Page 53 of Blade
Kayla stayed in her room until the bruise around her eye was faded enough to cover with makeup. She had a stomach bug. She had a headache. She’d twisted her ankle on the stairs.
No one checked on Kayla. Not Edie or Dawn or Emile. Not even the school when she didn’t show up for the first day of junior year. She had the Orphans, but they were just teenagers, like her. To the rest of the world, she was irrelevant.
Ana watched the other Orphans for signs about how she should be now. Like nothing had happened? Or like their lives had all been set on a new course? Kayla’s had shattered. Or maybe not. Maybe the pieces had glued themselves back together the way her bruises and cuts had healed.
Somehow, Jolene became bigger and brighter. Her smile, her laugh. Glitter nail polish and bright-blue eye shadow. Pink dresses and whitesweaters. Nothing but talk of movies and the new bleacher bee who’d arrived from California with her daughter, who couldn’t even land a double Axel.
And Indy—she became one-dimensional, like she’d gone deeper inside herself, focused only on the training. On landing the triple Axel, hoping this would mean she could finally go home to Bobby Stark. Dawn barked her orders—“Stay on your feet! Higher! Faster!” And Indy tried, stroking the length of the rink, crossovers at the corners, then cutting into the center, turning backward, shifting to an outside edge, then forward onto the left blade into the takeoff. And then the fall, every time flipping off the right blade and landing on her hip.
She couldn’t get the rotation no matter how many times Dawn commanded her to “fight the fear!” Or how many sessions she had with the doctor, the one who was supposed to teach her how to override her brain in that last split second. There was no way a girl as strong and powerful as Indy, who could also spin so fast in the air, couldn’t get the height she needed. It had to be in her head, he told her.
Then came the rumors about an altercation Kayla had with one of the bleacher bees, but she never said a word about it and neither did anyone else. Eight weeks after that night in the field, she was gone. A car from Pueblo parked outside Avery Hall. Edie helping carry the bags, ordering the rest of them to “grab a duffel, a suitcase, a box.” Kayla had been kicked out of the program and was going into foster care because her grandmother was dead and a family had been found for her about an hour south, in Pueblo.
There was a quick goodbye at the front door, where only Jolene cried and hugged her for more than a second, saying “I love you Kay—always.” For Ana and Indy, it was too short for tears to come, or for words to form, other than stupid things like “I’ll miss you” and “good luck.” That night, Ana lay awake and stared at Mio’s cat poster.Good luck?Seriously? Was that all she could come up with? It happened fast and without warning. The changes kept coming.
Hugo and Jolene sat together at dinner and right next to each other when they were all watching TV, and even when they weren’t. They would sit and talk, so close their entire sides would be touching, fromshoulders to hips, thighs to calves. Their feet would intertwine on the floor, like a pile of unsorted socks.
On Saturday nights, when there was no training the next day, Ana and Indy would look for Jolene to ask what they were doing. Cruising the strip near the downtown? Going for ice cream? A movie?
But Jolene would be gone, her red Jeep not in the parking lot, the smell of her perfume lingering in her room, where she’d gotten dressed and slipped out for the night.
Hugo would also be gone, his friends asking for him later in the TV room, or by the Ping-Pong table, or on the front lawn where Ana and Indy would sometimes sit and stare at the sky, waiting for Jolene to come home.
Mio returned to Japan for the season, and their room was given to a pair of girls from Norway, here for just a month. Ana was moved to a room across the hall with a girl from Holland, and later, a girl from Poland. And then no one.
Change and more change and more change—the air growing cold, the first gusts of snow, and a new competition season underway.
She sometimes thought about her brother, who was now in college, across the country in Ithaca, and her father and mother 289 miles away. None of them would tell her about Connie’s condition, just that she was in a new trial or on a new drug, and wasn’t that exciting? Wasn’t modern medicine something? Only it wasn’t excitement she heard in her mother’s voice.
Her family was slipping to the back of her mind. She noticed it one morning in the dining room, making a peanut butter sandwich. That was what her mother had always packed for her in the car. Peanut butter sandwiches in plastic baggies. Oranges cut into quarters. The smell of either of these had choked her up for months after she’d arrived at The Palace. Sometimes even sending her to the closet with the Pine-Sol. But then that one morning came when she opened the jar and smelled the smell and thought, not about her mother, but about Dawn and her lesson later that day. And whether she would be folded into the blue puffer coat, or left sprawled out on the ice after a fall, alone.
Just the smell of Dawn’s cosmetics became a hit of dopamine, and the need for her approval a gigantic weed inside her. The kind her mother had to pull from the garden using all her might. She wondered how she would stop it now, without Kayla. She was the only one with arms that were strong enough.
But then came a reprieve—the Midwestern Sectionals being held in Denver that November. Even though the sky was gray, and the city was coated in a brown blanket of dirty snow that sprayed up from the road and down from the exhausts of passing cars, it felt like a burst of sunshine. The three remaining Orphans were there together, sharing a room in the hotel. Indy and Ana in one bed. Jolene in her own across a small nightstand. A little cocoon.
Dawn had ten skaters competing and insisted everyone who wasn’t commuting from Echo stay at the same hotel near the rink so they could walk to the practices. None of the Orphans’ parents made the trip.
Ana’s father was tending to her mother.
Patrice told Indy this was just a formality. Everyone knew she would make Nationals, and she had just been here for the show three months ago.
Mr. M. and Mrs. M. were on a trip to Asia. Another continent checked off the list.
So here they were. Together and alone. When Ana walked into the room on the first day, she hopped onto the bed near the window and jumped up and down like a little kid. Indy joined her, taking her hands, the two of them jumping together.
“For fuck’s sake,IndyAna!” Jolene said. “Grow up!”
But she was laughing when she said it.
She sat down on the other bed and picked up a small folder by the phone.
“Shhh,” she told them. She flipped the pages, then grabbed the receiver and dialed a number.
“Hello. I’d like to order room service, please.”
Indy and Ana sat on the edge of the bed, eyes wide as Jolene ordered two pizzas, french fries, three ice cream sundaes. And while it made nosense because Ana had been in plenty of hotels before, this felt like the best day of her entire life.
That morning, Ana had a perfect run-through of her free skate. Four triples (two toe loops and two Salchows), one in combination, a double Axel, and six more doubles. The spiral sequence, footwork, and four spins, including the final flying camel spin into a whirring scratch. Dawn waited at the boards and pulled Ana into her arms like there had never been any doubt.