Chapter 41 2010
Esma took bronze at Junior Worlds that year, while Nicolette fell during her long program and blamed it on a divot in the ice. Heinrich came in fourth. They came back to the institute, and life mostly returned to what it had been except for three things.
First, Heinrich and Esma were boyfriend and girlfriend.
Which made sense. They already bickered like an old married couple.
Heinrich was fifteen, and Esma was fourteen.
And they were inseparable. Esma made the first move, kissing Heinrich moments after he got the disappointing results of his final skate.
“Best worst skate of my life,” he said with a grin, his face lit up like a puppy who had been adopted by his favorite person in the world.
Then they told me the second bit of news.
“We’re switching to pairs,” Esma said.
“Pairs?” I said, the news shocking.
Esma and I had always had the same dream: to be the greatest figure skater in the world. Pairs was . . . well, pairs. You did it as a team, which meant you weren’t the single best anything.
“Let’s face it,” she said, “I’m good, but I’m no Sasha Cohen. This Junior Worlds proved that. I don’t have the pop. But pairs”—she smiled sweetly at Heinrich—“that’s something we have a real shot at. Sochi 2014, gold, baby.”
Heinrich leaned down and brushed a kiss across her lips, and I was shocked by the jolt of pure envy that ran through me. I wanted to be Esma, pretty and happy and with a boy who looked at me the way Heinrich looked at her.
The third thing that changed was me. My focus, already intense, zeroed in on mastering the triple axel.
“Obsessed,” Esma said.
“Possessed,” Heinrich corrected.
I thought about the triple axel so often that hardly an hour passed when it wasn’t on my mind.
It was the only thing I felt I had control over.
If Botan and Meryl believed the jump was what I needed to prove myself, then I needed to figure out a way to master it.
Because the thing that had become painfully clear after not making Worlds was, What other option did I have?
Without skating, who was I? My entire life revolved around it, and it was the only thing people knew me for.
If I failed, my life would revert to the lonely existence it had been before I discovered skating.
I’d likely be sent back to Gaines, but without Dylan, Ivy, and Nick.
And once again, I would lose my family—Esma, Heinrich, Botan, and Meryl.
I told myself I was loved regardless, but part of me only believed I was worthy if I became the greatest figure skater in the world.
Profe, Mr. Jeffries, Esma, Heinrich, the coaches, and the other students had viewed me for so long surrounded by the intoxicating glow of potential, I was certain I would cease to exist if that halo were to disappear.
At the heart of it, I was still the terrified six-year-old with the loneliness stone inside, even if she was buried deep beneath a camouflage of a well-adjusted, happy kid.
So I obsessed. I increased my sessions on the ice from two hours to three and doubled my time in the gym so I was lifting four hours a day. I ate, slept, and breathed mastering the triple axel and, each night, crawled into bed thinking about it.
Though, the moment I closed my eyes and the conscious world fell away, what I dreamed about most was the past and the great chief.
The power of each of us comes from within.
His words would replay in my overwrought mind, the two of us sitting across from each other on the dock as he called on my spirit flame to return my courage and my voice.
Since that day, I’d heard it called many other names—chi, aura, life force, élan vital, brio.
Nearly every language has a word for it, the essence that exists deep within us that allows us to believe in ourselves well beyond any innate ability we previously believed ourselves to have.
The mind is the greatness, and the body simply a means it uses to run faster, jump higher, shoot straighter, sing, roar, or do anything you set it to do. The head rules, and if you learn to understand that, you will understand everything.
I felt it, in those in-between moments before sleep, the deep-seated, unflinching knowledge that, no matter the obstacle, my spirit flame could overcome it. Which was how I knew, somehow, some way, I was going to do that jump.
I will never forget the day I accomplished it.
The night before, I’d vividly dreamed of the chief, and I arrived at the rink strangely certain I’d succeed.
I did a loop around the rink and, with calmness that belied reason, picked my toe into the ice and flew.
One, two, three—I rotated in the air, landed on my right blade, and smoothly glided out of it, performing it so perfectly it was as if I’d done it a thousand times before.
Only one person saw it, a boy of eight who had just started at the institute.
“Was that a triple-A?” he asked, eyes wide.
“It was,” I said coolly as if it were no big deal, while inside I whooped and hollered and cheered.
The power comes from within, I thought and hoped the boy would someday understand it for himself.
It often amazes me, when I look back on my life, how those few brief moments with the chief changed me. I knew him less than an evening, yet he was one of the most formative people in my life.