Chapter 4 Théo
The basement gym in Avery’s building matched my mood.
Dark and a bit foul. The kind of space that existed purely out of obligation—a checkbox on the building’s amenity list that nobody had bothered to make decent.
One flickering fluorescent tube. Rubber flooring that reeked of old sweat and disinfectant.
A treadmill that squeaked on every third rotation like a small animal in distress.
That was my fault. I had intended to stick with the papaya salad.
I had been resolute about it, sitting next to Avery as he spread out the takeout containers.
But the smell of curry, spicy and warm, had made my stomach snarl.
And then, because I was apparently committed to the bit, I had some of the pad Thai as well.
Now the treadmill complained and my lungs burned and it all felt… correct. Earned. Punishment with a heart rate.
Maybe Avery had gotten all the easygoing genes along with the height and the broad shoulders and the ability to eat whatever he wanted and put on muscle like it was a casual hobby.
Maybe there had been some cosmic allocation happening in the womb during those ten months between us and he had simply arrived first and taken his pick.
I turned the incline up to 14.
If there was one thing I was genuinely good at, it wasn’t drive. It wasn’t discipline. It was avoidance. I had a gift for it. An artistry, almost.
Which was why I’d been putting off the coach conversation for weeks.
My body was feeling rusty—months away from figure skating had taken their toll and if I wanted to keep competing at the senior level, I couldn’t keep ignoring that. But finding a coach meant navigating the wreckage Renaud had left behind.
He probably already poisoned the well with most of the elite coaches.
His network stretched across the skating world like a spider’s web and I had no doubt he’d already put out the word: Théo Beaubien, difficult.
Théo Beaubien, unstable. Théo Beaubien, not worth the trouble.
Going to anyone in his circle would mean more of the same—the calorie counting, the weigh-ins, the way he’d look at me like I was a project to be fixed rather than a person to be coached.
So I needed to go outside the circle.
Sabrina, a fellow figure skater and my best friend since we were nine years old, was the only person who knew the full scope of what had happened in Toronto.
She found Coach Miller through one of her late night internet rabbit holes—the same obsessive energy she usually reserved perfecting a new routine, she spent on finding me a new coach.
She’d sent me a barrage of links at two in the morning.
Forum posts from former students. A few interviews where he talked about sustainable training and the mental health of athletes.
Sabrina: He’s not part of Renaud’s cult.
Sabrina: Look at what his skaters say about him.
I’d scrolled through the testimonials with the skepticism of someone who’d heard coaches say all the right things before.
But Miller seemed different. He’d taken a handful of skaters to the Olympics but he wasn’t chasing medals the way Renaud was.
His philosophy seemed almost radical in its simplicity: skating should be something you love.
Sabrina had texted his contact information with two words, Call him.
I had saved the contact but I still had not worked up the nerve to call him.
My mother had called me three times since I landed. Three calls, three voicemails I hadn’t listened to. I had sent her a single text—I’m here, not dead—and she had responded with a string of emojis that I also hadn’t fully processed.
I was busy. Obviously. I was busy running on a squeaking treadmill in a depressing basement at 7 a.m., punishing myself for curry.
It wasn’t Avery’s fault. I knew that. He hadn’t asked to be 6’1”, hadn’t engineered his own easygoing nature, hadn’t chosen to be the kind of person that rooms organized themselves around without any effort on his part.
People had been comparing us ever since I could remember.
Avery’s so big for his age. Avery’s so fast. You can already tell he’s going to be something special.
I had learned to smile and agree and then go find a patch of ice somewhere and skate until my legs gave out.
Everything came easily to him. I had to fight for every inch, clawing my way up through sheer accumulation of hours, discipline, control.
And I did claw far enough. I reached the level where the comparisons stopped making sense because we weren’t even in the same world anymore—he was hockey, I was figure skating, the metrics didn’t translate.
A national title at 19.
World Championship bronze at 20.
And then I burned it all down.
Not all at once. That was the thing nobody understood from the outside.
It looked sudden—the withdrawal from competition, the exile to Chicago with two suitcases.
But it had been accumulating for years, quiet and invisible beneath the surface, the way structural damage works.
I’d been so focused on gaining ground that I never stopped to look at what I was using to do it.
The Adderall had started as a practical solution.
Focus during off-season training, sharper retention of choreography notes, a way to compress ten hours of work into six.
No one—not my coach, not my mom, not the other skaters I trained with—ever questioned my energy levels.
They attributed it to maturity and dedication. I attributed it to necessity.
The eating had followed a different logic or what felt like logic at the time.
Figure skating’s relationship with weight was not a secret—not discussed openly, but present in every room, in every glance at the monitor during run throughs, in the way certain conversations stopped when you entered them.
I was slight to begin with. I told myself I was just being precise.
Intentional. I was an athlete optimizing performance variables.
I was 21 years old and some mornings I couldn’t get off the bathroom floor. Thirty-eight minutes. The treadmill squeaked. My lungs burned in a way that felt correct, felt earned, felt like something I deserved. I turned the speed up and ran.