I sit like a child while Kristen ties my laces, harassing me because I forgot how to do it myself. I wince when she yanks the strings and pinches my skin. She looks up at me with a devious smile.
"You bitch." I joke.
She stands up and offers me her hand, pulling me to my feet.
"Do you think you still have what it takes?" She asks me, walking away with a sway in her hips as if she weren't wearing razor thin blades as shoes.
"If I can't even remember how to lace up I doubt I'm going to be able to skate like I did when I was ten, Kris." She chuckles at my sarcastic tone..
I make sure to walk behind her so she can't she my wobbly steps as we head to the ice. Her transition from the padded floor to the freshly smoothed ice is seamless; walking one second and gliding the next. She joins Mariah and Ronnie in the center of the rink where they talk to an employee around our age.
I'm thankful that none of them are paying attention as I stumble onto the ice and immediately reach for the wall. I sniffle and wipe at my nose, the cold air in the building already starting to numb my extremities. I turn myself around by pulling the wall with one of my hands, keeping my legs stiff and straight. I must look really awkward. There's a ton of little kids skating today, and that eases my nerves little. At least I'll be out of this town by the time these squirts will be in high school. That way I don't have to worry about any of them harassing me for face planting right in front of them. A group of young boys fly past me, pretending to body check each other as they round the corner that I stupidly settled down in.
I finally muster up enough courage to gently push my body away from the wall and I immediately regret it. One of my feet slip out from under me and I jerk forward with flailing arms. I manage to stomp my foot back to the ice and end up in a half-bent position with my arms extended in front of me. I stand up straight again and wipe my hands down my hoodie. I don't understand how I can be sweating when it's so chilly in here.
Another group of kids skate past me quickly and with ease. I feel embarrassed, even though none of them seem to be paying attention to me.
I take a deep breath and hold it as I begin to shuffle my feet over top of the ice without picking them up. I praise myself for actually having covered some distance. I hear shrill laughs behind me and roll my eyes when all three of my friends speed past me on their skates, only to turn around and head towards me. Once in front of me, Ronnie grabs my hands and starts skating backwards, pulling me along with her. My legs buckle and slip and my eyes are wide staring at the ice underneath me.
"Guys I don't want to fall." I tell them with desperation in my voice. I don't dare take my eyes off of my unstable feet.
"That's a part of skating, Brae." Kristen retorts. "You fall on your ass and then you get back up."
I repeat Kristen's lame motivational phrase in a nasally voice, sticking out my tongue to mock her. She laughs at me and rushes to the other side of the rink, leaving fresh grooves in the ice behind her. Just as I let my legs get used to Ronnie pulling me, she lets go to chase after Kristen and I'm left alone with the momentum that Ronnie gave me. I hold my stretched palms in front of my body, ready to fall, but I don't. My knees buckle under me and somehow I regain my balance as I glide to a stop.
I decide to take a risk and raise my left foot from the ice for the first time. I use the tip of my bulky skate to dig into the ice and push off of it, but it gets wedged in a deep groove and I jerk forward. My legs fly out from underneath me and my arms fling out to my sides. My face is a foot from the solid ice when my arm is yanked back, sending a jolt of pain through my shoulder as my body twists to adjust to the hold. I don't hit the ice. Instead, I am laid down gently, by my dully throbbing arm, onto the frictionless surface. I close my eyes in embarrassment.
"Are you okay?"
Despite the fact that I'm laying on layers among layers of frozen water, my entire body suddenly buzzes with warmth. It's that voice again. I reluctantly open my eyes.
Humiliation floods over me as the boy from the concessions stand stares down at me, my hand still in his. A few strands of his long brown hair have snuck out of his headband and hang loosely over his forehead.
"Are you okay?" He repeats when I don't answer.
"Yeah. Uh, yeah. I - I'm fine." I stutter, afraid to move. He wraps his sturdy, warm hand around my wrist and hoists me up like I weigh nothing, stabilizing me with his other hand on my hip. I suck in a breath at the contact, alarmed by the sensation that his fingers had ignited on the bare skin under my hoodie. He moves both of his hands to my bent elbows, guiding me to the wall.
"You don't skate much do you?" He inquires.
"What gave it away?" I joke, my hands finding the railing and holding on for dear life.
"Well, the seemingly avoidable head-first dive into solid ice was the first sign." His voice is low but clear, his words come out sounding slow and teasing.
“Well,” I challenge, copying his teasing tone, “The seemingly avoidable damage caused to my shoulder tells me that you don’t usually save lives.” I reach my chilled hand up to massage my arm through my sweatshirt, dramatizing my pain.
I stiffen, completely dumbfounded, as his face splits into a breath-taking smile, revealing the most prominent dimples I’ve ever seen. He shakes his head while he laughs at me and I can do nothing but stare until he speaks again.
“Well, if I’m not mistaken, you just admitted to me saving your life.” He removes his hands from the wall to shove them in his pockets and turns around, leaning his back against the wall with his head at an angle, watching me.
It takes me a second to formulate a quirky response, still a little unstable after seeing his smile.
“Well,” I start, but quickly change my mind, deciding that response would be lame. I settle for, “You just didn’t want blood on your pretty ice.”
He chuckles again and looks towards the center of the arena where two young girls are starting a game of limbo.
“It’s not my ice,” he says, “It’s my dad’s.”
I respond instantly, grateful we’ve switched to a topic that doesn’t require much thought.
“This is your dad’s arena?”
“It always has been.” He says, moving away from the wall to drift in a half-circle around me, “I thought everyone knew that.”
There isn’t a hint of snobbishness in his voice, he’s just stating a fact. I don’t doubt that everyone in Greenson knows that this kid’s father owns the ice rink; most of the town is probably on a first name basis with him. Maybe if I’d paid more attention to iceskating and whatnot at school, instead of putting my headphones in whenever the topic arose, I would have already known that.
“What’s your dad’s name? Wait, first, what’s your name?” I ask, turning to lean my back against the wall while he continues to skate small circles around me. He gracefully stops in front of me and smiles.
“I’m Harry Styles, and my dad is Dan Styles. And you’re Braeton.”
My breath hitches in my chest.
“How do you know my name?”
“We go to school together. And Kristen shouted it while you were hiding from me.” He tries to conceal his grin but loses the battle, dimples popping.
I feel like sinking to the ground and assuming the fetal position in order to contain my overwhelming embarrassment, but I keep my composure. This is weird. I’ve never gotten embarrassed in front of a guy before; usually I’m the one leading the conversation and ultimately in control of all possible outcomes.
I let out a strangled laugh as I reach up to massage my injured shoulder again. I notice that he - Harry - has a slight slouch to his shoulders, and a few freckles on his face, and his collar bones poke out of the neck of his sweatshirt, and he’s still wearing his athletic shorts with his skates, and his skates seem like they’ve been used quite a lot, but I can tell from the design that they’re hockey skates, and I wonder if he plays hockey, and I wonder how I hadn’t noticed him at school before, and I see those green eyes staring into mine and blurring the rest of the room from my vision and making me feel like I’m standing in a grass field in the middle of the summer wearing a flowing dress and picking dandelions and spinning around in circles in slow motion, and I have to physically shake this chaotic train of thoughts from my head when I realize that his mouth is moving and he’s talking to me.
“W-what?” I blink wildly, bringing the rest of the rink back into focus. He stretches his open palm towards me, offering me his hand, and the corner of his mouth pulls into a smirk as he repeats himself,
“I said, would you like to learn how to skate?”