Page 25 of The Favorites
“Yes, really.” She lifted her chin. “I’m the one who asked my mother to invite you.”
Garrett Lin:Figure skating, especially at the elite level, is a small world.
Ellis Dean:Skating’s incestuous. Everyone knows everyone, everyone knows your business.
Garrett Lin:No one outside the sport understands your life. And everyone in the sport is your teammate. Or your competition.
Ellis Dean:You know the saying about keeping your friends close, but your enemies closer?
Francesca Gaskell:Of course it’s possible to be friends with your fellow competitors!
Teenaged Katarina and Bella pose for a photo backstage at a competition. They’re in full makeup, wearing matching Lin Ice Academy warm-up jackets, arms around each other.
Ellis Dean:That’s what Bella Lin was doing: keeping her enemy as close as possible. Exactly like her mother taught her.
Francesca Gaskell:It might not beeasy.But it is possible.
Inez Acton:The whole Katarina versus Bella narrative is so reductive. These women were competing for gold medals, not catfighting over petty bullshit.
Garrett Lin:Katarina Shaw was the best friend my sister ever had.
The same image of Katarina and Bella again, slowly zooming in on Katarina’s hand. She’s clutching Bella’s sleeve, digging her nails in. The screen darkens, ominous music playing.
Garrett Lin:Until…well, we’ll get to that, I suppose.
Chapter 17
I blinked at Bella. “Youtold her to ask me? Why?”
“Because you’re good.”
The way she said this, it didn’t sound like flattery. She was simply stating a fact: grass was green, water was wet, and I was a good skater.
“Not as good as me,” she continued. “But you could be.”
“Thank you?”
“You’re welcome.” She slid off the wall, walking toward the pool. Even barefoot, she moved as if she were balanced on blades.
“So you wanted me here…to be your rival?”
Bella nodded. “You push me, I’ll push you, we’ll both get better.”
“Like your mother and Veronika Volkova.”
“I’d rather you refrain from sticking razor blades in my skates, but otherwise, yeah.”
“That actually happened?”
“Oh, that’s the least of it,” Bella said. “The stories I could tell you…”
In the lead-up to the 1988 Games, the press had made the most of the Lin vs. Volkova rivalry, turning it into a full-blown spectacle with feverish speculation about sabotage attempts and secret love affairs. I’d assumed most of the reports were media spin, the usual obsession with pitting powerful women against each other.
Since her retirement, Veronika had trained ice dancers for Russia—andonlyRussia. Unlike most top coaches, she refused to take on international skaters, no matter how deep their parents’ pocketbooks. Her star pupil was her niece, Yelena, who skated with the eldest son ofVeronika’s former partner. People were already salivating over when Yelena and Bella would meet in competition, hoping for a next-generation Battle of the Ice Queens to bring high drama (and high television ratings) back to ice dance.
Maybe Bella saw competition with me as a lesser battle to help prepare her for that all-out war. I didn’t care. All I heard was:you could be as good as me.
That wouldn’t be enough, of course. I’d have to be even better. Better than Yelena Volkova too. But it was a place to start.
