Read Breaking the Ice Online

Authors: Gail Nall

Breaking the Ice (3 page)

Chapter Four

While Mom repeats the whole
awful story to Dad over the phone, I run up to my room. Crying into my pillow sounds really tempting, but it won't get me anywhere. Regionals are only a couple of months away. I can't miss any training time, and I
need
a coach.

Besides, if I'm busy searching for a new club, I can't think about what a mess my life is.

I scroll through the list of Michigan skating clubs online and click on the links to the ones that aren't too far away. I've heard of some of them from competitions. Finding one to skate at shouldn't be hard at all.

“Are you doing schoolwork?” Mom peers around the doorway to my room and squints at the screen of my laptop. “Remember, you're grounded. No talking to friends on the computer.”

Instead of telling Mom she's completely deluded about my social life, I turn the computer toward her. “I'm looking up clubs.”

Mom smiles and walks over to me. “I'm glad you're being proactive.” She points to the screen. “Now
that's
a real club. Wouldn't you love to train with Joanna Michaels? She could get you to the Olympics.”

I have no idea who Joanna Michaels is, but I just nod and say, “Yeah, that would be great.”

She leans forward and clicks on a link that shows photos of the skaters. I scan the smiling faces, not recognizing anyone. Skating at a new club will feel like moving to a new town. I practically lived at Ridgeline, saw the same people every day, did schoolwork at the lobby café tables between sessions, worked out at the rink gym. And now I have to start over somewhere else.

Mom's sitting on my bed and has pulled the computer into her lap, clicking away and writing names and phone numbers on my pink flower-shaped notepad. I mumble something to her and walk down the hall to the bathroom. I wash my face and look at myself in the mirror.

“Everything's going to be just fine,” I say to my reflection. “You're going to find a great club and a new coach. The coach will be so good, you'll blow away the competition at Regionals. Everyone at Ridgeline will be so jealous. You'll meet all kinds of new people.”

I can't even think about the alternative—not skating at all. It's what I do every day. What I've done since I was three years old. Skating is like a physical need. When we go to Florida for a week in May, I do jumps in the surf while I count down the days until I can be back on the ice. Not skating ever again would be like cutting off a hand.

I force a smile at myself in the mirror, pull my ponytail tighter, and go back to my room.

“There,” Mom says as she scribbles down one last name and number. “I'm going to call all of these clubs first thing tomorrow morning.”

“Okay.” I sit on the bed next to her. I'm not going to cry. Not, not, not.

Mom doesn't say anything. She just wraps her arms around me and squeezes. “We'll fix this,” she says. “I promise.”

And if Mom says she'll fix something, it'll happen. I smile and hug her back.

Mom clicks off her phone and crosses another club off our list. It's Friday morning, and I haven't been on the ice since Monday. I never knew it could take so long for people to call back. My feet are practically itching to put my skates on and do something. I miss the cold, and the sound my toe pick makes when I jab into the ice to jump. And maybe I'm going crazy, but I even miss the wet sock smell of the locker rooms.

Mom sighs. “Well, that leaves us one club.”

“Which one?” I ask.

“Fallton.” Mom doesn't meet my eyes.

“Oh.” I don't know what else to say. I can't imagine telling Ellery and Peyton that I'm skating at Fallton.

“I know. It's not your first choice. But everyone else
claims
their coaches are all booked, or the club has a waiting list. But . . .”

I know what she's going to say. It's either skate with Fallton or don't skate at all.

“I want to skate,” I say. “I just . . . well, everyone calls it—”

Mom cuts me off. “I know what they call it. I've heard the girls at the rink.”

I bite my lip.

“Why don't we just go check it out? They've invited you to skate as a guest at one of their sessions tomorrow morning.
We can meet the coaches and some of the other skaters. We don't have to make a decision until after we've seen it.” Mom turns her phone over and over in her hands as she says this.

I nod. That's reasonable. But I don't feel reasonable. Who wants to skate for a club that everyone calls Fall Down?

Chapter Five

It's seven a.m. on Saturday,
and I'm curled up in the front seat of Mom's car, on my way to skate at the Fallton Club.

It's like a part of me has been missing all week, and I'm going to find it today on the ice. But then again, it's the Fall Down Club. The worst club in the history of all skating clubs. I can hear Ellery giggling in my head.
You're skating at Fall Down? Wow, Kaitlin, that's such a loser rink.

Mom makes a left turn onto the highway. “We'll just try it out.”

“Their skaters aren't very good.” I feel bad saying this, but it's true. I'm thinking of the girl at the Praterville Open—the
really nice one in the green dress who helped me. She placed dead last in our level. Her program music was this awful screechy violin stuff, and she fell three times.

“If we decide you'll skate there, I'll make sure you don't get whoever coached that girl at Praterville,” Mom says, reading my mind.

I lean back in the seat and breathe in the citrus scent from the air freshener dangling from the rearview mirror. Mom claims it reminds her of vacations in Florida, but it smells like bathroom cleaner to me.

The drive to Fallton is only thirty minutes, but it feels even shorter than that. Before I know it, we're parked outside the rink.

I get out of the car and smooth my clothes. It took me forever to decide what to wear. At my old club, skaters wore either plain practice dresses or tight skating pants. I put on my favorite black dress this morning but took it off. I didn't want to look overdressed if everyone else was wearing pants. So I went with my black pants with the white stripes down the sides.

Mom pushes open the door, and we walk down a short, narrow hallway to the lobby. It's way smaller than my old rink. Straight across from us, rough white ice shows through the windows that line the far side of the lobby. An ancient, dirty, rusty Zamboni chugs around in slow circles, smoothing the
ice and sending fumes throughout the building. I wrinkle my nose and try not to breathe too deeply.

The bathrooms are off to the right, along with an open door with a sign hanging over it that reads
LOCKER ROOMS
. The
L
dangles from the sign at an angle that makes it look like a
V
. Vocker Rooms. I bite my lip to keep from giggling.

Then I remember this is my new rink. Not new, shiny, so-white-it-glows Ridgeline Ice Plex, but this place—Vocker Rooms and all.

Rows of dull orange plastic chairs are scattered throughout the lobby. Skaters perch on them, lacing up their boots and talking. A few look up at us, and I give them a tentative smile. Mom grabs my hand and pulls me over to a knot of adults. My face flushes. Why does she have to yank me around like a little kid in front of everyone?

“Hello,” Mom says to the group.

They stop talking and look at us. I wrench my hand out of Mom's grasp and cross my arms.

“You must be Laura Azarian-Carter.” A tall man wearing polished black skates steps forward and thrusts his hand out.

Mom shakes it. “Yes. And this is Kaitlin, my daughter.” She nudges me forward toward the group. I stumble and smile at the man.

He grins, and large dimples appear in his cheeks. Something about his smile makes me relax a little. “I'm Greg ­Stevenson, the skating director here. I used to star in the Skating Sensation touring show before I became a coach.”

I wonder what a circus-themed touring show has to do with anything, but Mom looks pleased. She smiles and nods.

“A great show. We took Kaitlin to see that when she was little. She loved it so much, she wanted to be in it. You wanted to be one of the dancing elephants, Kaitlin, remember?”

I look at the floor and wish I could disappear.

Greg just lets out a booming laugh and says, “Thank you, thank you.” He gestures at the two women wearing skates next to him. “This is Svetlana Priaskaya.” He puts a hand on the shoulder of the short, round woman stuffed into a fur coat. She nods at us but doesn't smile. Instead she looks me up and down like she's analyzing me.

I shift from foot to foot and look toward the other, younger woman with the braided hair and tie-dyed fleece jacket.

“I'm Karilee Clemmons,” she says.

Mom reaches out to shake her hand, but Karilee steps forward and grabs Mom in a hug. Mom's arms stick out around Karilee, and her eyes are like saucers. I cover my mouth so I don't start cracking up.

“We're so glad you're here!” Karilee says. “We love new skaters. It brings good energy to the group dynamic.”

Greg checks the clock on the wall and gestures at the doors to the ice. “Why don't you put your skates on, ­Kaitlin? Freestyle starts in five minutes,” he says as he zips up his jacket. He turns to introduce Mom to some of the other parents, and I catch the words
SKATING SENSATION
written across the back of his jacket in sparkling silver thread.

I put my bag in front of the nearest chair.

“Don't sit on that one. It's broken,” the girl across from me says.

“Thanks.” I move to the next chair. It looks like it has thirty-­year-old dirt embedded in the seat. I try not to think about it as I pull my skates on.

“Are you new?” the girl asks.

I look up and recognize the Nice Screechy Violin girl from Praterville. Is she joking? I mean, how could she forget? She's gathering her short black hair into a tiny ponytail and looking like she's never seen me before. “Yeah. I used to skate at Ridgeline, but now . . . I don't.” I tie a double knot in my right skate laces and reach for my left.

The girl shrugs and fishes a pair of red gloves from her skate bag. They completely clash with her pink hoodie, but she
either doesn't notice or doesn't care. “I used to skate at Pound Lake, but I don't anymore either. It's much better here.”

“Oh.” I wonder what happened to force her to leave a club as good as Pound Lake, but there's no way I'm going to ask. I'm sure she's just saving face by saying that Fallton is better, when everyone knows otherwise.

She tilts her head. “Weren't you at Praterville?”

Now she remembers. I take a deep breath as I search for my own gloves. “Yeah.”

She breaks into a smile. “I knew it! You had that really great program to
Swan Lake
, right?”

I blink at her. “Um, yeah. That was me.”

“So, are you going to skate here now . . . what's your name?”

“Kaitlin,” I say as I stand up and follow her out to the ice. “Maybe.”

“I'm Miyu. It's Japanese.” She runs the words together like she has to explain this every day.

No one is actually skating yet. All the skaters and coaches are busy stabbing and scraping at the ice with their blades. Some of them are even hacking away at it with little shovels. I try to figure out what they're doing as I cross the rink with Miyu.

She glides to the boards on the opposite side, where she deposits her skate guards and music. I put my stuff next to hers.

“What's everyone doing?” I finally ask.

“Scraping down the bumps. Come on.” She moves into the middle and points with her toe pick at a smooth, shiny mountain rising from the ice.

I glance down the rink. The huge bumps are in neat soldier­like rows, stretching from one end of the ice to the other. I've never seen anything like it. I mean, Ridgeline used to get little bumps sometimes, but these things are the size of Mount Everest. “How does the ice get like this?”

“It happens in the summer mostly. My mom says it has something to do with humidity and bad insulation.” Miyu chops at the offending bump with her toe pick. Ice chips fly in all directions. “If you hit one of these in a spin or even just skating backward, down you go. So we smooth them out every morning.”

I go to the next mountain in line and imitate Miyu by stabbing it with my blade. “How come the Zamboni doesn't fix these?”

Miyu shrugs. “The thing's been here since the dinosaurs. We're lucky it smooths the ice at all.”

I chop away at my bump until it's even with the ice around it.

Once the bumps are gone, the session really begins. Most
of the skaters move around the perimeter of the ice, doing vari­ous patterns of edges and turns to warm up. But one older girl glides into center ice in front of us, turns backward, and then leaps into the air to turn three times before landing.

My eyes want to pop out of my head. Who does a triple salchow to warm up? Except maybe Michelle Kwan? The girl launches into a series of triple jumps, one right after the other. I squint to see if I can figure out who she is. She definitely looks good enough to have gone to Nationals. All I can see is that she has dark, curly hair. Wait . . .

I turn to Miyu. “Is that—”

“Jessa Hernandez. She won Nationals a couple of years ago.”

“Wow.” I watch Jessa dig her toe pick into the ice behind her and launch into a triple flip. She rotates three times in the air before landing gracefully on one foot. “I thought she retired after her big meltdown at Worlds. I didn't know she was skating here.”

“She's been trying to make a comeback,” Miyu says. “I think this is her year.”

Miyu skates off to have a lesson with Karilee, the hugging coach, and I wrench my eyes from Jessa and begin to move around the rink.

As I watch Miyu work on spins, I realize how ­different she is from Ellery. She never mentioned my outburst at ­Praterville, even though she was the one who helped pick up all the medals. A smile creeps across my face as I realize
no one
here—not even the coaches—said anything about the competition. It's like it doesn't even matter to them.

I feel lighter somehow, as if the whole thing was just a bad dream. I push off and warm up with an energy I haven't felt since before Praterville. I don't think about the judges' scores or what I said. Instead I fly across the ice, taking care not to get in anyone's way. I do my favorite old crossover and turn patterns. I don't think I've ever skated this fast in my life.

It feels good.

The session flies by. With only five minutes left, I do one last double axel, my hardest jump. Skating forward on one foot, I leap up, twist around two and a half times, and land backward. Perfect. I glide to the boards, where I left my water next to Miyu's stuff. I grasp my purple plastic bottle and chug. The water's freezing cold from sitting in the rink. I can almost feel it rolling down into my stomach.

“I saw your double axel,” a voice says over my shoulder. “It's pretty good.”

I almost choke on the water as I spin around. A guy stands
at the boards next to me. And not just any guy. A really, really cute one.

“Um . . .” He points at my chin.

Too late, I feel the water dribbling down from my mouth and threatening to drip from my chin. I swipe at it and wish I could think of something funny to say to make him laugh.

“I'm new here,” I say instead. Which is probably the dumbest thing ever.

But instead of saying
I know
or
Duh, that's obvious
, the cute guy grins. He pushes his swishy brown hair out of his eyes.

“You probably already know that,” I say for him. I seriously wish I could start this whole conversation over.

“So, what's your story?” he asks as he leans against the boards. He's a little taller than me, but looks about the same age.

“My story?”

Miyu slides to a stop next to me. “This is Kaitlin,” she says to him. “She's checking us out to see if we're good enough for her.”

“No, that's not—” I start to say, but Swishy Hair nods.

“She's gotta have a story, or why else would she be here?” he says.

Miyu taps her blade guards against her gloved hand and narrows her eyes at him. “Don't you have something to ­practice?”

He ignores Miyu and waves at me. “See you Monday, Double Axel. Tell me your story then.”

“What was he talking about?” I ask Miyu when he leaves.

She shakes her head. “Who knows?”

Swishy Hair swoops by us and jumps into a perfect ­double axel.

And I realize I'm looking forward to seeing him again Monday.

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