OFFSIDE HEARTS

Monday January 8th of 2018

The ice is perfect and that’s the problem. It’s the kind of perfect that only exists in arenas like this, at competitions like this, when everything is on the line and the world is watching. I can feel the temperature of it through my blades, that specific cold that settles into your bones after you’ve been skating long enough. The PyeongChang arena is massive but it feels small when ten thousand people are holding their breath for you.

My music starts and my body moves before my brain catches up. Debussy. My mother Rachel chose it three years ago when she decided what kind of skater I should be. Sophisticated. Marketable. It doesn’t matter that I’ve been hating it for two years straight. My muscles know this program better than they know anything else in the world. I could do it in my sleep and honestly, I probably do sometimes because I wake up sore in places that shouldn’t hurt. The triple lutz into the triple loop combination is where I’m supposed to shine and the crowd knows it. They erupt before I’ve even landed it, that roar that fills your chest but doesn’t make you feel anything real, just proof that you did the thing right. My ankle throbs but I’ve been ignoring it since warm-up. The pain is part of the deal. The pain is always part of the deal. I think about how much this costs. Not just money, though God knows my father has spent a quarter million dollars this year alone on training and coaches and choreography and the right costumes from the right designers. It’s the other cost that kills me. The hours. The childhood I never got to have. The birthday parties I missed. The sleep I’ve sacrificed. The friends I don’t have because there’s no time for friends when your entire life belongs to the ice. My spiral is flawless because I’ve practiced it ten thousand times. Back extension, leg straight above my head, the kind of flexibility that only comes from starting when you’re five years old and your mother saw something in you that she wanted to own. The crowd loves this part. They love watching a girl bend like she’s not quite human.

The footwork sequence comes next and I nail every transition. This is what they paid for. This is what my father Michael dreams about when he’s calculating sponsorship deals. This is what my mother brags about at dinner parties when she’s drinking wine and telling her friends that she gave up her career for me, like that’s a gift I asked for. The image of perfection doesn’t come cheap and it doesn’t come easy and it sure as hell doesn’t come from wanting it yourself. Halfway through and I can already feel the gold medal sitting around my neck. The judges have made up their minds. The outcome is written in the way they’re leaning forward, in the certainty of the scores I know are coming. I’m winning. I’m always winning and that’s supposed to be enough but it’s never enough. My final combination is coming. Triple flip into a double toe loop. I’ve landed this combination so many times that I could probably do it with my eyes closed, though I’ve never actually tried that because some part of me knows it might terrify me to realize I could. For one perfect moment suspended in the air above the ice, I think about not coming down. About just staying up here where nobody can touch me and nobody can schedule me and nobody can tell me who I’m supposed to be. I land clean and the arena loses their minds.

The final pose is held exactly the way my coach taught me to hold it. My face is arranged in the exact expression that sells tickets: grateful, humble, successful but not arrogant. It’s the expression of a girl who loves this more than anything in the world. It’s a complete and total lie.

I skate to the side to wait for my scores and I feel nothing. Not relief. Not joy. Not the kind of satisfaction that’s supposed to come from peaking at fifteen years old. Just tired. The kind of tired that lives in your actual bones and doesn’t ever fully go away. The scores light up and I’m winning. 155.39. Gold medal. Olympic champion. This is supposed to be the moment I remember forever. This is supposed to be the pinnacle. Everything else in my life is just coming back down from here and I already knew that would be true the moment my mother decided I had the look for this sport.

Later the medal ceremony happens and I don’t really remember the details. I remember standing on the podium while they put the weight of gold against my collarbone and thinking about how heavy it is. How it doesn’t feel like glory at all. It feels like burden. My mother is crying in the stands. She’s beautiful when she cries, the way beautiful people are when they let themselves feel something. My father is smiling that smile. The one he uses for cameras. The one that means he’s already doing the math in his head, already thinking about how much this medal is worth. I wave to the crowd and I smile and I’m the girl everyone wants to be and I’ve never been more certain that something inside me is going to break if I have to keep doing this for one more second.

The hotel suite is exactly what you’d expect from people who have money. Modern furniture that looks like it came from a showroom. Floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the mountains. A kitchen we’ll never use because room service exists and my mother doesn’t believe in cooking. Everything screams wealth and control and the kind of life that looks perfect from the outside. I’m still in my skating dress. The one with all the sequins sewn in by hand. The one that costs more than most people’s cars. It was designed to make me look older than I am, more elegant, more like someone worth investing in. My mother is in the white dress with the beading that she wore to watch me compete. My father is in a suit. They look like they walked out of a magazine. My father closes the door to the suite and I know what’s coming. The performance is over. Now comes the part where we talk about the business side. “We need to start planning next season,” my mother says. She sits on the edge of the white sofa and crosses her legs like she’s posing for a photo. “Your coach thinks you’re ready for a quad flip by autumn. We’ll need to budget for additional training sessions.” I set my medal down on the marble table and it makes a sound like something breaking. “I’m not doing this anymore,” I say.

The silence that follows is the kind of silence that takes up space in the room. My mother’s expression doesn’t change but my father’s jaw tightens just slightly. He knows. Some part of him already knows what’s coming. “You’re emotional,” he says. “You just competed. You need rest.” “I need to quit,” I say. “All of it. Figure skating. Piano. Everything. I want to play ice hockey. That’s what I want to do. That’s the only thing that actually makes me feel like I’m alive.” My mother laughs and it’s sharp and bright, the kind of laugh she uses at dinner parties right before she says something that cuts. “Ice hockey,” she says. Like it’s absurd. Like I just told her I want to be an astronaut. “You have a career,” my father says. His voice is quiet and that’s scarier than if he’d yelled. “You have sponsors already lined up. You have endorsements for next year. You have a future, Dakota.” “I don’t have a future,” I say. My voice is shaking but I push the words out anyway. “I have a schedule. I have a plan that you made for me before I was old enough to even understand what decisions were. I don’t even know who I am without skating anymore and I don’t want to know because whoever I am is exhausted. I’m fifteen years old and I’m exhausted.” My mother stands up. She’s graceful about it, the way she’s graceful about everything. It’s calculated. Everything she does is calculated. “We invested $250,000 this year alone,” she says. Her voice is ice. “Your father spent two days a week managing your schedule. I gave up my entire career for you.” “You didn’t give up anything for me,” I say. “You did it for you. You did it because you liked having a daughter you could own. You did it because it made you feel important at dinner parties.” The words are out before I can stop them and I know I shouldn’t have said them but I can’t pull them back now. “This is about that boy,” my father says. He’s standing now too and his voice has changed. It has an edge to it that wasn’t there before. “That hockey player. How long have you been talking about ice hockey? Three months? Since you met that..” “It’s not about a boy,” I say. “It’s about the fact that I wake up every single day and I hate my life. I hate the ice. I hate the music. I hate the costumes. I hate the pressure. I hate that I’m fifteen years old and I’ve never been to a school party or had a friend or done anything that wasn’t scheduled by you. I hate that the only time you look at me like you’re proud is when I’m winning something.” “You think you’re tired?” my father says. His face is getting red and his hands have clenched into fists. “You think you understand what pressure is? You’re a child, Dakota. You have no idea.”