I reached back and turned the shower faucet closed and quivered with anger. I wanted to say a million things to squash her, but I knew nothing would end her the way I wanted to really end her. I had to focus on the future. I walked out of the shower, grabbed my towel and wrapped it around my body. I brought my gym bag over my shoulder and then hustled out of the locker room. I didn’t bother to get dressed because I knew that I had to get as far away from Poppy as I could. Both for my safety and for hers.
When I got outside, I realized I had forgotten my coat inside, but decided to just rush as quickly as I could across the grassy arboretum and back to the dorm. As I ran, tears found their way to my eyes, spilling onto my cheeks. As I continued to walk, I felt a shadow lurking behind me, and I forced myself forward. I felt for sure it was Poppy, ready to jump at me, carve her name into my back with a razor, the crazy bitch. I could almost see the blood dripping down and I could feel her laughter echoing in my ears.
Suddenly, there were hands on my back. I shrieked and sprung forward. But laughter rang out, and it was a male’s voice. I stopped and yanked around to find Zed in his running clothes, coming back from a run in the woods. He was so handsome as he towered over me. His laughter washed over me and I finally calmed down.
“Where are you going so fast without your clothes, Rooney Calloway?” he asked, giving me a once over.
I sighed and let my chin drop to my chest. I saw myself as he saw me: a tired-looking, very wet girl in only a towel, running across the arboretum like my life depended on it. “I just was in a hurry,” I tried but knew it sound very truthful.
“Well, it’s a really good way to catch a cold, I would say,” he offered. Then, he yanked his top-layer sweatshirt off his body, turned the neck toward my head and then shoved it over me, like I was a kid and it was his responsibility to get me dressed. I forced my arms through the sweatshirt and let the towel fall. The sweatshirt was so long, it covered my crotch and dipped toward my knees. The hood was still wrapped over my head as I blinked up at him.
“How do you do it?” he asked.
“What? What are you talking about?” I asked.
“How do you look so adorable even when you’re so fucking frantic?” Zed asked. I couldn’t help but stare up at the way he chewed on his full lower lip.
He moved toward me and then kissed me softly. After all the shit of the day, the panic of Poppy’s attack, the grueling practices, I fell into it and closed my eyes. His hands wrapped around my shoulders and then eased toward my lower back. He lifted me against him so that I could feel the bulge of his cock, but he didn’t force me to do anything else. He just held me like that. I could feel the thud of his heartbeat through my body—a bit high and fast, I guess, due to his run through the forest. When he tipped me back on the ground again, I felt dazed.
“Come to my room,” he suggested then. He latched his hand through mine and guided me back to the boys’ dorms. When we reached it, we followed the same trek as the girls—down into the belly of the old stone building, toward the back end of the hallway. He cut his key into the lock and we found the room to be empty. It had a similar stale, basement smell like mine did, and he and his roommate hadn’t bunked their beds, which made everything feel a little smaller. He closed the door behind us and tapped his bed so that I could sit. When I did, I hadn’t realized how tense my muscles were. I loosened them and closed my eyes.
“She’s fucking with you again, isn’t she?” he asked. Then he tugged at something under his bed and brought out a little cardboard box.
“It doesn't matter,” I murmured. “I can deal with it. She is definitely insecure about herself. That’s for sure. Crazy bitch.”
I closed my eyes for a long moment, then opened them and watched as he yanked open the cardboard box. “You know, I haven’t seen much of you since I got back from Thanksgiving.”
“I wondered about that,” I said. “You seemed a little distant. But I didn’t want to pry.”
Zed had worn a white t-shirt beneath his sweatshirt, and he drew that off to reveal his muscular form beneath. He scrubbed his fingers through his brown curls to tousle them. “It was fucked up. My dad has fully moved out of the house now, and my sister’s pregnancy is showing and… God. I mean, it just feels like the whole world is falling apart. All they did was make fun of me and ask me if I was going to the Olympics and shit.”
“And what did you tell them?” I asked.
Zed’s green eyes were huge. He dropped himself onto the bed and stretched out. I eased myself against him and cuddled him close. I wore no underwear, no pants, and he had only his running shorts. I felt a wave of desire for him but kept my hand across his chest. He dotted a kiss on my forehead and murmured, “It doesn’t matter. Let’s just rest, okay? God, I’m always so fucking tired. So fucking tired of working so hard for something that might not even come true. And I always hear it in my head. My parents asking what it was all for, you know? Not that they ever even watched the Olympics anyway. We barely had television growing up. Too. Fucking. Poor.”
I blinked and thought about what I could possibly say. In truth, there was nothing. There was only the honesty of knowing that Zed ached with sadness I could only half-way understand. I felt his heart beat slowly, softly, until he gradually fell asleep. And after about an hour of lying there, feeling a coziness I had never experienced before, I slowly crept over his body and landed back on the floor. I leaned forward and gave him a final kiss on the cheek and then tip-toed back out into the hallway.
What Zed had said represented exactly what the rest of the athletes at Denver Athletics and I felt, actually. We were stretched-thin, exhausted—eating as much as we could to retain our muscles, build muscles, whatever, but always ending up in bed strung-out and aching. Our alarm clocks rang too early, and our bodies gave until they couldn’t give anymore. In general, unless you were a genius like Clinton, our academics faltered. Mr. Collins gave us all a lecture about how we had to better our minds for the time after our athletics, but we all kind of blinked at him like—after? What? What do you even mean? And he gave up and upped everyone’s grades by one letter, just because he couldn't very well fail that many people.
When I reached my dorm room that night, I burst in to find Chloe and Max up in her dorm bed, stretched out to watch a movie. Both were fully dressed, thank god, but they stared down at me and exclaimed, “Where are your pants!”
I rolled my eyes and cranked up the ladder to my bed. “It’s a long story. Throw me one of those Snickers bars. I know you have them.”
They did as they were told, and kept quiet, or as quiet as necessary. I ate just two bites of Snickers and let myself drift off into a deep sleep. All too soon, the alarm clock rang.
Chapter Fourteen
“Promise you’ll watch what you eat. And you won’t drink anything with alcohol. And you’ll keep the thought of Nationals in your head when you make every single decision,” Coach Jonathon said to me in his office, about two hours before Theo had arranged to pick me up to head to his house for Christmas. “I know that everyone else is probably going to eat and drink to their heart’s content, but you’re different, Rooney. Nationals is only four months away, and you have to—have to—” Here, he pounded his fist onto his palm, and his cheek blotched up with red. “You have to focus up. It’s all mindset. Don’t you forget that.”
As if I’ve been doing anything else.
“I get it, Coach,” I reassured him one final time. I simmered with excitement to get off-campus. I hadn’t been off in four weeks, not since Thanksgiving, and the thought of one of the Everton’s warm guest beds, time with a huge television, and even conversation with them—a family who actually cared for one another, thrilled me. I had never had a cozy Christmas. Now, given the opportunity for one, I could not wait for it to start.
“Good. You had better.”
Chloe had left a few days before. “What do you mean you’ve never taken a plane?” she chirped when I told her, just before she left fo
r the Denver airport and then flew the rest of the way to Los Angeles. Then, she had muttered, “I guess there’s no way I could have afforded it either if it wasn’t for this.”
“Travel is a thing for the rich,” I had said, just before I flung my arms around her and hugged her so hard she would have broken if she wasn’t all muscle. When I told her this, she frowned and said that she should have been a fucking ballerina.
The strangest thing about all of this was that my birthday was December 23, which was just one day away. I was to be seventeen years old—the exact age when I had always assumed I would have everything figured out, which was hilarious to think about now. Knowing that my birthday was that day and that nobody else did felt like a secret, something I kept inside of myself that nobody else could see. I would celebrate Christmas easily and let my birthday drip past. I would simply start to correct people when they said I was sixteen, and say—“No. I’m actually seventeen now.”
It would be easy.
When I reached Theo’s car out front, Zed was in the back seat. I was surprised, yet totally pleased, and understood immediately that Zed hadn’t wanted to go home and Theo had decided to offer up his home for the holiday. Such was the way of the Brotherhood—they were always there for each other.
“Hey, boys! We’re out of practice for a few days. We did it,” I said.
“I’m almost too exhausted to celebrate,” Zed offered.
“Me too,” Theo sighed. He cranked the engine and changed the music to a hip hop song I didn’t recognize. “You’re going to like Christmas at my house, I think. It’s pretty chill, as long as you don’t get my dad talking too much.”
“He tends to do that,” Zed said.
“That’s okay.” There was no way I could translate to them that I felt a weird closeness to Mr. Everton, not without disclosing my father’s identity. “I haven’t really celebrated Christmas much before, so I’ll take anything.”
They didn’t know what to say to this. Nobody spoke for a little while, and I liked the silence, as it felt easy—the way it should, between people who’d grown so close over such a short space of time. We charged up the side of the mountain and snaked through the little roads, with sharp rocks that cut out from the cliff edges and seemed menacing. Theo was masterful at the wheel and drove inches from the rocks without clipping the car. Zed heaved a sigh and muttered, “God damn, this drive is scary. I always forget.”
“Always forget you’re not a mountain boy,” Theo said. He glanced at me and gave me a warm smile. “We were born in the mountains and they’re all we know. Right, Rooney?”
I nodded, although I had spent very little time in the Colorado wild. It was true that the mountains had a kind of mysticism for me; that just gazing out at them from my bedroom back at Karla’s had given me a sense of calm and purpose. I couldn’t imagine having that feeling looking out at the ocean, although I hadn’t seen it before.
“Even though you’ve been all over the world? You still think that?” I asked.
Theo nodded. “I’ve seen so many different mountain ranges. Dad got a crazy travel bug when I was eight or nine and we just went. But every time we got back here and hiked our familiar trails, I just knew. This would always be my home. There’s no place like it in the world.”
When we arrived at Theo’s mansion, the gates swept open for us and we charged through the driveway. I shoved away the previous memory of this place, when I had run into the night, tears down my face, and had had to call Jeanine to pick me up in the middle of nowhere. That seemed like years ago, rather than just a few months.
When Theo, Zed, and I reached the front door, Mrs. Everton, a woman I hadn’t met before, flung open the door and lurched forward to hug her son. She was a slightly overweight middle-aged woman with bright dyed red hair, lipstick, and this overwhelming perfume that seemed almost a bit too cheap for who she was, the wife of a billionaire. This somehow made her more endearing. When she brought her arms away from her son, she drew them over me and said, “Welcome to our home, Rooney! Thomas has told me so much about you. I’m so glad to have you for Christmas.”
I blushed. “Thank you so much for having me.”
That night, Zed, Theo, and I sat at their grand dining room table for the first of many unforgettable meals. Their cook prepped little charcuterie boards for all of us, each with unique cheeses from Europe, along with raisins, dried tomatoes and nuts. We then had salmon, with lemon and herbs, and a small glass of wine each. Mr. Everton did take the floor, in terms of storytelling, but I didn’t mind at all, not even when I caught Theo rolling his eyes toward Zed.
“What was that like?” I asked, in the midst of Mr. Everton’s story of his time in the Olympic village. “You must have met people from all over the world.”
Mr. Everton leaned forward and his eyes sparkled with nostalgia. “God, you would love it, Rooney. You really would. I remember, in particular, one of our gymnasts… Rudy Eyser, maybe you have heard of him.”
“Everybody knows who Rudy Eyser is, Dad,” Theo said.
“Of course.” I gave Mr. Everton a knowing look. “What did he do?”
“He fell in love with this French swimmer,” Mr. Everton said, chuckling. “He chased after her the entire time we were there. I kept telling him to blow her off and focus on his training. But he hardly thought about it at the time. God damn, I wish I hadn’t focused so much on trying to get him back in line! He still beat me, regardless of all that.”
I grinned, although my stomach stirred with apprehension. Why did I want to hear these stories about my father? Shouldn’t I focus fully on the fact that he wanted nothing to do with me? I didn’t want this nuanced view of this vagabond, wild man who had fallen in and out of love and still grabbed the medal of Olympic history.
“What happened to the French girl?” I asked.
“Turns out, she ran away with one of the weight lifters from Italy,” Mr. Everton replied matter of factly. “I read recently that they live in this big villa outside of Rome. Rudy never could have given her that, I guess.”
After our conversation had died down, the boys and I were exhausted. Just past 9:30, Mrs. Everton showed me to my guest bedroom, which was on the third floor, tucked toward the back of the mansion. She clicked on the light to reveal a California king bed with a dark green comforter and golden curtains that cradled the large windows that looked out toward the mountains. The floor was hardwood, but there was a large hand-made rug in the center. A modern art painting hung on the wall beside an antique wardrobe. It looked like a room in a museum, a place frozen in time.
“Wow,” I murmured, walking in deeper and looking around. “It’s beautiful.”
“Really? Oh, good. I always like to create some kind of theme in each room. Thomas thinks that I’ve taken my interior decorating too far, but honestly, I would go crazy without it. I’m always writing little notes to myself about how to improve this place. You could say that the whole house is something of an art project for me.”
I wanted to translate how little I understood about what it meant to “make a home” and that this effort she put forth was really amazing to me. But instead, I fumbled with my words and said, “I can’t wait to see the rest of it.” This seemed to be a good enough answer because she smiled and pointed at a stack of clean towels and told me to help myself.
When I woke up the next morning, I felt it in my belly like a stone. I was seventeen years old. Seventeen years before, that gorgeous black-haired beauty, Zelda Parkington, had given birth to me. Who knew what had happened that day except for Rudy Eyser himself? Had he held me after I had been born? Had I cried so loud, so much that he had made up his mind, he could never love me? Had Zelda looked down at me and thought, I want to give her the entire world, the way I imagined I might if I had a child?
Seventeen years old. I drew my legs over the side of the king-sized bed and dotted my toes on the chilly hardwood. The mansion felt dull and quiet around me. There were only five us in the house, plus maybe a
few of the staff, in a place bigger than the girls’ dorm building at school. It seemed like an immense waste of space—just Mrs. Everton filling it with other people’s old junk, antiques and all for the purpose of her boredom.
I showered and put on tights and a little burgundy dress that I had borrowed from Chloe. Despite nobody else knowing it was my birthday, I wanted to feel like something of a girl, a near-woman—pretty, smart and strong. I glanced in the mirror and drew eyeliner around my green eyes. “It makes them pop in this insane way,” Chloe had told me when she had taught me how. I blinked several times for full effect. Looking back at my reflection, I really did look like her—Zelda Parkington, through and through.
Downstairs, I heard a flurry of voices and padded toward the breakfast nook, where large bay windows cut out toward the mountains and December sunlight filtered in through lace curtains. When I entered the room, all four of them—Zed, Theo and Mr. and Mrs. Everton—sprung up from the table and sang out, “Happy Birthday!”
The Accident Page 11
