Silver Blades

One cold day at the end of December, Harriet Johnson and her mother, Olivia, were on their way to the skating rink as they always were at this time on a Tuesday morning. Harriet, who had just had her fifteenth birthday the week before, had started figure skating when she was ten. Her family doctor had suggested the sport as a way to strengthen Harriet's legs after suffering from a severe illness the previous year. Because Harriet's family was so poor, her oldest brother, Alec, started working a paper round to pay for a pair of rented skates for Harriet, and the owner of the rink let her skate for free. Her first day at the rink, Harriet had met Lalla Moore, a grand-looking girl her own age who had been skating since the age of three. Her father had been a famous figure skater, and after he and his wife died, Lalla was taken to live with her aunt Claudia, who wanted Lalla to be a figure skating champion like her late father. By the time Harriet and Lalla had turned eleven, the two girls were sharing all of Lalla's fancy lessons—skating lessons and classes with Lalla's tutor, as well as ballet and fencing classes. After Lalla gave Harriet her very own pair of figure skates for Christmas, Alec was able to use his extra pocket money to make a small garden in which to grow fruit to be sold in their father's shop. After months and months of lessons, Max had decided that Harriet was far more likely to become a world champion figure skater than Lalla was, so Harriet began to focus more on her skating and passing tests, while Lalla, whose entire life had up to that point had been centred around figure skating, figured out what to do.

    On this particular day, the bus that Harriet and Olivia were taking was running late because of the previous evening's snowstorm. Harriet had to hurry to put her beautiful white boots on in time to rush to the small, private rink for her and Lalla's lesson with Max. Max was a simply wonderful coach, always giving praise for things well-done, but was also strict with the necessity of practice and hard work. He was especially strict with Lalla's figures, mostly because she had a tendency to ignore them and focus on the free-skate, which she found more enjoyable. Harriet much preferred figures because the were delicate and precise and had to be practiced slowly, which was precisely why Lalla hated them. The jumps and spins of free-skate, on the other hand, required speed and power, which Harriet was not as good at, but Lalla loved.

    Harriet was currently working on trying to land an axel, which is a complicated jump in which the skater jumps off of one foot, (usually the left unless they are one of the few figure skaters in the world who are more comfortable spinning and jumping in the opposite direction from everyone else. Harriet, however, was not one of these people, so she jumped off of her left foot) spins one-and-a-half rotations in a tight position in the air, and lands on the other foot. Lalla had been able to land an axel since she was twelve, but she'd had a head start on her friend. Harriet had started working on this jump four-and-a-half months ago, and while everyone around her (including Nana and Miss Goldthorpe, who knew next to nothing about figure skating) could see the progress she was making, Harriet herself could not.

As she stepped onto the ice, Harriet pulled her wiry reddish hair out of her face into a ponytail so tight it made her already-large brown eyes seem even larger, and skated over to where Max and Lalla stood waiting for her. After a few laps of warm-up, Lalla skated the length of the ice, working on the figures she needed for her gold test in February, while Harriet went off into the corner to practice her axel. It was the most difficult jump she had ever attempted, and she hoped to be able to perform it in her first-ever skating exhibition that Max and Olivia agreed that she could give in April.

Max had told her that the best way to work on an axel was to practice a waltz jump into a loop. Between the combination of the two easier jumps, every aspect of an axel was performed; the takeoff, the air position, and the landing. After running through the combination jump seventeen or eighteen times, Harriet attempted a few axels, but she was not able to complete the required rotation on any of them.