Chapter 26

You wake up Saturday with the particular feeling in your stomach that only competitions give you.

Not dread. Not quite nerves. Something older than both — the feeling of a body that knows what today is and has been preparing for it longer than your conscious mind has, something that lives in your muscles and your edges and the specific memory of cold air and blade on ice.

You lie in the quiet of your bedroom for a moment.

Look at Gerald.

“Okay,” you tell him.

Gerald has no notes.

You text her before you get up.

you
7:43am
okay. today’s the day

alysa 🖤 ⛸️ ✨
7:43am
good morning beautiful

7:44am
how are you feeling

you
7:44am
like today is the day

alysa  🖤 ⛸️ ✨
7:44am
that’s exactly how you should feel

7:45am
eat something

7:45am
not too much

7:45am
actually Sandra probably told you all this

7:45am
ignore me

7:46am
no don’t ignore me

7:46am
you’re going to be so wonderful today

7:46am
I’ll be there

7:46am
go eat something 🖤

You put your phone down and go eat something.

The rink is different when it belongs to a competition.

Same ice, same cold, same smell — but the air has a different quality to it, charged and expectant, the particular electricity of people who have been working toward something finally arriving at the day it gets to matter. Boards with sponsors. Officials with clipboards. Other skaters in their competition dress moving through warm ups with the focused quiet of people who have gone somewhere inside themselves and won’t fully come back until it’s over.

You find Sandra at the boards and she looks at you the way she always looks at you before a competition — assessing, steady, the look of someone who has prepared you as well as she can and is now trusting you to know it.

“How do you feel?” she asks.

“Ready,” you say.

She nods once. Accepts this.

“The flip,” she says.

“I know,” you say.

“Trust it.”

“I will.”

She puts her hand briefly on your shoulder — which from Sandra is the equivalent of a lengthy motivational speech — and turns back to her clipboard.

You don’t see her until you’re in the kiss and cry.

Or rather — you see her the way you always see her, peripherally, without looking directly, the way you’ve been aware of her across rinks since before you knew her name. She’s in the stands, not front row but close — third row, slightly to the left of centre, and she has a small digital camera in her hands that you notice and then stop noticing because Sandra is talking and you have a programme to skate.

The warm up goes well.

The flip lands twice. The combination spin centres on the first try. The layback opens slowly and stays, held longer than you need to hold it, just because today you want to feel every second of it.

You skate off the warm up ice and sit with Sandra and breathe and don’t think about the stands.

Your name is called.

You step onto the ice.

The programme does what it does when it’s going right — it stops being something you’re doing and becomes something you’re inside, and the difference between those two things is everything. The music starts and your body knows what to say and you let it say it, let it find its own language, the way Massimo told Alysa and Alysa told you without knowing she was telling you.

From the inside.

The step sequence happens.

The flip —

Lands.

Clean and sharp and absolutely certain, your arms opening on the exit like they’ve been waiting to, and somewhere in the stands you think you hear something but you’re already moving, already finding the next note, already becoming the next thing the music asks you to be.

The combination spin.

You find the centre and pull in and the world narrows to a single revolving point and you feel it — quiet and perfect, exactly the way she described it that very first week — and you exit clean and the crowd responds and you don’t hear any of it because you are already thinking about the layback.

The layback comes near the end.

You find your entry, settle into it, and then —

Back arching. Head tipping. The ceiling of the rink becoming everything as you pull into the spin, the cold air rushing past, and you open into the Biellmann position — reaching back for your blade, drawing your leg up until your whole body becomes a single vertical line — and you hold it, hold it, longer than you need to, longer than you planned to, because it feels like flying and you are not ready to land yet.

You land.

The music comes back.

You finish.

In the third row, slightly left of centre, Alysa is very still.

She has been very still for the better part of four minutes.

The camera is in her hands and she has used it — quietly, carefully, the small click of it lost in the music and the crowd — at the combination spin, at the step sequence, at the Biellmann, at the layback. Small captures. Stolen moments. Photographs of you in the middle of the thing you love most, looking like something she doesn’t have words for yet, something that makes her chest feel too small for what’s in it.

She watches you finish your programme and come to your final position and the crowd responds properly now, warmly, a real response, and she puts the camera down in her lap and claps with everyone else except her hands are slightly unsteady and she notices this and decides not to examine it.

Beside her Massimo is on his feet.

His sign — WE LOVE [Y/N] in large letters, purple marker, Phillip’s handwriting because Massimo’s handwriting is famously illegible — is held above his head with both hands.

Phillip is standing too.

Clapping with great composure and slightly red eyes.

Alysa stays seated.

She looks at the photos on the small screen of her camera — the spin, the Biellmann, the layback, your face in the exit of the flip — and she thinks about the underside of a bench and permanent marker and it’s always specifically you and she thinks—

She thinks she is going to have to say something soon.

Something that starts with I and ends with you and has three words and has been true for longer than she has allowed herself to know it.

Soon.

Not yet.

But soon.

Second place.

The scores come and Sandra’s face does the thing that means she is satisfied and has notes and will share them in a constructive environment on Monday, and you step onto the podium and the silver medal is cold against your chest and you look out at the stands—

Massimo’s sign.

Phillip beside him, composed and red-eyed.

And Alysa.

Standing now, camera down, just — looking at you. With that expression. The open one, the luminous one, the one that belongs to early mornings and quiet rinks and the underside of a bench, and she is smiling at you from the third row like second place is the most wonderful thing she has ever witnessed and you are the most wonderful person she has ever seen standing on a podium holding a silver medal.

You smile back.

From the podium, in your competition dress, silver medal and all.

You smile back and feel it all the way down.

She finds you afterward in the corridor outside the dressing rooms.

Just — there, leaning against the wall with her camera in her hands and her jacket on and her hair down, and she straightens up when she sees you and her whole face does the thing and she opens her arms and you walk straight into them without breaking stride, silver medal and skate bag and all.

Her arms close around you.

Warm and certain and completely sure of themselves, the way she holds everything.

“Second place,” she says, into your hair.

“Second place,” you confirm, into her shoulder.

“You were—” she stops. Tries again. “The Biellmann.”

“I held it too long.”

“You held it perfectly,” she says, immediately and with great conviction. “You held it exactly as long as it needed to be held and it was — ” she pulls back just enough to look at you, her hands at your shoulders, and her expression is so earnest and so unguarded and so full of something she hasn’t finished finding the words for yet that you feel it like sunlight. “It was something else. You were something else.”

You look at the camera in her hand.

“Did you take pictures?” you ask.

She glances down at it.

Back up at you.

Something moves across her face — caught, a little, but not embarrassed. Just — honest, the way she is always honest. “Yeah,” she says simply.

“Of my spins?”

“Of you,” she says. “Of all of it.”

You look at her.

She looks back.

“Can I see?” you ask softly.

She hands you the camera.

You scroll through them slowly — the combination spin, centred and clean, caught at the exact peak of it. The step sequence, your face concentrated and present. The Biellmann from below, your body a perfect line against the rink lights. The layback, the exit, your arms opening.

And then one more.

The last one.

You on the podium.

Silver medal. Competition dress. Looking out at the stands with that smile — the real one, the whole one, the one you didn’t know was on your face because it was meant for her.

You look up from the camera.

She’s watching you look at them with that soft careful expression.

“You kept them,” you say.

“I’m going to print them,” she says quietly. “If that’s okay.”

Something settles in your chest. Warm and permanent, like marker on the underside of a bench.

“It’s more than okay,” you say.

She takes the camera back gently and you stand together in the corridor with the competition going on somewhere behind you and Massimo’s voice audible from three rooms away saying something about the sign and whether it helped and Phillip’s response which is measured and fond and almost certainly no Massimo the sign did not help her skate better —

And Alysa puts the camera carefully in her jacket pocket, close to her chest, where it stays.

Where you stay.