Page 17 of The Favorites
“Actually sleep,” I clarified.
“Okay, Katarina.” His freshly shaved face was smooth against my throat. “We’ll sleep.”
I lay down on the narrow bed, back pressed against the wall. Heath climbed in facing me and pulled the covers over us both. He ran his fingers through my clean hair and inhaled.
I hadfreshened upwith the free products in the bathroom—though I’d waited until Josie left, so she wouldn’t have the satisfaction of knowing I took her suggestion. They all smelled sweet and expensive, like confections at a fancy bakery. My skin had never been so soft.
Heath smelled the same as always: generic 2-in-1 shampoo and woodsy aftershave. My father was the one who taught him to shave, and Heath still used the same brand.
Los Angeles was the farthest I’d ever been from home. Part of me still couldn’t believe we were really there. It all felt too good to be true, like if I was to drift off, I’d wake up in my bed back in Illinois, Lee pounding on the door.
Maybe that’s why, even with Heath beside me, I couldn’t rest that night. Sometime around two in the morning, I gave up and broke my own rule, rousing him with my teeth on his earlobe and my nails on his back.
Afterward, I finally managed a few hours of fitful sleep. When my alarm went off at 5:45 sharp, Heath was already gone.
Jane Currer:I never understood what all the fuss was about with the Lin Ice Academy. It was just a gussied-up ice rink.
Kirk Lockwood:It was so much more than an ice rink. The Academy is Sheila’s legacy.
Francesca Gaskell, a friendly-looking freckled blonde who still seems girlish despite being in her mid-thirties, sits in a glass greenhouse filled with blooming winter roses.
Francesca Gaskell(Former Ice Dancer): When I was a little girl, Idreamedof becoming a Lin Academy skater one day.
Garrett Lin:I realize how lucky my sister and I were. We were tremendously privileged.
A video of fifteen-year-old Bella and Garrett training alone at the Lin Ice Academy.
Garrett Lin:We were also under a tremendous amount of pressure.
Garrett stumbles. Bella reaches for him, and they both hit the ice.
Garrett Lin:Everyone was looking to us—to be examples, to set the standard.
Kirk Lockwood:Before the twins were even born, the press referred to them as the “Lin Dynasty,” which was…well, less than culturally sensitive. Let’s leave it at that.
Jane Currer:The top team in the country was in their late twenties, and everyone assumed they would retire after the 2002 Games. Isabella and Garrett were the future of U.S. ice dance.
Garrett Lin:It might seem strange, training alongside our competitors. But if every day felt like a competition, real competitions would feel like a regular day.
Kirk Lockwood:Sheila wanted to train her kids in her own way, on her own terms.
Garrett Lin:That was the whole idea for the summer intensive. My mother wanted to motivate us, to surround us with world-class skaters and coaches and specialists, to give us everything we needed to become the best.
Sheila watches her children fall, then turns her back to the ice and walks away.
Garrett Lin:But she also wanted to remind us how easily we could be replaced.
Chapter 13
Here’s what it was really like at Sheila Lin’s elite skating school.
Eyes on us all the time—coaches and choreographers and dance instructors and personal trainers and photographers and reporters and most of all our fellow athletes, always watching, waiting for us to fall, to fail. Every moment a competition. Every day a series of victories and defeats, highs and heartbreaks.
So many hours on the ice, walking on solid ground felt unnatural. Running noses, chapped lips, cracked heels, bleeding toenails. My body aching like one big bruise. Feeling sunshine on my skin only through panes of glass, because we started before dawn and ended well after dusk. Passing out the moment my head hit the pillow at night.
A gnawing, constant hunger—not only because of the nutritionist-controlled portions of organic greens, lean proteins, and probiotic smoothies, but because I was closer than ever to the thing I wanted most, and I longed to finally sink my teeth into it. To savor the taste—and to clench my jaw so tight it could never escape.
No days off. No breaks. No excuses. Some days, I thought I might not make it through.
