From the Fan Fiction Unbound Archive,
posted by conTessaofthecastle:
Daphne walked even faster, concentrating on the space-shifting spell. She could sense Astoria right behind her. As Daphne carefully uttered the incantation, focused only on the sensation in her fingertips and the Portal of Arden, Astoria stumbled on a tree root and fell toward her. Daphne didn’t see it, but as soon as Astoria grabbed Daphne’s arm to keep herself from falling, Daphne felt a surge of power through her hands. She heard Astoria gasp. A gust of air swirled around them. When she opened her eyes, Astoria was gone. Daphne stood alone in the forest.
Daphne closed her eyes, trying to focus on what she had done differently when she cast the spell this time. She had been saying the words when suddenly Astoria touched her arm. Something changed when Astoria touched her that made the spell take effect.
Soph.
This afternoon, we put away the laptops—Celestine tells us, “Put your quills down”—and go skating. I was hoping for this and, luckily, Betty packed my Jacksons, which are in the bottom of my bag. When I pull them out in our room, Tess knits her brow.
“What?”
“Nothing, Soph. I didn’t know we were supposed to bring skates. They usually provide them.” She pulls on thick socks, almost as thick as the ones she lent me.
Uh oh. Maybe I’ll be the only one. Well, whatever. These skates fit me perfectly, so I’m bringing them. I haven’t skated at all this winter, much to Mom’s chagrin. I’ve been doing it since I was a kid in the Alps, when Mom and Papa skied down slopes much too dangerous for me. In the middle grades, it was my chosen winter sport at Partridge, but then I got to the upper school and could just take gym and do other extracurrics, like the literary magazine. I also gave up skating because Mom wanted me to compete and offered to buy me sparkly, short dresses and feathered headpieces. No thanks.
We walk out of the lodge in a big group to a yellow school bus waiting in the driveway. Tess was right. No one else is carrying skates. I see Orly take a window seat and sit next to her. I’m feeling protective of Orly. Chris, Yin, and Keisha are all sitting together. Tess goes past them and sits with Gabriela.
I ask, “Do you like skating, Orly?”
She turns her head from the window, and it’s obviously an effort for her to respond. “Never done it, Soph. They probably don’t have any skates big enough for me anyway.”
“Oh, skating is fun, Orly. I hope you’ll come out with me.”
She frowns.
“Try not to think about it too hard. It’s like dancing; once you try it, you can’t stop. I almost wish I still did it for school.”
“Okay, Soph. Thank you.”
I settle in the seat right next to her with our shoulders touching, and we ride in silence.
After about twenty minutes, the bus pulls into a small parking lot, and I see a little building and a frozen pond. The sun is out now, and part of the pond has been cleared for skating. A path leads through the snow from the parking lot to the building, and another connects the building to the pond. Everyone goes into the building, where there are dozens of pairs of skates for men and women.
I see Orly linger in the doorway and motion to her. She bites her lip, saying, “I don’t see any that are likely to fit me, Soph.” She tells me her size in a small voice.
“I’ll find you a pair. Have a seat on the bench, and I’ll be right over.” I have no trouble finding her a pair. She stares at me, doubt still clouding her face as I sit on the bench. “Give me a minute to lace up, and I’ll help you with yours.”
Orly sighs as if she’s very unhappy, but when I kneel in front of her to lace up her skates, her eyes are friendly. “Thanks, Soph. You’re a peach.”
I stand and reach out my hand. “Come on, let’s go down to the pond. You don’t have to skate, but you might want to try it. I promise it’s something you’ll never forget.” She stands gingerly, and we walk down with everyone else. My breath is like smoke. I usually skate on indoor rinks, where it’s warmer. The ice is rougher than at a rink, but there’s a lot of room to build up speed.
There are plastic deck chairs and wooden benches at the edges of the skating area. Several of the girls sit on them, adjusting their skates and talking to each other. Orly sits at the end of a bench and eyes me warily. “Give me a minute, Soph?”
“Sure, Orly.” Janaye is already on the ice, and I skate over to her. “Been to the rink at Chelsea, Janaye?”
She grins at me, and I see that she’s a little unsteady. “LeFrak, Soph, duh! In Prospect Park. But I’ve only been a couple of times!” I turn a circle around her and reach for her hand. She laughs. “Nuh uh, I’ll fall on my butt!” I see only a couple of other girls out on the ice. Tess skates smoothly, in big arcs. That’s not surprising, since she’s from here. Chris is sitting on one of the benches by the bonfire on the shoreline. She doesn’t have skates on. Keisha skates over to her and sits. They are too far away for me to hear them, but Chris shakes her head.
She’s not far from Orly, and when I see Janaye sit, I skate in that direction. I don’t want them hassling Orly. As I close in on them, I hear Chris explaining to Janaye that she never learned how to skate. Janaye offers to teach her, but Chris shakes her head. Yin skates up to them and sits with Chris also.
With both hands extended, I skate up to Orly farther down on the bench. “Are you ready to try?” She rolls her eyes, but smiles without opening her mouth and stands, holding on to the bench. “Take my hands and keep your knees bent, like when you can’t reach anything to hang on to on the subway.”
“Soph, slowly, please.” She’s still smiling, though. “I’ve never ridden the subway on skates!”
I can’t help grinning. I do love the sound of skates on the ice, scraping and cutting. I watch Orly’s eyes to make sure she doesn’t panic and slowly skate backward, guiding her to the middle of the pond. “Orly, you’re doing great!”
“I think you’re doing it, Soph, not me.” She’s wobbly and hangs on to me hard.
I remember what my first instructor said. “Use your legs now to go forward; push a little with the edge of each skate when you do.” She stumbles a little, but doesn’t fall. Her face clouds, then eases. I encourage her. “Good! Take it slow.” That makes me think of a children’s song about a turtle my nanny used to play. I’m a terrible singer, but I try. “Take it from me. Sometimes you gotta take it slow!”
Orly laughs. “You’re crazy, Soph. Good crazy, darlin’, but crazy!” I let go of one of her hands, and her eyes widen. She stumbles, then rights herself, and I can see how graceful she is.
“I’m not going to let go of you altogether until you’re ready; I promise!”
“Okay. I don’t guess I get a free ride forever.” She laughs shakily, and furrows her brow.
“Bend forward a little and tuck your arms in. Keep your body loose. You’re doing super great!” I pivot, skate behind her, and come up next to her so that we’re a pair. “Look at us!”
“Soph, you go on ahead. Show me what you can do.”
I examine the open expanse of ice. It’s usually much more crowded when I skate, except for lessons. I make a circle, then another one, then a figure eight. The cold air makes me feel as if I could go faster than ever before. I go to the far edge and look back at Orly, who has slowed to a stop and is looking at me expectantly. I build up speed and do a waltz jump. I hear whooping and look over to see several girls skating at one end of the pond. I can’t help it. I bow my head and circle back to the far end. I know I’m showing off. I skate backward, holding Orly’s gaze, gather speed, and then do a flip. My landing is shaky, but I hear more whoops and Orly grins, shaking her head.
I see Tess again. She’s pretty good. She’s not doing anything special, but she knows what she’s doing and she’s graceful. I wouldn’t have put that together with what I know of her already: the funny combination of reserve and a steady indignation at everything I blurt out. She doesn’t see me, so I turn and skate up next to her from behind. “Hi!”
“Very impressive, Soph.”
I can’t tell whether she’s being honest or huffy. She has that type of voice. “Thanks! You must do a lot of skating yourself.”
“Nothing fancy for me, Soph. But you know, up here the winter is long.” She adds, “You’re a really good skater. You look like a professional.” I guess she was impressed after all.
Tess.
I assumed Soph doesn’t know how to skate, since she grew up in a city. I assumed wrong. Not only does she skate, not only did she bring her own expensive-looking skates, packed, apparently, by the same Betty who forgot her extra socks, but she’s a figure skater, with fancy moves and that confidence she brings to everything. I find myself watching her do turns and flips. She looks beautiful on the ice, graceful and really happy to be there.
I’m a little worried about what Chris will do and, since I don’t want to get involved, I stay on my own, watch Soph help Orly, and then do a couple of turns and a spin.
Someone has built a bonfire by the edge of the pond, and the staff brings out hot cider and doughnuts. We glide around in the cold for over an hour, showing each other what we know how to do on skates and laughing and falling. Chris has been sitting on the bench the whole time we’ve been out on the ice and I wonder why she won’t even try. Orly is from the South too, but she has Soph pulling her around. I skate over to Chris and offer to help her find skates, but she just shakes her head at me.
“No, thanks, this seems pretty dangerous,” she says and turns back to Yin, who is holding out her phone to share something.
I turn away and watch Soph doing a jump. She lands on one blade. When I turn back, Chris is standing by the fire talking to Janaye and Ellen and watching Orly. I’m not sure if Orly sees her or not. It makes me uncomfortable, so I make a point of going over to Orly and offering to skate with her while holding her hand.
We do that for a while. Her cheeks are pink from the cold, and she keeps saying, “My word, it’s freezing,” in a breathy Southern accent. I don’t see any boy in her at all. Then I think I shouldn’t be watching her like that, so I tell her about skating with my sister Molly when we were little and how I got mad because she was so much better than I was even though she was younger. Daddy told me to grow up, that I couldn’t always expect to be the best at everything.
“Sisters, yes,” she laughs. “My older one, Rose, she gets to do everything first. She gets the new clothes, the new shoes. I just get her hand-me-downs. She’s a bossy know-it-all. When we were little she was always the queen and I was the servant. She still claims I was happy serving her all the time.” We’re both laughing, and Orly shakes her head at me, teasing. “So, I’m on Molly’s side.”
Soph catches our attention. She’s doing an honest-to-god pirouette that has her turning backward midair and landing on one skate. You can hear everyone react.
Without warning, Orly falls. I stop help her up when, suddenly, Soph is right there next to her, holding out her hand. She asks Orly if she’s hurt.
“No, I don’t think so,” Orly laughs. “But I daresay I’ve had enough ice for one day, thank you very much.”
Soph and I each take one of her hands to help her skate back to the edge of the pond. The day is cold and sunny, and everything feels fresh.
Later, back in the room, changing for dinner, Soph carefully wipes the blades of her skates with a towel before she replaces the blade guards. I ask her about her skating.
Her hair is still mussed from pulling her hat off; her cheeks are bright from the cold. She folds the towel over again and shrugs. She tells me she isn’t sure; her life got busy. “I still go once or twice a year, at Chelsea Piers,” she says, snapping the second guard blade into place, “but my mother ruined it for me. She made it into a girly-princessy thing and I don’t want to be her infanta in a mantilla, doing a triple axel for the social set.” She frowns and then shakes her head, as if she can shake off whatever it is that her mother did. “I’ve never skated on a real pond before today. That was amazing.”
“It was nice of you to teach Orly,” I say without thinking and realize I’ve just opened up that conversation I told her I didn’t want to have.
Soph looks at me hard. Then she says, “You know Chris is still at it.” Her voice sounds different, wobbly but angry.
“I know,” I say. “I offered to teach Chris how to skate, but she didn’t want to.”
Soph’s expression is sharp. “Why would you even bother with her?”
I’m not quite sure what the answer to that is, so I try to explain. “I think it would be better if everyone could be friends. If Chris got to know Orly better, maybe she wouldn’t be so scared of her.”
“Orly’s not scary,” scoffs Soph.
I don’t know what to say to that, because she’s right.
* * *
We are assigned to make dinner for that night, so, a half hour later, at about four-thirty, I pull on my shoes to go down to the kitchen. Dinner is supposed to be served at six-thirty. I’m doing calculations in my head about how long the meal will take to prepare and how to organize the cooking so everything is done at once. Soph is reading something on her phone. I stand by the door and wait for her to look up.
“Are you going somewhere?” She’s still lounging on her stomach on the bed.
“Well, we have to make dinner tonight for everyone,” I remind her. “We only have two hours, and I thought we should go down and get started.”
She sits up then, phone dangling in her hand, and laughs that chirpy, cute laugh she has. “Oh, can’t we just order Vietnamese or Middle Eastern dips and kebabs and let everyone choose what they want?”
I struggle to stop myself from rolling my eyes at her. Different worlds, Tess, I repeat in my head, different worlds.
“Soph, first of all, no, we’re supposed to cook. They said they’ve got ingredients downstairs. And second, I don’t have any money to pay for food for all these people.”
She flinches and quickly says, “No, I didn’t mean you would have to—I can put it on my card—” but I cut her off.
“Soph, you’re in northern New Hampshire in the White Mountains. I’ve never even seen a Vietnamese restaurant, and there probably isn’t a kebab anywhere around here either.”
“You’ve never been to a Vietnamese restaurant? Seriously?” She is incredulous, eyes wide, staring at me like I come from Mars. This whole country mouse, city mouse routine is a little old, especially because she has come to my country. I decide to turn the tables on her.
“You mean you’ve never cooked dinner before?” And as soon as the words leave my mouth, she looks away and then at her lap while fiddling with her phone. I hit the nail on the head.
“C’mon,” I say, reaching out to pull her up. “It’s probably spaghetti and meatballs or something easy like that. I’ll show you. It will be fun.” She takes my hand then, briefly, and, for a split second, all I can think about is how warm it is in mine. I can feel my face turn red and I drop her hand as we walk downstairs without saying another word.
I’m almost right. The kitchen staff has laid out all the ingredients and a recipe for lasagna. We make two huge ones, regular and vegetarian, and, once we start, Soph is a good sport. She has no idea how to hold a knife, and I don’t need to see any blood, so I cut onions and mushrooms. Soph stirs the sauce, which I tell her is important. Then I have her mix the cheese filling and lay the noodles in the pans.
“My MeMe, my grandmother, says you have to criss-cross the layers of noodles so it holds together better when you cut it,” I tell her. Then I show her how to alternate the way the noodles stack with each layer. I stand close to her and see that her hands are a little messy from the cheese filling. When I notice her watching me intently, I back up fast. My cheeks warm again, and I turn back to the stove.
But she just asks me, “Does your MeMe live near you?”
“Yeah,” I say, stirring the ground beef in the frying pan with much more attention than it deserves. “She lives in the same town. My grandfather died a few years ago, so we visit a lot to keep her company.” I explain how we all go over to her house every week after church for Sunday dinner and how I always help her with the cooking.
“There’s usually eleven of us, because my uncle comes with his family, so I’m used to cooking in big batches. I’m going to miss her when I leave next year.”
“Wow!” Soph is watching me stir the sauce. “We almost never see my aunt and uncle. They live on the Main Line.” I don’t know where that is, but I assume it must be far from New York, or they would see each other more often. I turn the gas off.
We layer the two casseroles side by each. That’s how we say “close to one another” where I’m from. Soph loves that expression. I tell her more about MeMe: how she still watches her soap opera on weekday afternoons and bakes cookies every Friday. Soph is practically giddy by the time the lasagnas are ready to go in the oven.
“No, wait!” she says, as I open the big commercial oven to put them in, “I need to take a picture! No one at home will believe I made this myself!”
She didn’t make it herself, but I smile patiently, and put the pans back on the counter while she pulls out her phone.
“You too,” she says, and pulls me in close for a selfie with her and one of the big pans of lasagna. I do the classic selfie pose, opening my mouth and raising my eyebrows as if I am surprised to be having my picture taken. She laughs when she shows me the shot. She has a smudge of tomato sauce on her cheek, and my hair is coming out of its ponytail, so it’s messy on one side.
“Sweet,” she says, and then holds the oven door open for me while I slide the two pans in. Then I show her how to make salad and garlic bread. At the end, I teach her to let the lasagna sit for ten minutes before cutting it so the whole dish will come together before we cut into it.
After we put the food out on the serving tables, I turn to find a seat toward the end of the table. I expect Soph will go back to the middle where she sat with Janaye, but she surprises me by plopping down next to me instead. When Orly comes in, Soph waves her over, and Orly sits down across from us with a small sigh. Soph tells her excitedly about making dinner.
Orly says she cooks with her grandmother. She tells us a funny story about how, when she was little, she used to think black-eyed peas really had eyes and she was terrified they were watching her eat them. I tease Soph a little about wanting to come to Minerva for four years without so much as knowing they don’t have ethnic restaurants around. It all feels comfortable and friendly, until I see Chris taking notes on the other side of the table.
* * *
From Soph Alcazar’s Writing Journal,
February 13, 2018
What I do well, I am able to teach,
But she shows me something new, side by each.