Tracy O'Neill - The Hopeful

“It’s going to be a blood bath,” I swallowed.

“Ah, sportsmanship!” Ryan sighed. He turned and ran back up the bleachers.

Lauren stood by the locker room. She wore a red coat and had pulled her hair back into a bun like when she herself had been a competitor. There are some habits that stay after their purpose is finished, like the woman who won’t smoke even after her pregnancy is over or the atheist who says “God bless” to a sneeze. A sneer passed over her teeth when she looked at me.

I found the order on a white paper taped to the same wall where results from completed divisions hung. I would skate third after the warm-up. “Third is practically perfect,” Lauren said. “Your muscles will be warm but you’ll have a chance to rest. And besides, they say lucky things come in threes.” I looked up and the clock said it was time to go to the mats. Lauren stretched my leg up behind my head. “Did you hear me?” she asked. “I said lucky things come in threes.” I thought of my mother, the first of three lives to be born and the only one not to bear life at all. She miscarried twice before she adopted, so would that make me the third or the first? I was the third plan and the first that lived. I was the first who walked and the third who wasn’t what she’d hoped. Vomit pushed up, and I pushed down.

“I don’t need luck,” I said. “I’ve got me.”

“You’ll kill it,” Lauren smiled. I looked at my watch. It was time to make myself pee.

I stopped the thrust in my throat from coming up and forced my pee in a brisk stream into the toilet. A girl was screaming in the locker room about a lacing. She said someone had cut her skate lace, and I gave her one of my three spares. The smart among us never left our skates out of sight because the smart and dumb both had heard the stories: blades scraped on cement to ruin the sharpening radius, razors stuck in the boot to filet the foot, nails loosened to unhinge the blade from the boot, and all the other ways fate could be pilfered.

“The regionals are no place to make friends,” Lauren told me.

“I’m not,” I said, stretching. “I’m just making sure there’s one more person to beat.”

“Today decides your year,” she said as the rumble of rolling suitcases introduced more hopefuls to the rink. The droves of us carried our skates in wheeled suitcases because we thought we were going places. Also they couldn’t be jerked like a shoulder bag and dislocate the scapula.

My flight for the five minute on-ice warm-up was me, Alanis Moranis, Phoebe Spiller, Rebecca Constantine, Sandra Lieberman, and Katrina Merriman. The six coaches — seven if you counted Constantine’s choreographer — stood by the gate with us. Moranis was the Russian’s girl, and he spoke close, chopping accentuation with one arm, the other on her shoulder. Spiller’s coach squeezed down her leg as though it was a tube of toothpaste to relax her hamstrings. Merriman’s coach stood looking off in the distance. It was an embarrassment to be seen with her after last year’s regionals, but the girl was her income and she was one of the few with children of her own to pay for. Lauren squeezed my shoulder, and I watched Lieberman’s coach stick her with a tiny cross pin. It didn’t matter that she was Jewish. When it came to competition, you sought whatever help you could get.

When the Zamboni had only one turn left to blank out the ice, we took off our pants. Someone somewhere had made a small fortune off our vigilance with thermal flyaway bottoms, and I knew it was time as I heard zipper whirs slipping down slender legs that had to stay warm for the snap and stretch and bending to be best. The heavy gate latch scissored up. The heavy gate latch dropped down. I let the others on first, so there’d be no toe picks coming at me from the back. Tonya Harding wasn’t the first to try to knock a leg off the competition. She was just the one that got caught.

I made an eight around and through the arena and tried not to notice the judges. See them take a note and I’d start wondering, deciphering the motion of their pens instead of executing. There was a crack to find between cognizance and consciousness, between not noticing the other girls, whether they had a new trick or had shown up as overweight disasters, all the while keeping them in the periphery of my eye so there wouldn’t be a crash. But of course trying not to notice only happens when you notice. Like Dr. Ogden would tell me one day, if you’re thinking Don’t do this , you’re thinking about what you don’t want to do, not what you do. So I tried instead to hone in on the feel of cold air going down my throat opposite of vomit. I focused on mechanics. Arm angles and pick placement and leg extension and pelvic alignment would make or negate the year.

After the warm-up, I stood in a bathroom stall bending my knees and flushing the toilet repeatedly to drown out any clues as to my competitors’ performances. If I heard applause, I’d know Alana Moranis or Phoebe Spiller had landed a jump, so I flushed ignorance through their programs. I went stall to stall because the toilets wouldn’t swallow right after a flush. It was Lauren’s job to come for me when Spiller was skating off the ice.

Cycles through, Lauren opened the door and I walked out into applause. I didn’t interpret it as much. Clapping indiscriminately was the one sportsmanlike practice you could count on in figure skating. The important thing was not to search Spiller’s butt for the damp tights that would be evidence of falls. I kept my eyes located shoulder height. My kneecaps were quivering. This must be what it felt like to take amphetamines, I thought.

When the announcer made my name reach the highest corners of the rink, I removed my guards. Lauren squeezed my hand once before I skated to the middle.

“Take your time,” she said.

“Taking,” I said.

I glided to center ice and covered my eyes. These minutes are mine, I whispered. God, these minutes must be mine. And then the bright flash of Stravinsky bore through the speakers, and I was the Firebird, vomit be damned. You cannot vomit if you aren’t human. I wasn’t human, just a whorl of arms, a jump jarring through suburban Massachusetts, spins and the airy split of a leap called a falling leaf. I stabbed gravity and saw seconds slow at the pinnacle of an Axel, amazed faces, a stilled clock, the flourish of a landing. A jump like that, maybe it was me turning through the air, but it may as well have been making the whole world whirl around me.

Alivopro Doyle, the announcer said once I’d raised my arms in an ecstatic end. Alivopro Doyle: she flies with her own wings.

The rest of the competition was hugging and my mother crying and Lauren blinking gleaming eyes fast to fan them dry. “You were the best,” my father said. “Moranis and Spiller looked like troglodytes in comparison.”

“You’re my father. You have to say that,” I said.

“That’s not true at all,” he said. “The judges have to agree with me.”

“Figure skating is a subjective sport,” Lauren told him. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

“That’s an oxymoron,” he said.

The oxymoron was the truth though. It was up to nine judges to determine whether or not I was first or just some other number. Every movement had a standard point value, but the points awarded could deviate up or down by three-tenths based on the judges perceived grade of execution. It wasn’t just another sport where as long as the ball went through the hole, you’d done enough. It was quality and quantity; there was completing an element, and there was completing it better and better and better. The best part was trying to be the best, and now it was the worst: waiting to see if your best was enough.