CHAPTER 111
Ana
HUMMINGBIRDS AND BUTTERFLIES are very rare this time of year.
You might catch a few of the bird here and there in Faerieladle, though the two creatures typically scatter across the air in spring when the flowers are just about to bloom.
A butterfly?
Good luck spotting one in this town until early March.
Except, as the next drop of snow falls across my temple, a teal wisp of light flaps quickly down the air, resting by my ankle.
But I blink and then it’s gone.
A smile tugs at my cheeks.
“I can’t believe your uncle was a figure skater,” I tell Troy, while we’re sitting over a blanket on the snow by a beautiful frozen Lake Faerieladle. Years of avoiding this ice, and it feels incredible to be back, a quick leisure skate this afternoon.
“Doesn’t he coach hockey in Sweden now,” I ask, “Lars, right?”
“Yup,” Troy confirms, “Lars.”
“So Lars Larsson?” I laugh.
“And one of his sons is also named Lars.”
“No way,” I say, finding this very funny suddenly, “so there’s two Lars Larssons?”
“Yes, Ana. There’s two.” Troy shakes his head with a chuckle.
Collecting myself, I say, “No seriously, I’m really glad that you and your dad talked things through.”
“It’s weird.” A heaviness grows in Troy’s eyes. “I didn’t think I wanted to talk to him anymore. Until we sat together and just emptied a lot of shit out. And I feel, I don’t know, a bit lighter and realized I kind of missed him. Isn’t that strange?”
“It’s not strange,” I reassure. “It must have been really difficult for him to come and talk to you. So it sounds like he missed you too.”
I start rubbing a palm across Troy’s shoulder, not realizing the touch until his eyes brighten and my hand quickly drops.
“How are things with your mom?” he asks, seeing the tension run over my features.
“Um,” I reply, “things are a bit better. I’m still mad at the situation. At her for not telling me about my dad and then refusing his help all these years when she knew how hard I was working to afford my skating expenses, school, our rent.”
I sigh as Troy listens to me carefully. “But she’s my mom, and I literally have no other family here other than her. And she gave up so much for me, so it’s…fuck, it's super conflicting.”
“It’s okay,” Troy says, reaching for my hand, “that you’re confused. Or not sure how you really feel now.”
I nod, knowing it’s true, still so fucking lost, knowing I can’t dwell on it with our flight to Milan being next week.
“Sometimes I wonder if I never chose figure skating,” I admit because the thought just hit me and I’ve never said it out loud before, “what I’d be doing now. Would I have been happier? More free?”
“Skating without Ana?” Troy pauses, his features raised in uncertainty like the adjective is impossible to pinpoint.
“Peaceful,” I offer.
“Boring.”
I chuckle. “Yeah, for you.”
“For everyone.” With a touch to the top of my hair, he ruffles it all up like he’d do when we were little.
Oh it’s on.
With my palm, I roll up a ball of snow and chug it right at his chest when Troy decides to raise his hands up in surrender.
That’s what I thought.
Tidying my waves again, I share, “You know Andrew, he had proposed to me.”
Troy’s eyes dart wide open at my confession.
“Oh shit.”
“Yeah, that was my exact same reaction. It was right after high school, and I wasn’t ready. I said no.”
“I’m sorry,” he says probably because everyone knew Andrew was a great guy. The best.
“No, it’s fine,” I quickly add. “It wasn’t meant to be. And he married a great girl, and they have a daughter now.”
I start remembering the moment I paid them a visit just before Christmas, seeing Penelope’s adorable face, my elementary school best friends so in love and happy together.
How I could’ve had something like that now if I had just focused on myself more than skating.
Focused on more than just my exhausting dream.
“Sometimes I wonder if I could’ve had a family by now,” I blurt out. “A life. If I chose something else. Anything else.”
“You’ll get it,” Troy promises, his jaw clenching so tight it sends a shiver across my collarbone. “I know you will.”
_________
Troy
“To think it was just yesterday that you still hated me,” I tease, changing the subject, stalling, credited to my nerves that are all over the place at the moment because…
You’re going to tell her today, dude.
“I did hate you,” Ana doubles down. “God, I really did.”
“Okay, rewind, rewind,” I roll out, seeing her run with my comment a little too seriously than I expected.
“I’ve been thinking about it lately, actually,” she adds. “And I wouldn’t change a thing.” My brows pull together. “We pushed each other. We brought out the best in each other. You sort of made me a better skater.”
And that makes me break into a wide grin.
“Yeah?” I say just to tease.
“Yeah,” she says with a breezy sigh. “You probably could win on your own.”
“Yeah, you’re right. I probably could.”
Ana’s mouth drops, gawking at me and just for that bright glow in her eyes, the comment was so worth it.
“The one time I’m nice to you,” she chides.
So I take this as the moment.
“I’ll be right back,” I say. “I have to get something from my car.”
_________
“If you were ever wondering how I felt about you,” I say, handing the medium sized carboard box that I brought with me to give Ana today.
She raises a brow up at me like what the hell is this?
And it’s a bit hard to explain so I wait for her to open each of the items herself.
Digging through the box, a DVD lands over her palms first.
“A Christmas Carol?” Ana says, trying to put together what that means.
“The secret Santa gift you got me in third grade” I explain. “Leave it to you to pick the least festive Christmas movie as your favorite.”
“Hey, it’s a great movie.” She points an index finger at me but I see a glimmer of surprise in those bright blue eyes like she’s also wondering if I chose to play that during movie night a few weeks ago because of her.
Exactly why I chose to play it that night.
Her hand falls right over her face at the small polaroid she takes out next.
The picture of her and me that my mom took of us at the rink in Wisteria. Where neither of us are smiling like the rivals we became from day one. And Ana is holding onto her first skating plush toy of a small cat.
“Troy, no,” she squeaks out. “There’s no way you remembered about Mishi? I was, I was five.”
“It’s not easy to forget anything about you,” I say. “Trust me, I’ve tried.”
She nudges my shoulder hard.
“The way you could never hold in your laughter after you’d give me an insult you thought was way more clever than your usual ones,” I recite. “The burnt toast you’d happily crunch on from across the benches during recess after I asked why you were eating tree bark.”
She laughs.
“The little stars you’d doodle over your physics homework, while we’d study at the rink.
I could name you a bunch more, but then I’d remember another hundred.
Though my personal favorite was when you threw your cupcake at me when you were in kindergarten.
That was the best day of second grade for me, hands down. ”
The day we met.
“Yeah, I bet.” She scoffs as she slides out a plastic goodie bag tied with a deep blue ribbon.
“You were obsessed with candy,” I say as she grins down at the shiny bag. “Saltwater taffy was your favorite.”
The same girl who loved the butterfly-shaped chocolates and sour candy during Winterfest but can be as rigid as stone and as cold as ice when she needs to.
The girl who has to have cranberry juice when her belly aches, who loves chocolate but only when it’s frozen, who’s favorite flavor of any dessert is strawberry.
The girl who smells like strawberries and something else perfectly her own.
The bag of candy she’s holding now, yeah it’s well-expired now but keeping it there somehow made sense. Just because she gave it to me. That made it make perfect sense.
Ana sets the bag of taffy onto the snow, her eyes tilted in vulnerability and something about it makes me think she remembers the same candy I brought her back from Greece.
But the moment is so quick, before I can ask, her brows pull together at the ring of fabric in her palm.
“My scrunchie?” she says.
“I swear that one’s not as weird as it looks.”
She raises her gaze at me in amusement.
“You dropped it on the ice,” I explain. “It was the day before Winter Formal in middle school. I brought it with me to the dance the following night. But then I saw you standing with Andrew, and I shoved the scrunchie back into my pocket. I couldn’t give it back to you.”
“Woah,” Ana interrupts, her eyes raised in shock, “are you serious?”
“I watched you dance with him,” I ignore her, “and it tore up my heart. Did you know you were the first girl to break my heart, Annabel?” She rolls her eyes at the nickname. “I was in eighth grade, and you broke my heart dancing with your little crush.”
She pushes her shiny lips to the side, trying not to smile.
“After I saw you dance with him, the hell I wasn’t giving it back. I was petty.”
Ana laughs at my stubborn tone. “I never knew you had so much of a crush on me, Troy,” she mocks, shoving my own words back at me now.
“It was more than a crush,” I say it so seriously her smile fades a bit and that stings my chest a little, wondering if she’s not ready to hear any of this from me, not yet, but I no longer have it in me to wait.
In fact I can confirm her avoidance, when her voice gets all teasing. “What if I wanted my scrunchie back?”
“You had like fifty of them,” I argue. “Literally the day after the dance you wore the exact same one. I even remember your hairstyle.”
She eyes me suspiciously.
Taking the scrunchie from her grip, I move my hands over to her tendrils with the hair tie, catching the flush of bright pink running over her cheeks as I comb through her silky waves, pulling them up into an obnoxiously high ponytail.
“Just like that.” I gesture proudly to her hair. “You looked just like a Who from Whoville.”
Her lips pulled into a scowl, Ana reaches into her bag, sliding a mirror out before she takes a look at the marvelous hairstyle that I just gave her but for some reason she immediately snorts.
“I did not look like that, you fucking liar!” she snaps.
“Did too,” I promise.
“Nuh-uh.”
“Uh-huh.” Glancing back at her soft hair, getting all dazed suddenly, I add, “I swear I can still smell the strawberry on it.”
Her brows crease. “What strawberry?”
“From your shampoo.” An intoxicating whiff of it reaches my senses even as she drags the scrunchie out her waves, her gorgeous hair falling around her shoulders. “Fuck, it drove me insane.”
Ana’s lips part when I catch a glimpse of her wet tongue that now I know tastes like strawberries.
It’s fucking fantastic that I can now confirm this.
Lovely that I now know the rest of her also has a strawberry taste.
Same but different.
Some spots more tart, some more sweet, one just so fucking tangy I could drown in it all day.
The snow knew I was getting carried away there for a second, which I owe complete credit to for intervening before I said some stupid shit and ruined what we now have going.
Which I still have no idea what this is, but it’s nice. I guess.
Ana’s attention also moves to the snowfall, then back on the tan box, slipping out the final item.
“Okay,” I say, “this one’s a little cheesy. Well you might find it cheesy and potentially even throw a snowball at me.”
Ana scoops up a pile of snow with her fists just in case and sets the ball beside her, waiting.
I laugh.
And sit beside her anxiously as she begins reading my ninth grade half-page paper that our homeroom had assigned us with.
About an athlete who inspired us most.
My Favorite Athlete
My favorite athlete is this figure skater that I met a little more than a couple of years ago.
At first, I thought she was pretty annoying.
Then I realized she’s even more annoying.
But she’s like lightning when she skates.
I’ve never seen something like it. And yeah, I might just be 14 right now, but she’s just that good. Probably the best, actually.
She shows up to the lake near my dad’s rink every single morning.
I think she gets there earlier than the birds.
The world could be collapsing, the trees all falling around her, and she’ll still be running across that ice with her skates on guaranteed.
When I watch her skate it makes me want to be better.
She challenges me, I’d never tell her that.
It would be too embarrassing when I’m the older one.
I kind of owe her a lot. She made me fall for this sport.
A tear slides down Ana’s cheek when I turn and face her.
“There was nothing cheesy about that.” She softly punches the side of my shoulder, laughing when I clutch onto my arm. “You really meant all that?”
I nod. “The day I wrote it, yes.” She reaches for the snowball beside her while I spring both my arms in the air to use as a shield. “Even more now!” Ana tosses the pile of snow back into the ground with a satisfied grin. “Remember the yearbooks you saw at my place before?”
“Yeah?” she says, her brows raising in intrigue.
“I only kept the ones that you signed.” Her eyes soften. “I’d read them every summer when I wanted to talk to you but couldn’t. The scrunchie, I held close when I wanted to be near you but couldn’t. And this necklace, I kept it in my pocket every time I tried to tell you how I felt but didn’t.”
I slide out the delicate gold chain from my pocket, handing it to her.
Finally.
“I got this for you,” I say.
She smiles.
She smiles and I almost forget the story that I’ve rehearsed since high school a thousand times over—an unhealthy number of times—hoping I wouldn’t fuck this up if I’d ever mustered enough courage one day to tell her.