Chapter 35

You make the sign on Wednesday night.

It takes longer than you expected — not because it’s complicated, just because you keep redoing it, keep deciding the letters aren’t right or the colours aren’t quite what you wanted, and eventually you accept that it is what it is and it’s made with love and that’s the only thing that matters.

Pale pink poster board.

Dark lettering — her colours, not yours, because today is about her.

WE LOVE ALYSA in large careful letters, and around the edges little drawings that take you the better part of an hour and that you are quite proud of — a tiny figure skater, a croissant, a raccoon, a small heart.

You prop it against your wardrobe when you’re done and look at it.

It looks exactly like something Massimo would make.

You consider this a success.

The good luck token is simpler.

A small thing — a tiny enamel pin, the same size as the ones on your bag, that you found three days ago in the same thrift store where everything between you properly began. A gold star. Small and simple and exactly right in a way you can’t explain except that when you saw it you thought her immediately and completely.

You wrap it in a small square of tissue.

Put it in your jacket pocket.

The competition is bigger than yours.

You feel that the moment you arrive — the scale of it, the particular electricity of a venue that holds more people and more stakes and more of everything. Bigger boards. More officials. More cameras. The kind of competition that matters in the way yours was beginning to matter and hers has mattered for years.

You find your seat.

Third row, slightly left of centre.

You sit down and realise where you are and feel something warm move through you at the symmetry of it.

You find her before the warm up.

She’s in the corridor backstage — you text and she tells you where and you go, and when you round the corner she’s there with Phillip and Massimo and she sees you and something in her face does the thing, that immediate involuntary lift, and she crosses to you without hesitating.

“Hi,” she says.

“Hi,” you say.

You’re aware of Phillip and Massimo a short distance away pretending to look at a schedule. You are both aware they are not looking at the schedule.

“How are you feeling?” you ask.

“Good,” she says. Then, honestly: “Nervous.”

“Good nervous or bad nervous?”

She considers. “Good, I think.”

You reach into your jacket pocket.

Pull out the small square of tissue.

Hold it out.

She looks at it. Looks at you. Takes it carefully and unfolds it and the little gold star sits in her palm and she looks at it for a long moment with an expression you feel in your chest.

“For luck,” you say softly. “Not that you need it.”

She closes her fingers around it.

Looks up at you.

“Thank you,” she says quietly. Not just for the pin.

You know.

“Skate from the inside,” you say. “The way Phillip always tells you.”

She stares at you.

“He told me,” you say. “At the rink. Months ago. I was listening from across the ice.”

Something breaks open in her expression — surprised and luminous and so completely fond.

She kisses you.

Right there in the corridor with Phillip and Massimo right there and the competition happening around you and you kiss her back and when she pulls back she’s smiling and so are you and from down the corridor you hear Massimo say something to Phillip in a tone of great satisfaction.

“Go skate,” you say.

She goes.

The sign comes out when she takes the ice.

You unfurl it in your third row seat and hold it up and Massimo, two seats to your left, sees it immediately and makes the sound — the Massimo sound, the one that contains everything — and leans over to look at it properly.

The raccoon.

The croissant.

WE LOVE ALYSA.

“You drew a raccoon,” he says.

“It’s her hair,” you say. “In the mornings.”

He stares at you for a full second.

Then he puts his arm around your shoulders briefly and squeezes once, the hug of someone who has decided you are exactly the right person and wants you to know it, and then releases you and turns back to the ice.

Phillip, on his other side, has seen the sign.

He looks at it for a moment.

Looks at you.

Nods once.

Which from Phillip is everything.

She skates onto the ice and the arena responds — she has that quality, always has, the quality of someone who makes a room pay attention without asking for it — and you lower the sign to your lap and just watch.

She finds her starting position.

The music begins.

She skates from the inside.

You can tell — even from the third row, even without knowing all the technical language for what you’re seeing, you can tell. There’s a quality to it that’s different from the times you’ve watched her at the rink, something that’s less about the elements and more about the space between them, the way she moves through the music like she’s not performing it but living it, the way Phillip always says.

The first combination — clean. Sharp. Her arms opening on the exit like they’ve been released from something.

The step sequence — you’ve watched her do this a hundred times across a rink and it has never looked like this. Like water finding its way. Like something inevitable.

And then the spin.

Her spin.

The one you told her you loved that very first Wednesday on the bench, the words that came out before you’d filtered them — I love your spins, they look so perfect and pretty — and here it is, right in front of you, and it is all of that and more and you grip the sign in your lap and feel something in your chest that is too large for the seat you’re sitting in.

The wobble comes on the jump.

You see it happen — the entry slightly off, something in the air not quite right, and for half a second your heart stops completely and then she lands it, not perfectly, one hand coming down to the ice briefly, and the arena makes a sound and she pulls out of it and keeps going, keeps moving, because she is Alysa and this is what she does, this is who she is — the girl who falls and gets up, the girl who wobbles and holds, the girl who keeps going.

Your eyes fill.

Not from the wobble.

From the holding.

From watching her take the imperfect thing and carry it and not let it be the end of anything.

You love her so much in this moment that you don’t have anywhere to put it.

You hold the sign up higher.

She finishes.

The arena responds properly — warmly, fully, the kind of response that means something — and she stands in her final position and looks out at the crowd and you are on your feet before you’ve decided to stand, the sign above your head, and she finds you.

Across the distance of the arena, through the crowd and the noise and the lights — she finds you.

And she smiles.

Not the performance smile. Not the competitor smile.

The real one.

The whole one.

Yours.

The scores come.

You’re in the kiss and cry with Phillip and Massimo — they brought you, naturally, obviously, without discussion, just come on from Massimo and a space made beside them — and Alysa is sitting with Phillip’s hand on her shoulder and Massimo’s hand on her other shoulder and you are there and the scores come up and—

Gold.

Massimo stands up immediately.

Phillip closes his eyes for one second.

Alysa turns and finds you and you are already there, already moving, and she stands and you meet in the middle and she holds you properly — both arms, her face in your hair, and you feel her exhale, the long complete exhale of someone who has been holding something for a very long time and is finally, finally putting it down.

“Gold,” you say into her shoulder.

“Gold,” she says into your hair. Like she’s still deciding if it’s real.

You pull back just enough to look at her.

Her eyes are bright. The competition flush in her cheeks. The small gold star pin — you see it, fastened to the inside of her costume where no one else would know to look, right over her heart.

She put it there.

She skated with it right there.

You look at it and back at her and she looks back at you and there are no words for what passes between you in that second so neither of you tries.

The podium.

You watch her stand on the top step from the third row with Massimo’s arm around your shoulders and the sign in your lap and the gold medal at her chest and she is — extraordinary. Not just the medal. Not just the skate. Just her, standing there in the lights with her dark hair and her silver piercing and somewhere on her costume a tiny gold star that nobody can see.

She finds you in the crowd.

She always finds you.

You hold the sign up.

The raccoon. The croissant. WE LOVE ALYSA.

She sees it.

She tries very hard not to laugh on the podium.

She does not entirely succeed.

She finds you afterward in the corridor.

Gold medal and competition dress and her hair coming loose from its pins and she walks straight to you and takes your face in both hands and kisses you and the medal is cold between you and the corridor is busy around you and none of it matters even slightly.

When she pulls back she looks at you for a moment.

“The raccoon,” she says.

“It looks just like you,” you say.

She laughs — the whole laugh, the real one — and pulls you back in and holds you there in the gold and the noise of the corridor and you close your eyes and hold her back and think about a bench and two people who said hey for six months and somehow ended up here.

Here.

Gold and croissants and raccoons and everything.