Chapter Eight Ana #2
Normally gathered in the stands just outside the snack bar entrance, the mothers would be everywhere now.
In the second rink doing costumes, and later outside the locker rooms with clipboards of pages listing the numbers and the skaters performing in each one.
They would stand behind the curtain, lining them all up in the right order and shushing them because it was hard to stay quiet with so much excitement in the air.
There were two kinds of skating mothers at The Palace—another thing Ana had learned in her time here.
The first—the locals—were the lesser of her worries.
They lived close enough to Echo to drive to the rink and stay for hours until the sessions were done, thinking that their kids had any remote chance of making it past Regionals.
As if the odds of winning the lottery were better just because you lived next to a gas station that sold the tickets.
The second kind—the ones who could cut you with a single look—were the transplants who’d moved to Echo from far away.
They’d left the rest of the family back home with a father, aunts and uncles, brothers and sisters.
Their lives, their sole purpose, and the reason they were so vicious, so annoying, Jolene said, was to justify the sacrifice to the families they’d abandoned.
Their kids had to succeed. So they spent their days watching every move of every skater—their own and their child’s competitors.
They kept notebooks on each session. What their kids practiced—jumps, spins, footwork connecting required program elements, choreography, run-throughs, maybe twice to build stamina.
Jolene called them bleacher bees. “Steer clear of their nest,” she said. “They’ll sting you until you’re dead.”
When Ana walked by them, it was sometimes hard to remember what she’d been told, because they were mothers, and in her old life, mothers were always looking out for kids.
It was one of those things that she had to keep in the front of her mind, like a Post-it note of something you’re likely to forget.
Ana repeated this to herself now, as they zipped her up and pinned her hair and painted one eye with a black circle that was supposed to look like a patch.
She reminded herself not to let her guard down, not to be fooled by their smiles and the words that turned into knives, spoken with voices that were sweet and soft.
Like the one doing her makeup, Shannon Finch’s mother, who smelled of stale coffee from the snack bar and the unmistakable scent of the rink—ammonia, gasoline, and sweat.
She studied Ana’s face, smoothing the makeup with her thumbs.
“There,” she said, pulling her face back a few inches to admire her work. “Adorable!”
The woman looked her over, head to toe. She brushed a trace of lint from Ana’s shoulders. Straightened her headpiece.
“It’s such a shame no one’s here to see you.”
She knew what Mrs. Finch was really saying—that Ana’s family didn’t care about her—but Ana wasn’t going to be taken down by this woman with her gray roots and saggy underarms, who had left her husband and son back in Oregon so Shannon could train with Dawn.
Shannon didn’t even have a triple-triple combination.
So Ana took a breath, like she’d been trained to do by Dr. Westin, and let it fuel her anger.
“They’ll see me when I make Nationals.”
Shannon’s mother smiled wider, but her eyes got smaller and her teeth clenched together so tightly Ana worried she might break one in half.
Shannon would be lucky to make it out of Regionals this year.
Maybe that was cruel to even think. Shannon had been sucking up to Ana since she got here.
Trying to be her friend, since they were the same age.
So it felt good, but then bad, using her own words as knives. But this wasn’t about Shannon. It was her mother. And if one of them had to leave costumes and makeup bleeding, better this bleacher bee than Ana. The new Ana. The one who’d stopped climbing into Indy’s bed at night.
She skated her solo in the pirate-girl costume, her joy unfettered by the bleacher bees and her parents MIA and the triple flip she still couldn’t land but needed for the upcoming season.
The song was from the movie, a quick tune, and her choreography matched the scene where one of the pirates swabbed the deck.
She made the most of it, a bounce in her strokes, quick arm moves, one hand on her hip and one stretched high into the air, ahoy!
—then landed a gorgeous triple-toe-triple-toe combination for everyone to see—including the judges who would be at Regionals in the fall.
Her heart was still racing when she neared the end of the ninety seconds, because she had never performed like this—in a dark arena with a spotlight following her every move. Skating a solo for a packed crowd. Killing the performance. Bursting with satisfaction as the audience applauded.
Then the music ended, and new music began, the claps fading as the spotlight moved from her to a new trio of girls who’d just taken the ice.
She exited stage left, with a shiver from a kind of elation that she’d never felt before. Not even when she’d won a medal. There was something about doing it here, as a Palace skater, that resonated deeper.
Behind the red velvet curtain, a bleacher bee checked off her name on a clipboard. Indy was there, too, waiting with Mio and the top three men training at The Palace—the ones who’d also been at breakfast. Ivan, Hugo, and Travis.
Mio smiled and waved. Great job, she mouthed, following the shushing orders from another bleacher bee.
Ana smiled and waved back, then looked toward Indy a little farther away, hoping to catch her eye as well.
But Indy was distracted, staring into the stands.
And when Ana followed her gaze, she saw Dawn at the boards by the entrance to the snack bar, next to Indy’s mother.
The two of them watching the show side by side, former rivals now enlisted in the same cause—to make Indy a national medalist this year and then the next one, too, leading up to the Olympics.
A second chance at a dream neither one had fully realized. Lifelong rivals in a tenuous détente.
Ana skated around the back to find her way to where Indy stood, but one of bleacher bees grabbed her arm.
“Exit that way, dear,” she said. Ana pulled away, tried again, but then her path was blocked by a swarm of younger girls being lined up for an ensemble number.
“Indy,” Ana whispered.
But the bleacher bee was angry now, giving her an evil eye, pointing to the boards and the exit from the ice.
So Ana left just as the music for the trio signaled the end of their number.
She grabbed her skate guards, almost falling over as she put them on in the dark, then walked, hugging the boards so she wouldn’t block anyone’s view of the show, to a spot where she could see the skaters who were watching in the stands, Kayla and Jolene and the others who were done and already out of their costumes.
The audience applauded again as Indy’s name was announced, and Ana looked back to the ice and watched Indy skate to the center, then stop, arms overhead, right toe pick planted behind her left skate. Her starting pose.
The music began. A dramatic action scene from the movie that showed off Indy’s power. No one moved faster on the ice. Not even Mio.
A tickle in her gut, and not the good kind that had been there before, Ana glanced back at the stands and caught Kayla’s eye, then Jolene’s. She waved at them to come down.
“What’s wrong with Indy?”
Kayla shrugged. “We think she had a fight with Patrice. She was crying in the locker room. We had to put her head thing back on and shove her out there.”
They all watched then, as the music played and Indy moved.
She rounded the corner and hit a triple flip.
Ana’s gaze went back to the two women by the snack bar entrance, clearly visible under the light for the exit.
Dawn was watching Indy with her fake face, the one Indy told Ana to watch for whenever Indy had a lesson.
This face, she said, was proof that the détente was a ruse.
A cover. And that Dawn was just using Indy to torture her mother, not to help Indy land the triple Axel and make the Olympic team.
“She hates me,” Indy had sworn a million times. “Coach Emile told me.”
She said Dr. Fear had told her the same thing. And then asked her what she was going to do about it. Cry like a baby?
Standing beside Dawn was Patrice, oblivious to the fact that Dawn wanted to annihilate her daughter, but instead watching her daughter with freakish intensity, her arms actually moving in sync with Indy’s, knowing the program by heart, her face changing expression with the music, like she was the one on the ice performing, landing the jumps, soaking up the applause.
A champion once again, and right under Dawn Sumner’s nose.
Just like she’d done twenty-three years ago.
As if that one lucky moment had failed to seal her lifelong victory and she still needed more.
Now all eyes were on Indy as she finished a footwork sequence, a spiral, then started to pick up speed.
“What’s she doing?” Kayla asked. “Is she trying the Axel?”
Indy hugged the boards, then turned backward—Kayla was right. This was her approach to the triple Axel.
“But she can’t land it!” Ana said, a gasp filling her lungs. She’d been falling, crashing all summer. And hard.
Then Indy was turning, stepping forward, flying into the air off her left toe pick.
The entire arena froze as Indy spun like a top. She came down hard, catching her right blade, then flipping off it again into the air, this time almost sideways, landing on her right hip, sliding into a fake palm tree that fell over on its side with a dramatic thud.
“Oh my God,” Ana whispered, her hand over her mouth as the rink quieted to a hush. The music changed abruptly as the spotlight shifted to the ensemble that was taking the ice early, Indy’s solo cut short by the fall, the show disrupted, the audience buzzing within a hush.
When Ana finally exhaled, it was Jolene who put the pieces together, just as Mio slipped out from behind the curtain, skated to Indy, and helped her up and off the stage. Hugo followed after putting the palm tree back in place as if nothing had happened.
But something had happened, even if it was only the Orphans who understood.
“That was a message,” Jolene said. “To her mother—and Dawn. She’ll do anything to get home to Bobby Stark.”