Chapter 6 Ice Is My Heaven
Ice Is My Heaven
Paisley
I hear the sound of blades on ice echoing through my heart again.
Other than that, it’s quiet here in the iSkate training center.
The smell of disinfectant and the rink enchants me.
I’ve been in a lot of rinks, and they all have the same smell.
That smell, it always sets me off on a form of time travel, with all the feelings and experiences I’ve had out on the ice.
The double-leaf door shuts behind me. Suddenly, I am lost in a vast hall, and to my right and left doors leading who knows where.
The sound of my boots echoes off the high walls lined with photos of skaters performing jumps or beaming from the winner’s podium.
The display cases are full of ribbons and trophies.
Running my finger across the plexiglass, my eyes are trained on the largest one, the one that’s in the shape of a golden ice skate. I imagine it’s mine.
Is it all that unrealistic? Is my gut feeling that I can do more than people say I can true?
My fingers slide off the glass when the sound of panting, followed by that of skates, drifts over to me. I look down the hall. My legs start to move and follow the shallow sound of the skates moving across the ice.
The lights above the stands haven’t been turned on yet, just the bright cones of the spotlights. They refract off the fox-red hair of the ice-skater gliding forward with supple movements as she prepares to complete a double axel.
I bite my lower lip watching her rotating body. She can’t get the right height, I think. It’s not going to work. And indeed, she finishes the turn on the ice instead of the air. She hits the railing in frustration before skating in backward on both feet to try a loop jump.
“What phase are we in?”
I blink. A girl my age appears next to me, leans her shoulder against the wall of the stands, and twists the stem of a white lollipop around in her mouth. Her eyes are following the skater out on the ice, as if the latter were giving a one-woman show.
“Umm. What do you mean?”
She nods her chin toward the ice. “Harper is my morning entertainment. She always trains by the same standards.”
“And those would be?”
My new conversationalist lifts a finger into the air. At the same time, her hair tumbles over the shoulders of her puffy jacket. Her hair is brown, fading into rosé at the tips. Somehow, she reminds me of the Disney princess Moana. Just hipper.
“First phase: Harper attempts a jump she’s convinced she can do although that is definitively,” she emphasizes the word, “not the case. At present, the axel.” She looks at me questioningly.
I shake my head. “Already over? Okay, a shame. That’s always the best part.
Second phase: Harper understands she’s made a mess of the axel and attempts to feel better by doing a Lutz.
Normally, she can’t get the right height.
” Once again, she peeks over at me. I nod and she claps.
“Oh, perfect. Now we come to the Rittberger, which, of course, she also thinks she can do. Look. She jumps and…” She snaps her fingers.
“Yeeep. There it is. She does it again.”
“She lands on both legs,” I note. Frowning, I watch the girl on the ice, how—judging by her expression—she really does seem to be enjoying herself. “Doesn’t she know that that results in a deduction of points?”
With a shrug the Moana-girl pushes off from the wall.
“Of course. But it’s Harper. In her eyes, everything that she thinks is okay is okay.
And if you tell her otherwise, well, you’re the devil incarnate.
” She moves on down the hall and waves at me to follow.
She tosses the stick of her lollipop into the trash.
“I’m Gwen. You must be Paisley, right? My mom told me about you. ”
That’s Gwen?
Pharell Williams’s “Happy” goes through my head. I was afraid she might not like me. Or that we wouldn’t be on the same wavelength. But maybe I was just panicky, afraid of not getting the start I wanted. But Gwen is nice. Thank God, she’s nice.
“Yeah,” I reply and follow her into the room that turns out to be our changing room.
Gwen tosses her bag onto one of the benches and hangs her jacket on one of the hooks with such a hectic movement that it falls right back down.
She doesn’t care. She’s already digging her skates out of her bag, and it is immediately clear to me that we couldn’t be more different from each other.
Gwen is loud. I am quiet. Gwen stands out. I’m the bush next to the hyacinth.
But I like it that way. Kaya was the same. She kept me on my toes. Not infrequently, I had the thought that, without her, I’d have been nothing but a living beanbag hanging around at home, counting the folds overlapping with one another the deeper I sank down.
At home…
“You here?” Fingers snapping before my face. “Anybody home?”
“Oh, yeah, sorry. What did you say?”
“I asked if you know who your trainer is yet. My trainer is my dad, but generally, the real excitement is in seeing who one gets assigned to.” Gwen ties her laces and then pulls the ends of her bootcut pants over her skates.
I try not to show how much her words have set my heart racing.
“No idea. We weren’t told beforehand which trainers are free.” I pull my practice clothes straight and concentrate on the drone of the ventilation above us. Somewhere a faucet is dripping.
“It can’t be Saskia,” she explains. “She’s been away since last week.
But I can’t think of anyone else who hasn’t been taken.
” Gwen stands up and steps from one skate to the other.
She appears to be thinking, then claps her hands again before reaching for mine and pulling me to my feet.
I almost lose my balance, as I was just trying to adjust my leg warmers.
“It’s so exciting! The last three newbies were either a lot younger than me or so conceited that every day I considered running over their feet.
Don’t look at me like that; I really mean it. You should have seen them.”
I don’t need that. In the last ten years, I’ve had enough experience to know the type of girls one encountered most often in the world of figure skating.
“How long have you been with iSkate?” I ask, pulling away from her and bending down to adjust my leg warmers again.
“One year. Before that I was in Breckenridge, under contract. Commuting was hell. Soon I hope iSkate will be paying me instead of me paying them, ha ha ha.” Gwen cannot stand still.
It strikes me that she has to be moving the entire time.
At the moment, she’s wiggling her legs, as if she had to go to the bathroom in the worst way. “Come on, let’s go on in.”
I follow her into the hall and see Harper is no longer alone on the ice: two male skaters are holding hands and making parallel steps before the larger of the two lifts his partner into the air.
“That’s Aaron and Levi,” Gwen explains, a dreamy smile on her face as she opens the door to the ice. “I love them.”
“They’re good,” I say, my eyes trained on the young men’s synchronous movements. “How long have they been skating together?”
Gwen presses a skate into the ice and pulls her velvet scrunchie off her wrist to make a quick bun.
“Two years, I think. They’re a couple. That’s why they trust each other so much.
Naturally, that has an effect on their skating.
Last year they took home a gold twice.” She gives me another brief smile, then sets off.
I do the same and within a millisecond it’s as if every gray cloud within me has been driven off by sunshine.
Gliding across the ice and feeling the cool air on my skin is incomparable.
Skating, feeling that magic and not letting it go, causes a sense of euphoria, of unadulterated joy, to well up within me.
I would sink into pure darkness if this sport wasn’t in my life.
With every step I gain speed, and at some point the other skaters are nothing but blurry bits of color.
I change from the forward outside edge to the backward outside edge without changing my leg—a three-turn—before shifting pressure to the inside, springing up from my left leg, turning around my own axis twice, and landing on the back outside edge of my right foot.
A double Salchow. Easy. Nothing special.
I did it to get myself warmed up, but when I notice the amused look on Harper’s face, I feel like I have to prove myself.
I ball my hands into fists before opening them back up and running my palms down my training outfit.
With the toe-pick, I push off from the ice, past Gwen, who is jumping into a toe loop.
I glide around her in a wide arc, bring myself into position, and jump from my left foot.
In the air, I spread my legs and bend my upper body horizontally forward.
For three seconds I fly like a bird before landing on my right toe-tip and shifting into a pointed spin.
A whisper rushes throughout my entire body as I stand up straight again.
It makes me understand that my body wants to jump.
Rotate in the air; experience the feeling of freedom, of weightlessness.
I start skating backward before shifting my weight onto my left leg and positioning my arms. With a deep breath, I take the chilly air into me and let it fill my lungs as I cut into the ice behind me with my right skate.
My bodyweight shifts to my back foot, and my right leg reacts immediately and bounces up.
It knows the jump. I could do it in my sleep.
I jerk my arms to my upper body, close my eyes, and spin around my own axis in the air.
One time. Two times. And a third before the blades of my skates land back on the ice.
I open my eyes and exhale my held breath.