Chapter Eighteen Ana
Chapter Eighteen
Ana
Now
My mind is reeling with the question as Kayla sits back in her chair.
“What happened before I got there?”
It doesn’t seem possible that anything could have impacted her life more than the night in the field. I can still feel Indy’s hand on my neck, then grabbing my arm as we watched Kayla being dragged out of the woods.
“You started to train there the winter after Indy arrived, right? After Nationals?” Kayla asks, her eyes looking to the window and the storm outside.
I nod. “Yes. The year Indy got fifth.”
“I remember meeting you that first time. You were with your mother. Jo and I were in the hallway.”
I feel a swell of emotions as I think back to that day. When the world was light. Not even a shadow, except the one I chose to ignore. How tired my mother had grown. The sudden urge to send me away. The scarves she once wore around her neck now tied over thinning hair.
“Indy came a few months before you—at the start of that season,” Kayla says.
My heart aches as I remember the moment when I first saw her.
“She was hiding in the room, texting Bobby Stark.”
Kayla turns her gaze back from the window.
“Dawn was brutal to all of us in her own way. But there was something about Indy. We all thought it was because of her mother, Patrice—that she harbored resentment over her life-altering loss when they were rivals. And I still think that was true. But Indy didn’t help her cause.”
I meet her eyes. Now I’m the one who’s curious.
“But Indy did everything Dawn told her,” I recall. “She had that bruise—from falling on the triple Axel.” The bruise that took my breath away the first time I saw it. The night we went to the field.
Kayla lifts a shoulder. Tilts her head. “Yeah, well. Indy made that choice. That’s how I always saw it. But it’s not about that. Things happened—and not just to Indy but to all of us.”
“Okay,” I tell her, trying to be patient, though my mind is screaming for this piece of information, the same way it used to when I was with them. The Orphans. How I craved knowledge about everything in my new world. About them most of all. It felt imperative to my survival.
Kayla continues. “Indy arrived at the end of the summer—right before school started. Jo and I had been in our room for sixteen, seventeen months maybe.”
I think back again to their stories. How Jolene had come because her parents were traveling.
She called them Mr. M. and Mrs. M., like they were characters in a sitcom.
They’d given her a choice—The Palace or boarding school.
She came here because she still wanted to skate.
And Kayla—she got a scholarship from a nonprofit organization.
They sponsored underserved girls in sports.
“We knew we didn’t have what it took to make it,” she says. “But we loved to skate.” Now a pause and a slight smile. “Do you remember that feeling? When you just loved it for what it was? Before it became about winning?”
I stare at her, wondering if I do. It’s hard to love something that set your life on fire.
“I fucking loved it.” Kayla smiles broadly. “The speed, and the power . . .” Now she holds her hand in front of her, making the shape of a blade.
“That one edge, carving into the ice, holding your entire body in any position you wanted—anything. It was a kind of . . .” She thinks now about how to describe it. “Freedom,” she says finally.
For a brief moment, we stay there, remembering that part, before she continues.
“She was there for maybe three weeks before the tears started.”
“Because she missed her coach back home—Bobby,” I say, picturing Indy on her bed the day I arrived, crying into her phone.
“I think she believed she could come and try it out, then convince her mother to let her go home. But there was some reason Patrice wouldn’t allow it—even after Indy fell at the ice show. That night we went to the field. The night I was assaulted.”
“I remember,” I tell her. I reach for her hand across the table and grab hold. She doesn’t stop me but pulls away after giving my fingers a quick squeeze.
“That night—I always see it as two separate stories. The show, the fall, the bruise—that belongs to Indy. The field, the man in the woods—that belongs to me.”
Kayla looks into her coffee.
“Oh God—Kay. I’m sorry.” I don’t know what else to say.
A moment passes, both of us reflecting on that night, how it started. Where it ended. Even though that night was not the start. Not the ending.
“Indy used to call home every day,” Kayla says.
“At first with tears and pleading. But when that didn’t work, she started making threats to her mother.
Calls and text messages. Like a little kid.
How she was going to run away and they’d never find her.
Or how she would single all her jumps that season, blow her chances to even make it to Nationals.
And still, she got the same reply. Patrice didn’t believe her. Called her bluff.”
Kayla gets up from the table, pours more coffee, even though her cup is only half empty. And I can see that she, too, is strangled by these memories.
“We told her it wasn’t that bad—she would land the triple Axel soon enough, and then she could go home. No big deal. On and on. None of it helped.”
Indy was stubborn. I felt it the first time I saw her sitting on that bed, crying but somehow still determined. Defiant.
“It was never about Bobby,” I offer now. “I’ve thought about her over the years, of course, and I think he became a test in a way. For her mother.”
Kayla nods. “Yeah—she just kept pushing it and pushing it to see if Patrice loved her—or just her skating. Living out the dream she never came to realize for herself.”
And then she adds, “Those mothers. They were all the same, weren’t they?”
“The bleacher bees.”
“Indy wouldn’t let it go, and Patrice wouldn’t budge,” Kayla continues. “So she came up with a different plan. One that involved us. Me and Jo.”
My hands are on my thighs again, digging in as Kayla describes their lives before I drove 289 miles with my sick mother, a silver trunk, and two duffel bags.
“It involved a letter to the skating association.” She pauses, takes a beat. “A letter about Dawn.”
Electricity runs down my arms. Somehow I can feel where this is going, this story she starts to tell, my eyes glued to her face. Lips as they move to form words, and cheeks as they rise and fall with the cadence. My entire history shifting with this new information.
The letter was anonymous, she explains. Disclosing dangerous training schedules, cruelty, and neglect at Avery Hall—Dawn Sumner had promised a safe, supervised environment, but what existed was anything but.
“We wrote how we walked or biked to the rink at five in the morning, in the dark, because there was no car service—as she’d promised—and because the roads got too icy for a bike.
And how Edie was never there, always hiding in her apartment watching soap operas and reality shows, unless she was cooking food—and how that food was sometimes recycled for days.
How we had no access to doctors when we got sick.
And then the jumps and the falls—Dr. Westin and his Fear Training—and that was before Indy got that bruise. ”
I think about this, all of it true—but how ill-conceived this plan was. In my mind, Kayla and Jolene were wise. But this was anything but. Mio had warned me from the start. How they were just kids themselves.
She smiles. “We thought it was so official, you know? We organized it into paragraphs with headers all in bold, underlined. Like a legal document. We referred to ourselves as ‘the Skaters.’”
Now she recites the letter as though it’s sitting right there on the table.
“The Skaters are not provided adequate transportation. The Skaters are not provided adequate nutrition. The Skaters are required to meet with a psychiatrist against their will. The Skaters are trained in a dangerous manner. My God—we thought we were so smart.”
“Did you send it?”
Kayla laughs like she still can’t believe what they did. “Oh yeah. Straight to US Figure Skating. The USFS.”
“And Dawn got ahold of it.”
“Of course. Because that’s how the world works. We just didn’t know it yet.”
My heart races as if Dawn is standing right behind me, her blue puffer coat unzipped, ready to fold me into it. To swallow me whole for even listening to this story.
“Indy thought if they investigated the program, her mother wouldn’t be able to keep her there.
” Her tone turns to sarcasm. “Because of course the association would look out for us, and not Dawn and The Palace—the most important training facility in the world. And of course Patrice would then let Indy come home. And of course Dawn wouldn’t figure out who wrote the letter. ”
They spent hours drafting it, she says. Typing it at school, sending it with no return address.
But of course Dawn knew exactly who’d sent it—and why, though they never got an official reply. They could tell by the sudden shift in her demeanor.
And just when I think I’ve got my head around this secret they never told me, she tells the rest of it.
“Dawn called me to her office on a Sunday. There was no training—just public skating sessions. So it was only me. I was anxious, you know. But I was always anxious. Always waiting for bad shit to happen. I convinced myself it was about my scholarship, or—and this is hilarious—that maybe she had news about one of the fall exhibitions—someone dropping out and me finally getting a spot. I needed to get in front of the judges. Make some headway before Regionals.”
Her words swim inside me, looking for a place to settle in.
Searching for the memories attached to the knowledge of these things.
The ISU exhibitions. The pressure to get from Regionals to Sectionals, Sectionals to Nationals.
But I’ve buried them so deep the words have nowhere to go. They swirl in my gut.
And then I picture Kayla in Dawn’s office. On a Sunday.