AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Getting up again, I began to skate, oblivious to Omar’s barked commands.
My eyes drifted shut, blocking out everything. Omar, the figure skaters waiting their turn on the ice, the other athletes that always seemed to hang around for the figure skater’s practice time—all of it.
Then I began to count.
It was a silly habit that I’d had from the first day that I stepped onto the ice in Minnesota born out of my silly obsession for a movie from the 80s that I hadn’t watched since the day of the accident.
The first three months of my time in the states had been spent hiding in the unfamiliar bedroom that they’d put together for me. Then Maxim and Alexei had had enough of my rotting away and put me to work at the skating rink they owned.
It was there that I first saw Brynn skate and how the grief over losing her own mother in the accident seemed to melt away from her skinny shoulders.
After that I spent more time watching her skate than anything else, the dads asked if I wanted to try and I jumped at the chance.
And I was terrible at it.
It was like the ice that my mother had loved so much growing up was rejecting me completely. I was stuck in a class with beginner babies and a teacher who didn’t want to teach me but had no other choice because the dads owned the rink.
It was so awful that I nearly quit until I remembered my favorite movie. It hadn’t survived the accident, going down in the car with the moms and I’d never watched it again. But I figured if Lexie could do it without her vision, then I could do it with my eyes closed.
Skate, one, skate, two, skate, three, I counted it off in my head as I turned in time not to hit the rounded wall of the rink.
The counting helped to center me more than anything, but I always started every morning warm up by ticking off the number of strides it took me to get from one end of the rink to the other, both length and width.
I’d done it so much at the rink that the dads owned in Minnesota that I could probably do my entire complicated Olympics routine with my eyes closed.
The training camp ice rink was considerably larger, so the counting wasn’t of as much import, but it soothed my frazzled nerves from the failed triple.
“Try again, Ciara,” Omar called again, his voice driving a stake into the Zen that I’d managed to gather over the past minute.
With a sigh, I followed his direction and picked up momentum.
Breathe, keep it tight, I could hear Alexei’s voice. Most of the time people fail the triple because they look at it like it’s their white whale. If you go into something with that attitude, how can you ever expect to achieve greatness?
I then remembered what I told Brynn, mimicking the words that she’d told me her mother used to say to her to calm her nerves.
Confident fly, nervous feet sink.
It was posted up all around the old house we all lived in and it had been what had given Brynn the courage to attempt a triple for the world to see.
I just needed enough confidence to try it again in front of a bunch of other athletes.
No big deal, right?
Flipping around, I lifted up off of my skates and into the air.
One, two, three, I counted and popped out, landing for just a breath on a single skate before wobbling and careening to the side.
“Shit,” I cursed loud enough for everyone in the arena to hear me, my tailbone smarting as I rolled onto my butt on the ice.
Omar seemed to concur. “Not bad. Not good either, but better than that awful first try.”
“Come on, Omar, she’s ten minutes over her time,” Felicite, one of the other figure skaters, whined in her posh British accent.
“No need to sweat,” I said, waving a hand over my head. “I’ll get off your ice just as soon as I put my ass bones back together.”
There was a rumble of laughter from the rest of the onlookers, the loudest from a redheaded man who was propped up on one of the low half walls.
I noticed him every time I’d come to skate for the past week. I wasn’t sure what he did on the ice, but he was a bit too bulky to be a figure or speed skater. That left curling as all of the hockey players at the training camp were in a different rink entirely.
