Page 26 of The Favorites
Bella sat by the edge of the pool, and I lowered myself beside her.
“So.” She folded her hands on her knee, like she was interviewing me for a talk show. “Tell me your goal.”
“My goal?”
“The thing that, when you achieve it, will make all this worth it.”
“Well…” I knew my answer, but I felt foolish saying it out loud. Then again, a few months earlier, I would have considered training with Sheila Lin to be a pipe dream too, and there I was in her backyard. “I want to go to the Olympics. I know Salt Lake’s a long shot, but Torino in 2006 maybe.”
“That’s all?”
For her and Garrett, making it to the Olympic Games wasn’t a lofty goal. It was the bare minimum expected of them.
“No,” I said. “That’s not all. I want to be national champion, and world champion, and I want an Olympic gold medal.”
Bella smirked, and for a second I thought she was going to laugh at me—that this had all been a trick, to get me to confess my delusions of grandeur so she could knock me back down to the bottom where I belonged.
But then she said, “Of course you do. You wouldn’t be here otherwise.”
No one had ever spoken to me like that before. My father, even at his most supportive, seemed to consider skating a childish pastime I’d eventually outgrow. As for my brother, he took my ambition as a personal attack.
Arrogant bitch. You think you’re better than me? You’re worthless. You’re nothing.
“What about you?” I asked Bella. “What’s your goal?”
“Me? I want all that too—except why stop at one Olympic gold?”
“You want two, like your mother?”
“I want my mother to be a footnote on my page in the record books.”
If someone had called Bella an arrogant bitch—to her face, that is; plenty of people called her that and worse behind her back—she would have smiled and saidYou’re damn right.
And if she wanted me to push her, I’d push her.
“Want to go for a swim?” I asked.
“Are you serious?”
I stared at her, unblinking, a spark of challenge in my eyes.
“It’s freezing,” she said.
“You think this is freezing? Where I come from, we consider this bikini weather.”
The wind had picked up, and it actually was a little chilly so close to the ocean. But I wasn’t going to back down now.
Neither was Bella. She stood up and pulled her dress off over her head, revealing a strapless bra and underwear in a matching eggshell hue. Then she turned and dove into the water, so smooth she hardly made a splash.
She flipped her hair back like a mermaid. “All right, your turn, Shaw.”
I removed my dress the opposite way, shimmying it past my hips. Bella watched me the whole time, and I couldn’t help feeling embarrassed by my less glam undergarments: a cheap black push-up bra and cotton panties grayed from too much washing.
I dove in headfirst too, but not with nearly as much grace as Bella had.
As soon as I’d gotten over the shock of it, though, I realized.
“It’s heated?”
