“—I know the one,” I finish quietly. His gaze is locked with mine, and it almost feels like he’s daring me to let him keep talking and begging me not to at the same time. I swallow. “It’s nice there in the afternoons, when it’s not too hot.” Heath’s stare doesn’t leave my face, and it’s all I can do not to squirm.
“Like the day after it rains,” he says.
I nod, knowing I shouldn’t. All I can do is wonder with a pang if it will ever not hurt to look at him.
I’m still wondering when he walks back to his truck and I slide behind Daphne’s wheel.
CHAPTER 9
“I’ll do it!”
I can’t help but laugh, a weary sound, as I roll my head toward where Maggie is expertly applying eyeliner at the vanity in front of her bedroom window the next morning. I’m lying on her bed while she films a voice-over makeup tutorial for her YouTube channel,Pretty Well Read, where she posts beauty and book review videos. Her current creation is an interpretation of the cover ofEverything, Everythingby Nicola Yoon. It looks like colorful wildflowers are bursting out of the skin all around her eyes. The effect is arrestingly beautiful.
“It’s not a glamorous job,” I tell her.
She eyes me through her mirror, pausing in the process of adding teeny tiny lines to the minuscule purple butterfly she’s drawn on her cheekbone. “Zamboni. Driver.”
Maggie has a thing for cars, or really anything with a steering wheel. Fast, slow, big, small, she doesn’t discriminate. The first time she saw me driving Bertha she practically drooled. Handing over Bertha’s keys is probably safer than letting her behind Daphne’s wheel, considering she’s already totaled two cars in the year that she’s had her license—she claims she has trouble staying focused, whereas I’m more inclined to think it’s due to her resentment toward her dad given his profession as a stunt driver. Either way, the only trick Bertha can do is occasionally leak hydraulic fluid on the ice.
“I don’t care if I have to be a minimum-wage toilet cleaner,” she continues, “if it means I finally get to drive Bertha. Want one?” When she points to her butterfly, I nod. She stops her camera and scoots down on her bench to make room for me to join her, then positions my face the way she wants it. In minutes, I have the twin to her butterfly on my cheek, though mine is blue instead of purple. I didn’t even have to ask for the color change, that’s how awesome my friend is. “And speaking of turds, you won’t have to deal with Jeff—” Maggie’s nostrils flare when she says his name. Not even mentioning Bertha was enough to cool her temper after I relayed Jeff’s accusations from the night before. “—on your own anymore once I’m working there too.”
I don’t respond right away. It would be so much better having Maggie at work, assuming Jeff doesn’t go out of his way to schedule us for different shifts. He’ll probably just put me on permanent bathroom duty. But she’s likely to hear from a coworker exactly why they all give me such a wide berth.
She’ll find out about Jason.
“You’re not wearing that bronzer I gave you, are you? I swear you just went like five shades of pale.” She plucks a giant fluffy brush from a glass jar on her vanity and starts buffing “life” back into the perimeter of my face. “There,” she says, with a satisfied nod. “You no longer look like someone outlawed figure skating.”
“Bronzer is magic,” I say, echoing her oft-repeated phrase while I will actual color back into my face. I don’t want to think about what I’ll do if Maggie learns the truth about my brother and I lose the one remaining good thing in my life. “But driving Bertha is the smallest part of the job. It’s ten minutes every hour—the other fifty it’s a straight janitorial job.”
“Says the girl who gets paid to drive her.” Maggie holds up two lip glosses for me choose between. I tap the peach one and then try not to move my lips as she swipes it on me.
“Did I mention that Bertha’s top speed is a whopping nine miles per hour and typically I don’t go half that? Try turning above four and you’ll nick the ice. It’s seriously not as awesome as you’re thinking. You have to be perfectly precise with your laps to avoid overlapping but not allow any gaps. You have to grease and sharpen the blades regularly. You have to constantly monitor the hydraulic and water lines, and even when you do everything right there’s still a chance that the ice could start crawling—literally buckle in on itself—if the temperature is too low. And then there’s the fact that Bertha is a million years old and sometimes she just goes down, which means you’ll be out on the ice with a squeegee and buckets of water.” I roll my shoulders, remembering the ache from last time that happened.
“If I didn’t know better, I’d think you didn’t want us to work together.” She says this without suspicion or wounded feelings. She has no reason to know how true her statement is. Maggie closes the lip gloss and lowers it to her lap, her head tilted in a half puzzled, half concerned manner. “Why am I having to convince you that this is a good idea? You’d get your favorite person in the world at your favorite place in the world and I could help you finally film your audition for your favorite job in the world. What part of that isn’t awesome?”
A year ago, I’d have said no part. Now, hearing them all together is like trying to breathe while a thick, scratchy blanket smothers me.Stories on Iceis THE national touring ice show. It may not be the Olympics, but it’s still a big deal, especially to me. Skaters from all over the country submit audition videos every year, and at seventeen I’m finally old enough to send in my own.
I try to grin with her, but it feels more like a grimace. “I still haven’t decided if I’m going to audition.” We’ve had versions of thisStories on Iceconversation dozens of times since she found the website bookmarked on my laptop, and they all end with the same evasive responses from me. She never gets mad; she just retreats and attacks again later. And she’ll keep on attacking until she wins. That relentlessness served her well while building her YouTube channel and learning to skate, and serves me less well when it comes to things I’m not ready to tell her.
“That’s officially the dumbest thing you’ve ever said.” Maggie swings a leg over her bench, straddling it so she fully faces me. “We can totally do this. You can do the skating, and I will make you look like a dazzling princess.” She nods to her filming equipment and computer. “They won’t be able to say no. After you graduate next year you could be touring the country as part of a national ice show! I mean, you’ll get paid to live on the ice. Tell me that’s not the best thing you’ve ever heard?”
It is, yet I have to feign a smile and hold it while Maggie goes on about how close I am to the dream job that can’t ever be mine.
From the first moment I stepped onto the ice, I knew I belonged there. I can’t remember a time in my life when I wasn’t skating, when I couldn’t make myself happy just by thinking about it.
Although Dad and I used to make that three-hour round-trip to Odessa five days a week, we hit a wall when I was thirteen and my coach said we needed to decide what my goals were—because if I had serious aspirations, five days a week wasn’t going to cut it, not even close. The schedule she proposed and the accompanying cost kept my dad silent the whole drive home. I remember hearing my parents discussing it that night. Dad talked about getting a second job and Mom mentioned taking out a second mortgage on the house. I still believe they would have found a way for me to do it if I’d wanted, but the idea of putting this huge financial burden on my family and essentially moving in with my coach so that I could dedicate every waking moment of my life to ice-skating was terrifying.
I loved the ice, but I loved my family more. I always would.
So we said no, and instead of a three-hour round-trip to Odessa to train with a world-class coach at a private rink, my journey turned into forty-five minute round-trips to Polar Ice Rink in town to learn however and from whomever I could. I let the bigger dream go—the one I wasn’t sure I’d ever really wanted—and replaced it with one that promised to let both parts of my heart, my family and the ice, beat together. That was when we started focusing onStories on Iceand my hopes to join it after high school and make it my career.
I pored over skaters’ audition videos online and spent countless nights planning for the one I could film when I turned seventeen. But my birthday came and went, and I put it off. Because by the time I turned seventeen, everything was different.
Jason was gone.
My family was shattered.
And dreams no longer fit into the nightmare we lived in.
