Page 26 of Oh, Flutz!

I roll my eyes. “Shut up.”

“No, I need evidence, hold on.” He pulls out his phone, and I dive for it, but he’s a lot stronger than me and is able to keep a grip on it long enough to click furiously on the shutter. “Oh, that’s a good one,” he says giddily, and turns it back towards me so I get a good look at the monstrosity of a photo—somehow both totally blurry and absolutely hideous, with my hair flying and an awful snarl on my face.

I grumble a few choice words, stabbing at a spinach leaf. “Don’t think I’ll drop the fact that you looked me up.”

He shrugs, putting his phone away in his sweatpants pocket. “Of course I did. And, I mean, I already knew a lot of it.” He pokes my leg with his foot. “You’re kind of famous, in case you missed the memo. Plus, you looked me up, didn’t you?”

“Of course I did.”

“There you go.”

“Your resume is a lot less impressive than mine.”

“Wow, thanks.”

I swallow the bite of salad. “It’s just the truth. You haven’t won anything since your last Junior Nationals. What I really want to know is how you’ve managed to avoid execution this long.”

His jaw is a little tighter than it was a minute ago. “Good question.”

I eye him. “You won’t answer?”

He laughs lowly. “Nope.”

I smile. ‘You’re a coward.”

He cocks his head, looking at me, wary, almost confused. I can’t really tell what he’s thinking. He clears his throat, popping another chip in his mouth. “You really aren’t very nice, are you?”

Good grief.It's so cute that people—men, mostly—think it crushes me every time they don’t like me. It’s like they expect me to fall over and die any time one of them calls me rude or unladylike. Tatyana never tried to make me be nicer to those idiots—it always amused her when I made a reporter blush—and everyone else had given up after the first try. Sure, they’d gripe about how itisn’t that hard to smile every once in a while,but they’d back off when they saw how good I am. They’d leave me alone, as long as I kept my place at the top. At least that’s what I thought.

I shove these thoughts away. Wanting to be liked is the only surefire way of getting yourself hurt, and I have enough injuries already from my sport. I force a nonchalant shrug and reach for my smoothie. “I guess that’s your fault for expecting me to be.”

He looks at me again, in that way I can’t decipher. “Yeah,” he says slowly. “I guess it is.”

Chapter Eight

KATYA

“Jesus, Katya, how hardis it to just listen to what I’m telling you? One second of you shutting up!Literallythat’s all I need!”

“I am listening, the problem is that you’re wrong,” I snap.

“I’m not wrong. I’m just saying that your entry is weird, and if you keep doing it that way, we’ll never be able to do side-by-side jumps good enough to win anything. That is what you’rein the mood for, isn’t it?” he says spitefully.

I scowl. “My triple Axel is perfectly fine.”

“Actually,” Lian interrupts warily, “he’s not completely wrong.”

“Thankyou!”

“Don’t thank me yet, kiddo. Her failures are your failures, and vice versa. You aren’t evaluated separately. One of you eats it on a jump, both of you get the deduction.”

“Well, I don’t know why you’re looking at me,” I say, crossing my arms. “I’m the one with quads here. I don’t thinkheof all people should be lecturing me on jump technique.”

“Believe me, I could do them too if I was cheating them like you are.”

“Excuse me?”

“I think you heard me.”

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