Page 115 of Oh, Flutz!

“Ten! Nine! Eight!”

“You’ve been drinking this whole time,” I point out, and he shoves me playfully in the shoulder, making me sway dangerously. “If you make me fall, I’m going to be so mad!”

“Ooh, I’m so scared,” Bryan taunts, looping an arm around my waist, and I screech as he trips, bringing both of us tumbling down onto the ice, flat on our backs.

“I hate you,” I say, groaning, but the effect is more than a little ruined by my uncontrollable giggling.

“I know.”

I turn my head to look at him, but he already has his eyes on me.

“Four! Three! Two!”

“What are you thinking about?” he whispers.

I look straight up above us, at the fireworks exploding overhead over the Midtown skyscrapers, painting the sky with streaks of light and color. “I’m thinking…”

Back home, there’s this saying—those who don’t take risks, don’t drink champagne. I always thought it was a sorry excuse for the wild cards at my old center to attempt the most out-of-control, death-wish elements they could think of (cough, Vanya, cough)--but now, lying here, on this ice with this boy in this city…I can almost see it.

I turn my head to the side to tell him this, but his eyes have already fluttered shut.

I let out a sigh, my breath puffing into the cold air. “Happy new year.”

When we get back,I’m too tipsy to do much of anything.

I try to shower, but after ten minutes of just standing there with the water running I get out. Then I pull out my phone, scrolling aimlessly before opening my email and digging through the hundreds of unreads clogging my inbox, stumbling across one [email protected].

It must’ve gotten lost among all the junk in my spam folder until now. Mikhail’s probably been sitting in his office, squinting judgmentally at his empty notifications tab, his drama queen self stewing just because he’s too stuck-up to follow up himself—

AIRLINE FLIGHT 13080

Passenger ANDREYEVA/EKATERINA

NEW YORK CITY, JFK to MOSCOW, SVO

Typed below is a brief message.

I’m sorry. Please come home. It’s time. -M

Chapter Thirty-Six

KATYA

ONE WEEK LATER—JANUARY

Ican barely lookat him.

I don’t know what I’m going to do. I don’t know if it’s even real. Not because I’ve fully lost my mind—at least I don’t think I have. That feels like the kind of thing you’d notice, right? Unless Sanjiv was right about those hallucinations.

The thing is, I’ve never heard of this happening. There aren’t supposed to be second chances, not with us. Once Tatyana says no, you’re out for good. At least, that’s what it’s been for the last decade. Is it really possible that she’s breaking her rules for me? That I’ve been taken out of her little black book (she actually has one); that they actually want me back, that I actually….succeeded?

I mean, that was the whole point of this, wasn’t it? To prove to my old team that they made a mistake in kicking me out, to give them a big middle finger by way of succeeding at something out of pure spite? That’s what I had told myself when I agreed to Lian’s proposition. That it would be temporary. A means to an end.

Now, though, I don’t know. And that’s the part that scares me most. Katya from last January wouldn’t have thought twice about it. She would’ve flown back to Moscow in a heartbeat, on the soonest flight she could catch. But here I am, a week since I saw the ticket: walking around like nothing's happening, hiding from my own partner, ducking Mikhail’s calls. All because I don’t know my own mind anymore.

I’ve always known the world moves on from skaters. This is one of the least permanent sports out there. Every time you’re out on the ice, every mistake you make, you can feel it creeping up on you—you know your shelf life is slowly dripping away; that there’s a conveyor belt of younger, skinnier, less injured girls stacking up behind you by the minute.

I was one of them. I was the one who replaced Sokolovskaya after she broke her hip and was out for good—I remember her crying uncontrollably after it finally snapped after her sixth triple axel in a row, just sprawled out on the ice andwailing.I remember Tatyana turning to us, the barely-fifteen-year-old seniors who’d all woken up at dawn to test on our birthdays the second we were eligible.

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