Chapter 50 2013
“It’s up to you,” Meryl said from the kiss-and-cry box.
Which was why I should have been entirely focused on whether to include the move I’d been working on for the past week or leave it out. Instead, my heart was beating out of rhythm for another reason altogether.
“If you think you can pull it off, you should go for it,” Meryl said. “You’re in second, which means, if you nail it, you’ll take the podium, and then you’d be . . . well, golden.” She smiled, but it was a tight smile. Her nerves were jacked up high, her cat eyes flicking side to side.
The signature move we were considering had literally been discovered by accident.
During one of my practices, my right leg cramped as I went into an axel, causing me to pitch forward.
To save myself, I stabbed my left skate into the ice.
The momentum nearly sent me crashing headfirst to the ice, but being a Weeble, somehow instead, I cartwheeled around like a corkscrew, whipped my leg down, and miraculously landed on the blade.
Dang, that was a close one. I nearly broke my neck, I thought at the exact moment Meryl said, “Do that again?”
I did and miraculously managed again to land on my skate.
We named it the Patch Catch because it looked as if I was catching myself in the nick of time before I fell, which was exactly what I was doing.
Meryl checked that the move was legal, and it was.
Backflips were banned, but there was no rule against horizontal spiraling so long as my hands never touched the ice.
Introducing a signature move in a competition would put me in an elite class of skaters: Axel Paulsen (Axel jump), Alois Lutz (Lutz jump), Ulrich Salchow (Salchow jump), Denise Biellmann (Biellmann spin), and my favorite, Dorothy Hamill (Hamill camel).
“Patch, focus!” Meryl snapped. “You need to have a plan.”
The warm-up music was winding down, and the skaters were leaving the ice. I craned my head to look past them into the stands.
The glimpse I’d caught was fleeting. Out of the corner of my eye, on my final warm-up pass, I saw a flash of dark-gold hair with eyes that almost matched. Dylan. But when I spun around, he was gone.
I’d last gotten a letter from him six months before, and it was short and worrisome:
Hi Patch,
I’m writing to let you know I’m going to be out of touch for a while. Not sure where I’m going except that it’s going to be far far from here.
Nitwit! Blubber! Oddment! Tweak!
Dylan
I spoke to Mr. Jeffries about it. He knew Dylan and cared about him, and Dylan was only seventeen, still a minor.
He said he’d do what he could to track Ivy down to find out what Dylan meant.
He emailed a few days later with the devastating news that Ivy was dead and that Dylan’s dad had been arrested for her murder.
I couldn’t believe it. Dylan never mentioned his dad in his letters, and when he wrote about Ivy, it was to tell me an amusing story or to relay something funny she’d said.
I thought everything was fine and that the worries I’d had when they first moved back to Georgia were unwarranted.
It turned out I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Ivy was dead, and Dylan was gone. My heart ached with grief and worry, and the dozens of emails I sent Dylan after I got his letter had gone unanswered.
“Welcome to the ice, from the United States of America, Patch.”
The audience roared. Among those cheering were Mr. Jeffries, Coach Lee, and Hawu along with three other Somali cooks from Gaines.
The group had made the ten-hour drive from Minnesota to watch me.
They sat front and center in matching brown T-shirts that read Team Patch!
Profe was also there, sitting high in the stands, regal in his suit.
Since Mother had let him go, he’d rented an apartment in Saint Paul that was walking distance to all the downtown museums. Each day, he went to a nearby park and played chess with a group of other retirees, many of them immigrants.
He also had a cat called Gato (“cat” in Spanish) who sauntered into his apartment the week he moved in and stayed.
Profe said he was happy, and I believed him.
It was the first time any of them had seen me skate in person, which I found both thrilling and nerve racking. I waved to them as I skated to the center of the ice.
The music started, and the audience and everything else fell away.
It’s hard to explain the feeling of competing.
Lucid dreaming might come close. The music, which you know so well, is part of you, while your body remains apart, as if you’re viewing what’s happening from the outside.
Yet the moment is in hyperfocus, everything sharper, clearer, and brighter.
I heard once that adrenaline creates the illusion of time slowing, not because physical time actually alters but because your brain processes information at an accelerated rate.
I think that’s what happened when I competed.
The beginning moments, as I built up speed, were serene—rhythmic, even hypnotic—my skates scratching the ice with my strokes as the cold air moved through me.
Then I would start to go faster, and my quads would begin to burn, scintillating pain in my muscles that built until the moment the adrenaline kicked in and a surge of energy would rush through me as I both held myself up and held myself down at once.
The crowd would spin wildly around me, a blur of color and noise as I went faster and faster until I was on the razor edge of control and became speed itself and invincible.
I don’t recall deciding to do the Patch Catch. I simply did it, my only memory the jarring jolt of the toe stab and the spike of panic that followed as I spiraled perilously over the ice half a second before my skate whipped around and caught me.
The audience cheered so loud when I finished that I held my final pose an extra few seconds to soak it in.
My Team Patch fans were on their feet, hooting and hollering and whooping up a storm.
I blew them kisses as I skated back to the kiss-and-cry box and Meryl, who had tears in her eyes a moment before she realized it and quickly blinked them away.
“That’ll show them,” she said under her breath as she opened the gate for me.
Before stepping off the ice, I glanced back at the stands to the spot where he had been.