Being Sloane Jacobs (7 page)

“If you like it so much, why don’t
you
go?” I say. “You seem to think figure skating is such a breeze, after all.”

“Don’t tempt me,” she mutters.

I pick at my entrée, twirling pasta around on my fork. The brochure just reminds me of what will be expected in the next four weeks: perfection. And if there is anything I am not, it’s perfect. I’ll spend my summer falling on my butt while I attempt jumps I can’t do anymore. I’ll eat tasteless food in the name of fitting into yet another leotard. I’ll pretend to be friends with the cutthroat competitors who are my fellow campers. I’ll be reminded of three years ago, when I ate ice at junior nationals, ending my season and possibly my career.

A real dream. I’d give anything not to have to do it. I’d even—

And then it hits me. Like an elbow straight to the stomach.

“You could do it, you know,” I blurt out.

“Yeah, right.” She flips back to the page showing the dorm rooms and sighs. The next page shows a girl outfitted in red sequins and rhinestones, and Sloane starts laughing. “Can you imagine me in this?”

“Actually, I can,” I say.

“What are you talking about?” Sloane stares at me.

I don’t answer right away. The puzzle pieces are just slotting together in my head. Even though it sounds slightly insane, it could work. I look over at Sloane, with her long black hair, her athletic build. We are the same height. She can skate, we know that. So it’s a different kind of skating—who cares? And if she fails, at least she figures out that it’s not so easy. Everyone always thinks it’s so easy to be me.

“We look alike. Even that desk attendant thought so,” I say, as much to myself as to her.

Sloane blinks at me from the other side of the table, staring at me as though I’ve gone insane.

And maybe I have.

But the idea won’t let go: Here it is. My chance to be somebody else for a bit.

My chance to switch.

CHAPTER 6

SLOANE DEVON

I get it now: This girl, this other Sloane, is totally, completely, and inarguably crazy. Not cuckoo-homeless-man-on-the-bus crazy, but crazy in a way only rich girls can be.

She can afford to risk her whole future on a whim, because there will always be someone to clean up her messes and pay for her mistakes (literally).

It doesn’t sound half bad to me.

I look from the brochure to Sloane and back, and a little beat of temptation starts drumming in my brain. Figure skating is way easier than hockey. No one is trying to break your legs or bash your brains out when you’re figure skating. There are no shots to take or miss, which means no tingles. And there are no scouts or coaches expecting me to be a hero, thus there’s no way to fail.

I look up at Sloane Emily again. “You really think we could pull this off?”

She breaks into a huge grin. She must take my question for an agreement, because the next thing I know she’s dragging me out of my chair—she’s surprisingly strong—and up to her room to plot.

When we get to her door, Sloane bumps it open with her hip. Inside, she flings her purse onto the table, then turns around to face me. “You coming in?” she says.

The sight of the room before me stops me in my tracks. So this is what you get when you’re actually
paying
for a room at a hotel like this. It’s a giant loft space on the top floor, corner of the hotel, with everything in one oversized room. Floor-to-ceiling windows that have to be at least twenty feet high overlook the entire city. In one corner are two fluffy queen-sized beds like the one I have crammed in my teeny tiny room. In another corner, an L-shaped bank of couches faces a massive flat-screen TV. Partially hidden behind a privacy screen is a glassed-in shower large enough to host my entire hockey team, a Jacuzzi for nearly as many, and an expansive tile countertop with not one, not two, but
three
sinks. What do you even need three sinks for? And there’s another massive television facing the Jacuzzi, so you can watch TV while taking a hot soak. The only thing this place is missing is a rapper, his entourage, and several bottles of expensive champagne.

Sloane heads straight to a mahogany cabinet near the couches and flings open the door to reveal a minibar that is anything but mini. The door of the cabinet is stocked with tiny liquor bottles, wine, water, and cans and jars of various
nuts and other snacks. There’s a glass-front fridge filled with sodas and sparkling water and beer. Sloane slides out a deep drawer underneath the fridge filled with enough candy to help a kindergartner achieve liftoff. It probably costs enough to send that kindergartner to Harvard. There are no prices on anything, but I can imagine. I remember the time my parents took me to New York for Christmas to see the Rockefeller Center tree when I was eight. We stayed at a Marriott in Times Square, and back then I thought it was a palace. I ate a jar of jelly beans from the minibar, and my dad nearly had a heart attack over the fourteen-dollar price tag. And that place wasn’t even half as nice as this.

“Candy bar?” Sloane says. She riffles through the stock and pulls out a Butterfinger for herself.

“Snickers,” I say, and she tosses a king-sized bar at me. “Aren’t those things like, twelve dollars each?”

“It charges to the room, which charges to my parents’ credit card, which means all of this is fair game.”

“Won’t they be pissed?” I ask, but I waste no time in peeling back the wrapper and taking a giant bite.

“My mom will be mad that I ate my weight in sugar, but Dad couldn’t care less. Eat up—we’ll need fuel to pull an all-nighter.” For a second I detect a trace of bitterness in her voice, but it’s quickly gone, and she breaks into a smile.

She throws a bag of Bugles at me, followed by a Coke in a glass bottle. Then she kicks off her shoes and settles into the corner of the couch.

“Now let’s talk terms.”

“Terms? Okay, Senator,” I reply. I plop down next to her, not bothering to remove my sneakers before propping them on the oversized ottoman.

“Hey, if we’re going to do this, we’re going to do it right,” Sloane says between mouthfuls of candy bar.

“I don’t even think we’ve established that we’re definitely
going
to do this. And there’s pretty much no ‘right’ way to pretend to be someone else while spending a summer participating in a sport you’ve never played, in which the other person is supposedly a pro.”

“False,” she says. She pulls the last of the Butterfinger out of the wrapper, pops it into her mouth, then reaches for a sleeve of Reese’s Cups. “We are both excellent ice skaters. Our skills just lie in different areas. And everyone at this camp knows I’ve been out of the game for three years. I—I mean
you
—are going to be rusty. If you’re as good as you say you are at hockey—”

“Hey, I’m good,” I snap, but almost immediately I start to feel a tingle in my shoulder. I shake it off. “I can skate.”

“Well, to get good at hockey, I imagine you have to be a hard worker. You have to take feedback and listen to your coaches. And you can do all that at my camp, and who knows, maybe there are some latent figure skating skills hiding underneath those baggy clothes.”

“I doubt it,” I say.

“I’ll be the judge of that,” Sloane says.

“Aren’t you forgetting something?”

“What?”

“Uh, how am
I
”—I gesture to myself—“supposed to get mistaken for you? Aren’t all those skater girls going to see through me in a second?”

“I’ve been out of the game awhile,” she says. She pulls out her laptop. “Let’s just say I’ve changed.” She opens iPhoto and scrolls through to some old pictures of herself in spandex on the ice. She double-clicks on one, making it full-screen. I practically leap back.

“Jeez! Plastic surgery much?” I lean back in, squinting at the tiny face, trying to find some of the dark-haired beauty in front of me.

“No,” she snaps. “Just puberty, braces, and a decent haircut, thankyouverymuch. Now back to business.”

For the next hour, Sloane teaches me the basics of figure skating. She pulls out her shiny MacBook and plays YouTube videos of her old programs. She makes me raise my arms, then molds them into what she calls “ballet arms,” with my fingers all raised and sculpted like it’s teatime or something. I feel ridiculous. But every time my arms droop, Sloane Emily slaps me on the back and tells me to tighten up. I listen to the music for her long and short programs on a continuous loop, and when I think I’m about to pull my hair out from hearing
Madame Butterfly
one too many times, we switch to a hockey tutorial.

I clear off the desk, and using the mini liquor bottles, I show her the positions and set up plays. I tell her about practices, training, and drills. I demonstrate some of the basic hockey skills off skates, and I even pull up some clips
of old Flyers games on YouTube. By three a.m., we’ve devoured nearly the entire contents of the candy drawer, sampled all the nut varieties, and polished off the sodas. All we’re left with now is the sparkling water, which tastes gross to me, and the unopened bottles of liquor, which she doesn’t offer and I definitely avoid.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” she says. She drops a wadded-up Skittles bag on the floor, then lines it up with my hockey stick to practice her slap shot into the overturned trash can.

“I told you to stop with the king-sized bag of peanut butter M&M’s, but you wouldn’t listen,” I say. I’m clicking through old videos of Olympic programs, watching Tara Lipinski and Sarah Hughes grin and spin their way to gold medals.

“Ugh, don’t mention candy.” She shanks the bag to the left, where it bounces off the desk chair and rolls under the minibar. “Damn,” she mutters. She uses the end of the stick to rescue the Skittles bag and takes a second shot. This one lands squarely inside the trash can. “Yippee!” she shouts, jumping up and down with the hockey stick hoisted over her head, then falls backward onto the bed in victory. “Did you see that? I did it!”

“Sloane, you’re going to need to dial back the perky about six notches if you want to make it in a hockey game. ‘Yippee’? Are you kidding me? No one, and I mean
no one
, is cheesin’ out there on the ice. That’s how you lose your teeth.”

“I can be tough,” she says, and I can’t contain the snort. “I
can
!”

“Then let me slap you in the face.”

“What? No!”

“C’mon, let me slap you in the face.” I march up to her and lean over, hands on my hips.

“Why?” She shields her face with a pillow in case I launch some kind of sneak attack.

“My teammates and I do it all the time before games. Most people freak out about contact sports because they’re afraid to get hit. They work it up in their brain that getting hit is awful and unbearable, but it’s really not that bad. And when you get slapped in the face, it sort of recalibrates your toughness.”

“You’re crazy.” She throws the pillow at me. I bat it to the floor.

“And you’re doing it,” I say. I grab her by the shoulders and pull her up, then position her right in front of me. “I’m not going to make you bleed or anything, I’m just going to give you one good slap, okay?”

She takes a deep breath. “Okay,” she says. I raise my hand, but as soon as it’s near my shoulder, she flinches and ducks.

“Hold still!” I scold, but I’m laughing. “I can’t believe in the cutthroat world of ice dancing or whatever that you’ve never been slapped in the face.”

“Figure skating,” she corrects. “We’re much classier. Hence, no face slapping. Just do it.”

“Okay.” I smile; then
I
take a deep breath to prepare, but she closes her eyes and shouts, “Now! Now! Do it now!” so I haul off and slap her. I don’t give it everything I’ve got, but it’s enough that the palm of my hand stings a little. Her eyes open, then grow wide. For a minute, I worry she’s going to cry, or maybe even slap me back. But I watch the smile grow until her entire face cracks and she’s got the most insane case of the giggles I’ve heard this side of first grade.

“Don’t tell me I slapped you silly,” I say, watching her, now crumpled on the floor, clutching her stomach and gasping for breath. But within seconds, I’m laughing too, and we’re both down on the floor in a heap of oversugared teenager. It takes a few minutes before we’ve caught our breath and righted ourselves, climbing back up onto the beds until we’re facing each other.

“Oh hey, you’ve got a scar on your chin like I have,” she says. She reaches out and runs her finger along the thing, a two-inch mark on the left side of my chin that runs vertically down underneath it. “Is that from hockey?”

“No, that’s from my mom’s mean old cat, Lenin. I tried to pet the damn thing when I was nine, and this is what I got.”

“Lennon like the Beatles?”

“Like the Russian revolutionary. Mom was—is—a history nerd.” She raises an eyebrow and tilts her head, trying to read my verb tense slip-up, but I don’t give her a chance to ask. “What about yours?” I say quickly, to change the subject. “Did someone Tonya Harding you?”

“Nothing that glamorous. I fell off a platform when I was eleven. My father was giving his acceptance speech after his second election victory, and I got bored with all the thank-yous and God Bless Americas. My mind started to wander, I lost my balance, and down I went.”

“Seriously?” I try to contain a little giggle. “
Please
tell me that’s on YouTube somewhere.”

“Thankfully no,” she says. She looks down at her hands, which are folded neatly in her lap. She’s quiet for a moment. “I’m very good about staying out of the shot.”

“So matching scars,” I say in an effort to cut the tension. “Any other injuries?”

“Of course. Skating is completely brutal on your body.”

“Probably not as brutal as skating and having a big, burly German milkmaid of a girl come hurtling at you at Mach five. See my nose?” I face her straight on. “See how it slopes down and then, just after the bridge, sort of curves off to the right?”

“Holy crap, it’s crooked like a mountain road,” she says. She leans in and grabs my chin, turning my head to the left, then to the right. “I’m pretty sure any half-decent surgeon could fix that.”