Chapter 28
I’m the stupidest woman alive.
That’s what bounces around in my head for the next few days as I attend another tournament for junior ice hockey players and numbly plan my master class.
Of course my mother made Chase block me. Of course she did. But then she lied about it, which is so much worse.
This is what men do, she said. They tell you they love you, and then they leave. I believed her, too. Because it was demonstrably true.
Or was it? On the one hand, it’s not like Chase to obey my mother’s rules even after she fired him. But he was only nineteen, and he’d just lost his job, and apparently there’s more to the story than I thought.
Meanwhile, Veena has emailed, asking Chase and me for our musical selection. And Chase has been silent. He’s on a road trip and likely busy. But that leaves me to obsess about it alone and replay the footage from our ill-fated practice.
It’s hard to watch without cringing. Every step, every stroke, every move was out of sync. On our best try, we made it only fifty seconds into the routine before we almost killed each other.
What’s happened to us? We used to be effortless.
We need more practice. But even if Chase were speaking to me, we couldn’t rehearse this week. The team has flown off to play both teams from Florida. Darcy went with them, leaving me to brood alone in my apartment.
All the wrong people are trying to get in touch with me, too. There are passive-aggressive texts from my mom, asking when she can visit. I’m so mad at her that I don’t acknowledge them at all.
Then I get a text from my uncle nagging me to call my mother, because she’s worried about me. I ignore him, too.
The one thing that goes well is that I finally get my first paycheck from the Legends. I immediately write a rent check to my management company, with an apology. Sorry about the delay! It won’t happen again.
Here’s hoping.
On my last day of solitude, I head over to the practice facility, which is a ghost town. My plan is to figure out how the Legends’ camera equipment works, and maybe even do a little figure skating.
Alone on the big rink, I lace up my figure skates and take a few laps. Maybe I should simplify our routine. The audience only wants to see Chase do some figure skating. If I just got out of the way, he could probably do okay on his own.
Maybe we can trade off somehow, taking turns as the lead skater while the other person circles in an unobtrusive way?
That would just be weird, says the panel of judges in my head.
You shut up, I answer back.
I grab my phone off the bench and crank up our music. At center ice, I close my eyes and just let the song wash over me. I’m not the same girl I was the first time I choreographed a routine to this music. I didn’t have a bad knee, a broken heart, and a failed marriage.
I didn’t really understand that hearts could break, even if the composer was valiantly trying to warn me.
The powerful chorus pulls me to center ice, where I limber up with some simple spirals and chassés. The chords are as familiar as breathing. I find myself noodling with the choreography. Maybe the pair spins have to go. We could try another lift, maybe.
I restart the music several times, playing with my options.
I haven’t done this in years—prepping a routine for an audience.
It’s like visiting a past life. And this music has so much potential for drama.
I bet Chase can still do a knee slide. Those are easy but flashy.
So I throw a few of them, experimenting with the rhythm and the beat.
Then I follow that up with an Ina Bauer, which means skating in a backbend, to see if I still have the flexibility to pull it off.
Yup. Still got it.
Then I skate the routine the old way, straight through to the end. I finish in a plié, as originally choreographed, my hand curving into half of a heart shape.
How fitting, really.
I’m startled when someone lets out a wolf whistle. When I look around for the perpetrator, it’s Aiden Sharp, waving to me from the bench.
“Hey, Zoe,” he says. “You had some questions about the cameras? I saw your email.”
When I try to answer him, I find that I’m panting. I haven’t skated full out like that for a long time. “I would love to hear about the cameras,” I say when I can catch my breath. “But I’m surprised to see you here. Is the team back already?”
“Got back an hour ago,” he says. “Happy to tour you around the equipment. The software is a little glitchy.”
“Thanks. I appreciate it.”
He shows me how to affix the tripod to the boards, and I pretend that I actually need help with that part. And after we set up the first two cameras, he shows me how to link them together over Wi-Fi so the images can be synced up later for analysis.
“Just hit the sync button and it will link up like magic,” he says as we work on the second one. “See?”
“Miraculous,” I agree. “If only Chase and I had a sync button, then all my problems would be solved.”
He chuckles. “Trouble in paradise?”
“What? I’m talking about our crappy first practice for the jamboree.”
“Isn’t that what first practices are for?”
“Yeah, but it wasn’t just bad,” I say, handing him the next clamp-on tripod. “It was epically, horribly bad.”
“You guys rusty? He forgot how to spin around like a princess?”
Oh please. “His skating is fine. My skating is fine. But neither one of us can remember how to skate together.”
“You know…” He chuckles. “Merritt was a bear during this road trip. Even DeLuca got sick of his grumpy ass. Must have been bad.”
“He skated well in Florida, though,” I point out. I watched both games, and Chase got three points on the road. “He couldn’t have been too distracted.”
Aiden rubs his scruffy chin thoughtfully. “So what now? Extra practices?”
“Maybe. We’ll see.”
He attaches the third camera to the tripod. “Maybe your standards are too high. Even if you don’t skate all that well, so what? It’s a stunt, Zoe. Nobody cares.”
I’ll care. “You weren’t there,” I grumble. “It was rocky. And now we’ll need to spend extra time on this stunt, as you called it. Which takes focus away from Chase’s hockey game. And we’ll stink it up anyway. Chase will probably blame me for getting him tangled up in this fiasco.”
Aiden looks up at me, and I realize I’ve been more honest than I intended. “Well that sucks. But why do you care?”
Because I still love him. “Because I need the team to like me so I can get a full-time contract and stop eating cans of soup for dinner.”
He grins. “Fair enough.”
“If I make us both look like idiots, that probably won’t help.”
“You won’t look like idiots,” he says, checking the camera’s battery.
“There’s no way to be sure,” I insist. “I need to warn Veena. She shouldn’t advertise this thing until we have it under control.”
Aiden glances up sharply. “Um…”
“Um what?” I gasp. “Is it too late?”
“She did a big social media push today. I assumed you saw it, and that’s why you were so stressed.”
My heart drops like a rock. “I never look at social media anymore. She announced it already?”
“Yeah—she’s auctioning off the last two hundred seats, and there are big pics of you and Chase.”
With a whimper of dismay, I take out my phone and open Instagram. It takes less than five seconds to find the big splashy post on the Legends’ account. She’s tagged me as well. And there’s my smiling face right next to Chase’s. Come and see the Chase and Zoe show!
“Oh God. Now we have to make this work.”
“You will, buddy.” He chuckles. “But here’s the thing—I’m going to give you some advice as a guy who doesn’t know shit about figure skating, okay?
But that’s why you should listen to me. Because it doesn’t have to be fancy.
Give the female audience what it wants—Chase in spandex and figure skates.
All he has to do is smile and hold your hand and maybe do a spin. ”
I sigh.
“And you have to wear a short skirt.” He shrugs. “I don’t make the rules. You have to smile and look perky and skate backward holding Chase’s hand. The end.” He flips on the camera, and a view of the rink appears on its digital screen.
“You know what, Aiden? That’s both depressing and insightful. But at this rate I don’t know if we can do that without tripping each other.”
“Is Chase really that bad?” he asks. “Didn’t you say he was one of the most natural skaters you’ve ever met?”
He’s right but also wrong. “It’s weird. He didn’t forget how to figure skate.
He looked fine while we were warming up.
But then when we tried to skate together…
” I pause for a moment while the horror of it replays in my mind.
Missed connections and a faltering rhythm.
“We just couldn’t sync up. And synchrony is at the core of pairs skating.
If you’d been there, you’d know why I feel hopeless. ”
He chuckles again. “I wasn’t there, because you kicked everyone out. But there’s your answer, Zoe—call someone in to help. I know you want to prove yourself as a coach. But you’re not the coach in this situation. You’re on the struggle bus, so get a second opinion.”
I stare at him for a second. “Okay, you might be a genius.”
He laughs. “Nah, Zoe. Asking for help is, like, a thing people do.”
Not me. Not usually. But he has a point.
“I know just the right person.” I grab my phone again.
And while Aiden tests our setup, I dig up an email address for Martina—the first person who ever watched Chase and me skate together.
She moved to Korea last year, but sometimes we still correspond by email.
After pulling up her address, I tap out a plea for help. What is wrong, and how do we fix this? I link to a section of the video from our practice. And—because I don’t want him thinking that I went behind his back—I also cc Chase.
He always liked Martina, and he’ll probably listen if she offers us tips.
That done, I skate over to Aiden. “Thank you for the great advice. And for teaching me how the cameras work.”
“You’re welcome,” he says. “What are you using them for?”
“Science. During my master class, I’m going to use some software to measure everybody’s speed on a few crucial skills, and then compare them. It will help me get a baseline for every player on the team.”
“Sounds kinda gimmicky,” he says. “No offense. My buddy is a skating coach, and he doesn’t use cameras at all.”
“No offense taken,” I say quickly. “It is gimmicky. But that’s beside the point.
Not every player responds to the same kind of coaching.
But no matter their personal style, every player is competitive as hell.
If I tell a winger that his buddy is twelve percent faster at transitioning from forward to backward, he’s going to try to fix that metric. ”
“You evil genius.”
“I prefer to think of it as motivational psychology—just with a dash of pettiness.”
“Good luck with your class. I heard Coach Fairweather tell the boys that they’re all expected to participate, no excuses.”
“Really?” This perks me up. “What a great guy.” Unlike your father, who’s a dickweasel.
“Agreed,” he says, still smiling, almost as if he can hear the comparison aloud.
“I’ll put all the cameras away, okay? You helped me so much already.”
He gives me a salute. “My pleasure. Night.”
A few hours later, I’m back at my own apartment when my phone pings with a text.
Chase: Saw your email to Martina. That was a good call. Did you delete the part at the end when I threw a temper tantrum?
I sink down to sit on the floor, smiling at my phone.
Zoe: I deleted your tantrum, plus the part where I was a whiny little bitch.
Chase: On your worst day you were never a whiny little bitch.
He’s wrong, but my heart does a double axel anyway.
Zoe: We’ll see if she comes back with anything useful. Or if she just tells us not to quit our day jobs.
Chase: She’ll know what to do. Martina is magic. We have a lot to discuss. Want to come over tomorrow for an early dinner? Say 5:15? I’ll get some food.
Zoe: I’d love to.
After that, I get ready for bed. But it’s hard to fall asleep when all I can think about is the last time Chase and I dined together.