Page 50 of Blade

They spent hours drafting it, she says. Typing it at school, sending it with no return address.

Butof courseDawn knew exactly who’d sent it—and why, though they never got an official reply. They could tell by the sudden shift in her demeanor.

And just when I think I’ve got my head around this secret they never told me, she tells the rest of it.

“Dawn called me to her office on a Sunday. There was no training—just public skating sessions. So it was only me. I was anxious, you know. But I was always anxious. Always waiting for bad shit to happen. I convinced myself it was about my scholarship, or—and this is hilarious—that maybe she had news about one of the fall exhibitions—someone dropping out and me finally getting a spot. I needed to get in front of the judges. Make some headway before Regionals.”

Her words swim inside me, looking for a place to settle in. Searching for the memories attached to the knowledge of these things. The ISU exhibitions. The pressure to get from Regionals to Sectionals, Sectionals to Nationals. But I’ve buried them so deep the words have nowhere to go. They swirl in my gut.

And then I picture Kayla in Dawn’s office. On a Sunday.

“It’s strange how I remember every detail about that day. What I was wearing. How I got to the rink. Even what the air smelled like with the leaves falling. Do you remember how the pine needles started to cover the roads?”

She glances at me, and I give her a nod.

“The rink was so different on Sundays,” she says. And I get a quick flash because I can see it and feel it as she draws it all out.

“Dawn asked me to come at four o’clock. That’s after the last public session, so it was empty. The rink, the locker rooms. The snack bar was closed, but it still smelled of stale coffee and grease from the fryer. The cleaners hadn’t come yet, so there was ketchup and other shit on the floor. Soaking into those black rubber mats.”

Yes.It’s all right there.

“I walked around the boards by the lockers to the other side. Up the steps to that hallway, then the first door on the left.”

Dawn’s office.The long hallway that was dark and smelled of mildew.

“It was open, so I walked in. Dawn was always at her desk, but on that day she was standing in front of it. She told me to come closer. She told me to close the door behind me.”

Kayla’s voice grows unsteady, her mouth beginning to quiver. And suddenly I’m back to that night in the field, when she lay in the back seat of Jolene’s car. When she cried for the first time, at least that I’d seen. How it rocked my world as much as anything else that night.

“She had that look on her face,” Kayla says. “The one she gets when she has the upper hand.” Now a pause and another bitter laugh.

“This may be hard to believe, Ana, but I was a lot like you back then. Dawn was the only grown-up in my life. And not just because I was at Avery Hall. But because I was an orphan ineverysense of the word. There was a time when I longed for her approval—the same way you did.”

With each piece of this story, each disclosure, the landscape of the past is ripped from the ground. Like a tornado that’s pulled up all the trees and flower beds. I have no idea where it will all land.

“So she walked up to me and put her hands on my shoulders with that smile. I was still thinking about good news—or maybe justsomethinggood—when I felt her hands move from my shoulders toward my collarbones on either side. The same smile on her face, but her eyes growing—I don’t know. Smaller? Darker? She didn’t say a single word, but instead ...”

Kayla draws her hands to her throat. “She started to close her fingers around my neck. Her thumbs pressing—here.” She traces her hands over her trachea as she says the words.

“And then the other fingers wrapped around the back, here ...”

Again, she places her hands where Dawn’s were over seventeen years ago.

“I can’t believe I’m saying this out loud because it’s so surreal. But she started to squeeze my neck. And at first, I thought it was a joke. I think I may have even smiled and tried to laugh. Because she was smiling, and her eyes were narrow, like the way eyes get when someone’sjust being mischievous. But she kept squeezing and squeezing, and I lifted my hands and placed them on hers and tried to get my fingers between my skin and her skin, but there was no room and then I couldn’t breathe ...”

I sit, frozen, arms buzzing, heat building in every cell. Because I can see this, I can see Dawn, her face, her narrow eyes, as if I was right there in the room with them.

“She pushed me step by step until my back was against the wall, and I could feel my head growing dizzy, and my arms flailing against her.”

Kayla pauses to draw a new breath, while my mind spins wildly. Picturing Dawn with her hands around Kayla’s throat.

“Just when I thought I was going to die, and I did think that—she let go and stepped away, leaving me buckled over, coughing and holding my neck where her hands had just been.”

She strokes her skin, softly, with the delicate fingers I never noticed before.

“She said—and I remember her exact words—‘I am what you should fear. Don’t forget that.’”

I gasp, seeing the words from her book. “That’s what she wrote about,” I tell her. “Creating a fear that surpassed anything we faced on the ice. Like a gun to our heads. Kay—I’m so sorry ...” Dawn became the bigger fear. Westin taught us to channel fear to rage. To fight for her approval. To land the jumps and perform for her.