Breaking the Ice Read Online Free PDF Page A

sparkling silver thread.
    I put my bag in front of the nearest chair.
    â€œDon’t sit on that one. It’s broken,” the girl across from me says.
    â€œThanks.” I move to the next chair. It looks like it has thirty-­year-old dirt embedded in the seat. I try not to think about it as I pull my skates on.
    â€œAre you new?” the girl asks.
    I look up and recognize the Nice Screechy Violin girl from Praterville. Is she joking? I mean, how could she forget? She’s gathering her short black hair into a tiny ponytail and looking like she’s never seen me before. “Yeah. I used to skate at Ridgeline, but now . . . I don’t.” I tie a double knot in my right skate laces and reach for my left.
    The girl shrugs and fishes a pair of red gloves from her skate bag. They completely clash with her pink hoodie, but sheeither doesn’t notice or doesn’t care. “I used to skate at Pound Lake, but I don’t anymore either. It’s much better here.”
    â€œOh.” I wonder what happened to force her to leave a club as good as Pound Lake, but there’s no way I’m going to ask. I’m sure she’s just saving face by saying that Fallton is better, when everyone knows otherwise.
    She tilts her head. “Weren’t you at Praterville?”
    Now she remembers. I take a deep breath as I search for my own gloves. “Yeah.”
    She breaks into a smile. “I knew it! You had that really great program to Swan Lake , right?”
    I blink at her. “Um, yeah. That was me.”
    â€œSo, are you going to skate here now . . . what’s your name?”
    â€œKaitlin,” I say as I stand up and follow her out to the ice. “Maybe.”
    â€œI’m Miyu. It’s Japanese.” She runs the words together like she has to explain this every day.
    No one is actually skating yet. All the skaters and coaches are busy stabbing and scraping at the ice with their blades. Some of them are even hacking away at it with little shovels. I try to figure out what they’re doing as I cross the rink with Miyu.
    She glides to the boards on the opposite side, where she deposits her skate guards and music. I put my stuff next to hers.
    â€œWhat’s everyone doing?” I finally ask.
    â€œScraping down the bumps. Come on.” She moves into the middle and points with her toe pick at a smooth, shiny mountain rising from the ice.
    I glance down the rink. The huge bumps are in neat soldier­like rows, stretching from one end of the ice to the other. I’ve never seen anything like it. I mean, Ridgeline used to get little bumps sometimes, but these things are the size of Mount Everest. “How does the ice get like this?”
    â€œIt happens in the summer mostly. My mom says it has something to do with humidity and bad insulation.” Miyu chops at the offending bump with her toe pick. Ice chips fly in all directions. “If you hit one of these in a spin or even just skating backward, down you go. So we smooth them out every morning.”
    I go to the next mountain in line and imitate Miyu by stabbing it with my blade. “How come the Zamboni doesn’t fix these?”
    Miyu shrugs. “The thing’s been here since the dinosaurs. We’re lucky it smooths the ice at all.”
    I chop away at my bump until it’s even with the ice around it.
    Once the bumps are gone, the session really begins. Mostof the skaters move around the perimeter of the ice, doing vari­ous patterns of edges and turns to warm up. But one older girl glides into center ice in front of us, turns backward, and then leaps into the air to turn three times before landing.
    My eyes want to pop out of my head. Who does a triple salchow to warm up? Except maybe Michelle Kwan? The girl launches into a series of triple jumps, one right after the other. I squint to see if I can figure out who she is. She definitely looks good enough to have gone to