Georgia
The ice here felt like it had been waiting for me.
I never find out what happens after Puck looks up into the dark seats of The Fang and finds me there. I don’t wait around to see. The second the rink goes silent enough to hear the lights humming, I’m already moving, down the stairwell, out the side door, back across the dark campus to my dorm room with my heart slamming so hard I can feel it in my teeth. I don’t look back. I tell myself it doesn’t matter if he saw me. I tell myself a lot of things that night that I don’t quite believe.
The next two days pass in a kind of low-grade siege. I take the long way to breakfast to avoid the hallway outside the ice arena. I sit facing the door in every classroom, half-braced for Puck to appear in a doorway, for some teammate to sidle up beside me with a knowing look, for anyone to say something about a girl who sneaks into The Fang after curfew to skate alone in the dark. Nobody does. The silence should feel like relief, and for a while it does, but by the second night it’s curdled into something closer to dread, the particular exhaustion of waiting for a blow that never lands. I catch myself flinching at footsteps in the corridor outside my dorm room. I catch myself, more than once, standing at my window and looking toward the rink like I expect to see him standing in it, looking back.
By the time my schedule finally lines up with an actual assigned ice time, a solo session slotted in for new students to get evaluated by the coaching staff, something in me has quietly decided that I’m done hiding. If Puck wants to say something, he can say it to my face. If the ice wants to hum with whatever secret rhythm it’s been humming, it can do that too. I’m skating anyway.
The rink looks different during the day than it did from the dark upper seats. Sunlight comes in through high windows along one wall, catching the ice and throwing soft, moving light across the boards. Nobody else is here. My new coach, a woman named Yolanda with sharp eyes and a clipboard she barely glances at, waves me toward the ice with an economy of movement that tells me she’s watched a thousand new skaters do exactly this.
"Take your time," Yolanda says, brisk and businesslike. "Get a feel for it first. Then show me what you’ve got."
I step onto the ice and immediately understand what she means.
It’s smoother than anything I’ve skated on before, not just clean but somehow responsive, like the surface itself is meeting my blade halfway with every stroke. My home rink upstate has good ice, well maintained, properly resurfaced, but there’s always a fraction of resistance you learn to compensate for, a slight drag you build into your muscle memory without even realizing it. This ice doesn’t have that drag. It gives exactly what I ask of it and nothing less.
I do a slow lap first, feeling it out the way Yolanda suggested, and by the second lap I’m already picking up speed without meaning to, crossovers eating up the ice faster than I expect, my edges biting cleaner than they usually do this early in a session before I’ve properly warmed up.
My chest loosens, breath by breath, muscle by muscle.
I run through my usual warmup, spirals and simple spins, watching my own reflection blur past in the boards. Somewhere in the middle of it, I catch a flicker of movement in my periphery, up in the dark balcony where I hid two nights ago. A shape, maybe, or just a shift in the light. My pulse jumps. For a second I almost stop, almost turn to look straight at it, but some stubborn, hungry part of me refuses to let this be taken too. I’ve earned this hour. Whatever’s up there can wait. I push the unease down, hold onto the last thread of Yolanda’s clipboard and the ice under my blades, and keep skating.
I think about the program I’ve been working on back home, the one with the triple lutz combination I’ve never once attempted in front of anyone, not even my old coach. Mollie drilled the risk into me: the cost of a bad landing at a bad time in front of the wrong judge. I’ve run through it in my head a hundred times without ever letting my body actually try it.
Today, for reasons I can’t fully explain, I set up for it anyway.
The entry feels right immediately, my speed exactly where it needs to be, my free leg swinging through the check with a precision that surprises even me. I pull into the rotation and everything narrows down to just this, just my body doing the thing it’s spent years learning how to do, no Mollie watching from the stands with her clipboard face, no rankings scrolling through my head, no fear of what happens if I fall.
I land it clean.
I don’t stop to process it. I chain straight into the next element, the combination spin I’ve been avoiding for months, and my body just knows what to do, arms pulling in tight, the world spinning into a blur of light and boards and windows, and when I finally pull out of it I’m breathless and grinning, alone with the fact that I just did something I’ve been too afraid to attempt in front of anyone for over a year.
For the length of that one program, Mollie disappears from my mind. The rankings disappear. The letter and the seal and the boy with burning hands and the howl in the trees all disappear. There’s just my body moving exactly the way I ask it to, ice sliding beneath my blades like it was built specifically to hold me up, and something that feels a lot like joy, pure and uncontaminated, flooding my chest until I can’t stop grinning.
I skate until my legs shake, until Yolanda finally calls out that we’re done for the day, her clipboard now covered in notes I can’t read from this distance and don’t particularly care to. I glide to the boards, breathing hard, sweat cooling against my skin, and for the first time since I got that cream envelope in my locker, something in me settles instead of tightening.
I don’t know, as I unlace my skates and towel off and head for the exit, just how long I wasn’t alone up there.
I don’t know that in the dark upper balcony, the same one I hid in two nights ago, Puck has been standing at the railing since before I even stepped onto the ice, watching every lap, every spiral, every jump, both hands gripping the steel bar in front of him like it’s the only thing keeping him rooted to the spot. I don’t know how long he stood there or what it cost him to stay quiet and still while I skated a program I’ve never shown anyone, uncontaminated and unwatched, or at least what I believed was unwatched.
I find out on my way out.
I take the long way back through the upper seating, some instinct pulling me up the same stairwell out of curiosity, wanting one more look down at the ice from above before I head back to the dorm. The balcony is empty. Whoever was here, if anyone was here at all, is long gone.
But the railing isn’t.
I run my hand along the cold steel bar out of habit, and my fingers catch on something wrong, something that shouldn’t be there. I look down.
Pressed into the metal, deep and unmistakable, are two handprints. Not scratched. Not dented from an accident or a careless bump. Bent, the steel curved inward in the exact shape of fingers gripping too hard, like someone held onto this railing with enough force to fold it like it was nothing more than warm wax.
I stare at them for a long time, my own hand still resting beside one of the prints, small and human and entirely unremarkable next to whatever made this.