Page 33 of Oh, Flutz!

I have no idea what comes after that. I don’t want to know.

I don’t know how I’m going to get her to like me, but…maybe I don’t need to. I think she’s so gold-starved it might make her ignore how much she hates me just so we can get to the Olympics. I think all she needs is to get on that podium in Helsinki, make her old team realize their mistake. They’ll be begging her to go back.

She’d go home, and I would finally have something to show for my pathetic senior career; prove to everyone I’m not a worthless bag of shit. And I could figure something out with the AFSC, maybe stick to pairs. With an Olympic gold—fuck it,anyOlympic medal, how could they say no? I’ll find another partner, one who isn’t a raging lunatic, and everything will be okay.

It'll work. And if Little Miss Adrenaline Junkie thinks she’s going to stop me, try and drag me down with her before I get a chance to get there, she has another thing coming.

Iwas right thismorning when I figured we’d be working on side-by-side jumps today.

Sure enough, as soon as Lian got here and Katya emerged from wherever she stormed off to, we started drilling. Singles, doubles, triples—everything’s going fine, but of course Katya has to go and ruin it.

“Time for quads?” she asks nonchalantly, although the effect is a little diminished by the fact that she’s sweaty and slightly out of breath.

Still, I narrow my eyes at her, and she raises her eyebrows at me, like,whatever did I say?

It’s payback for this morning. She knows damn well I can’t do any quads consistently.

“Quad toe? Come on, you can at least do a quad toe. It’s the easy one.”

“Sometimes,” I mutter. On a good day. I can do them in training a good sixty percent of the time, but I haven’t landed one in competition since I was a junior. Not once.

“Salchow?”

“No.”

“Flip?”

I don’t answer.

“Loop?”

I clench my teeth.

“Lutz? Axel?”

Who does she think I am, Ilia Malinin?“Do you ever get sick of being a brat?” I spit out, and she just grins.

“I’ll take that as a no.”

“You know damn well you can’t do any of those either, so back off.” You’d think she had all of hers the way she’s acting, but she doesn’t. That’s the whole reason she’s been stuck in second place anyway, is because Polyakova, the Barbie doll-looking one, has more. Katya might be the Ice Queen, but she’s definitely not the quad queen.

“That doesn’t look like playing nice to me,” Lian calls out.

Katya smirks at me, then turns to her. “I have an idea. Why don’t we add a quad combination?”

I stare.

“I think it’ll be fun,” she adds cheerily, and my fists actually curl.

“Pairs don’t do quads,” I say as calmly as I can manage, trying to get my blood pressure down. “There’s no point.”

You think I switched over without checking? It’s too much risk for too little reward; only a few teams have ever done them in competition. Quad twists pretty much send the girl into cardiac arrest, and the jumps…the whole thing is goddamn impossible, is what it is, even if Katya wasn’t suggesting it just to piss me off. Which is exactly what she’s doing. I hate that it’s working.

“Bryan’s right,” Lian replies warily. “It’s extremely rare, for good reason. We need to focus on getting everything solid, instead of risking everything on a few extra points.”

She just shrugs. “Like you said, it’s extra points.”

“Yeah, and more points off in fall deductions. Duh.” I can’t even believe we’re having this discussion.

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