Page 100 of Crew Girl

The room fell silent. The tension was palpable.

“Rowers, pick up your handle.”

Twenty handles whirred into position.

C’mon, Cam. You’ve got this.

“Sit ready,” called the moderator. “Attention! GO!”

It was hard to know where to focus. The leaderboard tracking the rowers’ progress, or the rowers themselves.

Ryder’s name flew to the top of the board straight away.

“Keep it up, Easton!” Coach Hayden called. A reminder that in less than ten minutes they’d be a team again.

“Go, Ryder!” Karina shouted.

Baloo, who was closest to them, was pushing hard. So was Logan. Not hard enough.

Teagan cupped her hands to her mouth. “GO, BALOO! FLY LIKE AN EAGLE!”

Coach Hayden shook his head. “He’s pushing too hard. He’ll burn out trying to keep that pace.”

He was right. She glanced at the leaderboard, watched Baloo’s name drop. Saw Josh’s name shoot past it, closing in on Cam and Ryder.

Josh’s face was tight, tense. Too tense. She’d seen him straining before, gritting his teeth, pushing through the pain to hold a pace, but this was different. He wasn’t reacting to the muscle burn in the way he normally did.

“Josh’s losing steam.”

Ryder saw it, too. Pushed harder, faster, like the two of them were in some weird Marvel film, and Ryder, who’d been forced to stand in his cousin’s shadow all his life, was literally draining Josh’s energy stores. He was rowing stronger than he ever had before. Behind Teagan, his mom was going wild. The leaderboard continued shuffling names.

Teagan shook her head, not believing what she was seeing.

Josh had fallen to tenth place. He wouldn’t be getting an invitation to the Junior National team. Not now. Maybe not ever.

Coach shook his head, bewildered. Caught Teagan’s eye and pointed at Ryder and Cam, who were pretty much rowing in sync. Solid. Strong. Steady. And fast. “It’s a two-man race now.”

Their names flipped back and forth on the leaderboard faster than an Olympic Ping-Pong volley.

Five hundred meters to go.

Ryder.

Cam.

Ryder.

Cam.

She felt sick with nerves. Forced herself to watch the rowers.

Cam was in his element. He could pull ahead. Keep himself in the number one position, get noticed, like he deserved. Everyone on the team trained hard, but Cam had done it fastidiously, noticing his faults, correcting them, pushing himself to another level, fine-tuning until he was ready to move to the next.

He glanced up, caught her eye. She willed him to know how much she wanted this for him. How much she believed in him. How deeply she cared for him.

His name passed Ryder’s.

The two of them glanced at each other. Ryder looked pissed off, like Cam had laid down a royal flush after successfully bluffing at a high-stakes game of cards. Cam held his poker face…