Chapter 2 A Second Chance

My fingers clenched around the edge of the poster until it crumpled beneath my grip. Its smooth texture creaked under the pressure of my hand.

I wanted to yank it down, tear it into tiny pieces, and throw it into the trash just to make the irritation in my chest disappear.

I wanted to erase Joseph’s condescending gaze from my memory.

But just before my fingers tore through the top of the paper, my eyes caught a small line of text at the very bottom.

“This program is open to students with non-skating athletic backgrounds, including gymnastics, ballet, and track and field.”

My hand stopped instantly.

The breath I had been holding rushed out of me. I read the sentence three times. Every word felt like a needle prick, awakening nerves that had been dormant for two years.

“Lyla? Are you trying to destroy the poster?” Mia gently pushed my hand away. “You’ve looked so tense this whole time.”

I lowered my hand and clenched it beside my thigh. “No. I was just... reading it.”

“What’s the point of reading it when the guy who runs the rink is as scary as that?” Mia whispered, glancing toward the end of the hallway, where Joseph had just disappeared behind the glass doors. “Besides, you can’t even skate, Ly. Standing on ice with blades strapped to your feet is completely different from walking.”

Mia was right. Technically, I could not skate.

Two years ago, my job had been running across a spring floor, twisting through two rotations in the air, and landing precisely on a mat. My body had been trained to defy gravity with bare feet. Ice was a foreign territory I knew nothing about.

But the heat spreading across my palms refused to disappear.

I curled my fingers, feeling the tension in the muscles of my arms. An athlete’s physical instincts never truly died. The way my eyes measured distance, the way my shoulders maintained balance, even the muscle memory in my core when bearing weight, it was all still there. Trapped inside the body I had forced myself to turn into that of an ordinary person.

“I can learn,” I murmured unconsciously.

Mia turned toward me so quickly that her eyes widened. “What? Are you serious?”

“No,” I shot back, quickly trying to cover up the words that had slipped out of my mouth before I could stop them.

I turned my back to the bulletin board. “I was just kidding. Come on, let’s go to class.”

We continued down the now-quiet hallway. Yet my steps felt heavier with every passing second.

Each time my heel touched the cold corridor floor, my mind imagined the scrape of metal blades against ice. Could my heels and knees withstand it? Would the injury in my left ankle begin throbbing again under a different kind of pressure?

I touched my left ankle through my jeans. The surgical scar still felt like a stiff, raised line beneath the skin. The doctor had said the bone had healed perfectly. Only the ligaments still needed to be treated with caution.

On ice, the friction is different.

The voice of my former physical therapist suddenly echoed loudly in my mind. Back then, he had only been trying to comfort me as I cried on my hospital bed. But now, those words felt like an emergency exit waving to me in the darkness.

I stopped abruptly in the middle of the hallway.

“Mia, go ahead,” I said, turning around.

“Huh? Why? Professor Blake’s class starts in ten minutes!”

“I left something near the bulletin board,” I lied curtly.

Without waiting for Mia’s response, I strode back toward the main corridor.

I had not left anything behind. I simply needed to confirm one thing. My body needed an answer, not another fear for me to keep nurturing.

When I reached the now-empty bulletin board, I reached into my pocket and pulled out my phone. I aimed the camera at the registration QR code in the bottom corner of the poster.

My phone vibrated briefly, bringing up a link to the digital registration form. My fingers trembled as I typed my name into the field.

Lyla Carter.

When I reached the athletic history section, I hesitated for several seconds. My fingers tapped restlessly against the side of my phone.

Then I typed two words I had not spoken aloud to anyone in two years.

Former Floor Gymnast.

I pressed Submit.

The screen turned green, displaying an automatic confirmation message that my application had been successfully entered into the open selection system. My breath came out sharply. My heart was pounding incredibly fast, pumping adrenaline through my veins, an exhilarating sensation I had desperately missed.

“You have excellent flexibility, but your standing posture is far too rigid for a former gymnast.”

A deep, unfamiliar voice filled with authority suddenly came from my left.

I flinched and immediately turned off my phone.

A middle-aged man stood three steps away. He wore a dark windbreaker with a coach’s logo on the left side of his chest. His face was stern, with sharply defined cheekbones, and his piercing eyes were fixed on my left foot, which was bearing slightly less weight.

Coach Adrian Hayes. The head coach of the university’s figure skating team.

He held a clipboard in one hand, studying me from head to toe without the slightest trace of friendliness.

“You’re Lyla, aren’t you?” Coach Adrian asked, his voice calm but firm. “The girl Joseph was pointing at in front of the poster earlier?”

I swallowed, trying to hide my phone behind my back. “I was just... reading the announcement, Coach.”

“Your eyes weren’t just reading,” Coach Adrian replied curtly.

He stepped closer to the bulletin board and touched the edge of the poster I had crumpled earlier.

“You were assessing the risks.”

I stood straight, instinctively squaring my shoulders to conceal my nervousness.

Coach Adrian turned back to me. His gaze settled on my defensive posture.

“Tomorrow morning at six. Come to the ice rink. I want to see how much your body remembers about moving.”