Chapter 67: Mollie Arrives Early

Georgia

She arrives two days early to help, which means two extra days of being managed.

I find out she’s already on campus the way I find out most things about my mother lately, secondhand, through someone else’s surprise. Coach Ferreira mentions it at the start of practice, casual as anything, like she’s telling me the weather forecast instead of dropping a bomb into my morning.

"Your mother stopped by the rink office this morning," Coach Ferreira says, testing the words like she’s not sure they’re safe to release into the air. "Very thorough questions about our conditioning program."

She delivers the line with careful neutrality, the kind reserved for situations that require diplomatic handling, and that tells me exactly how the conversation went.

"She’s here?" I ask, panic sharpening my voice as my stomach drops straight through the ice beneath my skates. "The Classic isn’t for two more days."

"She mentioned wanting extra time to, and I’m quoting here, get a feel for the environment," Coach Ferreira says, deadpan, her mouth twitching like she’s fighting a smile she knows better than to let loose. "I told her the environment is a rink. Ice, mostly. She didn’t find that as funny as I did."

I don’t laugh either, not really, though I press my lips together in something that might pass for appreciation. My hands curl at my sides, fingers digging little crescents into my palms. Two extra days. Two extra days of Mollie inserting herself into every corner of my life here before the actual competition has even started, and I already know, with the kind of certainty that comes from eighteen years of experience, exactly how those two days are going to unfold.

I’m right within the hour.

She’s waiting outside the rink when I finish my session, dressed like she’s about to be photographed for a magazine spread on supportive skating mothers, camel coat cinched at the waist, not a single hair out of place despite the wind cutting across the parking lot. The second I step through the doors, she’s already talking, already narrating, already three steps ahead of any conversation I might have actually wanted to have.

"There you are," she says, brisk and assessing, her eyes raking over me like she’s cataloguing flaws before I’ve even said hello. "I watched the last twenty minutes through the window. Your entry into that combination spin needs work, you’re dropping your shoulder on the setup."

She falls into step beside me like this is completely normal, like she didn’t just critique my technique before offering a single word of greeting. My jaw tightens, but I keep walking.

"I spoke with your coach about tightening the conditioning schedule before the Classic," she continues, clipped and efficient, "given how much is riding on this."

"Mom, I’ve got two days left," I say, exasperated, the words scraping out before I can soften them. "I don’t need a new conditioning schedule."

"I’m not saying overhaul anything," she says, patient in the way that makes my skin crawl, like she’s explaining something obvious to a child. "Just optimize what’s already there. Small adjustments can make a big difference to how you present under evaluation."

This is how it goes for the rest of the afternoon, and then the evening, and then the next morning too, an unrelenting stream of small adjustments and helpful suggestions that somehow manage to touch every single part of my life here without her ever once asking whether I wanted the input in the first place. She corrects my footwork to Coach Ferreira’s face during my session, standing rinkside with her arms crossed like a judge at a trial. She rearranges my toiletries into what she calls a better system while I’m at practice, and I come back to find everything lined up by height, my toothbrush standing at attention like a soldier on inspection. She strikes up a conversation with a random parent in the rink lobby and somehow spins it into a detailed narration of my entire competitive history, plateau included, like my setbacks are just interesting color commentary for strangers who never asked.

I bite my tongue through most of it. Old habit, worn smooth from years of practice, the same reflex that used to have me nodding along to every criticism without a single word of pushback. My molars ache by the end of the first day from how hard I’ve been clenching them.

The costume conversation happens the second evening, in my dorm room, Mandi conveniently absent at some student council thing, leaving just the two of us and the garment bag Mollie’s brought with her, hung carefully on the back of my closet door like an unspoken argument waiting to happen.

"I had this made specially," she says, businesslike, unzipping the bag to reveal a deep blue costume, elegant, expensive looking. "I sent your measurements ahead. It’ll photograph beautifully against the ice, and blue reads as trustworthy and composed to judges. There’s actual research on this."

I look at the costume. It’s beautiful, objectively, the fabric catching the lamplight in a way that makes it shimmer like something alive. It’s also not mine. I already have a costume, one Coach Ferreira and I picked out together weeks ago, deep green, simpler, something that actually matches the choreography we built specifically for this program, the one that’s supposed to be about me trusting myself instead of performing a version of composed that some research paper decided reads well to judges.

My throat tightens before the words even form.

"I already have a costume," I say, quiet but firm. "Coach Ferreira and I chose it together."

"I’m sure it’s lovely, sweetheart," she says, dismissive, waving a hand like she’s swatting away a fly, "but this one’s been professionally designed with the scouting evaluation specifically in mind. Presentation matters as much as technical content at this level, you know that."

My hand actually drifts toward the blue fabric for half a second, old habit tugging at my fingers before I even notice it’s happening, the same reflex that’s had me folding myself smaller for my mother since I was small enough to fit in her lap. I catch myself. I pull my hand back.

"I’m wearing the green one."

My hands are shaking. I press them flat against my thighs so she won’t see.

The sentence comes out of me flat and clear, no hesitation dressed up as politeness, no soft qualifier tacked onto the end to cushion the refusal. My heartbeat picks up the second the words leave my mouth, thudding hard enough that I feel it in my throat, like some part of me is still waiting for the ceiling to cave in, for some consequence to arrive immediately and prove that saying no out loud to my mother was never actually an option available to me.

Mollie blinks. For a second she just looks at me, garment bag still held open in both hands, like she genuinely didn’t expect the sentence to leave my mouth in that particular order.

"Georgia," she says, warning wrapped around my name like a wire pulled tight.

"I already have a costume," I say again, steadier this time, my chin lifting a fraction. "I like it. It’s what we built the choreography for. I’m wearing it."

It’s such a small thing. A costume. A single decision about fabric and color that shouldn’t carry this much weight, and yet my whole chest feels like it’s holding its breath, waiting to see what happens next, like I’ve just done something far bigger than declining a dress. Somewhere in the back of my mind, a small voice whispers that this is what it feels like to want something and say so.

Mollie’s eyes narrow, slowly, and it isn’t anger exactly, not the sharp, immediate flare I’m used to from her when I push back on anything. It’s colder than that, more controlled, something calculating settling behind her expression like she’s already three steps ahead, already planning her next move in a conversation she has no intention of actually losing.

"We’ll talk about this after the Classic," she says, cool and even, her voice carrying none of the warmth from a moment ago, and somehow that stillness feels far more dangerous than if she’d just yelled.

She zips the garment bag back up slowly, deliberately, the sound of it dragging through the quiet room like a small, controlled threat, and hangs it back on the closet door anyway, right where it was, like leaving it there is its own small, silent argument that the conversation isn’t actually finished just because I said no once.

I don’t say anything else. I just stand there, my heart still hammering, watching her smooth down the front of her blouse and check her watch like nothing at all just happened between us.

But something did. I can still feel it sitting in my chest, small and shaking and enormous all at once.