Edge of Glory

by Rachel Spangler

  “When you set the bar that low, I actually have a chance of meeting expectations.” Corey laughed.

  “Awesome.” The girl bounced off.

  “What in all the fucks, dude?” Nate whispered.

  Corey threw a chagrined smile over her shoulder as she followed more slowly. “Go Team USA, right?”

  “Who was that?” Elise asked when they were both out of earshot.

  “Nikki Prince.”

  Elise shook her head. “Sorry, but again, who is she?”

  Paolo raised both his palms to his forehead. “Do you never pay attention to anything other than skiing?”

  “What? Is she like a pop star or something?”

  “Pretty much,” Nate said. “She’s the next big thing in boarder-cross. The media loves her. Doesn’t hurt that she’s young and cute and bubbly.”

  “But can she race?” Elise asked.

  “That’s the million dollar question,” Holly said. “She rocked the junior circuit pretty hard for the last two seasons. All the coaches and sponsors claim she’s the future face of the sport, but she and Corey have yet to face each other. She’s only seventeen.”

  “Wait a second. She’s a teenager who’s never faced a pro-level competition and they’ve already crowned her the future of Team USA?”

  “They’ve done the math.” Nate said the word “math” as if it were unsavory. “Corey’s not getting any younger, but none of their other prospects have eclipsed her in productivity or popularity.”

  “That speaks highly of Corey. You think they’d do everything they could to keep her happy instead of focusing on a possible replacement.”

  “You’d think.” Nate drank from a bottle of Saranac beer. “But the younger athletes are easier to mold.”

  “Corey could make things a little easier on herself on that front,” Holly said wearily.

  “She made it pretty damn easy on them for a long time,” Nate shot back with enough force to make Elise wonder what she’d stepped into.

  “I’m not saying she should go back. I’m enjoying this version of Corey much more than the one I managed three years ago, but there’s a middle ground between selling your soul to a multinational corporation and ‘drink water.’”

  “I agree, but if we focus on winning again, we won’t have to worry about making those kinds of compromises quite so often.”

  “I’m sorry.” Elise cut in, still confused. “What do you mean by ‘drink water’ or ‘selling your soul’?”

  “Guys,” Corey said in a tone made up of equal parts embarrassment and annoyance as she stepped back onto the patio. “It’s cheat night. I leave for like five minutes and you start a corporate takeover?”

  “The topic came up in conversation,” Holly deflected.

  “I started it, apparently,” Elise said, still not sure what exactly “it” was. “I don’t follow snowboarding much—”

  “And by that you mean not even a little bit.”

  “Right, not at all, but I was only trying to get caught up on your underage guest in there, and somehow we ended up talking about water, though I now think water might be a code word for something else.”

  “It is,” Corey said matter-of-factly as she settled back into the Adirondack chair next to her.

  “You seem fond of those,” Elise enjoyed the little quirk of a smile Corey tried to hide behind her mug of hot chocolate.

  “This one isn’t as, shall I say ‘fun,’ as others you might’ve heard about. It’s not even a code so much as a movement.”

  “A movement?” she asked, amused. “What, like civil rights?”

  “Maybe not that lofty, but progressive. The ‘drink water’ movement is pushback against over-corporatization of a sport that should belong to athletes and fans,” Corey explained.

  “How so?”

  “When I got started in boardercross racing, we all competed because we loved to. We raced for fun or pride or because we wanted to push the limits. We were outlaws on most slopes. We cut courses between trees and on the backsides of mountains. Even when the tours got running, we were sponsored by board makers or ski resorts. One of my first pro races was funded by two chiropractors and an orthopedic surgeon.”

  “Fitting,” Elise said, not sure where Corey was going, but captivated by the passion in her voice. She’d seen a more serious side to her the night in the trainers room, but she hadn’t seen this kind of spark in her before. Now her hazel eyes shone like the stars popping out in the sky overhead.

  “We found the connection hilarious, but it still made sense. We rode boards, at ski resorts, and we broke a lot of bones. The sponsors reflected the sport. Then we got bigger. The events got bigger. The crowds got bigger. All of a sudden we were Olympians, and grandmas knew my name. Then people wanted to buy my name.”

  “You mean they wanted to sponsor you?”

  “Yeah, but not like give me money. They wanted me to use their products and to convince other people to use them, too.”

  “Pretty standard for advertising.”

  “I did what they wanted . . . for years. But it wasn’t only boards and gear and stuff I actually liked. Soon it became cereal and fast food and the Air Force,” she scoffed. “’Cause nothing says military recruits like a bunch of board bums with long hair wearing baggy pants, cutting school to crash into each other.”

  “I can see where there’d be a little bit of a disconnect.”

  “Yeah. I thought they were stupid, because none of the kids following us around were ever going to join the military and wear uniforms and buzz their hair. I didn’t mind because what did I care about how the government wasted their money on advertising? Then I got a deal with a big soda company.”

  “Corey, that’s excellent,” Elise gushed. A deal with a company of such mass appeal was the holy grail of sponsorship. She’d been there. Her comeback was still being financed by those residuals long after the ad campaigns ended and the sponsors stopped calling.

  “I thought so, too, but after a while these kids started acting like what I said mattered. I had young girls chugging soft drinks on the slopes and acting like they were bosses ’cause they drank what I drank on the posters. And I’m not talking about a can of Coke at the end of a long day. I mean the hyped-up energy drinks that have enough caffeine to kill a cow and so much sugar you practically have to chew them.”

  “She’s talking about Rush.” Holly interrupted her story.

  “Wait, isn’t Rush made by Pepsi? Pepsi is a Fortune 100 gig.” Her brain spun trying to do the math on an endorsement of that magnitude.

  “Yeah, but it tasted like ass.”

  “I’d be able to swig castor oil right from the bottle if Pepsi told me to.”

  “Oh, I did,” Corey said. “At least at the photo shoots or the big events, but the kids were all hopped up on the stuff all the time, like speed. And it didn’t make them better or faster. It made them slower and weaker and probably dumber, too. I couldn’t imagine why any aspiring athlete would put such utter crap in their bodies, so I finally asked a young boarder. “What makes you think you can win a championship with that stuff running through your veins?”

  “What did she say?” Elise asked.

  “This fourteen-year-old girl stared up at me, no joke, and said, “Because you do.”

  Elise’s stomach ached, but she couldn’t look away from Corey’s clenched jaw and faraway stare.

  “I finally got it. The Air Force wasn’t stupid. Pepsi wasn’t stupid. McDonald’s wasn’t stupid.” She shook her head. “I was.”

  She couldn’t decide if she found Corey’s conclusion to be admirable or crazy. Probably both. “You walked away from Pepsi?”

  “She didn’t just walk,” Holly said. “She twirled hard and flipped ’em the bird on the way out.”

  “I was sick of people who didn’t know us, people who’d never been on a board acting like they owned us. No one owns me. I wiped all the stickers off my board and replaced them with one big clean white catchphrase tha
t simply says, “Drink water.”

  “I remember that,” Nikki said, startling them all. No one seemed to have noticed her rejoining them.

  Elise suspected everyone else was wondering how much she’d heard. Holly and Nate didn’t seem to be fans, or even to trust her particularly. They both clammed up and looked anywhere but at her.

  Corey didn’t wear her usual smile, but she was gentle. “Oh yeah? Well now there’s a big fish left in the sea for you. You can thank me later. Someday you’ll probably get the same offer.”

  “I already did,” Nikki said, resting her back against the deck railing in a clear ploy to try to act casual. She appeared impossibly young, her brunette hair pulled back in a simple headband and her jeans slung low enough to reveal a sliver of flat stomach below the hem of her long T-shirt. “They called right after I turned pro a few months ago. I turned them down.”

  The comment turned every head on the deck. Only the crickets and the muted sound of conversations from inside filled the silence stretching between them. No one knew what to say. Elise wanted to shake her, or ask if all snowboarders were morons or some sort of moralistic communists. Maybe they took too many hits to the head. Instead, she stared from her to Corey with the same slack-jawed expression as everyone else, wondering when someone would offer some sort of reasonable explanation.

  Nikki cracked first, her youth showing through once again as she rushed to fill the void. “I, um, I had a poster of you on my bedroom wall when I was seven years old. And later my parents let me stay up late to watch you race in Vancouver when you won the gold. I had this jersey I cut to match like the bibs you wore in races, and when I started competing I couldn’t have sponsors because, well, you know the rules, but I scrawled “drink water” on the tail of my board in silver Sharpie.”

  Corey opened her mouth, then shut it as the kid spilled her heart out, fan-girling for her childhood hero.

  Nikki must’ve realized she’d lost her cool and quickly tried to rein it back in. “I mean, I followed your career all the way up. I tried to race like you did and train like you did. When Pepsi called, it seemed only logical to answer them like you did.”

  “Logical?” Elise squeaked.

  “Yeah.” She shrugged without actually portraying an ounce of carelessness. “It’s the first time I felt like a real athlete, you know, ’cause when you turn down money like that on principle, you can make a statement, right?”

  Everyone continued to stare at her, Elise included. This kid, a literal teenager, turned down life-changing money because Corey said to drink water. What sort of bizarre world had she entered where people made financial and career decisions based on the model of a woman who referred to a yoga chair pose as “pig fucker”?

  Corey must’ve sensed the absurdity of it all as well because she burst out laughing. Not her normal chuckle of amusement, or even the giggle fit she usually got when someone accidently used a double entendre, but deep, rolling laughter that shook her whole body and washed over everyone within a half-mile radius. Several people from inside stuck their heads out to see what was so funny, and Elise couldn’t have found the words to answer even if they’d asked.

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” Corey said, between gasps for air. “I’m not laughing at you. You’re a total boss. I had no idea. Really, it’s just, did you say you had a picture of me on your wall when you were seven years old?”

  Nikki nodded, embarrassment coloring her cheeks enough to be seen even in the dim light spilling out through the French doors.

  “Holy fuck,” Corey said, laughter still ringing through her voice. “I’ve never felt as old as I do right now.”

  “You’re not that old, Core,” Nate said calmly. “She’s really young.”

  “About as young as I was when she started watching me race,” Corey said. Then she turned to Elise, her eyes growing serious. “Is thirty old?”

  “No,” everyone else on the deck said in unison, even Nikki.

  But Elise only smiled, her heart feeling tight in her chest. She understood the real question in Corey’s eyes. She’d seen it in the mirror plenty of times. She’d felt the panic that accompanied the math when no matter how you worked the equation you couldn’t make it say you had more races ahead of you than behind. She finally sighed and said, “They don’t know what we do, do they, Core?”

  Her grin returned, more genuine this time. “No. I guess not.”

  “You want to tell the kid, or should I?” Elise asked.

  “She won’t understand. Would you have if someone had told you?”

  Elise shrugged. “Probably not. I’m sure people tried, but I didn’t get the message until I woke up in a hospital.”

  “You still learned a few years ahead of me. I’m not sure I got it until right now.”

  “Are they drunk?” Paolo whispered to no one in particular.

  “I’m freaked out they’re getting along. I liked it better when they were being witty assholes to each other,” Holly said.

  “Tell me what?” Nikki asked.

  Corey shook off the haze that had settled over them and smiled brightly once more. “Don’t blink, Tigger.”

  The girl, did, in fact, blink several times, then looked from one person to another as if hoping for an explanation. “What, like during a race?”

  Elise shook her head. “Not ever.”

  Chapter 7

  “Someone put a bee in those tight britches of yours?” Corey asked as she straddled the exercise bike next to Elise and allowed herself a few seconds to watch her powerful thigh muscles ripple while they worked. Her core temperature rose a few degrees before she even had a chance do any exercise of her own.

  “Nope, it’s leg day,” Elise answered without breaking pace.

  “Every day is leg day.” Corey fiddled with the resistance nobs on her bike to distract herself from the surge of attraction.

  “Not Friday,” Elise said, a wistfulness in her voice Corey had never heard before. “Friday was cheat day.”

  “Ah, cheat day. I remember thee well.”

  “’Cause it was only two days ago,” Holly called from the treadmill. “Stop yapping and start pedaling.”

  “Ouch,” Elise said, glancing over her shoulder. “When did she get bossy?”

  “The day I was born and she wasn’t the youngest anymore.”

  Elise smiled, not a full-blown, toothy smile, but not the tight-lipped line Corey had seen in their early encounters. She’d seen the new expression enough lately not to be shocked anymore, but not often enough to expect it.

  “Do you remember in school when the teacher would have to leave the room and she’d always put one kid in charge, the one who was strict, even stricter than her?”

  “Yes. I suspect you weren’t often selected for that job.”

  “No, I wasn’t, but I get to relive the experience every time Nate has a meeting because he always asks Holly to run me through my warm-ups.”

  “Ah, I get it now. Give her an inch, and she makes you run a mile.”

  Corey laughed outright. “Was that a joke? Oh my God, Elise Brandeis made a joke.”

  “I make jokes all the time,” Elise said. “I just keep them inside my head.”

  “You don’t want to share the joy?”

  “I like to think my mere presence brings enough joy to go around. No need to overload anyone.”

  “Well, that’s true,” Corey said with mock seriousness as she began to do some light pedaling. “I’ve often thought you radiate joy. Sometimes it’s distracting when I’m trying to work out.”

  “Or stalling,” Holly said, powering down her treadmill. “Do I need to separate you two?”

  “Maybe you should,” Corey said. “Elise is pulling me off task with her joke cracking.”

  “Yeah, she’s a regular class clown,” Holly said. “I’m sure she had that written on her report cards all the time.”

  “Don’t mind her,” Corey said and then stage whispered, “she’s grumpy because Paolo’s not
here.”

  “I’m not grumpy. Don’t tell him that. He’s probably in the same meeting as Nate. Everyone wants to check in before we all leave town next week.”

  “He’s meeting the USSA?” Corey asked. “Oh yeah, US Ski and Snowboard. I forget we have the same bosses.”

  “If by bosses you mean the same governing organization, then yes,” Elise said.

  “Huh?” Corey frowned and picked up her pace.

  “What?” Elise asked.

  “She’s thinking,” Holly explained. “She always pedals harder when she’s confused. It’s like the wheel on the stationary bike makes the hamster wheel in her head spin faster, too.”

  “Maybe if we hooked her up to one of those kinetic generators and gave her some algebra problems, she could power the whole training complex,” Elise suggested.

  “Wow,” Holly said, “two jokes in ten minutes.”

  “Don’t you think it’s weird?” Corey asked.

  “That I made two jokes?”

  “No, aside from the fact that you have a sense of humor, isn’t it weird to think about us answering to the same organizations. USSA or FIS, doesn’t matter, national or international, they always put skiers and snowboarders together, whether we want to or not.”

  “Most of the time we don’t want to,” Elise said. “No offense.”

  “None taken. Snowboarders complain about it more than the skiers do.”

  “We pretend you guys don’t exist,” Elise said breezily, as she continued to power through her warm-up without breaking a sweat.

  Corey, on the other hand, was already feeling the burn in her legs. Maybe she was pedaling too hard, too soon, but a little voice whispered maybe she hadn’t fully recovered from yesterday’s workout yet. She tried to drown out that voice by verbalizing her stream of consciousness. “Our collective personalities couldn’t be more different, right? You guys are uptight, type A, snobs.”

  “Right.” Elise’s voice dripped with sarcasm. “And you guys are immature, reckless burnouts.”

  Corey laughed. “It’s abundantly clear why we fought the powers that be swooping in and lumping us all together.”