Chapter Eight

I have a pre competition routine that has not changed since I was fifteen.

The night before anything important, a competition, a significant practice run, a session where I'm attempting something I haven't fully landed yet, I do the same things in the same order. I lay out my training clothes. I review the program in my head from start to finish without skipping the hard parts. I make chamomile tea that I don't actually like but that my first coach swore by, and I drink it sitting on the floor of wherever I'm living because I started doing it on the floor of my childhood bedroom and the floor part stuck.

It's not superstition. It's architecture. The routine builds a container for the nerves so they have somewhere to live that isn't my body.

I was sitting on the floor of my dorm room at ten PM on Wednesday with my chamomile tea and my program notes when Bria came in from the library, dropped her bag, looked at me, and said: "Floor night."

"Thursday's a big practice," I said.

"The Lutz?"

"Not yet." I looked at my notes. "The combination spin sequence. Hendricks wants the personal essay outline by Friday and I've been avoiding it, so I'm thinking about the spin sequence instead."

Bria sat on her bed and pulled her hair out of its tie. "What's the essay about?"

"Coming back," I said. "After an injury. That's the angle she suggested."

"Is that the angle you want?"

I looked at my tea. "I don't know what angle I want."

"That's usually the one worth writing," Bria said. She picked up her book. "Also you have a text."

"I have my phone."

"You've been not looking at it for an hour," she said, with the precision of a person who notices things and has decided honesty is a kindness. "Which means either you're waiting for something or avoiding something, and given that it's floor night I'm guessing both."

I picked up my phone.

Three texts. One from my mother, which I would answer in the morning because answering my mother at ten PM opened a conversation with no natural endpoint. One from Sofía, which was a link to a video of a skater landing a quad Axel with the caption not to add pressure but.

And one from Declan, sent forty minutes ago.

practice tomorrow got moved. Briggs shifted the morning slot. we'll be off the ice by six.

I read it twice. The morning slot, our Tuesday-Thursday overlap had been a consistent ten minute encroachment issue for three weeks. He was telling me they'd be clear by six. Our ice time. No overlap.

He'd noticed. He'd said something to Briggs, or checked the schedule, or done whatever he'd done, and he was telling me directly instead of letting me show up and find it fixed without explanation.

I typed back: thank you.

His response: six thirty is six thirty.

I put the phone down and looked at my tea.

"Both," I confirmed to Bria, who hadn't asked again but was waiting in the way she waited for things patiently, without pressure, with the quiet confidence of someone who knew the answer was coming.

Thursday's practice was good until it wasn't.

The spin combination went well better than well, actually, the kind of well that happens when you've been overthinking something for a week and then your body just does it while your brain is briefly distracted. I came out of the combination with the right position and the right edge and Harlow's figure skating coach, Coach Dmitri a Ukrainian man of approximately sixty who communicated in a ratio of forty percent technical instruction and sixty percent significant silence watched it and wrote something in his notebook, which was the closest thing to effusive praise his system allowed.

I was warm and focused and the ice was good and I had forty minutes left in the session when I decided to put the quad Lutz back in.

Not land it. Not attempt it at full program speed. Just approach it. Skate the entry, feel the edge, let my body remember the shape of it without the commitment of actually leaving the ice. A rehearsal of intention. That was all.

I set up the entry from the back outside edge. I built the speed. I felt the moment coming where the jump would begin, and I 

I pulled out.

Not a fall. A choice, technically. My body made the calculation and chose the floor over the air before I'd consciously agreed to it, and I came out of the entry rotation into a graceless two footed landing that was the skating equivalent of a sentence that stops halfway through.

Dmitri looked up from his notebook.

"Again," he said.

I set up again. I built the speed. I felt the moment.

I pulled out again.

The third time I didn't even build full speed. I knew before I started that I wasn't going and some part of me had already conceded it, which was the worst version of the thing not trying and failing, but failing to try, which left nothing useful to fix.

I came to a stop at the center of the ice and stood there for a second.

Dmitri was quiet. He wrote something in his notebook a long note, which was unusual and then he said: "That's enough for today," and walked off the ice.

I stood at center ice in the empty rink and breathed.

The thing about a rink when it's quiet is that it gives everything back to you. The sound of your own breathing. The particular quality of cold air that has been cold for a long time. The slight hum of the overhead lights. Everything you brought in with you, returned, because there's nowhere else for it to go.

I was still standing there when the doors opened.