SLEAZE: A Hollywood Comeback Story (Book #1)

Chapter 20

As I tightened the laces on my rented ice skates, I found myself asking the same question that I’d been repeating since we left the house: “Are you sure you want to do this?”

Bundled in my mom’s spare winter coat and a scarf, Sophie sat next to me on one of the old, wooden benches that lined the pond, staring out at the dozens of people already on the ice. “Oh my God, stop asking me that,” she said as she swung her thin legs up and down. “Obviously I want to do it, it was my idea.”

“You’re going to get worse,” I warned, hitting the back end of my skate’s blade against the mat on the ground and wriggling my toes around inside the boot.

“Somehow,” Sophie said, “I doubt it’ll be fatal.”

“Suit yourself,” I replied, getting to my feet and teetering towards the rink’s entrance.

“Stop trying to make me feel bad,” Sophie said, her voice lilting in a slight whine as she got up and followed me with small, uneven steps. “I mean, give me a break. I’ve been stuck inside for three days straight, I feel like I’m going crazy.”

“Welcome to the suburbs,” I muttered. “Seriously though, what did you expect—a chartered flight to Jamaica the minute you got bored?”

“Don’t do that,” Sophie said. “That’s not what I meant.”

“Yeah, well, just try to remember that your goal is to keep a low profile.”

“Right, because going ice skating is really the scandal of the century.”

Sophie rolled her eyes and I shrugged off her protest as I neared the break in the rink’s wall, hesitant to cross the threshold and leave dry land.

Like most people who’d grown up in my neighborhood, I’d learned how skate long before I even knew how to read. Mastering the skid stop had been an early rite of passage among the boys on my street and by the time I turned five, my skills on the ice were good enough to get me recruited for the town’s pre-peewee hockey league. Unfortunately, despite my dad’s misguided belief that I’d grow up to be the starting goalie for the Bruins, my two-season career came to a swift end when Scott fired a puck into my face during a Saturday morning practice. I could never quite pinpoint when it happened, but at some point between having my front teeth knocked out and waking up in a hospital with nineteen stitches in my mouth, my hatred of the ice was born.

I could count the number of times that I’d been skating since then on one hand, and yet, that hadn’t stopped my mom from barging into my room and ordering me to take Sophie to Frog Pond that morning. Naturally, my first reaction had been to lie and I crossed my fingers that I looked as sick as I had the day before as I began my act. Mom remained stone faced as I detailed my made up battle against influenza, but it wasn’t until I’d unleashed a barrage of fake coughs that Sophie had wandered in with her face set in a perfect mask of disappointment.

It took less than three minutes of being cajoled by the tag team for my resistance to break, but as I stood flailing on the ice like a newborn foal, the only thought that crossed my mind was that I had to be the biggest sucker in the entire world—and for what?

I cursed loudly as my feet began to veer in opposite directions, attracting the disdainful glares of several moms within earshot. “Here,” Sophie said, hands outstretched for me to grab as she gracefully glided around me in circles.

“What?” I grumbled as I straightened up and pushed off from the ice with my back foot. “You think I don’t know how to skate?”

I’d gone maybe three yards before Sophie caught up, studying me as she skated backwards with fluid strides. With her focus trained squarely on my face, she seemed unconcerned about the groups of skaters whose faces lit up with recognition when they spotted her or the flock of children that stumbled along the edges of the ice. She didn’t even break her gaze to watch a talented girl in the middle of the rink land a double axel.