Walk on Water (4 page)

Lexa suspected he approved more of Bry’s fear than his progress, but she pretended otherwise. “That’s what I told him, but you ought to build him up more. Ian’s got him pretty intimidated.”

“He should. Bry’s not even seventeen yet and Ian Wilde is a star.” Blake shrugged. “There’s always silver.”

“No one trains for second place.”

“No?” He cocked an eyebrow at her. “What place are you training for, Lexa?”

“Whatever,” she said, sorry she’d brought it up. “Ian’s your star. We all get it.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. You can’t believe I favor him over you?”

She put down her fork and faced him. If she’d grown older, so had he. The tired lines around his eyes had settled into permanent creases.

“It feels that way on the ice,” she said.

“What do you expect? On the ice, I’m your coach. It’s my job to tell you when you’re blowing it.”

“I must be blowing it all the time, then.”

“If you’d only
focus
, Lexa.” He stood and carried his plate to the sink. “Do you think I can’t see how often you don’t want to be there? Does it look as if I enjoy shouting into a vacuum? Sometimes I don’t even know why we’re still doing this.”

She saw his shoulders droop inside his worn sweater, read his exhaustion in the slant of his back. She wanted to say that she didn’t know either, but that wouldn’t have been true.

Skating was all they had left.

The main hall at Erie Shores High School was one long stretch of clashing banners, campaign posters from the previous week’s student elections only half torn down before the junior/senior prom committee descended with enough butcher paper and poster paint to cover a small country. Lexa read the notices as she walked with cold hands tucked under crossed arms. For the past month the hallway had been as overheated as the parking lot had been frigid, but the elderly boiler had apparently quit that morning, leaving the building as cold inside as out. Lexa would have felt it less if she’d used a blow dryer instead of trying to do the job with her car heater on the short drive to school. Now she wasn’t sure which was making her shiver: damp hair or the thought of the prom.

Nobody would ask her. To go as a sophomore, she’d need an older date, and the few non-skating students she knew well enough to talk to probably thought she was stuck-up. The girls in junior high certainly had when skating had forced her to stop attending school events and slumber parties. Guys assumed she was sheltered and Lexa supposed she was—no one who put in as many hours at the rink as she did had time to get
un
sheltered.

“Hey, rock star!” Jenni said, walking up and flicking a damp curl off her shoulder. “Love the ’do. Very eighties hair band.”

“Blake had me throwing triple-triples till I wanted to strangle him this morning. He barely left me time to shower— you’re lucky I’m wearing clothes.”

Jenni gave her a once-over. “I’d have done the hair and come naked.”

“That’s because you’re an exhibitionist.”

“I am an
artist
,” Jenni corrected, smiling as she gestured from her perfectly spiked pixie to her expensive leather boots. “And this is a whole lot of art to display.”

Lexa laughed in spite of herself. There was nothing wrong with Jenni’s self-esteem. She kept hoping that some might rub off on her, despite the fact that Jenni had better reasons for it. She was not only prettier, happier, and more popular than Lexa, but also wildly adored by two parents who gave her everything. Lexa’s only advantage was that Jenni hadn’t outskated her in competition since they were ten years old. On days when she felt completely overshadowed, she tried to hold on to that.

“Are you going to the prom?” Lexa asked, nodding toward a banner. Jenni and Bry were both sixteen too, but their summer birthdays put them a year ahead of her in school.

“I don’t see how I have any choice. How else will I find out what the slut squad wears?”

“Give the cheerleaders a break, for once. I think you secretly wish you could be one.”

“I
could
be one, if I didn’t have better things to do.” There was a wistful look in Jenni’s eyes, though, and Lexa understood why. Whether or not Jenni wanted to be a cheerleader was completely academic given her skating schedule.

“Who will you go with, then?” Lexa asked.

“That’s under consideration. You?”

“I’m obviously not going. I couldn’t care less what the cheerleaders wear, and besides, who’s going to ask me?”

“What if someone did, though? You’d go then, right?”

“Someone like who?”

“Bry would take you. He might even want to.”

“Maybe.” But it wouldn’t mean anything. Years before, when Bry had first moved to town to train with Blake, Lexa had harbored an aching crush on him, one Bry had tried to reciprocate. But eventually they’d both had to face the truth.

First bell rang. Students started moving faster. Lexa and Jenni glanced at the caged clock on the wall.

“Crap. Got to run,” Jenni said, trotting off with her messenger bag bouncing on her hip.

Lexa hustled to U.S. History, a deadly boring fifty minutes that, coming on the heels of a four a.m. wake-up call and morning session with Blake, nearly always saw her doze off. She had long ago resigned herself to rereading everything her teacher said, but being late led to detention, and detention was one more thing she didn’t have time for. Aside from learning just enough material to pass the exams, Lexa’s primary goal for history was avoiding tardies.

She took her back-row seat with five seconds to spare.

“Hey,” the stoner on her left greeted her. He looked as thrilled to be there as she was, his knit cap pulled down nearly over his eyes.

“Hey,” she replied. Digging out her textbook, she propped it up as camouflage.

Mr. Xavier read the daily announcements. He took roll. Five minutes into his lesson, Lexa and her half-baked neighbor were both asleep at their desks.

Lexa’s stomach had begun growling so painfully by fourth period that she nearly drove through McDonald’s on her way to her grandmother’s house. A large fries would leave plenty of room for whatever overly green lunch Beth had planned, and despite the constant harping on her lousy diet, Lexa knew exactly what her workout schedule let her get away with in terms of calories: plenty. Beth would be watching the clock, though, so with a sigh Lexa bypassed the drive-through.

If she “forgets” dessert again, I’ll come back for a shake,
Lexa promised herself, watching the restaurant recede in her rearview mirror.

Patches of dirty snow lurked beneath the trees on her grandmother’s sprawling estate, sheltered against the rare shafts of sunlight that pierced the gray overhead. Lexa drove up Maplehurst’s long private drive and parked without noticing the imposing columned facade of the mansion owned by Kaitlin’s side of the family for the past hundred years. The contrast with Blake’s three-bedroom tract house was just part of life for Lexa, a bricks-and-boards reminder of the schism in her family. Beth made sure Lexa had what she needed, but she wasn’t about to help Blake.

“What’s for lunch, G-mom?” Lexa called, walking in and tossing her coat on a Queen Anne chair.

“Lexa! Back here, kitten.”

Beth had set places with china in the formal dining room, insisting that Lexa’s visits were the only chance she had to use it anymore. Lunch was a chopped salad featuring just enough avocado and bacon to make the rest of it worth eating. Lexa helped herself to a thickly buttered roll as well.

“How was school today?” Beth asked.

“I’m not sorry it’s over, if that’s what you mean.” Lexa shrugged. “Not that the rink’s been much better lately.”

Beth’s fork paused over her plate. “What’s wrong at the rink?”

“Nothing’s wrong. It’s just . . . I don’t know. I’m tired of working so hard all the time and not getting anywhere I want to be. Did Mom ever feel like quitting?”

“You feel like quitting? Kitten! I thought things were better now, with the tutor.”

“I didn’t say . . .” She shrugged again. “I’m really tired, that’s all.”

The lingering concern in her grandmother’s eyes showed that she wasn’t convinced. “Is Blake driving you too hard? Is it the pressure? It’s a lot to live up to, I know, having Walker and Walker for parents.”

“It’s a
ton
of pressure, and only me to carry it. At least when they were skating, they had each other to lean on.”

Beth’s expression turned sour. “And look how that turned out.”

“It was an accident,” Lexa said wearily.

“He was drinking!” Beth replied, as always.

“She was drinking too. Do you really think if Mom was here she would blame the whole thing on him? He blames himself already.”

“He should. I wish I’d never introduced them.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“What? Oh, kitten, you know I don’t mean you.”

“You never think things would have turned out better if Mom hadn’t gotten knocked up?”

“I could never regret you, Lexa. Not for a second. Because of you, I can’t even regret your father. I have regrets—too many—but you aren’t one of them.”

“Do you ever wish Mom had skated singles? I mean, if we’re talking about changing the past, singles would have been safer.”

“I’ve been over that ground a hundred times too. But pairs is all Kaitlin ever wanted to do, from seeing her very first ice show at five years old. Flying overhead, being thrown through the air . . .” Beth’s sadness gave way to a smile. “Your mom was a little daredevil right down to her soul.”

“You never tried to talk her out of it?”

“I
couldn’t
have talked her out of it. Kaitlin believed that skating with Blake was what she was born to do. And for a while, at least, it was hard to argue with the results.”

“No kidding.” Lexa gazed down at the lunch she had lost her appetite for. Beth reached across the table and squeezed her hand.

“She believed you were born to skate too. Naming you
axel
spelled backward, that was Kaitlin’s idea. The hardest jump, forward takeoff, one and a half revolutions to all of the other jumps’ one . . . She saw great things for you.”

“Yeah? What did Blake see?”

“The same. Although he wanted to name you Sky.”

“Sky?” How had she never heard that before? “Sky is pretty! Sky Walker . . . Oh.”

“Exactly.” Beth shook her head. “Be glad Kaitlin held her ground. They were so young, Lexa. Barely older than you are now.”

And so much farther ahead,
Lexa thought
.
Whatever promise her parents had seen in her obviously hadn’t been realized.

“It would be easier if no one knew who I was. I show up at competitions and the judges’ expectations skyrocket the second they hear ‘Walker.’ Half the audience has been around for my whole life story, and nobody hasn’t seen the tapes. To be just Lexa out there, without my parents’ weight on my shoulders . . . I can’t even imagine what that would feel like.”

Her grandmother nodded sympathetically. “Be glad that you’re not skating pairs.”

“I’m not glad, that’s the problem! I wish I
was
skating pairs.”

Beth looked genuinely shocked. “Have you said that to Blake?”

“Not lately. You know how he gets.”

“But, Lexa. Are you serious? To start in pairs now, so late . . . You’d lose everything.”

“Like what? My red-hot fifth-place career? I just want a chance—a
chance
—to do something I might be great at. If skating’s really in my blood, if that’s my legacy, it’s got to be skating pairs. Right?”

Beth studied the large diamond on her right hand, twisting the stone back and forth, letting it catch the light. The gem had been part of a wedding ring once, before Beth’s obsession with advancing Kaitlin’s career had turned Kaitlin’s father into a skating widow, before he’d filed for divorce, moved to Florida, and started over with a new wife and kids. Lexa had only seen him a couple of times, so she didn’t miss him, but she read the pain in her grandmother’s eyes and looked away. Why had she even raised the subject?

“I wasn’t opposed to it,” Beth said at last.

“Excuse me?”

“It wasn’t my idea to keep you out of pairs. That was all Blake.”

“But—”

“Obviously you had to learn to skate first. And little boys don’t lift—that’s not safe for anyone. But by the time you were ten or twelve, with a partner a year or two older . . .” Beth trailed off, still staring at her diamond. When she finally looked up, her expression had cleared. “To see you up in a lift, flying like your mother . . . How could I not want that?”

“You just said it was too late.”

Beth shook her head. “I said
late
. There’s a difference.”

Lexa skated her spiral sequence with a knot riding high in her throat. She was on the third full run-through of her long program, Blake’s sadistic idea of a normal morning practice. Her thigh muscles were jelly, making it hard to hold the long swooping edges without wobbling, but she was almost to the end. Stepping out of the left-outside spiral, she began her straight-line footwork.

“Arms! Arms!” Blake shouted from near the rail. “You’re flailing like someone should throw you a life ring!”

Clenching her teeth, Lexa reined in her arm movements. Her body ached as if it were coming apart, the anxious knot in her throat the only tight muscle left. She pushed into her final element—combination spin—and traveled sloppily before finding her center and reaching for the layback. The rafters spun around her. She let them blur, tracking only enough to know when to catch her free blade and pull it up into the Biellmann. Four more revolutions and she dropped her foot with relief, finishing out with an easy scratch spin into her final position.

“Hold that finish!” Blake admonished as she bent over her ribcage, gasping. “Every run-through like it’s for real!”

As if I’d ever skate three back-to-back programs in competition,
she thought, but she kept the sarcasm to herself. Despite his usual yelling, Blake was in a good mood that morning and she didn’t want to waste it. Skating past him, she grabbed a towel off the rail and wiped her face.