Page 117 of Chasing Gold, Catching Her

“Are they serious?” she muttered, opening her mouth in disbelief. “They came here to laugh around while everyone else is trying not to fucking die from stress?”

“Oh, come on, Anfisa… they’re here to support us…”

“Support us? Do you see that idiot blond guy smiling?”

“Hermann?” Alisa looked up at him and waved from below. The entire hockey team was sitting high in the stands, standing out painfully among the skaters, nervous parents, and other spectators who had come to watch the internal championship.

“Yes, him. He’s smiling like an idiot.”

“He’s smiling at me.”

“Pfft.” Anfisa snorted and turned away so she wouldn’t have to look at the annoying hockey players anymore.

They went to the front bench and sat down, waiting for the whole group to be called onto the ice.

The judges sat at their table, talking quietly and typing into their tablets, probably adjusting scoresheets or checking protocols before the performances began…

And then the announcer’s voice echoed through the arena speakers, calling out the first group and listing all their names one by one. The girls immediately stood up and began heading toward the ice in order.

“Warm-up — five minutes. Skating order: Anastasia first onto the ice, then Anita, Anna, Alisa, and Anfisa.”

After the acceleration lap, Alisa began skating backward, warming up her jumps, doing entrance triples and lighter jump combinations. Then she went into a single jump just to feel the ice beneath her blades, and it seemed stable enough, but her spins worried her. Today her body felt alien, foreign even and disconnected, as if she was spinning in the wrong direction entirely. Her spatial orientation was fucked up from lack of sleep, and after the warm-up ended and she returned to the bench to watch Anastasia’s performance — since she was skating first — Alisa suddenly felt her knees weaken.

Something sharply clicked when she bent and straightened her leg.

Blyat’, that’s not good.

Alisa only grimaced at herself in disgust and pity, frowning harder and biting her lower lip until she tasted blood.

She had to skate well enough to get to the damn Olympics, no matter what.

She HAD to.

And when it was finally her turn to step onto the ice, her legs felt like cotton, numb and hollow beneath her.

Fuck! This is really bad.

But after inhaling deeply and exhaling through clenched teeth, she forced herself to move, skating around the rink before the performance and waving automatically to every side of the arena or, more accurately, to the one side actually filled with people, but tradition was tradition. You waved to every side anyway.

Then she stopped in the center of the rink.

The music began.

The first jump was… well, not a disaster, but definitely not good. She landed so hard she nearly collapsed, and to save herself from falling she transferred onto the other foot during the landing, which immediately ruined the element.

The second jump wasn’t much better either, though at least she stayed upright.

Her spins felt weak too, unstable, blurry around the edges, but somewhere halfway through the program something suddenly shifted inside her, like her body finally remembered what it was supposed to do. Confidence returned in flashes. She jumped once cleanly, then twice, then another three or four successful elements in a row, her body finally surrendering to muscle memory instead of fear.

But by the final part of the program, exhaustion caught up with her again.

Her spins blurred together, and during the final element she tilted too far off-axis and almost fell completely. Somehow she managed to catch herself at the last second and force the spin back into place on the second rotation, though she no longer finished in time with the music.

Alisa closed her eyes immediately after the ending pose, grabbing her head as if she could physically hold herself together.

With a devastated expression, she skated toward the bench, where Anfisa instantly wrapped her arms around her.

“You did well! Everything’s fine!”