Chapter 15 Ari
Ari
It was six a.m., and the sun hadn’t risen yet.
But Ari was already outside walking in the snow with her headphones on, listening to her self-assigned weekly audiobook and trying to look past its corny sports clichés.
“Make sure to highlight your teammates’ strengths before you address their weaknesses,” said the voice of Valentina Ross-Rodriguez, a gold medal–winning gymnast. “Resist the temptation to take on other people’s doubts,” she said as Ari looked at her own footprints in the snow.
The stress of managing the team’s emotions while trying to bring out the best in them on the ice was so overwhelming that Ari had developed a mild case of insomnia during the first three weeks of boot camp.
She’d considered calling Gracie for advice—after all, she’d been the first person to text her when her new role as captain went public.
But she couldn’t. She knew that Gracie would pick up and say something helpful and encouraging.
But it felt selfish to interrupt Gracie’s recovery with worries about the job Gracie had spent her life working toward.
Slipping away for an hour in the morning to listen to someone else’s advice felt like the least-complicated alternative.
But Ari couldn’t focus on what she was listening to, because she’d woken up that morning thinking about Drew.
She would have never predicted seeing him again, and the last place she expected to find him was under a lamppost in the middle of the Winter Village.
But to her surprise, she’d felt as comfortable with him as she had on New Year’s Eve.
Maybe it was because she’d told him so much that first night that it felt like seeing a friend who’d been in the trenches with her.
But what really surprised her was how much more attractive he was up close with the lights on.
How handsome he looked with stubble. The small spark she’d felt as he gently grazed her skin.
Deep in her thoughts, she lost track of the chapter she was listening to and reminded herself that she hadn’t come all the way to Switzerland to spend the first day of the Games thinking about a boy she barely knew.
The next ten days were going to be a marathon.
They needed to win at least two of their four preliminary games to have a good shot at making it to the quarterfinals.
After that came the semifinals and then the actual finals, when the best teams at the Games would compete for gold.
Ari had much more important things to worry about than the boy she’d kissed last night.
So, she finished her walk at seven, grabbed breakfast with her teammates at eight, and headed over to the other side of the Village to get ready for her first-ever Olympic match.
Ari imagined that in every other area of his life, Coach McLaughlin walked into rooms with a certain air of authority.
He’d been coaching hockey for the past thirty years, leading a bunch of the men’s teams to victory.
But because the women’s team had been through so many coaches who’d only stuck around for a few months, they were much harder to impress.
Coach liked to empower each team captain he worked with to take on the role of leading and inspiring their team.
And one of the ways he did that was by asking them to start each locker room session with a short speech.
Gracie’s speeches were always memorable.
Sometimes she began with a joke about something she’d noticed in training, and other times she started with an anecdote that she would spin into some meaningful lesson or rally cry.
Gracie knew how to energize her teammates, but Ari was still just trying to figure it out.
“Let’s get started,” she said as she walked to the front of the locker room.
But nobody was listening. They were all plotting, panicking, and celebrating the fact that in less than fifteen minutes, they’d be up against the Czech Republic for the first time since their disastrous loss at the start of the last international hockey season.
“Shall we begin?” she asked, trying to get their attention.
But Izzy was teaching her teammates on defense a TikTok dance, Sienna was sitting in a corner with her noise-canceling headphones on, and Yasmeen was chatting in a circle with the girls in reserve, sharing gossip about one of the after-parties.
If Gracie had been here, the room would have quieted in an instant.
Her very presence inspired focus. But Ari’s voice wasn’t very loud, and they weren’t used to hearing her speak as any sort of authority.
“Okay guys, it’s time to get ready. Huddle up!” she said with no success. They carried on milling around the locker room, paying her no attention. She stood there for a moment, trying to find the right words, until Coach McLaughlin finally glanced over and shot her a sympathetic look.
“She said listen up!” Coach shouted, commanding the room. Everyone stopped talking and looked over, surprised.
“Captain?” said Yasmeen. A few of the other girls laughed.
They’d taken to lightheartedly calling her that whenever she stepped into her role and, while she knew they were just playing around, it still freaked her out.
Coach McLaughlin looked over at her and put his hand out, not so subtly telling her to take the reins.
“I’ve heard you talking about today’s match, and I know you’re worried,” she began. “But if there’s one thing we can’t afford to do today, it is to go in scared. Yes, the Czech team is brilliant. And yes, they defeated us last time…”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence, Captain,” said Sienna, who’d never scored a goal against the Czech team. Ari knew she was dreading their upcoming match.
“What I meant to say is that our last game against the Czech team is history now. So, when you go out onto the rink, look at it as a fresh start,” Ari said, trying to sound confident enough to convince her teammates that she knew what she was doing.
“Defense?” she said, looking over at Yasmeen and her part of the team.
“We have a weak spot when it comes to the right side of the rink, so be mindful of that today. Goaltenders?” she said, looking over at Izzy.
“Look alive. I’ve noticed that you don’t get alert until a few minutes into the first third, and we can’t afford that today.
And centers?” she said, looking over at Sienna and the rest of their teammates.
“Stop trying to control what’s going on behind you.
It’s not your job to manage the rest of the team.
Focus on getting those pucks into the goal. ”
Becoming captain made her hyperaware of everything that was going on around her.
At boot camp, she’d spent more time trying to lead the team than playing her position.
But now it was time to focus on what she’d originally been put on the team to do: score goals.
Ari nodded and gave one final line of encouragement.
“Okay, let’s get ready, skate to the rink, and play the best match of our lives,” she said. The cheers from her teammates temporarily settled her nerves. When she reached over to put her phone in her locker, it flashed with a message from a familiar name:
Gracie: Good luck today!!! Cheering you on from my couch!!
The message came with a photo of Gracie sitting in front of her TV in full Team GB regalia. Patriotic to the point where the plaster cast around her broken leg was decorated with Union Jacks. Ari smiled, sent her a team photo from the locker room, and then joined the girls as they got ready.
Izzy, who was in charge of the playlist that day, pressed PLAY as they separated from their groups and put aside their distractions.
It was time to get into match mode. Ari watched her teammates pick up their helmets, lace up their skates, and do their final individual prematch rituals.
Izzy danced around the room, hyping herself up as she got ready to leave.
Yasmeen sprayed her favorite perfume on the sleeves of her jersey, saying it smelled like good luck.
And Sienna closed her eyes, trying to center herself amid the chaos.
As the players made the final adjustments to their uniforms, Ari sent out a silent prayer to a God she only believed in on the rink, and then she and the other girls did one final team huddle before they made their way out into the hockey stadium.
The match they played felt straight out of a dream.
From the minute the first puck landed in the center of the rink, Ari realized they had the advantage of being underestimated.
The Czech team had beaten Team GB last time, so Ari could tell that they’d come into the match certain they would win again.
However, that assumption had made them less alert when it came to preventing the British from scoring.
Plus, they’d made the mistake of underestimating just how determined Ari and her teammates were.
The girls had something to prove. Going home early wasn’t an option.
Izzy had never looked more alert in her life.
Ari watched in awe as her friend prevented their opponents from scoring goals, as if she already knew where the puck would land.
But the puck rarely reached her because Yasmeen and the other girls on defense took Ari’s January training session advice and built a rock-solid wall between the center and the goal.
Sienna, who had spent all six weeks of boot camp worrying, skated around the ice with laser focus, and Ari smiled beneath her helmet as she watched her shoot goal after goal with an uncharacteristic level of confidence.
The combination of it all inspired Ari to play in what felt like the best form of her life.
She scored goals and batted pucks away from the opposition with fierce determination.
That morning, the girls commanded the ice rink as if it were their own, and, for the first time that year, their team played in complete harmony.
By the time the final buzzer rang, the score was 6–2.
Ari couldn’t believe it, they’d won their first preliminary match and had gotten further than the pundits and cynics back home had predicted.
And despite all Ari’s worries, her first match as captain hadn’t been a total mess.
She was overwhelmed with relief as her teammates skated to their side of the rink, pulled themselves into a group hug, and cheered in delight.
“I know it’s the first game, and we shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves, but…” began Ari, excited to celebrate but afraid of jinxing it.
“We killed it,” said Sienna as she squeezed her tight.
It was definitely too early to celebrate; this was just the first of the four group-stage matches they were playing. But Ari couldn’t help but feel a small, tentative wave of hope.
She looked out into the crowd, trying to see if any of her other athlete friends were there to watch the game.
She waved when she saw a Polish speed skater and a Chilean skier she knew cheering in the crowd.
But her eyes stopped when they reached the middle of the stands.
Because there, amid her friends, was one unwelcome guest.
Harrison.
She hadn’t invited him, of course, but he’d still shown up.
She hadn’t messaged him, but he was only ever a matter of minutes away.
The men’s snowboarding team was staying just one floor below her in GB House, and the Village was too small to avoid him.
So she needed to devise a Harrison-proof plan to stop him from trying to claw his way back into her life.
Harrison didn’t really do boundaries, but there was one she knew he wouldn’t cross.
By the time she and the girls skated out of the rink and headed over to the locker room to debrief, she was already hatching a plan.
It was a long shot, and there were a hundred ways it could go wrong, but as she started to map it all out in her head, she realized it might be ridiculous enough to work.
She just needed to figure out where the press office was and find out if Drew was willing to play one more game.