Foreign Worlds

• • • Prologue • • •

Most children have the pleasure of knowing that they have two very loving and doting parents to be there to raise them and care for them. But some, however, are not as lucky as them.

They have either one or none at all. But for me? I have only one of those parents. And that'd be my mom—Leila. She's been my best friend and one to go to since birth. I can always trust her with everything.

That is, until the day I made my senior debut in the Long Beach surfing competition. That was the one day I would never been able to forgive her for what she'd done to me all these years.. That night, the very same day I'd taken first and taken the world by storm, she'd reveal to me the most shocking truth I'd never been told my whole life.

My father was alive. And he was the international figure skating legend himself—Viktor Nikiforov.

It was that same night I felt my world come to a screeching halt and I felt many things for my mother: anger, sadness, and hatred.

Anger for being lied to all these years, sadness because I grew up without a father figure, and hatred?

Hatred because I never got to meet my father—not until I was 18, a legal adult. I'd gone a total of 18 years without him in my life and now she wants to suddenly throw him into my life and into the picture? And you agree that she had a right to do it? You obviously must have lost your mind if you think she did.

Leila had no right in hiding my own father from me and telling me he didn't want me as his daughter. He wanted me—to see me grow up, watch me compete and go head to head with champions from all over the world, to tell me 'I love you' everyday I woke up or before I went to bed... I was robbed of a proper, happy childhood filled with memories of him.

Sometimes I can't even believe I was told I had a rare illness that made my hair so platinum and silver looking, when really... in the end?

I was Viktor Nikiforov's daughter the whole time.