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physics involved?”
    Physics? Amy knew nothing about physics. Ian was the one who understood physics, not her.
    Dad talked to the coaches. They gave him articles to read. “The latest research on jumps,” he said to Amy afterward, “argues for importance of upper body strength, and that can be improved.”
    So Amy started lifting weights.
    She hated it. How she hated it. Skating was about speed and beauty and emotion, about lifting an arm and extending a leg and knowing, feeling, the beauty of the line. Lifting weights was drudgery, a job, and she hated it.
    There were no short cuts; there was little satisfaction. She couldn’t let her muscles become bulky, so she didn’t have the challenge of seeing how much she could lift. She instead faced endless repetitions. It didn’t matter which tapes she listened to or who else was in the room to talk to; lifting weights was always hateful, and she had never hated anything about practice before.
    But she did it.
    Her jumps were never as strong as some of the other girls’—they never would be—but they grew better, and she worked on her landings until they became feather-soft. If the jumps themselves were slow and low, that grew to seem right because she was like a feather, floating easily, effortlessly.
    It turned out that the more her father talked to her coaches and the other staff at the training center, the less he thought of them. He asked her which two junior skaters she enjoyed watching the most. “I don’t care about who is winning, not at this level. Simply tell me who you can’t take your eyes off of.”
    She thought for a while. It was hard. At competitions you just thought about who was going to win. “There arethese two guys—Henry Carroll and Tommy Sargent—I do love to watch them. Henry blazes across the ice, he has such power, and Tommy, he’s little and he always seems so funny. He makes me laugh even when he’s skating.”
    Her father seemed to like the sound of that. “Then let’s look into who they train with.”
    â€œBut, Dad, they never win.”
    â€œAnd I think that’s in their favor. It’s the little robots that are winning the Juniors.”
    Henry and Tommy were in Colorado, not at the big facility in Colorado Springs, but at a smaller rink in Denver, where they trained with a man named Oliver Young. Family finances had forced Oliver out of amateur competition before he had made a name for himself; he had skated in ice shows for several years and was now starting to coach. He was interested primarily in boy skaters; Amy would be the only girl at the Junior Olympic level.
    â€œWill that bother you?” her father asked her.
    â€œNo.” She had never gotten very close to the other girls in Delaware, even the ones she lived with; their rink was too competitive for friendships.
    She moved to Colorado in the fall. Oliver agreed with her father. His philosophy was yes, you had to get all the basics, and yes, you had to lift weights, but in the end you had to learn to skate like yourself, and the next winter, the year Amy was fifteen, with a program full of dazzling footwork she won the Junior tournament. From seventeenth place to first in one year.
    The girls in her old skating club tingled with frustration. They had thought Amy had left Delaware because she wasn’t good enough. So why had she won? They were better skaters, they kept saying to themselves over andover, and it was true. But they were not better performers, and there was nothing that they could do about it. Amy’s musicality—that she seemed to hear more in a piece of music than anyone else—and her capacity to project herself, to make people feel what she was feeling, both of those were simply God-given talents, which Oliver Young recognized and fostered.
    She went on lifting weights. Day after day, and she never liked it any better, never found it any more satisfying.