Rated

by Melissa Grey

  Speed had always been Hana’s greatest strength as a skater. Today she’d pulled her hair back from her face into a ponytail, as she always did before practice. She was skating so fast across the nearly empty rink that the end of her ponytail lashed against her cheeks like a whip. Her coach, an imperious Russian veteran of the sport and former Olympic champion, watched her fly by from the boards. Maxim Dmitriev was ancient, but his advanced age did nothing to reduce his demand as a coach. A scowl marred the lines of his weathered skin, but since Hana had never seen him without it, she was pretty sure that his face just looked that way even when he was happy.

  He wasn’t happy now.

  She’d removed her smartwatch for practice—she never wore it while she was skating—but was sure that if it had been strapped on her wrist, she would have felt it buzz with Dmitriev’s displeasure. He wasn’t afraid to dock her rating if he felt like she wasn’t trying hard enough. Hana’s rating depended not just on the judges she faced in competition. Her own coach’s approval was paramount. And Dmitriev was unforgiving, which was precisely why Hana’s parents paid him an absurd amount of money to turn her into a champion.

  She shot by him and his scowling face, her blades scratching against the ice as she set up the jump that had eluded her all afternoon.

  The triple Axel. The crown jewel of ladies’ figure skating. An element so difficult that only a handful of women had ever successfully completed it in international competition. A few girls around Hana’s age had tried their hands at quadruple jumps—a mainstay of men’s skating—but none had managed to work up enough consistency to incorporate them into their programs. The elusive triple Axel was fiendishly difficult, but Hana knew she could land it. Deep in her heart, she knew.

  Unfortunately, her body wasn’t nearly as sure.

  The jump had a longer lead-in than the others in her short program. She needed to build up enough speed to launch herself from a forward outside edge—it was the only jump with a forward takeoff—and spin three and a half times before landing in a backward glide. In skating’s code of points, falling on a fully rotated triple Axel was still worth more than cleanly landing a double. It was a risk, but one worth taking.

  Hana squared her shoulders, bent her knee, and skidded the blade of her working leg into the ice, pushing into the air. The world whizzed by in a blur as she pulled her arms into her chest to speed her rotations. One and a half turns, two, three—

  Pain shot up Hana’s hips as she slammed into the ice. Again.

  “That’s enough.” Dmitriev’s thick accent was as icy as the Siberian lakes on which he’d learned to skate. He hailed from the city of Novosibirsk, and any time Hana grumbled about the cold, he was quick to remind her that she was soft and spoiled. Had she grown up in a place like Novosibirsk, she’d be as hard and cold as he was.

  Hana pushed herself up, brushing the snow off her leggings. She shuddered to think what her legs must look like under the stretchy black fabric. A symphony of black and blue and that disgusting mustard yellow.

  “I can do it,” Hana said, though her voice quavered in a way she knew Dmitriev wouldn’t miss. She’d started their session so sure that a clean landing was just within her reach, but with every fall her certainty crumbled, bit by bit. What had felt strong and light as air had grown heavier and heavier as the hours wore on. Her limbs weighed her down in every jump and spin.

  “Not today.” Dmitriev beckoned her to the boards and like an obedient soldier she followed. She skidded to a stop in front of him, the pain settling deeper into her sore muscles and bruised bones. “You are too slow. Like slug.”

  Sluggish, Hana thought. It was one of her least favorite words, climbing up the ranks every time her coach slung it at her like a sharp rock. He’d been saying it more and more lately.

  The worst part was that Hana knew why.

  She had ingested six hundred calories all day, each one meticulously tracked in the little black notebook tucked into the side pocket of her backpack. Not enough even for a person leading a sedentary lifestyle. And most assuredly not enough for an elite athlete of Hana’s caliber. But the thinner she was, the faster she would spin, the higher she would fly. It was a double-edged sword, and every day she buried that blade deeper and deeper into her bruised and battered body.

  Dmitriev’s frown deepened as he looked down at her. He wasn’t very tall—few male singles skaters were—but Hana was petite, even for a skater.

  “Your conditioning is no good. We have to build up stamina and strength.”

  Hana nodded, trying to mask how winded she truly was. She doubted that Dmitriev would be fooled, but she had to try anyway. If he didn’t think she was mentally strong enough to compete at the highest level of her sport, she knew he would not hesitate to move on to a new pupil, abandoning her without a coach.

  “I think I’m coming down with something.” She sniffled for good measure. Her nose was usually runny at the rink anyway, so she had that working in her favor. “I’ve been feeling off all day.”

  An understatement, to be sure.

  Dmitriev hummed thoughtfully. From the depths of his coat, he produced a small beat-up wire-ruled notebook and a pen. He scribbled a few lines on a piece of paper and ripped it from the notebook.

  “We will end here today. Now you will go to this shop. Ask for these herbs. They are the best for what ails you.”

  Hana looked at the list. His handwriting was, as always, utterly illegible. She could just make out the name and address of the shop, but the identities of whatever herbs he’d written down were beyond her. That he hadn’t specified what it was he thought ailed her wasn’t lost on her.

  “Okay,” she said, slipping the scrap of paper into the pocket of her snugly fitted fleece. Normally, she warmed up enough during her after-school practice sessions to eventually shed the fleece, but today she’d remained chilled no matter how hard she worked. Maybe a nice herbal tea was exactly what she needed. It wouldn’t fix what was truly wrong with her—too many things to count—but maybe, for just a few minutes, it would make her forget about them.

  She wanted to tell Dmitriev that she could keep going, that she could fight through whatever was ailing her, but when her coach made up his mind, it was made up. Nothing she could say or do would change it. And even if she did manage to convince him, she wasn’t entirely sure she’d be able to live up to the promise. She ached in places she hadn’t known a body could ache. Lately, it felt as though she wasn’t recovering the way she used to, despite the ice baths and the anti-inflammatories and the cortisone injections. A skater’s body had to be accustomed to a baseline state of discomfort, but she felt like she was slipping deeper and deeper into a quagmire of her own invention.

  She stepped off the ice and slipped on her blade guards. They were gold, like the blades on her skates.

  “Wishful thinking,” Dmitriev had called it when he’d supervised her selection.

  “Positive thinking,” Hanna had replied, but his words had stuck in her mind, surfacing whenever she was alone with nothing but silence and her own fear to keep her company.

  She was afraid almost constantly. Afraid that he was right, that she would never capture the most elusive medal in the world, an Olympic gold. That her rating would hover at good without ever reaching truly great. That all her hard work and sacrifice would amount to nothing.

  Positive thinking, she reminded herself, even though she was starting to forget what such thinking felt like. She wondered if she had ever really known at all.

  * * *

  Hana took the bus to the shop, tucked away on a small side street near the downtown area. Dusk had fallen when she’d been on the ice, and shadows lengthened in the spaces streetlights couldn’t touch. Hana’s experience of sunlight was limited to a few snatches on Maplethorpe’s campus between classes. She rose before dawn to get to practice and arrived home well after dark. Her parents were home maybe half the year. The other half, they were traveling for her mother’s competitions or attend
ing conferences or seminars or whatever it was they did with their time. Hana honestly didn’t know. She didn’t much care either. She loved them, and in their way they loved her, but that love was best served at a comfortable distance.

  Hana alighted from the bus, squinting into the evening gloom to find the sign for the apothecary. The fact that an apothecary existed in this corner of the world, in this century, was something of a curiosity to Hana. She hoisted her skate bag higher on her shoulder and walked toward an awning flanked by two crescent moons. A bell rung as she pushed the door open, an antiquated little sound that matched the antiquated little shop.

  A wild barrage of scents assaulted her the moment she crossed the threshold. Incense hung thick in the air, cloying in its intensity. The power of it made Hana sway on her feet. She had to close her eyes and grope for a nearby surface—a tall mahogany bookshelf that matched nothing else in the room—to keep herself upright. The hollow pit in her stomach widened, like a chasm torn by a glacier. She’d been light-headed all day. Practice, and now the strange and potent scents of what surely had to be some kind of witch’s brew, was not helping.

  She opened her eyes to see a black cat, heavily pregnant, sauntering across her path. It gazed at her with deeply unimpressed amber eyes.

  “Don’t mind Sprinkles,” came a voice from the back of the shop. “She’s in a mood.”

  The voice sounded vaguely familiar, but the speaker was kneeling as she unpacked a box of candles to stack on a lower shelf. The girl stood and turned around. She was wearing a bulky black cardigan, the sleeves of which swallowed her hands, and an aubergine top that matched the purple gloss on her lips. Her hair was mostly dark blond with a hint of lavender coloring the ends. Hana recognized her immediately.

  The Witch of Maplethorpe.

  The girl’s actual name—it would probably be impolite to refer to her as a witch—eluded Hana. Thankfully, the girl didn’t seem much interested in exchanging pleasantries.

  “Can I help you with something?” Her tone implied that she would rather not, but it wasn’t belligerent enough to put Hana off her task. When her coach told her to do something, she did it.

  “Yes, actually.” She groped in her pocket for Dmitriev’s hastily scribbled note. “I’m looking for some herbs.” She handed the Witch of Maplethorpe the note.

  “Looks like somebody slept through penmanship class,” the girl said as she squinted at Dmitriev’s illegible scrawl.

  “I don’t know if they had those back in the Bronze Age.”

  The Witch of Maplethorpe cracked an actual smile. It softened her face significantly.

  “I think I can just about make these out.” The girl squinted at the paper, as if urging it to relinquish its secrets. “Might have to go to the back to find some of these, though. Herbal remedies that taste like butt aren’t exactly flying off the shelf.”

  Hana nodded and immediately wished she hadn’t. The room swayed on its axis. Or maybe she was the one swaying. She reached out to place a steadying hand on the countertop. The sensation reminded her of the head rush she got when she came out of a scratch spin. She squeezed her eyes shut, willing her equilibrium to find itself.

  “Hey.”

  Hana blinked her eyes open. The Witch of Maplethorpe was looking at her expectantly, as if she’d been speaking to Hana for some time. But her eyes couldn’t have been closed for more than a second. Probably. Possibly? Hana wasn’t so sure.

  “You okay?”

  Hana nodded again, because apparently she was a fool. Her grip on the counter tightened, the skin across her knuckles turning white, then pink. “I’m fine.”

  “Uh-huh.” The girl held Dmitriev’s note aloft. “I’m gonna go find the rest of these.”

  The rest … ?

  Hana looked down at the counter to find two little baggies full of dried herbs sitting on top of it. Those hadn’t been there before. Time had gone weird and elastic, and Hana didn’t like it one bit.

  The beaded curtain that separated the front of the shop from the back tinkled like chimes as the other girl went through it. Hana watched the long strands sway in her wake.

  The world tilted the way it did when she was off her axis in a jump. Sometimes, even the jumps with wonky takeoffs could be saved with a hand down or a two-footed landing or sheer determination. But some couldn’t, no matter how hard she tried. Those were the times she knew she was going to fall.

  And fall she did.

  The curtain swayed again as the other girl emerged, just in time to watch Hana sink to the ground, her fingers sliding down the glass display case as she went.

  * * *

  “Holy crap. Wake up. Wake. Up.”

  Hana woke up and immediately wished she hadn’t.

  A light was shining in her eyes and she tried to bat it away, before realizing it was a lamp on the table beside her. Hana squinted at it from her position on the couch.

  Wait a minute.

  How did she get on a couch?

  The last thing she remembered was gawking at the Witch of Maplethorpe.

  “Oh, thank the goddess.”

  Hana blinked at the voice. As her eyes adjusted to the light, the girl resolved from a blur into a person. She was kneeling next to the sagging, well-worn couch. She stared down at Hana, her heavily lined eyes wide and worried.

  “I thought you were dead.”

  It was a minor struggle, reaching for words, but Hana found them all the same. “That seems … dramatic.”

  “You went down like a marionette that just had its strings cut. That was dramatic.” The girl reached for something on the table and held it out to Hana.

  It was a glass of water. The sight of it made her realize just how parched her throat was.

  She accepted it with as much grace as her shaking hands could muster—not very much—and sipped. Her stomach roiled in revolt, displeased at being so assaulted after a day of deprivation.

  “Are you okay?”

  Hana sipped her water again so she wouldn’t have to answer. They didn’t have the time to discuss all the ways in which she wasn’t okay.

  The girl sighed. “Okay, fine. Do you have a name?”

  “Everyone has a name,” Hana mumbled into her glass. Realizing how rude it sounded, she added, “Hana.”

  The other girl nodded. “I’m Tamsin Moore. Is there someone you want me to call?”

  Tamsin. It was an odd name. It suited her, this Witch of Maplethorpe. Maybe more so than her reputation. Tamsin didn’t seem nearly as misanthropic as Hana had been led to believe.

  Hana shook her head too fast. A surge of nausea threatened to erupt, even though she knew there was nothing in her stomach to expel.

  “No, no,” Hana said in a rush. “It’s okay. It was just a dizzy spell. Not a big deal.”

  Tamsin’s eyebrows inched upward. “Really? Because you were pretty much out cold.”

  “Pretty much isn’t entirely.”

  “There was a vague attempt at shuffling your feet as I carried you to the couch, but okay. Have it your way.”

  “Thanks,” Hana said quietly. She looked at her surroundings. They were in an office, from the looks of it. A large desk sat under the oppressive weight of several sloppy stacks of papers. The faint scent of incense hung in the air. There was a small altar in the corner covered with a dozen partially melted candles, a statue of a wide-hipped female figure, and what looked like an honest-to-god crystal ball.

  “Are you really a witch?” Hana asked.

  Tamsin blinked at her for a moment before a laugh bubbled from her lips.

  “No, but my mom is.”

  Hana didn’t know what to do with that information, so she just stored it away to mull over later.

  “I’m sorry for passing out in your shop.” It seemed like the right thing to say.

  “Don’t sweat it. It was the most exciting thing to happen here all day. Oh! Before I forget.” Tamsin held up a little black notebook, its corners soft and round from use. “This fell out of
your backpack.”

  Hana’s hand shot out and snatched the notebook from Tamsin’s grasp. Nausea rolled in her gut. Her body wasn’t ready to move quite so abruptly just yet, but the thought of someone flipping through her deepest, darkest secrets made Hana want to hurl and then die.

  “Whoa, there.” Tamsin held out her hands in a placating gesture, as if she expected Hana to lash out like a wounded beast. In fairness, that was exactly what Hana had done. “I didn’t read your diary, weirdo. I wasn’t raised by a pack of socially inept wolves.”

  Hana cycled through a number of possible responses, the book clutched tightly to her chest. She settled on the most basic. “I’m sorry. I just … I write dumb, embarrassing things in here sometimes.”

  “No worries. Girl’s gotta have her secrets. I respect that,” Tamsin said. “Besides, not like I’d let you read my grimoire.”

  “Is that, like, a spell book?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you really have one?”

  “No.”

  “Oh.”

  A smirk ticked at the corner of Tamsin’s lips. “You sound disappointed.”

  “I’m not,” Hana said, even though she kind of was.

  “Does the infamous Witch of Maplethorpe fail to live up to your expectations?”

  Hana shrugged. It felt nice, this casual banter. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d shared anything of the sort with someone her own age.

  Tamsin sat back on her heels, casting an appraising eye over Hana. “You sure you’re okay?”

  A door slammed in the front of the shop, saving Hana from having to answer.

  “Tamsin! Sunshine, I’m home!”

  “Sunshine?” Hana asked. Tamsin didn’t seem like a sunshine.

  “Ugh, gross.” Tamsin pushed herself to stand, brushing her hands on the thighs of her artfully torn black jeans. “In the office, Mom!”

  All the shouting was making Hana’s skull pulsate as if it were trying to liquefy her brain.

  An older woman entered the room, and Hana did a double take. If one were to scrape off the layers of dark eye makeup from around Tamsin’s blue eyes, she and her mother would be nearly identical. Mrs. Moore had aged astonishingly well. She didn’t look old enough to have borne a child Tamsin’s age. And there was a way to how she carried herself that seemed utterly foreign to Hana. Her limbs were loose and her steps assured. In contrast, Hana’s mother had a gait that was as clipped and precise as everything else about her. Tamsin’s looked like she would be equally at home fronting for a gently alternative rock band or telling fortunes in a tent at a Renaissance festival.