When Samantha de Rosetis started falling again and again, everyone had theories. The ladies at the Pro Shop, including Samantha’s mother and mine, had different ways of putting it, different names: they said she was getting buxom, that she was just filling out up there, nothing unusual. “Maturing.” As soon as your body gains a bit of diameter, Mrs. Garbett was fond of declaring, your turn gets heavier—it’s physics, it happens.

Davis, who worked the two-hour shift at the snack bar before hockey practice, had his version of this theory: Big Boobs, Bad Balance.

And I had my own ideas.

It was true that Samantha was starting to grow, not only up there but all over, in her hips and thighs, lengthwise too, and Mrs. de Rosetis would complain to her daughter that this process was costing hundreds in dress alterations. Samantha owned only three dresses, one in each primary color, which she’d been reusing in competition for almost two years, and the spandex butt and shoulders were becoming threadbare and pilly. Despite Samantha’s begging before every competition, Mrs. de Rosetis refused to replace them on the grounds that Skating is about style not sequins, a sentiment the other girls’ mothers furtively regarded as negligent and cruel. Mrs. Garbett, who always bought her daughter Gisèle two identical new dresses for each competition—one to be hung afterward in their private shrine of competition memorabilia, both aspangle with Swarovski rhinestones, pearls, laces, sequins, bugle beads—demurred in private that it was the girls’ job to skate and the mothers’ to make the girls presentable, elegant even, because after all figure skating was more than anything about elegance and grace in every respect, and maybe Samantha wouldn’t be so ungracefully falling on her fanny so often if she had a little more encouragement from the parental end of things, in the form of a half-decent dress every now and again, but oh who was she to judge? Leave that to the judges.

At any rate, Samantha’s now-frequent spills were rough on her costumes, which were getting ragged along the back. When the frill of her red dress parachuted out during her spins, you could see white moth-holes on either side of her glutes where the batting of her crashpads crept out. Bruises, appeared in vivid blotches of yellow and violet on her elbows and knees. For the other girls—and me, too—commenting on Samantha’s decline was a secondary sport, and we’d decided with inquisitorial conviction that her falls were somehow her fault, and her failures were punishments. We could not name something as likely as growth for her falls, because no matter how badly we wished ourselves frozen petite, we knew it could visit any of us, and that we would only be able to show ourselves as much forgiveness as we had shown one another.

That’s why the concept of fat was so attractive: it was a way to hold a girl accountable for her worthiness. You didn’t even have to be fat to be called fat, as it was a matter of composure as much as physique; you could behave fat and speak fat. You could also invent fat. Renata claimed to have seen a pack of cigarettes in Samantha’s locker, which everyone knew only made you skinny at first. Gisèle added that she had seen Samantha at last year’s Baystate Games eat five entire slices of sausage pizza all by herself, crust included, not even sopping it with the napkin first.

I could barely watch.

No wonder Samantha can’t land a toe loop to save her life, we agreed, she eats like a garbage can. “Buxom” became the by-word—as in, “Better not eat that last french fry, Kelly, you don’t want to get too buxom”—for what we feared to become: heavy, scrutinized, grown.

* * *

Renata Till, the strategist, the smartest of us, grounded her judgments of Samantha in technique: “It’s in the way she dips her butt down before a jump. It wasn’t a problem before, but now that she’s doing the hard doubles, her bad form is coming back to haunt her. She never followed Denise’s advice back when she was learning, so she’s kind of had this coming all along.” Renata wore her glasses on and off the ice, and was seen as the smart one mainly for that reason.

“Her head’s getting as big as her ass,” Gisèle agreed, crossing her arms and swiveling her head laterally around her shoulders, one of her stock gestures, the cobra-neck. To which Kelly Odenkirk agreed: “Yeah.” Kelly was two years younger than us; so she was the young one. Renata was the clever one. Samantha used to be the most talented one; now she was the fat one. And I was the Asian one. Really, Gisèle was the only one who fit in at all.

* * *

Into this orgy of condemnation I had cast my approval, mm-hmm, but at heart I never doubted Samantha’s ability. She put in twenty-six hours of rink-time a week on top of her sterling academic regimen, plus the supplementary ballet, and though she loomed at least three inches above the rest of us, her frame was still solid, not an ounce of jiggle. Even after she’d blown her ACL when Kelly accidentally sheared her on the ice two years earlier, she was only away from practice for a week before returning to rehabilitate by the side of the rink with a set of wide blue P.T. bands. She had been skating longer, learned more jumps, and had worn more gold than everyone else combined, regional, state, tri-state. I knew her: she was too passionate to let a small decentering of gravity ruin her. I knew this even though we had not spoken then for six months.

Even if her height was affecting her balance a little, there was still no explaining the stunning inelegance that afflicted her now, not only at practice but in competition too. At Regionals she took one fall after another, cheating each jump by spreading her arms too early so she would come a quarter-turn short and land shakily on one foot, the other leg way off-center, and the blade would zoom out from under her and her body hung such a long time in the air as it arced toward the ice that the crowd winced before she’d even made contact, and the breath that was collectively drawn as she left the ice would subside into a moan, half-sympathetic and half-pained: Awwwooh. The other girls and I groaned our support, but as Samantha swished off the ice, faintly clutching her hip in the aftermath of injured applause, Gisèle leaned over and nudged me. I watched Samantha as she sat gingerly on the bench by the gate and wished I could tell her one of the things she used to tell me after I would fall (“Just one less fall you’ll have to worry about”) but the thought was interrupted by Gisèle’s mutter at my ear: “I really hate to watch this. She’s like Charlie Brown out there.”

So the rumors kept circling and derision mounted with each new day’s worth of Samantha’s falls and injuries. She walked stiffly by the changing benches, taking short, mincing steps to ease the stress on her knees and lower back, and our conversation would ebb as she passed us to go change by herself in the girls’ bathroom. She didn’t say hi to us anymore, which we understood as shame, and since she was usually the first one on the ice, we would have a few minutes to circulate our newest observations—did you see how her legs looked like they were rotting off?—before following her to the ice, where we traded smirks and raised eyebrows as we anticipated more shouted exasperation by her coach Denise:

“Bend your knees and straighten—”

“—learned this two years ago—”

“—tuck as you fall, you’re going to kill yourself if you keep landing on your backside—honey, you’re not even falling right. You’re going to wreck your back!”

Only once, we heard Samantha shout back, in a strained pitch: “It’s mine to wreck!”

[End of excerpt]