I spring into the air higher than the full-length mirror lets me see myself, tucking my right skate up under me as I come back down on my left one. I let it wobble, so that all of me ends up on the foamy bathroom floor.
Silver brushes the floor as I push myself back to a standing position. There’s a whole set of off-ice jumps we’re supposed to do as a warmup; the goal, always a perfect landing. I give those a try whenever I have time. For me, it’s never been the jumping that’s hard. It’s falling. Actually, falling is really freaking scary. But I wouldn’t ever say that because I’ve spent enough time being scared of things. The way I warm up with my careless falls, anyone would say, stop it, that’s dangerous. Nobody is here to say that, though, that’s what the empty bathroom is for. When I start off crash-landing confidently, I can do anything afterwards.

There’s a new skater here today. She’s probably twelve or thirteen, a year or two younger than me, with hair that’s shiny and umber and flicks like a horse’s tail. She’s talented, too. Brand new here and her skates already chase each other like spunky baby rabbits, curious and unafraid.
The oval of ice drops down with two stairs into this back place, bigger than a hallway but too narrow to be a room. In between. I lean against the glass surrounding the ice. Always in between.
Kp-
Ssshhhhhh…
This new girl is so close, if I close my eyes I can imagine the sounds are coming from my own blades. I almost believe it, too; the excitement sends a warm electrical pulse all the way up from their metal to my jumpy heart.
I always get a buzz like this before getting onto the ice for the first time in a day.
I look up at the ceiling now. Maybe there are gods who swirl the top of the skating rink, that place too high for me and my fear to reach. I make a silent wish to them that when it’s my turn to go out there, I can be half as strong as this girl.
And I laugh at myself.
I’m over this, being all scared of messing up.
I am the one who’s always skating before she even touches the ice.
Now, I pivot on one skate, my ponytail curling around from behind, vanilla and molasses slapping the sapphire cloth as I dash to the ice.

“Alana, you are just blowing my mind away today,” Riley beams at me fourteen minutes into lesson. “I think you’re ready for a scratch spin.”
If my heart were the sun, it could solar power the whole earth.
My first spin is a mini disaster but I keep trying. My first successful one has the sloppy wag of a puppy’s tail; a few later, I am an electric mixer, finally a tornado. My smile is lightning that weaves in and out of it, laughing in a game of chase.
It’s in the middle of my triumphant twister that I catch a glimpse of her.
The new girl. At first when I look at her now, I think I must just be dizzy and seeing wrong. But one more revolution, two, and my smile flattens, my whirlwind running out of steam. Her face is pooled with end-of-the-world, plashet tears.
She’s holding an icepack, so she probably fell and that’s all. If she was hurt bad, one of our coaches would be waiting on the bench with her.
Still.
Riley always likes to end lessons on a high note, she says, which is what she calls it when we get to do the tricks I’m extra good at by now. “Show me a toe loop!”
I chip the ice as I kick off of it and into the air. I feel good. For some reason, though, I just keep glancing over at that girl, unable to shake her.

For a year and a half, I have had nothing but control. I can think and feel what I want. If I don’t want to worry, I don’t have to because I can decide not to.
Today when we see each other’s faces up close for the first time in a while, I have to look away.
In one instant the Old Alana has snapped right back up from the dust.
I don’t even know why.
I thought I had gotten rid of her.
I thought she wasn’t inside me anymore.
Old Alana grabs for the wall and falls anyway.
The other girl stops fast, snow shooting up to nest among my freckles. When she pulls me up, her hand is too cold even for an ice rink – I can feel that and I’m the one wearing gloves.
And then I feel the rough red spot on her knuckle, subtle but unmistakable. Without meaning to, I shift my grip so I’m not touching it, which means I fall down again before getting up.
“Thanks,” the Old Alana whimpers to this girl, too quiet for me to even hear.
Does she know I noticed? Was I too obvious?
She strokes away without a word.

One day I go into the lounge and she’s asleep in the chair. Without meaning to, I wake her up with the sound of my zipper.
“Oh, sh-no,” She moans, rubbing sleep from her eyes and hauling herself out of the cushions. She looks like she just came out of hibernation. Somehow she still manages to run.
It’s so confusing. The way she triggers my sixth sense, and calls out the Old Alana just by breathing my same air.
I have to know why.
With no idea what I’m looking for, I curl up in the chair she just left. It feels like trying to sleep in a bathtub.
I try to get up but the hard chair is unexpectedly glue-like, and it’s in the process of trying to pull myself up that there’s a crinkling sound. From under the couch cushion. I reach into the crack.
I pull out one, two, three, four, five Snickers wrappers.

I claim one of the circles on the far side of the ice for myself. All mine. Alana-only zone. All the space I need. No worrying allowed.
It doesn’t work.
Old Alana is still here.
I don’t do stroking, every one of my “strokes” is a slice across the ice, determined. Alana, Alana…you know who you are. Don’t let her surface. It’s over, remember?
I keep messing up in lessons. Riley asks me if everything is okay.
“Yeah,” Old Alana lies through my lips, “Why?”
“You’re so quiet, and you seem all nervous.” And I’m doing so badly.
No I’m not. Well, I am. It’s just that I can’t think like that anymore. I have to filter those thoughts out of me before they can sink in and do damage.
“I’m always quiet.”
“You?”
My eyes implore an explanation.
She says, “You’re one of my most outgoing students. The most, right now.”
Shivers of excitement climb my spine. It is moments like this that I have been working towards for two years. People telling me they like me for my talking skills. Still I have to ask, “Most outgoing ? Me?”
“Yeah! Until Violet changes her mind about giving everyone the silent treatment; I know how talkative that girl can be when she feels like it.” I follow where she’s pointing and our gazes land on the new one. Violet. So that’s her name.
It’s not a choice. My body goes rigid and I have to will the words to stay inside. My old mantra, bringing back pictures of nights after school or occasional parties, catechizing myself – why won’t you do it, you don’t even have a good reason, just talk already, you decided you would stop being afraid now stop it - it’s not a choice no matter how much you wish it was so maybe you were wrong that you ever could in the first place.
“Can we work on backward crossovers?” I ask with fabricated eagerness. I’m good at pretending like that. It’s just that I almost never have to do it anymore.

Five Snickers wrappers – binge eating.
Scratches on her knuckle – vomit marks, scratched by sharp teeth as she pulls away hurriedly.
Tiredness, getting hurt easily – malnutrition.
I can’t be sure of anything. I don’t know that there’s not some other explanation for this.
All I know is, Old Alana is screaming, crying out inside my head: OBSESSION. OBSESSION. HERE’S SOMEONE WHO CANNOT STOP HERE’S SOMEONE WHO IS DESPERATE – HERE’S SOMEONE FAR TOO MUCH LIKE YOU...LIKE ME.
“Are you okay?” I ask on my way off the ice to get a drink.
Violet glares up at me before looking back down at her icepack. “Would everyone just stop asking me that?”
Embarrassment twines my blood vessels.
The Old Alana runs away and bursts into tears of social anxiety. They are long lost but all too familiar.
When I go to the drinking fountain, it looks like my day. Full stream at the beginning, before breaking into a million crystals swirling the drain.
I’m thirsty but each mouthful of water feels like those five Snickers bars and I can’t keep it down. I cup my hands under the spraying droplets like that will make up for it. I squeeze. Trying to catch them, but they slip away.
I feel the Old Alana and the New Alana join hands inside me. I try to pull them apart but it doesn’t work. Only, this time it’s only the new Alana who’s scared. That’s a first.
Old Alana cannot let go of this girl.
New Alana says, go talk to her again. No need to be scared or embarrassed.
I’ve never noticed both of them agreeing like that. They’re complementing each other.
My blades feel the urge to stick in the foamy floor, settle and stay, but my brain doesn’t, so that’s the instinct I follow.
I step up the single stair to the bench deliberately. “Hi.”
“Hi,” She says.
“Is it okay if I sit here?”
Violet shrugs so I perch on the bench’s edge a safe distance away. “I know that…we don’t know each other. But I do know some things. Like, I know that you’re amazing at what you do. I want to skate like you do.”
She sighs disbelievingly, but I go on. “That means, I know you’re not getting hurt because you’re clumsy. I don’t know you so I get if you want nothing to do with me, but, I am worried just from the few things I’ve seen. So truly, is everything okay?”
She draws her knees to her chest, buries her face in them and nods yes which we both know is a lie. Old Alana would have reeled at the uncertainty here. Bolted. But neither Alana leaves. We don’t leave. I don’t leave.
I am unsure but this is worth it to me.
She slices an M&M wrapper with her toe pick. “Dammit. It’s everywhere.”
“You mean food?”
She gets a deer in the headlights look like she forgot I was here and meant to only say that to herself. She looks down at the wrapper again, disdainful, a semi-answer which I take as a yes. As an, Alana, you were right.
Both of you.
All of you.
“I get it,” I say quietly.
Something like hope flickers on her face. “You mean, you don’t like eating either? And you have tricks and hiding places and all that?”
I shake my head. Hopefully, my eyebrows are blonde enough that she won’t notice the way they’re furrowed. They won’t seem to do what I say right now.
“Oh.” She says. Silence. And then she runs away.

She didn’t say you can never understand me. Not with words, at least; she didn’t have to.
So what if I was anxious all the time, socially and whatever? I never thought twice about what I put in my mouth. So no matter how much I want it, how can I have any empathy for somebody who can only think about that?
If I were Violet… I would have run away from me, too.

I work on waltz jumps for the next hour. They’re one thing I can never seem to get down. But needing to get something right today, I manage an almost perfect one. OCD can work wonders. It happens just as the intercom bellows, “Attention, skaters…” It’s time to tell the ice goodnight.
In the lounge, I unlace my skates and head for the door.
“Alana! There you are.”
I turn around to see Riley. “Were you looking for me?”
Her voice is higher than usual, which is saying a lot for her. There’s something in it I can’t pick up on, almost like doctors waiting for test results, desperately assuring patients that there’s no need to worry and hoping to God they’re right. “Um...yeah! Do you have a minute?”
“Of course, what’s up?”
She looks at me searchingly, like I look when I have a really long, stressful day, and still nothing makes any more sense than it did in the morning. “I’m not the one looking for you. Someone else is.”
My dilating pupils slurp up all the greenness surrounding them. “Oh.” I say quietly. Because I just might know who this ‘someone else’ is.
Riley points to Violet’s familiar figure, in the bleachers this time.
I look at her, then back at Riley. “It’s okay, you can go talk to her,” she encourages. “Trust me. You should.”
“Okay.”
?
“Hi,” I sit down next to Violet, on air that threatens to shatter beneath me.
“Hi.” Her silence tells me it’s my turn to talk.
I take a deep breath. “I do eat. I can do it without thinking much. I’m lucky, I guess. Food isn’t one of the things that scares me. But it’s kind of a rarity like that. Because I’ve had my share of fear. That’s why I told you I get it.”
Thirty seconds ago, I was planning to tell Violet I was sorry. That I had overstepped. I open my mouth to taste the words I just spilled into the air, so different than I had planned. I don’t want to swallow them back up though. I would be lying if I said they didn’t awe me. Perplex, but awe.
It all comes down to fear.
That’s what New Alana knew that Old Alana didn’t.
It all comes down to fear.
“You don’t seem like that. You seem all happy. What are you even scared of?”
I hesitate. Once, a few months ago, someone asked me about middle school. I told them I never was twelve, or thirteen, skipped straight to fourteen. They berated me, but that’s the answer I stuck to because it was easier than the truth.
Now, I twirl a strand of my hair, then stick it back in place purposefully.
“I was like you. I didn’t talk to anyone either…” I listen as my voice keeps going, sharing. And then I take a deep breath and jump right in with it, unwinding. Spilling. Everything.
I see Riley is watching us, in bewilderment. I know she’ll ask me what happened later. Maybe I’ll tell her. Maybe even the parts I said, and how I was scared to come over here at first. How I did it because I remember what it’s like to want to know a magical way out. I can’t give Violet that, no one can. But I can tell her everything I know.
I tell Violet, and I will tell Riley, about Old Alana. And I’ll tell them, I don’t think there is one anymore. Or a new one. Both of them, they’re just Alana. Just me. I like it better this way.