Georgia
My mother’s love had teeth.
I don’t figure that out until later. Right now, sitting alone at my desk with the letter still creased from being folded and unfolded too many times, I trace one finger over the wax seal. The wolves stay still, just wax pressed into a shape, nothing more. I almost convince myself I imagined the whole thing that first night. Almost. Then I remember the exact way they moved, the precise weight of that moment, and something in me settles into certainty. It happened. Whatever this school is, it isn’t ordinary.
I need to tell her before I lose my nerve.
"Mom." I set the envelope on the counter between us, wax seal facing up, the broken red circle catching the morning light through the window. "Something came for me yesterday at the rink."
Mollie looks up from her coffee, reading glasses pushed up into her hair even though she never actually reads with them. She picks up the letter like she’s handling evidence, turning it over once, twice, her eyes moving fast across the paper.
"Rosethorne," she murmurs, testing the shape of the word in her mouth. "Rosethorne High."
"You’ve heard of it?"
"I’ve heard of it." She sets the letter down and looks at me, her whole face lighting up in that specific way that used to make me feel special before I learned what it actually meant. "Georgia, this is incredible," she says, breathless.
"I don’t even know what it is yet. I don’t know why they picked me."
"It doesn’t matter why," she says, already pulling her laptop out of her bag on the counter, already opening a browser tab before I’ve finished my sentence. "What matters is that they did. Do you have any idea what kind of program this is? The connections that come out of a school like this?" she asks, urgent.
I watch her type Rosethorne High into the search bar, watch her scroll, watch her face sharpen with focus the way it does when she’s building something in her head. This is what happens every time. I bring her a piece of my life and she turns it into a blueprint before I’ve even decided if I want to build anything at all.
"I haven’t said yes," I say, flat.
"Of course you’re going to say yes," she says, not looking up from the screen. "This is exactly the kind of exposure we’ve been trying to get you in front of. New coaches, new ice, a completely fresh evaluation pool. If we time this right, you could be looking at Junior Worlds contention by next season."
We. Like she’s the one who landed the triple toe loop at five in the morning with nobody watching.
"I found a list of alumni," she says, still scrolling, distracted.
I stand there and let it wash over me, her voice building a whole future out of my morning, and I feel that familiar tightness settle into my chest. She’s not wrong that this is a big deal. She’s not wrong that I should probably say yes. But somewhere between the letter landing on the counter and her opening a spreadsheet in her head, this stopped being my decision and started being her project.
"I need to think about it," I say, testing her.
"Of course," she says, still not looking up. "Think about it tonight. We’ll want to call them back first thing tomorrow."
That night, my phone rings while I’m lying on my bed staring at the ceiling, letter still sitting on my desk where I left it. Arthur’s name lights up the screen. I answer on the second ring.
"Hey, kiddo," my dad says, his voice the same as always, low and even, the kind of voice that doesn’t need volume to fill a room. "Your mother called. Told me about the letter."
"Did she tell you she already has my whole career planned out?"
He laughs, quiet and knowing. "She might have mentioned a timeline," he says, wry.
"It’s a lot, Dad."
"I know it is," he says. A pause on his end, the kind he takes when he’s actually thinking instead of just waiting for his turn to talk. "Georgia. Is this what you want?" he asks, gentle.
Nobody’s asked me that yet. Not really. Mollie asked what I thought about the alumni list. She asked if I’d started packing in my head. She never once asked if I wanted to go.
"More than anything," I say, and I’m a little surprised by how true it feels once it’s out loud.
"Then go," he says, without hesitation. "And call me when you get there."
"That’s it? Just go?"
"That’s it," he says, and I can hear him smiling through the phone. "You’ve never needed my permission, kid. You just sometimes need somebody to remind you it’s yours to give."
We talk a little while longer, nothing important, just his voice keeping me steady the way it always does. Before we hang up, Mollie appears in my doorway, coffee mug in hand even though it’s nearly nine at night, and waits for me to finish.
"Tell your father I said hello," she says once I’ve hung up, in a tone that makes it clear she has no intention of calling him herself. She leans against my doorframe, and for a second her expression shifts into something more distant, like she’s remembering rather than performing. "You know, I trained with a coach years ago who sent a few of her skaters to Rosethorne. Small world," she says, almost to herself.
"What did she say about it?"
"Just that the students there were unusually disciplined. Unusually physical, for skaters especially." Mollie waves a hand like she’s brushing away a fly. "She used to say the whole place had a strange energy to it. Very old money, very its own world. I always assumed she meant the tuition." She laughs, a light, dismissive sound, already turning to head back down the hall. "Anyway. Get some sleep. Big day tomorrow," she calls over her shoulder.
I don’t laugh with her.
Unusually disciplined. Unusually physical. A strange energy.
I think about the wax seal, how it had moved once, just that single instant, and then gone still, as though it had said what it needed to say and nothing more. Mollie thinks she’s talking about tuition and prestige. I know better. Whatever pulled at me from inside that letter is real, and that knowledge, not her enthusiasm, not her spreadsheets, is what finally decides me. I file the rest of her words away in the same place I filed that first moment, some drawer in my head labeled things I don’t have an explanation for yet, and I close it, and I go back to staring at my ceiling until I finally fall asleep.
Packing takes me most of the next afternoon. Mollie hovers for the first twenty minutes, refolding things I’ve already folded, suggesting a garment bag for my competition dresses that I don’t own yet, until I finally ask her for space and she retreats downstairs with her laptop.
Alone, I work through my closet at my own pace. Clothes first. Skates, wrapped in their guards, tucked along the side of the suitcase. My laptop, my chargers, the stuffed rabbit I’m too old for and still can’t leave behind.
Then I open the drawer where I keep my medals.
There are more than I remember collecting. Regional bronze from two years ago. Sectional silver. A handful of smaller ones from competitions that don’t matter to anyone but me. I lay them out on my bed and look at them for a long moment, the ribbons faded, the metal a little tarnished from being shoved in a drawer instead of hung on a wall like Mollie always wanted.
I don’t display them. I never have. Displaying them means somebody else gets to look at them and decide what they mean.
I wrap each one carefully in a T-shirt and tuck them into the very bottom of my suitcase, underneath everything else, where nobody will see them unless they’re looking for them specifically. Not celebrated. Not shown off. Just there.
Proof that I existed before this moment. Proof I can dig up if I ever need to remember who I was before Rosethorne decided who I might become.
I close the suitcase and zip it shut.