“Yeah, I see it,” Brendan said, without her needing to finish the sentence. He did a little pivot on the ice, then launched into another set of turns and steps that took him from one end of the sheet to the other. Aaron’s calves burned just watching it.
“Do you think you can do that?” Brendan called from the other side of the rink.
“Uh. Sure.” Aaron, in fact, thought no such thing. All the individual elements were items he was perfectly capable of executing, but in that combination, with the deep edges and flair that Brendan always brought to step sequences... not so much. That was where the hard work, and the magic, would have to be.
“Also, Aaron,” Katie chimed in. “Please fix your arms, if you’re not gonna skate to a warhorse don’t skate like you’re a warhorse.”
“Got it.” Aaron rolled his shoulders to loosen some of the tension. Katie was right—his posture and carriage needed grace and flow. Even if his legs felt like they were going to fall off.
“Ready? And—go,” Katie and Brendan said at the exact same time.
Aaron chuckled to himself at them as he took a crack at the footwork. The steps were challenging and the speed with the music would be brutal, but it sang.
Yes, Aaron thought as his blades carved patterns on the ice. This is what it’s supposed to feel like.
He couldn’t wait for Zack to see it.
THE NEXT FEW DAYS WERE relentless, unending work. His free skate, to his dismay, got worse, not better. His technical elements were solid, the artistry was there, but the emotion, after those first brilliant days, was a mess—sometimes. Sometimes it was brilliant. Consistency had never been Aaron’s strongest attribute, but that had always been about jumps, not the rest of it. Whatever was going on, it was driving Aaron up a wall.
Frustration, as it turned out, did not help him skate any better.
One night, only a few days before camp, Katie reminded him he could go back to his old program. Whereupon he freaked out at her completely about needing to show his true self and broke down in tears in the middle of the ice.
“Breaktime,” Katie declared prompt, and steered him to the door.
Once he was seated on the bench in the hockey box, Katie got him tissues and his water bottle then sat beside him.
“I’ve noticed a pattern,” she said. “And I’m curious if you have.”
“I have noticed nothing except the rapidly diminishing number of days before I have to show this program off at camp.”
“Your footwork is strong, your jumps are solid, and I have nothing to say against your artistry.”
Aaron nodded. Praise, welcome as it was, didn’t make him feel any better when it still wasn’t working. And after he’d asked for and gotten a new program.... He sank his head into his hands.
Katie rubbed a gentle hand across his back. “All of which means it’s your emotion that isn’t working.”
“Sometimes it works.” Aaron tried to cling to that. If he could get it to work when he needed to... but no. People could win a medal by luck, if all the stars aligned. But he couldn’t have the kind of season he needed to get to the Olympics solely on luck.
“It works when it’s just me here with you,” Katie said. “And I’ve walked by a few times when it’s just you and Zack. It works then too.”
“You’ve seen that?” For a moment, Aaron was startled out of his misery.
“I work stranger hours than you know. But anyway. It works for me and it works for Zack. Not—” Katie gestured to the rink, where a handful of other skaters were on the ice and another handful were working on off-ice drills on the mats. “When anyone else is around.”
Aaron pondered that for a moment. “Huh. I guess I hadn’t noticed.”
“Which tells me something. If this is the program in which you want to showcase your true self.”
“That I’m only comfortable being that self around you and Zack?”
“Bingo.”
“How do I fix that?” Aaron asked plaintively. He hoped she had the answer. Katie came closest to understanding what it was like to be from a world so different from what anyone else came from. If anyone knew how to deal with this problem, she did.
“No idea,” Katie said. “I’ve been retired for years and still struggle with it. But,” she said, standing and offering him her hand to pull him to his feet. “Now that you know what the problem is, maybe you can work the solution out for yourself.”
WORKING OUT THE SOLUTION himself probably should have meant spending time alone either with meditation or journaling to try to crack the problem that Katie had raised. And Aaron did, dutifully try that for a couple of days. But while he could see the problem, clearly, he didn’t see a solution to it, at least not one that was anything other than practice.
Dealing with fear—physical or emotional—was mostly about desensitization. At a given point he had to believe the problem would solve itself through time.
And time, of course, dictated every aspect of his life. Eventually, on the night before camp, he had to accept he had done all he could to prepare for it and allow himself, instead, some time to relax, whether that meant thinking about something else or thinking about nothing at all.
He went over to Zack’s place knowing this was his last chance to see him not just before camp but before the season and its pressures truly got underway. Unfortunately, the challenges of having any sort of personal life while competing were already making themselves known, at least in Aaron’s head. He’d have to talk to Zack at some point about all the rules around food and sleep he was going to have to follow to be at his competitive best.
He didn’t think it would be a big deal, but he still felt weird talking about it. What
