Chapter 66: The Build-Up

Georgia

The whole school starts talking about the Classic like it’s already history.

It happens fast. One day it’s my private countdown, ticking away between training sessions, and the next it’s everywhere. Students I’ve never spoken to nod at me in hallways. Teachers mention it in passing like it’s a fixed point on everyone’s calendar now instead of just mine.

"You’re the one skating at the Classic, right? With the scouts coming?" a girl in my chemistry class asks, and I don’t even know her name.

"That’s me," I say, keeping my tone light, though my stomach does a slow, nervous roll.

She beams. "That’s so cool. My cousin does pairs skating in Ohio, she says the scouts barely show up to anything smaller than nationals."

"Guess I got lucky," I say, and she laughs like I’ve made a joke instead of just stating a fact that terrifies me. Mandi has taken to introducing me at meals like I’m already famous.

"This is Georgia," she announces one night at dinner, gesturing at me with her fork like I’m a museum exhibit, her voice pitched for maximum drama. "She’s about to become an Olympic legend."

"Mandi," I groan, sinking lower in my seat.

"What? I’m just speaking things into existence," she says, unbothered, stealing a fry off my tray like this conversation is already over. "Manifestation is real, Georgia. Look it up."

It makes me want to sink through the floor every single time, though I notice I never actually correct her.

Darcy’s attention sharpens too, somewhere in the middle of all this buzz, in a way I don’t examine too closely because I’m too locked into training to examine much of anything these days. He starts showing up at the rink sometimes near the end of my sessions, waiting by the boards with a coffee he’s clearly brought for me, asking careful, specific questions about my program, my jumps, how the scouting evaluation process usually works. The first time he shows up like this, I almost tell him he doesn’t need to. It feels like too much, someone who isn’t Coach Ferreira caring this specifically about my triple loop. But nobody else is showing up at the boards with coffee these days, and some tired, hungry part of me decides that’s reason enough to let it happen.

"Big triple coming up in the second half, right?" he asks one afternoon, his voice easy and warm, watching me lace up. "The one you’ve been drilling."

"Triple loop," I say, surprised he’s noticed the pattern of my practice sessions closely enough to know that. "It’s the one I’m least confident about."

Something flickers across his face, too quick to name. Interest, maybe. Or calculation. Then it’s gone, replaced by that lazy confidence I’ve come to expect from him. "You’ll land it. You look incredible out there, by the way. Not that you need me to tell you that."

"I need you to tell me that literally all the time, actually," I say, half joking, tightening a lace with more focus than it requires.

He laughs, low and pleased. "Noted."

It’s nice, in the moment. It’s exactly the kind of easy, uncomplicated encouragement I’ve been craving after weeks of Mollie’s critiques and Puck’s silence, and I let myself lean into it without questioning why he’s suddenly so invested in the technical details of my program, why he seems to know my training schedule almost as well as Coach Ferreira does.

The twins, meanwhile, go quiet in a way that should probably register as strange, if I had any spare attention left to notice it properly.

I catch it in fragments. A conversation in the dining hall that cuts off entirely the moment I sit down two tables over, the silence dropping so fast it’s almost audible. Bella and Bianca exchange one of their identical, unreadable looks before returning to their food without a word. In English, someone mentions the Classic, and both twins just stop talking altogether, neither of them offering the usual sharp comment about my mother or my rankings.

It should feel like a relief. Weeks of low grade hallway cruelty just evaporating, replaced by nothing at all. I notice the twins’ silence the way you notice a radiator that’s gone quiet, distantly, without checking why. I file Darcy’s coffee and his easy certainty under *nice*, and go back to running my footwork sequence one more time before Coach Ferreira calls it a night.

"You okay?" Mandi asks one night, catching me staring at nothing over my textbook, her voice softer than her usual chaos.

"Fine," I say, shaking myself back into focus. "Just tired."

She studies me a beat too long, her expression unusually serious, before shrugging it off. "You’re always tired lately. Sleep more, Steele."

"Working on it," I say, and mean it as much as I can while still living on four hours a night and a granola bar habit that would horrify my mother.

I don’t think about either of them again until that evening, walking back from a late practice session, my skate bag heavy on my shoulder, my legs aching in that satisfying, worn out way that used to only exist in the good years, before the plateau, before everything with Mollie went sideways.

The dorm hallway is quiet this late. Most students are already tucked away for the night, the overhead lights dimmed to their after hours amber, and I’m halfway past the twins’ room when I hear it. Bianca’s voice, low and sharp, pitched for a conversation she clearly thinks is happening behind a closed door where no one else can hear it.

"It has to look like an accident," she says, her tone flat and businesslike, the kind of voice people use when they’re discussing something mundane and terrible in the same breath.

I stop walking. My whole body goes still in the hallway, skate bag still slung over my shoulder, my heart suddenly loud in my own ears, my pulse ticking hard against my throat. The strap digs into my shoulder, but I don’t adjust it. I don’t move at all.

I wait, half expecting more, some context that would make the sentence make sense, some innocent explanation involving homework or a prank or literally anything other than what my stomach is already, instinctively, twisting itself into knots imagining. Nothing else comes. Just silence from behind the door, thick and absolute, like whoever’s in there just realized the walls in this old building are thinner than they’d like.

I tell myself I misheard. It’s late, my legs are exhausted, my brain is running on nothing but training adrenaline and half a granola bar from hours ago. *It has to look like an accident* could be anything. A broken vase they’re trying to hide from a resident advisor. A surprise party gone slightly wrong. Some completely mundane, forgettable sentence that just happened to land wrong in my sleep deprived ears at exactly the wrong moment.

I keep walking, forcing my feet to move again, telling myself the story all the way back to my own room, that I misheard, that it’s nothing, that I’m building conspiracies out of ordinary teenage drama because some stubborn, exhausted part of my brain has gotten too good at looking for danger where there isn’t any. My legs are dead tired, my brain running on nothing but adrenaline and half a granola bar, and it would be so easy to let this be nothing too, filed away next to the radiator, next to the coffee, one more thing I’m too worn down to properly look at.

I did not mishear it.