CHAPTER 69
Ana
SMASHED PUMPKINS COVER the outskirts of Naomi’s street.
Candy wrappers sprinkled over the sidewalks like pieces of cheap confetti, figures of costumes ghosting along the entrance of each home, a ladybug-themed red dress wrinkled on the floor by the corner of Naomi’s bed, all if it serves as yet another reminder of an October gone.
Another Halloween missed.
Another holiday I missed for a competition.
But we won. Troy and I won our first Grand Prix event, if our technical score surpasses Violet and Ethan’s at our second, securing us a strong spot going into Nationals, and then hopefully, the Olympics.
An intricate maze that, in this moment, even with the recent very important medal, feels very impossible to reach.
My eyes rest over my phone, emotion flat, unable to let go of the words burning through the screen.
“Blue or purple?”
Naomi dangles two strips of glittering fabrics, one color in each hand, waiting for my verdict.
“Um,” I say, pausing to bring my thoughts back to a healthy medium and not the spiraling freefall it was speeding right into, “I’d go with the purple.”
“Yeah, this shade of blue’s pretty bleh,” she agrees, tossing both onto her bed, carefully scribbling notes in her sparkly mint binder. “So, I told Emily to ask Kyle to the dance, and she actually did and he said yes.”
“Karl’s friend, right?”
“Yup, him.”
I let out a soft laugh, remembering the guy from my card ride with Troy. “That’s cute. What about you, are you still going with…um…?”
“Stephen,” Naomi helps.
“Right. Sorry.”
“Yeah, but we’re going separately since Emily’s going with the hockey guys, and Stephen and I will be with the water polo team.
It’s nice to see Naomi still close with her middle school best friend, Emily, friendships so fragile to maintain it seems lately, happy that she’s happy and keeping busy with her student leadership activities.
“Do you want to go dress shopping with us?” she asks.
“Uh,” I say, filtering my schedule in my head to decipher if there’s any room in it left. “Sure.”
There’s no room, I concluded in a matter of mere seconds, but for a friend, I can make room, I assure myself with a nerve-filled hope.
“Yay! Then we could go by Céline’s and get those cinnamon pretzels from the food court we used to always fight over!”
A bittersweet smile falls over my cheeks at the memory from high school, Naomi still in middle school, the weekends her mom would drop us off at the Faerieladle Mall, while we’d try on dresses we couldn’t afford and quite literally wrestle over the last cinnamon and sugar-coated pretzel from the shopping center’s bakery.
I haven’t had one of those pretzels in seven years. My stomach dips in shame at the realization.
“I’m still not over your dress from Skate Canada; you looked like an actual fairy, it was STUNNING!”
“Thanks, Naomi,” I say with a smile, knowing how much she’s always appreciated a good crystal or two on skating costumes.
A string of text messages and impromptu FaceTime call from her right when we landed back in Maryland was the second instance I checked my phone during the trip to Canada for our first Grand Prix event.
It wasn’t my fault, I try and convince myself of the first moment. After hearing an iteration of the same voicemail all over again.
Hi, Ana, It’s Stephanie. I’m calling from the Faerieladle Wellness Center. I wanted to follow-up with you, again and make sure you’re doing alright after your surgery. Please give me a call back at your earliest convenience. Thank you.
The voicemail I received half an hour before Troy and I reached the ice, the one that led me to the horrible, lengthy abyss of online hate I’d been doing better to avoid lately.
Focus on the kind words,
The people who mean well,
The ones who continue to support you, the exact mantra in that same order must have looped in my brain for a good couple minutes—or maybe longer. Not really keeping track, but knowing the moment it stopped was when Troy’s feet obstructed my vision.
I couldn’t look at him when he found me.
Not when I had just seen the comments, only a fraction of the cruel online discourse.
I liked obese Ana over anorexic Ana
Why is Troy skating with that bitch?
I just sent a petition to the ISU to ban Ana from the Olympics.
If they ignore me, I’ll just send another.
Violet, we need you, please beat that hideous cunt.
And, none of which were the cause of my panicked chest; I owe all of that mainly to a new anonymous caller.
If you touch Troy, I’ll kill you.
There was no way I would ever repeat any of those things to someone, let alone the guy responsible for fogging up my already cloudy head.
There is no room for him or anyone in my life. In that way.
That decision was made for me long before the envy sprouted online.
There’s a Christmas postcard that arrives at my doorstep every December with a set of two familiar faces—seeing them in Troy’s yearbook the other day a record few months before—to prove of this fact.
The past three years, a new, tinier face squished in between the two, all three of them decked in the most festive and matching wardrobe.
You made your decision.
I did, and this weekend came as a warning, that the world does not become less poisonous when you choose to escape it.
_________
And the Larsson Ice Rink will never not feel intimidating as hell.
This morning, there’s hardly any room to walk in the lobby, thanks to a bunch of college hockey scouts crowding the place and enjoying their cups of coffee and pastries from the snack bar.
Deeper into the entrance, and I can feel my skin start to break into hives.
They’re all staring.
At me.
All the skaters—what feels like all of them—have their focus on me, making me second-guess if I arrived without clothes on, but one dip down and—nope.
Fully clothed.
Before I can do so much as blink away the scene, Scott (who’s probably spoken to me all of twice since I joined this rink), walks right up, lifts a hand, raising it to give me a—high-five?
And that’s when I see it.
The rest of them, the juniors and seniors skaters looking at me like they never have, with small smiles, in fondness, like I’m one of them.
“You guys did incredible last weekend,” Scott says, drifting off before my sudden shock allows me to articulate a response.
And that’s followed by praising remarks from Perla, Isabella, even Marc, whose friends Nathan and Antonio glare at him with major death-stare during it, a detail I barely notice with the bizarre tonal change in the lobby today.
It’s not until my gaze meets one particular skater’s that my own smile leaves my face.
A pale purple spandex turtleneck leaning against the edge of the hallway. With her arms folded across her chest, Violet’s eyes tick with jealousy and something deeper than that—vengeance.
She disappears into the hallway, and toward the women’s locker room. Wanting to avoid a potential run-in, already in my skating attire, I move to sit on the glossy bench to lace up my skates, catching a glimpse of Troy warming up on the ice alone.
_________
What was that?
Every thought led back to that pressing question on my way to Troy’s apartment from my afternoon lecture.
Still in shock from the reaction I got at the rink today, one look at social media—which I had an itch to check even though I knew I shouldn’t—and I have my answer.
Troy.
100,000 followers added to all my social pages and thousands of comments associating me with him, us together, as a team, the team to beat, and the attention, the overwhelmingly positive attention for a change, makes it hard to spot the horrible ones.
My chest suddenly beams with warmth, but then there’s an aftertaste of nervousness. More eyes on us mean more faces to impress. Swallowing down that anxiety, I move through the apartment doorway, walking into an empty living room.
I take advantage of the silence to catch up on the one group project still unfinished, halfway done when the front door of his apartment unlocks, Troy entering the doorway with stacks of papers and a look of fatigue.
“Need some help?” I offer, lifting myself off the navy sofa.
“Nope, I’m good. Thanks,” he replies, a sheet of paper balancing beneath his chin. He moves into the kitchen, setting the sheets onto the island. “Did you eat?”
The way he asks the question weighs over my shoulders, like there’s something wrong with me if my answer is “no.”
“Not yet,” I say, “I was waiting for you.”
So that last part was a lie, even though I technically was wondering what he was up to.
Ever since our trip to Canada, there’s an obvious concern in his expression. When we’re in the same room, when we’re practicing together, when he’s looking at me.
“You were?” he says, his eyes thankfully warming up, though not in a flirty way, I see the soft intrigue.
And I take that as the cut in this odd murkiness since the competition.
Walking toward him, I tug at the two strings hanging from his sweatshirt.
“Yup. To ruin your hair.” Sliding a hand over his head, I grip onto that unruly strand—the one I’d daydream cutting right off as a preteen, wondering if that would’ve somehow made Troy’s face uglier, concluding now, that no, it would not have—pulling at it softly before ruffling up the entire top of his head.
“Such a little shit.” He laughs into my weight, capturing my hands from above his head before he grips them to my sides, moving them behind me, holding them there with an invisible knot.
And suddenly, the hammering of my heartbeat is hard to ignore when he leans himself enough where our hips brush, my lower back bumping right into the island’s counter.
He hasn’t kissed me yet, I remind, telling myself that I could just let go.
He could just walk away.
We could stop this from happening again.
The way I promised myself—for what feels like the millionth time—to stop this. Even repeating the promise the moment after he touched me in the lecture hall, and then right after we got home and I touched him.