Walk on Water Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.

 
—7—
     
    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