Page 12 of Blade

Maybe it is.

Chapter Four

Excerpt from Testimony of Dawn Sumner

Ada Olson: Ms. Sumner, you’ve compared your methods for eliminating fear in your athletes to military training. You said, and I’m quoting here, “When a person’s identity becomes solely dependent on the institution, that is when they subordinate their own self-interest to that of the collective.”

Dawn Sumner: That’s correct.

Ada Olson: And what is the collective in the context of an athletic program?

Dawn Sumner: The collective represents the end goal—winning. In the short term, that means overcoming fear and committing to the demands of the training.

Ada Olson: And the institution? That would be you, in this scenario, correct?

Dawn Sumner: Yes, and the other coaches under my supervision.

Ada Olson: And do you ever worry that this kind of conditioning might have repercussions off the ice? In other aspects of these young girls’ lives? If you become their only source of self-identity?

Dawn Sumner: I train them to skate and to win. That’s my only concern, Ms. Olson. If they aren’t equipped to handle that, they shouldn’t be here.

Ada Olson: One more question about your methods, Ms. Sumner. Did you ever hold the back end of a blade to a skater’s head as a way of summoning fear?

Dawn Sumner: No. Those girls are all liars.

Chapter Five

Ana

Before—Five Months at The Palace

The dream was always the same.

Ana lies flat on her back after falling on the triple flip. It’s days before the Midwestern Sectionals, and she needs the jump to place in the top five and make Nationals in the junior division. She hasn’t landed it once, always short on the rotation. It’s become the bane of her existence, Kayla says, a phrase she now understands and plays over and over in her mind.

Everyone has seen her fall. Jolene, Kayla, and Indy, who are on the ice. Other skaters, too, for the morning session. Seven a.m. Coach Emile stands by the boards, shaking his head. He’s disappointed, and this stirs something inside her.

It’s a vicious cycle, Indy says. They all know the theory—the one spelled out in Dawn’s book.Making Champions.Ana keeps it by her bed like a Bible. Fear makes you hesitate, slows your speed, and then there’s not enough height and then you fall. And the fall makes you more afraid.

Indy has it, too, this vicious cycle with the triple Axel. The bane of her existence.

In the dream, all of this flashes by until she sees Dawn come out of her office between the stands and walk down the steps and open the boards.Always in the big blue puffer coat and beige skates like they had in the Ice Capades when that was a thing, and gold blades, not silver.

Fear crawls into her stomach, and it clenches tight, and this spreads up and down her body like a shiver until she’s unable to move a single muscle. Dawn is on the ice, skating right toward her. The mothers from the stands gasp as they strain their necks to get a good look. And Ana’s mother, Connie, cowers behind the plexiglass, her head wrapped in a scarf and her eyes tearing up.

Because Ana couldn’t fight the fear, and now she’s fallen. Paralyzed on the ice as Dawn barrels toward her, and will she even stop? And thenno!Ana screams. Then a spray of shaved ice covers her face when Dawn’s blades dig in for a hockey stop just before they reach Ana’s head.

“Ana,” Indy whispered, her hand on Ana’s back. “Wake up—you’re having a bad dream.”

Ana opened her eyes, still in the dream, but then here, in the Orphans’ room down the hall. In Indy’s bed.

She sat up and rubbed her palms into her temples as reality set in.

They were still six months—not two days—from Midwesterns. There was plenty of time to get the triple flip, and maybe even the loop or the Lutz—the harder triples requiring three full rotations.Thank God.

But then here she was, not in her bed, but in Indy’s. Not in her room, where she’d been living alone while Mio was back in Japan, but in the room at the end of the hall. The Orphans’ room.

And now it all came back. Each pathetic moment. Waking up alone. The random thoughts of home that had crept out while she was asleep, small things like the smell of Connie’s warm banana bread and the crinkle sound when Carl turned the pages of the paper. Tim’s car—the worn leather seats, the gross smell of stale pot smoke, food wrappers everywhere—as he drove her to school.