She didn’t want to have a panic attack. Not again. Not for the second time in less than a week.
They were so inconvenient. And disorienting. They came on fast—racing heart, nausea, sweat, tingling—only to crest and dissipate as if nothing had happened.
It had been over a year since she’d had one. Maybe closer to two years. So it sucked to be staring down the barrel of two within seven days. Right before the Olympics.
She lifted her drink to her lips, but her hand was shaking so much the ice rattled. She quickly placed the glass back on the table.
Jordan chattered away, and Kirby nodded along. She needed to get a grip. She did some box breathing, trying to smile through her episode. Then star breathing. Then 4-7-8 breathing. Then she started to worry she was doing way too much breathing as her hands began to ache and cramp, symptoms the handy-dandy Internet had told her were due to a drop in carbon dioxide levels in her blood.
“I’ll be right back,” Kirby said and stood to go to the bathroom. She didn’t want anyone to know what was going on, but it felt like she was a walking neon sign of wrongness. The attack would end soon. She just had to get through it.
The bathroom didn’t have an attendant, thank God, but it did have one of those fancy seating areas. Her feet were heavy like she was postholing through deep, wet snow. She lowered herself onto a cushion, even though she hated the idea of sitting on a bathroom sofa.
It was a momentary bodily reaction. A spike of something in her brain chemistry. Something she couldn’t control.
She told herself that again and again.Just a momentary bodily reaction. It is okay to feel out of control.
The first time this had happened, when she was fifteen, had been the same. Sudden, unexpected, and ill-timed.
It is okay to feel out of control.
She wasfine. Everything was fine.
The bathroom door opened, so Kirby pretended to be very interested in her phone. She had texts from her best friend, Apollo, arranging breakfast with her the next day and opening the door for a booty call that night.
She tried to focus on that. To take her body’s temperature. To trick it into wanting to fuck rather than going haywire in a restaurant bathroom.
A pair of adorable, pastel purple tennis shoes wavered through her peripheral vision and she almost groaned.
She didn’t have to look up. It was perfectly acceptable to just ignore?—
Who was she kidding? Mara May was hard to ignore.
Mara’s steps stuttered as she met Kirby’s eyes. Kirby’s jaw hurt.
“Are you okay, Bonham?” Mara asked, unsmiling and serious as always.
“Yeah. Are you?” Kirby’s voice was needlessly snappy, but she didn’t have control over herself at all.
Mara’s head tipped to the side, and she scowled. “I’m not the one hiding in the bathroom.”
“I’m not hiding,” Kirby said, but Mara had already moved from the seating area to the sinks. She stopped at a mirror to fix her flawless hair and put on shiny pink lipgloss.
Kirby stood up abruptly. The world shimmered around her, but she ignored it. There was nothing to hide.
CHAPTER
TWO
Nine daysuntil the Opening Ceremony.
Ten to skiathlon.
Twenty-five to the inaugural Olympic women’s fifty-kilometer mass start.
Mara had so many countdowns in her head, there wasn’t space left for much else, but on the third day of training in Oberhof, the cameras arrived. They brought with them even more mental disruptions. She had expected it, but she didn’t like it. They had been given the team filming schedule at dinner, and that morning they were shuffled into the room with the best light at the training center to film some B-roll.
Everyone seemed so comfortable, but she couldn’t loosen up. She sat among her teammates, stiff as a board. Memories of last time, of the press conference before Beijing, rushed at her. She’d acted so out of character and had regretted it.
