Chapter Five Ana
Chapter Five
Ana
Before—Five Months at The Palace
The dream was always the same.
Ana lies flat on her back after falling on the triple flip.
It’s days before the Midwestern Sectionals, and she needs the jump to place in the top five and make Nationals in the junior division.
She hasn’t landed it once, always short on the rotation.
It’s become the bane of her existence, Kayla says, a phrase she now understands and plays over and over in her mind.
Everyone has seen her fall. Jolene, Kayla, and Indy, who are on the ice. Other skaters, too, for the morning session. Seven a.m. Coach Emile stands by the boards, shaking his head. He’s disappointed, and this stirs something inside her.
It’s a vicious cycle, Indy says. They all know the theory—the one spelled out in Dawn’s book. Making Champions. Ana keeps it by her bed like a Bible. Fear makes you hesitate, slows your speed, and then there’s not enough height and then you fall. And the fall makes you more afraid.
Indy has it, too, this vicious cycle with the triple Axel. The bane of her existence.
In the dream, all of this flashes by until she sees Dawn come out of her office between the stands and walk down the steps and open the boards. Always in the big blue puffer coat and beige skates like they had in the Ice Capades when that was a thing, and gold blades, not silver.
Fear crawls into her stomach, and it clenches tight, and this spreads up and down her body like a shiver until she’s unable to move a single muscle.
Dawn is on the ice, skating right toward her.
The mothers from the stands gasp as they strain their necks to get a good look.
And Ana’s mother, Connie, cowers behind the plexiglass, her head wrapped in a scarf and her eyes tearing up.
Because Ana couldn’t fight the fear, and now she’s fallen. Paralyzed on the ice as Dawn barrels toward her, and will she even stop? And then no! Ana screams. Then a spray of shaved ice covers her face when Dawn’s blades dig in for a hockey stop just before they reach Ana’s head.
“Ana,” Indy whispered, her hand on Ana’s back. “Wake up—you’re having a bad dream.”
Ana opened her eyes, still in the dream, but then here, in the Orphans’ room down the hall. In Indy’s bed.
She sat up and rubbed her palms into her temples as reality set in.
They were still six months—not two days—from Midwesterns. There was plenty of time to get the triple flip, and maybe even the loop or the Lutz—the harder triples requiring three full rotations. Thank God.
But then here she was, not in her bed, but in Indy’s. Not in her room, where she’d been living alone while Mio was back in Japan, but in the room at the end of the hall. The Orphans’ room.
And now it all came back. Each pathetic moment.
Waking up alone. The random thoughts of home that had crept out while she was asleep, small things like the smell of Connie’s warm banana bread and the crinkle sound when Carl turned the pages of the paper.
Tim’s car—the worn leather seats, the gross smell of stale pot smoke, food wrappers everywhere—as he drove her to school.
Then the tears, and the walk down the hall that turned to a run because the lights cast strange shadows. Opening the door slowly so it wouldn’t creak, tiptoeing across the room and curling up at the foot of Indy’s bed like a little baby.
“I’m sorry,” Ana said.
But Indy shrugged it off. “I don’t mind.” She was buzzing about in the morning light shining through the window. On the other side of the room were two unmade beds. Jo’s with the fuchsia comforter. Kayla’s with the brown wool blanket.
Ana swung her feet around and planted them on the floor.
She heard footsteps thumping from down the hall, then Kayla’s gruff voice as she returned from the bathroom. “Get up, dummy.”
Jolene was right behind her, dressed for the morning session.
And Indy, too, was almost ready to go. Black leggings, yellow sweatshirt. Hair combed and braided as she put on lip gloss in front of the mirror above a shared dresser.
Ana swallowed the panic left over from the dream but also from new thoughts creeping in about her lesson with Dawn.
It was a big deal at The Palace. The Saturday morning session was reserved for the best skaters—the international champions, the Americans who had made it to Nationals, like Indy—and the boarders at Avery Hall.
To skate with the best in the world, and to have the first lesson from Dawn on that session, was evidence of her progress, in spite of the triple flip she couldn’t land.
In spite of the dream. In spite of her being a big baby who missed home.
She’d promised Jolene that very first day that this wouldn’t happen.
Indy was on the bed now, beside her, pulling on her sneakers. “Was it the same dream?” she asked with a grin.
Ana nodded.
“Did Dawn do a hockey stop and spray your face?” Her smile widened as she leaned closer.
“Yeah,” Ana answered. The dream was losing its power in the light of day.
“I keep waiting for her to skate right over your face, in front of everyone . . .”
“Indy!”
“And there’s blood everywhere, shooting out of your neck.”
Ana let out a small laugh, though it felt like a betrayal of the woman who filled her dreams. And whose affection she’d started to crave.
Indy continued. “After Dawn skates over your head and kills you, you turn into a zombie.”
Her eyes lit up with amusement, her voice deep and theatrical.
“You chase her through the stands, back to her office and into the training room. Your hands have turned into skates, and you swipe at her head with the blades . . . and then she falls and starts crawling on her hands and knees, trying to get away from you, because you keep saying, in your zombie voice—Fight the fear, Dawn! Fight the fear!”
Now she was laughing, hard, not caring who joined her or didn’t.
“Jesus, Indy,” Kayla said. “That’s twisted.
Even for you.” Indy let out one last burst of laughter, pleased with her story and the images of Dawn’s suffering.
Her heart was filling with hatred for Dawn and The Palace, drop by drop, like a pail beneath a leaky pipe.
It was almost imperceptible, until moments like this one.
Indy had been at The Palace for almost a year, and she was no closer to getting the rotation for the triple Axel. It was the only reason she was still here—at the insistence of her mother, Patrice Cunningham, Dawn’s nemesis.
She was here against her own will. Separated from Bobby Stark, her coach back home.
It had become a matter of fixation for Indy, and God, were they sick of hearing about it.
Especially Jolene and Kayla. It had become a symbol of her defiance, Jo said, because Bobby was the antithesis of Dawn, and the reason she’d gotten this far.
Indy swore that Bobby could help her get the triple Axel with his kindness and encouragement. Not a brutal course of falls and Fear Training.
No one, not even Indy, questioned that she needed the jump, failing to outscore others in her field, always finishing fourth or fifth, and for reasons no one could quite explain.
If Indy had the triple Axel, she would be one of only four women in the world who could land it—becoming an irrefutable contender for a medal in the next Olympic cycle.
And that was just eighteen months away. Her mother said she couldn’t come home until she landed one in competition—proof that she had it under her belt.
So Indy jumped and fell. Over and over. And let the drops of hate drip into her heart.
Indy grabbed Ana’s hand and pulled her to her feet. “Come on.”
They went to Ana’s room down the hall, where she changed into her favorite dress and tights, a sweatshirt, sneakers.
Next, to the bathroom to brush her teeth and pull her hair into a band, her mind shifting from where she was, nestled inside Avery Hall with the Orphans, her new family with the roles that had been firmly established, to where she was going, a knot forming in her stomach as she thought of Dawn and the dream and the triple flip.
Then outside, the four Orphans in rows of two, walking to the rink along the start of the access road, a quarter mile of mountain air and views that caused tourists to stop and take selfies.
When had things like that stopped mattering one single bit?
Ana’s focus was always ahead, to the ice inside, to The Palace.
To Dawn. To the triple flip. To her dream.
They went in through the side door to the snack bar, and the familiar smells of burnt coffee and rubber mats, then pushed through the maze of mothers and local skaters who swarmed The Palace on the weekends but had to skate on the earlier sessions and were now having a breakfast of donuts and shitty coffee.
They unlaced their skates, getting ready to yield the ice to the ones who mattered.
Maybe that was harsh, but it was the truth.
They passed by the opening to the arena, and the break in the stands where the mothers liked to sit, in the bleachers around the edge of the boards, as the Zamboni made its oval sweeps, the engine loud, fumes rising, black to white all the way to the rafters.
The sound of it, the smell of the gas triggered a pang of nerves.
Every single time. Fresh ice. Time to perform.
They walked from the locker room together, skates laced tight, rubber guards hugging the blades, and stood among the herd.
Indy smiled and mouthed the words good luck because Dawn was already there, on the ice, before the Zamboni had cleared into the dock, finding her spot on the side across from the snack bar entrance, away from the mothers so they couldn’t hear, close to her office where she could easily retreat.
Ana felt the urge to take Indy’s hand and never let it go.