Chapter Two Ana
Chapter Two
Ana
Before—Day One at The Palace
Ana had been violently ill the night before she left for The Palace. High fever, vomiting. Curled up in her bed, in the same room, in the same house where she’d lived her entire life, she told herself this would be gone by morning.
Her brother, Tim, was sitting on her floor, cross-legged, shoving her clothes into a duffel bag with more effort than the task required. A demonstration of his annoyance at having to help.
“Maybe you don’t want to go,” he said. “Maybe it’s your subconscious trying to warn you.”
Tim could be a total dick. Getting a stomach bug the night before she moved to The Palace was a coincidence.
He didn’t have a single clue about her skating. How good she was—how good she had to be for Dawn Sumner to agree to coach her. He talked about it like it was summer camp. Like she’d be making arts and crafts, carving woodblocks, canoeing, telling dumb stories around a campfire.
Ana didn’t kill time. She used every day, every hour, as a chance to get stronger, faster, smarter. To train her muscles so they would remember what to do when she sent an order. One command, and her body could execute a spin, a jump, an intricate footwork pass.
Tim couldn’t even throw a Frisbee.
Connie and Carl were next to appear, stopping at the door to observe the chaos.
Connie was still in her work clothes after a late house showing—pencil skirt, heels, blouse, and scarf.
Always a scarf. As she was constantly saying, it put buyers at ease when their eyes caught a splash of color, especially now that she’d cut her hair so short.
“Jesus. What a mess,” her father said. He was in the same tracksuit from earlier that day when he’d left work to fetch Ana from school, feed her crackers and Gatorade, and empty the garbage pail.
The room had been pulled apart—every item of clothing from every drawer in piles needing to be sorted and folded and then either put into a trunk or duffel bag, or returned to the drawers.
Shoes, coats, hats, bike helmet, and snow gear, and of course, the dresses, joggers, leggings, sweaters, pullovers, socks, tights—enough for six hours a day, six days a week.
Connie seemed frozen by the chaos. “How are we going to get this done?”
Carl waved her off. “She doesn’t have to go tomorrow. I can drive her on Saturday.”
But then Connie swung around to face him.
“No! I can’t go Saturday, and I need to take her,” she said, and with conviction that caught Ana by surprise.
Her mother had been complaining about all the driving for months.
That was the whole reason they’d finally agreed to let Ana try out for Dawn Sumner.
It was that, or quit skating, they’d told her. As if quitting was an option.
Making the Olympics had been Ana’s dream from before she could remember.
After she got the feel of the blade in the center of each foot, and when the blades became a part of her body, and she discovered she could just go and go until the wind made her eyes water and lifted her ponytail in the air—she knew she wanted to spend every second she could with her feet in those boots.
It wasn’t her fault that the rinks were so far away.
Connie carefully dropped to her knees beside Tim and began sorting through the piles. Carl joined her, resting his hand on his wife’s shoulder.
“It has to be me,” Connie said.
And then Carl nodded. “Okay. We’ll get it done.”
In the morning, Connie drove Ana 289 miles to the remote village of Echo. Today’s scarf was shades of blue and orange, and it was neatly tied around Connie’s head. A splash of color, ready to conquer the world.
Ana leaned against the closed window, sipping a liter of Gatorade through a straw.
“How are you going to skate tomorrow?” Connie glanced quickly at Ana, then looked back at the road. She looked worried.
“Extremely well,” Ana answered.
“Haha,” her mother laughed. “You know that’s not what I meant.”
They took the exit for Echo. Cheyenne Mountain was practically on top of them as they passed an open field, then stopped at the first traffic light. They made a right and were soon passing the entrance to the training facility.
“There’s the rink,” her mother said.
Ana stared at the enormous, majestic building as her entire body straightened and leaned against the door and the window, like it wanted to transport itself out of this car and through the brick walls and the metal stands and the wood boards right onto the ice.
This was where she belonged, and she wanted to be there now. Right now.
Connie drove up the access road and made the first turn into the driveway of Avery Hall. She parked in one of four spots, between a blue SUV and a red Jeep with Oklahoma plates, and killed the engine, staring out the window at the building.
“Jesus,” she said, scrunching her face. “Well . . . I guess this is what dorms look like.”
Connie always had an opinion about houses and property, since selling them was her job.
“Who cares what it looks like?” Ana popped the hatchback with the button on the console.
Connie opened her door, still scanning the beige box with the flat roof, a green wire with holiday lights affixed to the gutters, half on and half off like someone had started to take it down, but then gave up.
“Even a little dormer, or some shutters . . .”
Ana climbed out and walked around the back to drag the two duffel bags and one trunk onto the asphalt. Her mother followed, slowly, tired as usual, and now worried about the architecture.
“Sometimes you can spruce things up with a nice row of boxwoods.”
“Connie—stop!” Ana handed her the strap of one duffel, then another, and Connie heaved them onto her shoulders. She followed Ana, who dragged the trunk toward the front yard.
“I’ll picture you there in the spring,” her mother said, pointing to a snow-covered bench, as if she wouldn’t be here to see it. Which was absurd. Connie would probably visit her every weekend.
The door opened, and a woman appeared, breathless and out of sorts, her heavy frame bursting from the sides of an apron like she was someone’s grandmother in the middle of cooking Thanksgiving dinner. Orthopedic shoes, royal blue polyester pants, white tunic. Glasses, short gray hair.
She introduced herself with a hearty handshake.
“I’m Edie—the dorm mother. You must be Ana . . . and Mrs. Robbins.”
She grabbed one of the duffels from Connie’s shoulder and led them down a long hallway, motioning with her head as she pointed out the attractions—her apartment on the right, where she lived alone because her husband had passed and her boy was in the navy; the TV room on the left; and behind that, the kitchen.
At the foot of a wide set of stairs, they stopped to let two girls wearing Team Germany warm-up jackets scurry by without breaking their side-by-side formation.
“This is Ana. Say hello,” Edie said.
The girls ignored her, then walked away, down the hallway to the front door.
“Don’t mind them.” Edie led them next up the stairs, the duffel bags dragging, the trunk thumping as it hit each new step.
“The girls come and go.” She looked back at Ana then. “You’ll get used to it. Just don’t get too attached to anyone. I tell the girls when they first arrive, but they never listen.”
More of them passed by as Edie labored up the stairs, trying to explain things about the dorm while she climbed.
“There are two floors for the girls, six rooms on each, with two girls to a room. Three if we get tight on space, but right now I have you in a double. Toilets and showers are in the middle.”
They followed Edie left at the landing, then to the first door down the hall.
“Well,” she said, letting them pass into the room across from the toilets. “Here it is.”
Ana looked around. Two beds, two dressers.
Beige carpet and white paint. Her side was the one with the bare walls.
The other belonged to her roommate, Mio Akasawa, and Ana lingered for a moment on the poster that hung above her bed, a cat on a skateboard with some Japanese writing.
It was enough to paste a smile right across her face.
Mio Akasawa, the Japanese national champion, could land triple Axels in her sleep—and Ana was now one of probably only a handful of people in the entire world who knew she liked stupid cat posters.
Connie nodded as she took in more information from Edie about this place where she was about to leave her daughter. The boys’ wing on the other side of the building, meals and laundry and the car service if the weather got too inclement for a bike.
Her face tightened, exposing the worry lines between her eyes.
“Mio keeps this room year-round, though I never know when she’ll be here,” Edie explained. “But she’s older, and I think that will be good in this situation. Ana is younger than the others.”
She said this with sympathy, like she felt sorry for Ana. But this morphed into resignation when she heard laughter out in the hall.
“Ana—why don’t you go meet the girls in the last room. Those are the other Orphans.”
Connie’s head jerked back. “Orphans?”
Edie explained how most of the skaters at Avery Hall came for a summer, or a few weeks.
Just to get a taste of the training, and, of course, to work on new jumps.
“The rest of The Palace skaters are locals,” she said.
“Or transplants—they usually come with their mothers and live in the gray condos on the road to the school.”
Connie scrunched her face and shook her head, like she was confused. Or now suddenly worried because she hadn’t looked into any of this and now her daughter was considered an Orphan.
Edie patted her shoulder. “Don’t worry. There are a lot of mothers here. And Dawn, of course. She’ll be just fine.”
Yes. I will. This was Ana’s dream, and staying here was the only way she could reach it.