Being Sloane Jacobs

Also by Lauren Morrill

MEANT TO BE

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Text copyright © 2014 by Paper Lantern Lit, LLC
Jacket art copyright © 2014 by Cindy Clarissa Tanudjaja, Getty Images

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Random House LLC.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Morrill, Lauren.
Being Sloane Jacobs / Lauren Morrill. — First edition.
pages cm
Summary: Sloane Emily Jacobs and Sloane Devon Jacobs, from very different worlds but both with problem families, meet in Montreal where they will stay in the same hotel while attending camp, one for figure skating, the other for ice hockey.
ISBN 978-0-385-74179-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) —
ISBN 978-0-375-98712-0 (ebook)
[1. Interpersonal relations—Fiction. 2. Camps—Fiction. 3. Family problems—Fiction. 4. Ice skating—Fiction. 5. Hockey—Fiction. 6. Montreal (Quebec)—Fiction. 7. Canada—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.M82718Bei 2014
[Fic]—dc23
2012046889

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v3.1

For Adam and Lucy, the best family a girl could have

Contents

Cover

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Excerpt from
Meant to Be

CHAPTER 1

SLOANE EMILY

The music in my head swells to a crescendo, the timpani rolling like a summer thunderstorm. I push hard into the ice and turn, the wind whipping pieces of hair into my face. I position my arms for an arabesque. I look over my shoulder. I bend low at the knee, suck in a deep breath, and leap, spin, spin …

And land hard and fast to a cymbal crash only I can hear.

“Damn,” I mutter. I wanted a triple, but once again, I missed. I wussed out at the last second and doubled it, a move that is quickly becoming my signature.
And
the landing was total crap. I can practically hear my mom’s voice in my head, bemoaning yet another failed jump.

I stand up straight and skate a wide circle around the center of the ice with my hands on my hips, shaking first my right foot, then my left, my standard “Get it together, Sloane” move. In two hours of practice, I only managed to
get two halfway-decent triples, and both times I was sure I was going to snap my leg in two with the force of the landing.

The fear I’ve had since I started practicing again a few months ago is becoming more and more real: I lost it, and it’s not coming back.

I execute a low, fast camel at dead-center ice, as if the physics of the impossibly fast spin will send the fear and doubt flying out into the empty seats above me. I straighten up from the spin a little bit dizzy and am immediately annoyed that I didn’t spot properly, something I learned to do when I was just six years old. What is wrong with me?

A beam of light pours down from an open door high in the last row of the stands. I see Henry shuffling down the stairs from the mezzanine level in his standard-issue jeans and threadbare wool sweater. His gray hair peeks out from a black wool beanie, and I wonder, as I often do, if it’s the same one he’s been wearing since I started at this rink when I was five or if he replaces it every few years. Even though it’s a balmy eighty-two-degree Washington, DC, day, Henry wears long pants and wool year round, and he’s never without his hat. I guess that’s what comes of a lifetime maintaining an ice rink.

He makes his way down the stairs, until his nose is nearly pressed up against the glass that surrounds the rink. I pick up the pace and go for one last triple, just for him. I barely land and have to step out of it a half second after I hit the ice, but Henry applauds anyway.

“Hey there, Little Bit,” he calls to me, his pet name for
me from back when I actually
was
a little munchkin of a skater. He doesn’t care that now that I’m five four, one of the taller skaters out there, and sixteen years old, the name no longer applies. “It’s closing time. Off the ice.” Henry may be my biggest fan, but he’s also a stickler for the rules.

I skate toward him, then throw a hard hockey stop like James taught me when I was little. The blades give a satisfying
SSSSSSCHICK
across the ice as I skid to a stop inches from where Henry stands. “Okay, okay, I’m going!” I’m breathing hard from the last jump, which was probably one too many for this session. I can feel my thighs starting to turn to jelly.

He just shakes his head and smiles, then opens the little door to let me out of the rink. “Don’t you have school tomorrow?”

“School’s out, Henry,” I say. “Last week.”

“So I guess I better get used to shooing you out at closing for the next three months, huh?”

“Nope,” I reply. “In fact, this is the last you’ll see of me, Henry. I’m off to Montreal in the morning.”

“They shipping you off to some fancy finishing school or something?” Henry chuckles. He likes to pretend I’m some prim and proper lady circa 1955, and I like to pretend like I’m some kind of rebel skate punk. He’s a little closer to the truth than I am.

“Worse. Skate camp. ‘Four intensive weeks of training with former Olympians, surrounded by more than fifty promising young athletes,’ ” I say, quoting the brochure.

“A fate worse than death, I’m sure. For someone who’s here every dang night, isn’t skate camp the perfect summer plan?”

“Here the only person I have to impress is you, and you’ve been clapping for me since I first learned to skate backward,” I say.

“You put too much pressure on yourself,” he says. He lays his heavy hand on my shoulder. “It ain’t a big deal. Either you love it or you don’t. Either you can do it or you can’t. And, kid? I been watching you for years, and I know you can do it. The question you gotta figure out is, do you love it?”

It’s a wonder my jelly legs don’t collapse beneath me immediately. Henry knows the question is way too big for me, though, and he doesn’t even wait for an answer. He steps onto the ice behind me and makes his way slowly to where the Zamboni lives.

In the locker room, I remove my skates, then strip off my leggings and leotard and replace them with a pair of holey jeans and a white T-shirt. After spending hours spinning in spandex, there’s nothing better than throwing on baggy, soft, comfortable clothes. Actually, there’s one thing better, and that’s slipping into a hot bath. But according to the voice mail Mom left for me earlier, that’s not on the agenda tonight.

I wad up my skating clothes and wedge them into the front pocket of my black skate bag, making a mental note to take them out when I get home so they don’t ferment. I
pull the elastic out of my bun and check the mirror to see if I can do anything with what I see, but my long black hair, normally shiny and stick straight, is a sweaty, frizzy mess. I wind it back up into a pseudo-bun and secure it with the elastic. Mom will be here to pick me up any minute, so there’s no time for the shower and blowout I’m sure she’d prefer.

With one final look in the mirror, I lug my bag over my shoulder and push through the heavy blue door that leads into the lobby. I walk across the shiny linoleum and out the front door, but there’s no sign of the shiny silver sedan Mom drives, a gift from Dad on their twenty-fifth anniversary. I dig my phone out of my bag and see that she still has ten more minutes. Mom is always Right On Time. She’s always right, period.

I head back inside to wait.

I settle in on one of the benches in the narrow corridor across from the trophy cases. I’ve probably spent days of my life sitting here. Between my lessons and training sessions and James’s hockey games, I feel like the rink is my childhood home, not the two-story brick colonial in Alexandria. I root around in my skate bag, searching for my summer reading book, but it’s not there. In my mind’s eye, I can see my copy of
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
on my nightstand. I hate being without something to read. I get up and wander across the floor.

The trophy case takes up an entire wall of the lobby, and even though I’ve looked through it a hundred times, I can’t stop myself from scanning the photographs of various
skate teams from the past decade. A small, gangly girl grins cheesily in every one, a mile-wide gap between her two front teeth. Her jet-black hair, cut in a severe wedge, shines in every shot. In some she’s raising medals to the camera, in others she’s executing spins, and in one she’s even mid-salchow. In all of them, she looks completely blissed out, like she’s the queen of the ice.

I step back and shudder at the pictures of my tween-age self. Thank God for a growth spurt, several thousand dollars’ worth of orthodontia, and finally ditching that awful bob haircut my mom always said was “so CUTE!” If I had more of a juvenile delinquent bent, I’d break the glass and burn those pictures. I can just imagine what the papers would have to say about
that
.

The last picture is of me at sectionals, age thirteen. I’m wearing a navy-blue dress with tiny silver rhinestones around the collar and a short, flouncy skirt. It was my lucky dress, I had decided, because it brought me a first place at regionals. I’m holding a bouquet of red roses nearly bigger than I am and hoisting a gold medal over my head.

I’m glad there’s no picture of me from junior nationals that year. It would show me in that same navy dress, skidding across the ice on my butt after failing to land a double—
a double!
And that moment, three years ago, was the end of my competitive career—until now.

My mind is already going there, to that disastrous routine. I’m picking up speed, I’m bending, I’m leaping, I’m spinning, I’m—

Honk! Honk!

I turn around. Through the glass doors I can see my mom’s silver Mercedes. I shake off the memories, grab my bag, and rush out to the car.