Summer's End Read Free Page B

of her that I don’t know at all.”
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    Amy could not wait a whole week for her next lesson. Please please please , could she have another one now? She would do anything, anything .
    Her parents sat down and talked to her. As long as she worked hard, they said, she could skate all she wanted.
    Worked hard? What were they talking about? Book reports, math problems, that was work. This was skating.
    She could walk to the rink, so she went every day after school. She watched the hockey practices, she watched the Zamboni man, and she skated. She skated endlessly, forever. She never got tired of it.
    She had no idea if she was any good. She didn’t care, she just loved it so much. She even read a book that spring—a pictoral biography of Peggy Fleming.
    Then one afternoon during the last week of school she came home from the rink to find her duffel bag laid outon her bed. She stared at it. It was heavy green canvas with a zipper and a single handle.
    Duffel bags. That meant Minnesota, packing to go to Minnesota. Her family had a cabin on a lake in the northern part of the state, and that’s where they spent the summer, the whole summer. Their cabin was in the middle of a forest, miles and miles from any town, and even that town was too small to have a rink. She would have to go the whole summer without skating. She couldn’t do it. She just couldn’t.
    But she had to. No one gave her a choice.
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    â€œThis is going to make me sound like a horrible snob,” Hal was saying, “but we didn’t have a lot in common with the other skating families. It wasn’t merely that they were obsessed with their children’s lives to an extent that seemed very unhealthy to us, but their notions of success were so limited. All they could think about was winning competitions and making money.”
    Gwen could easily understand how a person’s vision could get “limited” to that, especially if you didn’t have the family money Hal said his wife had had. “What were your definitions of success?”
    â€œCreating beauty. Expressing the music. I think if we helped Amy at all, it was managing to instill that in her. If she did something lovely, if she made the audience feel something, then she had succeeded regardless of what scores she got.”
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    Amy’s ethereal childhood beauty stayed with her. Her mother came from an aristocratic background—three hundred years of privileged men marrying the prettiest girls they could find. That heritage showed in Amy. She remained lovely. Her arms, legs, and neck were willowy and graceful; her strength came in long, clean lines rather than in bunchy knots of muscle. Her torso was lean and compact, and her back was the most flexible her pediatrician had ever seen.
    â€œShe needs to be with someone better than me,” her coach said. “There’s nothing in Iowa for her.” The coach recommended a training facility in Delaware. A number of families who lived close to the training center took in boarders to help meet their own children’s expenses. The local schools were used to giving the young skaters plenty of release time, or tutors could easily be found for those who wanted to be taught at home.
    Eleanor had gone to boarding school; sending a child from home was not strange to her. Amy herself loved the idea. This was her dream, to skate all the time, to train with the best.
    The rink was one place where she was always special. She would be bent over her skates, lacing them up, and she would hear the coaches, the other parents, whispering her name in the way that teachers had always whispered Phoebe’s and Ian’s names. She liked that. At home she felt like an afterthought, Amy the Afterthought. On the ice she was someone else. She was the one people thought about first.
    Not in Delaware. Not at the training center there. She wasn’t the best anymore. At first she didn’t even seem very