Bittersweet (24 page)

“Just a minute,” I say. “Be right out—”

“Or …” The door swings open. “I’ll just come in.”

“What—”

“Yeah. Hi, Hudson. Happy New Year to you, too.” Kara shuts the door and leans her back against it, red liquid sloshing out over the cup in her hand. Mascara is smudged beneath her eyes and her long, strawberry blond hair is slipping from its headband, the ends tangling in a black boa around her neck. I didn’t see her in the crowd before, but of course she’s here.

“Don’t worry, I’m not planning to stab you with an ice pick. At least, not with all these witnesses around.”

My eyes flicker to the sink, but there’s nothing but a bar of soap and a cup full of frayed toothbrushes. Sure, a dental instrument to the eye might sting for a minute, but as far as self-defense weaponry goes, the Jordans’ bathroom is severely ill-equipped.

Kara downs her drink and tosses the plastic cup into the bathtub. It rattles against the porcelain, leaving a trail of orange-red dots in its wake.

“Kara, if this is about Will, I really don’t—”

“Nope. Over it.” She helps herself to one of Mrs. Jordan’s lotions from a shelf on the wall and flips the cap. She sits on the edge of the tub, props her foot up on the sink, and massages white goop into her bare legs. The whole room reeks of dried roses and spiked fruit punch, and I have to breathe through my mouth to keep from gagging.

“Hear you’re training again,” she says. “For the Capriani Cup.”

“Who told—”

“You did,” she says. “Just now. Not like I couldn’t figure it out. They announce a competition, and suddenly you’re hanging out on the ice again? Not exactly coincidence.”

“No, not exactly.” A new thought ripples through my mind, its sharp edges catching behind my eyes. Kara wasn’t one of Lola’s trainees, but that doesn’t mean she wasn’t invited to compete. They probably sent the letter to everyone who’d ever set foot in the Buffalo Skate Club, Lola students or not. I can handle the other girls from my skating past. Chances are at least one of them continued skating, at least one of them will be there next month. It won’t be easy or pleasant, but I know I can hold my head high, ignore the whispers and taunts, and skate my ass off.

But not in front of Kara.

“So … you trying out, too?” I cross my arms over my chest and try for the hard stare, but inside, my stomach flip-flops.

“Parade myself in front of the judges, just so they can tell me all the ways I’m not good enough? No thanks. I’ll leave the
kiss-and-cry drama to you.” Kara gives me the once-over, her eyes landing on my shoulder—the exact spot where we used to pin our matching silver good luck rabbits. The exact spot where mine is still pinned to my old skating dress.

“What I can’t figure out,” she says, “is the Wolves. Why are you helping them?”

I shrug. “It’s a good opportunity.”

“Opportunity. Right. Let me guess: Will cut you a deal? Traded a little ice time for some help with the team? Maybe a little something on the side?”

My mind flashes to Will, the feel of his body against mine in the dark room down the hall, his breath on my neck. Heat rushes to my cheeks. She doesn’t know anything about Will and me. If there even
is
a Will and me.

“Excuse me.” I step around her and grab the doorknob, but she’s got her foot against the door, and I can’t open it. “Kara, I really—”

“How can you go out for another event?” Her voice breaks suddenly, all the edges of her crumpling. “After everything that happened … after I left the ice … you never said anything. Ever. And you go out there again like it’s just … nothing!” Her foot slips from the door and she slumps back against the edge of the tub, tears leaking down her face.

“I know I screwed up that night.” I reach for the box of tissues on the back of the toilet and pass her one. “But you didn’t have to leave. You were amazing, too. You could’ve gone on to compete and—”

“You don’t get it.” She shreds the Kleenex in her hands, little white bits falling into her lap like snowflakes. “It wasn’t about the competition. I liked skating, yeah. But it wasn’t the same without you. We weren’t skating together, we weren’t even talking. I skipped the club meets, stopped practicing.”

“You just needed some time to—”

“It was more than that. It was like I didn’t have it in me anymore. And my parents knew it, so they gave me an ultimatum.” Kara deepens her voice to imitate her father. “‘We don’t have the money for you to screw around. So get back out there like you mean it, or start working on your—’”

“Backup plan,” I finish without thinking. I lean against the tile wall across from her, staring at a smear of bright blue toothpaste in the sink. I’d heard the same arguments from my mother over the years, every time I wanted to skip an event or sleep in an extra hour instead of going to five a.m. practice. Every time I came home whining about bruised hips and blistered heels. Every time I fell and swore I’d never do it again, never get up for another try. But somehow, my father always found a way to make it happen. To remind me why I loved the ice.

I’d always assumed Kara’s parents would do the same for her.

I hand her another tissue.

“Don’t.” She pushes my hand away and stands up quickly, wobbling on her heels before steadying herself on the edge of the sink. “I don’t know what I came in here for, but it wasn’t this. I just …” Kara wipes her eyes with her fingertips and opens the door, looking at me one last time. “Forget it.”

She yanks the door shut behind her, leaving me alone with the mirror again. I remove her plastic cup from the bathtub and wash my hands, but I still can’t look at myself. All I want to do is get home, change into my pajamas, and curl up on the couch with my brother, who isn’t old enough to remember my past mistakes and wants nothing from me but a hug, an occasional cupcake, and permission to stay up past his bedtime. My heart aches to think of him alone tonight. I never should’ve left him. I never should’ve come.

I find Will back in the living room, half listening to an intense debate between Rowan and Luke on the hotness of various Disney princesses. Jasmine is winning. Kara is nowhere in sight. When Will notices me lingering on the edge of the room, he crosses over and pulls me into his arms.

“You okay?” he asks. “I was getting worried.”

“I’m fine. I just need to get back to my brother.”

I say my good-byes to the boys and Will walks me to the truck, scraping the ice and snow from my windshield as I warm up the engine.

“Happy New Year,” he says again, leaning in through the open driver’s side window. He kisses me once more, slow and gentle, and when I finally drive away, he stands in the street and watches me go, shrinking in my rearview until he’s no more than a wisp.

Left too long without supervision, most kids would probably finger paint the walls, flush their underpants down the
toilet, or, I don’t know, set the whole place on fire. Our little genius? He turned the entire living room into an airport, complete with a four-foot-high LEGO traffic control tower and a fleet of paper planes, plastic army pilots taped safely into their cockpits. From deep beneath the couch, a large utility flashlight illuminates some sort of … landing strip? I crouch down for a better look.

Oh. My. God.

Stuck to the carpet in parallel, unbroken paths from one wall to the other are two lanes of brand-new maxi pads. Plastic dinosaurs stand guard at every fourth pad—triceratops and T rexes on one side, brontosauruses and pterodactyls on the other—protecting the airport from enemy aircraft and/or heavy flow.

Clear across the room, blissfully content, Bug snores on the couch in an inspiring ensemble of safety goggles, pink earmuffs, blue zip-up pajamas, and one of Dad’s old hunting vests in bright orange camo.

“Happy New Year, sweet pea.” As quietly as I can, I slip out of my coat and boots and carefully remove Bug’s goggles and earmuffs. He stirs and mumbles something incoherent, then drifts back to la-la land while I get to work deconstructing the Blake Street Super-Absorbency Airport before Mom gets home. She’d freak if she saw me throwing these things out—pads are even more expensive than the Ziplocs the kid uses for his anthrax operation.

Landing strip destroyed, I’m about to start on the paper
planes when my phone buzzes on the coffee table. Probably Dani. Things between us may be a few degrees below normal, but she always calls me after her dad’s New Year’s shows, ready with the full report on the food and the dresses and all the cute Canadian college boys roaming the hotel.

I grab the phone and sneak into the kitchen, checking the screen—not Dani. Josh. I stare at his number as it lights up my phone. Josh is calling me on New Year’s? Does that mean he’s not out with his cougar hottie?

“Happy New Year,” he says when I finally answer. His voice is soft and deep, muffled like he’s lying in bed and just on the edge of sleep.

“Hey! I missed you at—well, I thought you guys might show up at Amir’s.”

“You … guys?”

“You and … whoever.”
Brilliant,
Hudson. “What are you up to tonight, anyway?”

“I’m home with your ex-boyfriend, Dick. He says hi, even though you broke his heart tonight.”

I laugh. “He never really loved me, anyway.”

“Hey, no judgments here, Avery. You still partying it up?”

I peel a renegade maxi pad from my knee and stuff it in the trash with the others. “Oh, it’s a party, all right. I was home by one thirty. Does that make me totally old?”

“Not yet. But if you start eating dinner at four and watching
Golden Girls
, time to worry. Anyway, you near a computer? PBS is streaming the Addicts.”

“No way!” I sit at the kitchen desk and pull up the site. “Live?”

“It’s a replay of their tenth anniversary tour,” Josh says. “Some little club in Denver. They’re about to do your song—they were talking about it after the last set.”

I turn the speakers on low just in time for the opening chords of “Bittersweet.” It’s kind of a sad song, slow and mellow and haunted, none of that everything’s-gonna-be-all-right fairy dust crap they play on the radio these days, and that’s exactly what I like about it. It tells the truth. Sometimes life rocks so hard your heart wants to explode just because the sun came up and you got to feel it on your face for one more day. Sometimes you get the bitter end instead. Life is as gray and desolate as winter on the lakeshore, and there’s no way around it, no cure, no escape.

It was always my favorite skating song because it reminded me of the competition itself, how nothing comes without a price, and when you make sacrifices to get what you want, sometimes you screw up and pick the wrong thing.

But once in a while, you pick the right thing, the exact best thing. Every day, the moment you open your eyes and pull off your blankets, that’s what you hope for. The sunshine on your face, warm enough to make your heart sing.

Right now, quiet on the phone with Josh and the Addicts while the kitchen clock ticks softly and my brother sleeps on the couch behind his tower of plastic blocks, I know that this is one of those moments.

Those exact best things.

And then my e-mail notifier pings me with a new message, and the song fades out, and the sun disappears.

It’s an update from my father’s blog.

Watch out, Olympics!
the subject says.
Here she comes!

“Thanks for calling,” I whisper into the phone, not trusting my voice to come out right. “I should go. Happy New Year, Josh.” I hang up without waiting for a reply and, against every screaming warning in my head, click on the link.

Chocolate Coca-Cola cupcakes with vanilla buttercream icing topped with buttered popcorn, peanuts, Raisinettes, and M&M’s

Two days into the new year, I’m back at Hurley’s for the pre-open cupcake
shift, hands speckled with exploded chocolate goo, frosting clumped in my hair, and a killer stomachache.

“Hudson, what happened?” Dani asks. We haven’t spoken since our argument right after Christmas, but now she’s staring at me across the flour-covered prep counter with genuine concern. “Say something.”

I toss a spoon into a bowl of useless, runny batter, my own personal comfort food. I probably have salmonella now. “My father.”

Dani frowns. “Another e-mail?”

“A blog. A special one for New Year’s.” The words flash
through my head.
You should’ve seen my beauty out there on the ice!

Dani sighs and clears a few crusty bowls from the counter. “Wanna tell me about it?”

I close my eyes. At the other end of the kitchen, the big coffeemaker hisses, and I see the words again.
Watch out, Olympics! Here she comes!
Skiing, sledding, snowshoeing, snowman making, snowball fighting … of all the
s
-named winter activities my father could’ve offered his blushing she-Elvis, he picked the one that was supposed to be
ours
. The very last thing we had together. The thing that no one else could touch—not even my mother. Maybe I turned my back on the rink three years ago, but it wasn’t to go skate with another father.