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families knew about the jumps. It was starting to make her mad. The other families came to watch competitions; some mothers were at every practice, every single one. She understood that her family wasn’t like that, that they were different, but Dad had no business acting like he knew what he was talking about. He didn’t.
    He must have sensed her mood. He stopped and gathered up her hands in his, pulling her close. “I know you don’t agree with me, but could you humor me for a bit? The minute I’m gone, you can go back to doing it the old way.”
    She could feel the tweed of his jacket along her forearms. The tweed was made of twists of blue and green, and the suede patches at the elbow were a soft brown. His hands were slender for a man’s, but they were warm.
    He and Ian had learned calculus together. It had been during her last year at home. Ian, who seemed to be able to learn languages faster than Amy could read English, was actually having trouble in a subject. “Well, it won’t hurt me,” their father had laughed, and night after night they sat in the book-filled living room, moaning and making faces. But Ian had gotten an A.
    Now her father—her father who had skated during his own childhood—was here, helping her.
    She wanted to believe him, she really did. She didn’t want to be mad, not when he had gone to so much trouble to get here, but what did he know about the sport? She looked over her shoulder at her coach.
    That was a mistake. She knew it the instant that she did it. She was saying to him that her coach’s opinion mattered more to her than his did.
    Well, maybe it did.
    Surprisingly the coach supported him. “Pretend that you’re a professional, in an ice show,” she suggested. “In an ice show you don’t have to worry about judges.”
    No one had ever talked to Amy about a professional career. The best girls were already getting flowers from the ice shows and the management agencies, but not Amy.
    â€œCan you think like that?” Her father’s voice was gentle.
    â€œYes.”
    She was the most important element of the program, he said. Not the music, not the costume, not even the jumps, but she herself. He preached sincerity, absolutesincerity. “Do you love that move? You can’t do it if you don’t love it. No one will believe in you unless you believe in yourself.” He talked about emotion and getting the audience to feel what she was feeling. “Reach out to them.”
    And above all, she had to be herself. “Maybe it would be easier, even better, if you were a jumper, but you aren’t. Pretending to be won’t work.”
    He helped her understand that she liked the Top 40 tune because it was so cheerful, so full of bouncy anticipation. The first evening he found a piano and started playing a rough medley of three medieval German folk songs. Amy instantly fell in love with the songs. Hal played and replayed them, trying all sorts of different arrangements. Amy listened and listened.
    After an hour he stopped playing. “You have a marvelous ear,” he said, shaking his head. “I don’t know why I hadn’t noticed it before. I thought Ian was the only one of you who had it.”
    All her life she had heard that Ian was so good at languages because he had a nearly genius-level ability to remember and recreate a sound. It was strange, it was incomprehensible, to hear her ear compared to his.
    They made a tape of the German songs, and the next morning they took everything they had worked on the day before and put it to the new music. Then he rearranged the music so the jumps made sense. She came to understand what she had hated about jumps was that they never seemed to have anything to do with the music. But now her music seemed to be lifting her and turning her on its own.
    â€œWhat makes a jump work?” her father asked. “What makes you go around? What are the