Chapter 5
MATEO
I walk into the locker room pre-game and immediately know something’s different.
The guys are clustered around Mercer’s phone – Barrett is holding it. Ward is watching with an expression of awe. Even Chen is leaning in.
“What’s going on?” I ask.
Mercer looks up. “Did you know she was famous?”
“Who?”
Barrett turns the phone toward me.
It’s Elida. She’s younger, maybe nineteen, in a costume that catches the light, mid-spin, her face focused. The caption is in Swedish but I can read the name: Elida Eriksson, European Figure Skating Championships.
“Where did you get this?”
“Googled her,” Mercer says. “Figured if she’s going to coach us we should know who we’re dealing with.”
Barrett scrolls to a competition video. The sound is off but it doesn’t matter.
The first jump, I don’t even know what it’s called. She launches herself into the air, spins faster than I can track, and lands on one foot.
No one speaks.
Another jump. Higher this time. Three spins in the air - four? I lose count - and she lands backward, one leg extended behind her, arms out, skating out of it like the landing was the easy part. It seems physically impossible.
“Holy shit,” Barrett says as the video ends.
“Yeah,” I say.
Holy shit is exactly right.
I take the phone and scroll.
There’s more. Competition footage. Interviews - some in English, some in Swedish with subtitles. A Wikipedia page. A list of medals and titles that makes me realize I had no idea who was coaching us.
And then I scroll past a headline I don’t even need to translate. The words scandal, coach, allegations jump out. There’s a blurry photograph of two people embracing, and I understand what I’m seeing.
Mercer peers over my shoulder. “Fuck! So that’s why she left Sweden. She was sleeping with her coach.”
“She’s a world-class athlete,” I interrupt him. “Whatever shows up when you Google her - whatever rumors - that’s not our business.”
“Just saying,” Mercer mutters. “Makes you wonder what she’s really doing here. If she couldn’t cut it there-”
“Mercer.”
Something in my voice makes him stop.
I look at each of them. Barrett, who won’t meet my eyes. Ward, shifting his weight. Chen, completely still.
“I don’t want to hear a single word about anything else. Ever.”
Silence stretches. Someone coughs near the showers.
“Alright,” Mercer says. “Fine.”
I hand him back his phone.
“We clear?”
“Yeah,” Mercer mutters. “We’re clear.”
I sit down at my stall and start taping my stick. Black tape. Even passes. No overlap. My hands are steady.
Behind me, someone laughs at something unrelated. The locker room returns to normal.
It’s our first match since Elida arrived to give us extra skating coaching. Fat lot of good it’s done.
We lose 3-1 and it isn’t close enough for that scoreline to be flattering.
The first period is fine. Scrappy, physical, the kind of hockey that’s not pretty but keeps you in the game, and we go into the first intermission level. The locker room has that tight, focused energy that I recognize, that I’ve been trying to rebuild all season. Like the team is about to click.
It doesn’t click.
Northern State score seven minutes into the second on a transition we should have read, a defensive breakdown that starts small and builds fast, the kind of thing that happens when you’re half a second behind and can’t claw it back. I watch it happen from the crease and there’s nothing I can do.
We pull one back midway through the third. Ward, off a scramble in front, and for about four minutes the game feels like last season, and the bench is loud and I can feel it - that thing, that almost-thing-
And then they score twice in six minutes and it’s over.
The buzzer goes.
I stand at center ice for a second longer than I should while Northern State celebrate at the other end.
3-1.
We’re better than that.
I tap gloves with their guys coming through the line and I keep my face neutral. I say the right things to the right people and I try not to let anything show.
ELIDA
I watch from the stands a few rows behind Coach Calloway.
I’m not their coach. Not for games, not officially. I’m hired to give extra skating help. So I just watch.
And technically speaking, they’re so close.
That’s what strikes me, sitting here in this cold, unremarkable arena in this small Minnesota town with my scarf pulled up.
They’re not a bad team. They’re not even a struggling team, not really.
They’re a team that’s right on the edge of being great.
Watching the third period slip away from them is like watching someone reach for something just beyond their fingertips over and over again.
I know that feeling.
When the buzzer goes I stay in my seat while the stands empty around me, watching the handshake line below, watching Russo move through it with his chin up and his face composed in a way that is quite clearly concealing disappointment.
That’s when I notice the man near the glass.
He’s not a student. Late twenties maybe, broad-shouldered, in a Northern State jacket. He looks up at me and catches my eye. He smiles - easy, open - and nods toward the ice in a way that says good game without saying anything.
I nod back.
He moves toward the gate and leans on it. “You’re the new skating coach?”
“I am.”
“Jake Skelly.” He offers his hand over the boards. “Assistant coach at Northern State.
“Elida Eriksson.”
“I know.” His voice is warm and not pushy. “I followed your career. You were incredible.” He says it but doesn’t make it weird, which I appreciate.
“Thank you.”
He looks back at the ice, comfortable with the silence. “Your guys aren’t bad,” he says, after a moment. “Honestly. They’re right there.”
“I know.”
“Maybe that almost makes it worse?” He’s intuitive.
“Yes. It does in a way.”
We talk for a few minutes. He’s easy to talk to, interested without being intense, and he makes me laugh once about something regarding the absolute misery of coaching in Minnesota winters, and I’m aware that he’s attractive in a straightforward kind of way.
I’m also aware, with a different and less comfortable part of my brain, that somewhere on the ice behind me the guys are finishing up and starting to head towards the tunnel.
I don’t turn around.
“I’d love to buy you a coffee sometime,” Jake says. “Pick your brain about skating techniques. We’re trying to bring someone in for a similar role and I’d value the perspective.”
“That sounds good.” It will be nice to have some extra connections here. “I’ll give you my number.”
I pull out my phone.
And as I do I glance back at the ice, briefly.
Russo has stopped moving. He glances up at me briefly then starts talking to Barrett.
I smile at my phone screen and type in Jake’s number.
We file out through the emptying stands. I don’t think about the expression on Russo’s face coming off the ice.
Much.
MATEO
I’m on the ice by six because the alternative is lying in the dark replaying the third period on a loop, and I’ve already done three hours of that - it hasn’t helped.
I skate hard. Alone. The way I used to before any of this - before scouts and the weight of a captaincy that feels heavier some mornings than others. Just effort and the mercy of a rink at six in the morning that doesn’t ask anything of you except to move.
It almost works.
Except that every time I come around the far end I can see the stands, and every time I see the stands I see her up there in her scarf and then I see her filing out with him - Skelly, Northern State, the opposition, literally the team that just beat us - easy and smiling.
It’s fraternizing with the enemy. How could seeing that not bother me? Chatting up the coach of the team we lost to.
By the time the team arrives, I’ve worked myself into something I can’t quite name and wouldn’t want to, and I try to pull it together because that’s the job, that’s what the C on my chest is for.
Calloway gathers us before we start.
He doesn’t raise his voice. He never does after a loss - that’s one of the things about him, the way his disappointment is always quieter than his approval, which makes it worse.
He talks about the second period breakdown, about transition reads, about the moments where we gave them the game instead of making them take it.
He’s fair and not unkind, and every word of it lands exactly where it’s meant to.
“We were close,” he says finally. “Close isn’t nothing. But close doesn’t go on the board.” He looks across the group. “We’re extending this morning. Elida’s running the first hour. I want you snappier than you were last night, and right now your skating technique is where we find that. Questions?”
Silence.
“Good.”
She’s waiting at the far blue line, and the team spreads out without much noise, which tells you everything about the mood. Even Mercer is quiet, which is either respect for the loss or maybe only tiredness.
I find my position and wait.
She starts us on edge work, basic progression, and I go through it mechanically and try to focus on the ice and not on the image of her laughing at something Skelly said.
Then she moves into the turning drills.
At first I don’t say anything. I run the sequence - tight rotational turns, weight centered, the kind of controlled pivot that she frames as transition work - and I can feel what she’s doing, technically, I can feel the logic of it.
Some of the guys are getting it. Ward is actually good at it.
Chen moves through it with the quiet competence he brings to everything, and even Barrett is trying, which on another morning I’d find funny.
But we lost last night.
We lost last night and she left with the assistant coach of the team that beat us and now she’s out here on our ice making us-
“Again,” she says, moving through the group. “Tighter on the rotation. You’re dropping your shoulder, Mercer - keep it level. Ward, that’s good. Again.”
I run it again.
And again.
On the fourth repetition something gives.
“This is a pirouette,” I say.