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- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
'A groundbreaking debut from an extraordinary writer ... a testament to where a woman can go after rock-bottom' PIPER KERMAN, New York Times bestselling author of ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK Keri Blakinger's brave, brutal memoir, Corrections in Ink, is a riveting story about suffering, recovery and redemption' DAVID SHEFF, NEW YORK TIMES 'A raw, fast-paced portrait of one woman's descent into a mental abyss' Irish Independent Keri Blakinger had always lived at full throttle. Whether flying through the air, chasing Olympic dreams on the ice rink; surviving on as few calories as she could; or balancing a heroin addiction with pursuing a degree at an Ivy League university. But on a cold December day, Keri is arrested with a Tupperware container full of heroin. Shortly afterwards, she is convicted and sent to prison. Forced to confront her addiction, Keri finally manages to break free of it, and finds herself in a place unlike anything she has experienced before: a world built on senseless brutality, but whose inhabitants, her fellow inmates, will change her life forever. Written in luminous prose, with searing honesty and flashes of dark humour, Corrections in Ink shines a light on a broken prison system, and the cruelty and kindness Blakinger experienced there. It is a radical call for justice, and a testament to the power of finding one's voice.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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To all the people I met inside, and the ones still there today
Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.
—“not waving but drowning” by stevie smith
Contents
Author’s Note
This book is a memoir, drawn from my experience, recollections, letters, and voluminous journal entries, some of which have been condensed and edited for clarity. The events here are described as I remember them—though I have fact-checked my memory where possible, through government records and personal interviews. Some conversations are included verbatim based on notes and journals, but others I reconstructed to the best of my ability.
I have changed the names and some identifying details of people I met behind bars, including all staff and most prisoners. I made similar changes when writing about people described committing crimes or doing drugs. There are a few exceptions: I used the real names of people who are now dead, as well as the real names of prisoners I met in the course of my work as a reporter after my release. In many cases, their names have already appeared publicly in my stories. Finally—at their request—I have used the real names of both Stacy Burnett and her pet chicken.
Chapter 1
Ithaca, 2010
I have problems: I am out of clean clothes, I cannot find my glasses, my English paper is late, and my pockets are not big enough for all the heroin I have.
But, honestly, more than anything, I want a cigarette.
I’m only ten minutes from where I’m going, and it’s cold outside. The sun is deceptive; it looks like a nice upstate New York morning, but really it’s December and the wind is whipping up from Ithaca’s gorges. I stop walking and push my fingers deep into my pockets in search of a Parliament.
In a minute, there will be police, with questions and handcuffs. By tomorrow, my scabby-faced mugshot will be all over the news as the Cornell student arrested with $150,000 of smack. I will sober up to a sea of regrets. My dirty clothes and late English paper—one of the last assignments I need to graduate—will be the least of my problems.
But that’s all in the future. Right now, I just want that cigarette. Where the fuck did I put them?
When I woke up this morning in the stash house on Stewart Avenue, the first thing I did was look at my day planner—I am over-organized as ever, even on the brink of disaster. Then, I answered the phone after my boyfriend called repeatedly. We got in a fight. I emailed one of my professors to beg for another extension and promised myself today would be the day I would finally finish everything I need to graduate.
Then I mixed up a spoon of heroin and coke and spent the next two hours poking my arms and legs, fishing around under the skin with a 28-gauge needle in search of relief. My veins are all shot out and scarred and hard to find, so my stabs at oblivion usually involve a few hours of crying as I bleed all over the floor, leaving behind the speckled blood spatter of a crime scene.
This time, I got extra-high, and that last shot was really just out of spite; my boyfriend had the nerve to accuse me of stealing from our heroin, and frankly, I’m pissed. I’m pissed at him, I’m pissed at myself, I’m pissed at every moment that’s led me here, and I’m pissed that he’s calling on repeat, screaming and threatening me while I’m just trying to get high, to get smashed, to get far away from the darkness I’m running from—or toward. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference.
The phone goes off again, buzzing with the pop-punk notes of a New Found Glory ringtone bought with drug money.
You were everything I wanted, but I just can’t finish what I started.
It’s him, of course: Alex. He’s been smoking crack all morning, holed up with my skittish dog in our basement apartment beneath an unofficial adjunct sorority house up the hill in Collegetown. I can imagine him there, his tattooed arms prying the blinds open as he checks for the black bears and SWAT teams of his drugged-out hallucinations. He is fourteen years my senior, but I know how his face looks childish with terror when his dark eyes gape at what is not there and he begins muttering in his parents’ native tongue. They are Greek, and he is whispering a tragic chorus.
Right now, it seems, he’s more focused on his phone than on his fear, as he’s been calling me again and again to demand that I come back immediately with our Tupperware of drugs. He wants me to bring the whole six-ounce stash so that he can check the weight and make sure I didn’t steal any before we sell it.
Before leaving, I take out three or four grams and tuck it under the insole of my black suede sneakers. I like to be prepared. You never know when you might need more heroin. I leave behind the tiny digital scale, an array of baggies and needles, some assorted pills, and my backpack of schoolwork. But then the drugs kick in, and I accidentally nod out for an hour or so in the bathroom before I finally head out into the cold in a black, dragon-print hoodie that leaves me significantly underdressed for twenty-five-degree weather.
I’m a couple houses away—right next to the gorge where I tried to kill myself three years earlier—when I realize I can’t find the smokes.
I was damaged long ago, though you swear that you are true, I still pick my friends over you.
Without even glancing down at my beat-up flip phone, I send Alex straight to voicemail. Then, I whip the clear container full of heroin out of my oversized hoodie and put it down on the curb.
This—like so much else in my life—is probably not a good idea. But it’ll only take a minute, and I need a damn cigarette.
I lose sight of everything else as I hunch over to empty out my pockets, pawing through ballpoint pens, mechanical pencils, gram-sized drug baggies, lint, and the assorted debris of my life.
When I look up, empty-handed, there’s a cop walking toward me. Given the presence of the patrol car a few houses down, I’m guessing he drove—but he sure seems to have materialized out of thin air, a harbinger of bad things ahead breaking through the haze of my high.
Instinctively, I toss the heroin under the nearest car before I stand up, hoping he didn’t see my roadside discus toss. I smile to show that everything is okay. Of course it’s okay, Officer! Why wouldn’t it be?
Then something happens—did I just nod out or black out?—and I’m still yammering away to this cop about the weather (which is not as nice as I’m claiming it is) when a middle-aged lady who works at the nearby flophouse comes plodding across the parking lot. She is large and largely unmemorable—except that she is holding the next two years of my life in her hands.
“Are you looking for this, sir?”
Shit.
Eying the contents of my Tupperware, the cop clears his throat and instructs me to empty out my pockets—which I know hold at least a $150 eight-ball of coke and ten or twenty of the deep-green eighty-milligram Oxys.
Welp.
I decide to make this arrest as painless as possible. I take out the coke with my left hand and as I’m handing it over, I take my right hand and pop the pills into my mouth and swallow them all dry. The cop threatens to pepper spray me if I don’t spit them out—but it’s too late because I’ve already eaten them all. It’s enough to kill most people, but I’ve built quite a tolerance through nearly a decade of self-destruction.
Soon I’m handcuffed and in the back seat, bouncing around like one of those annoying little jumpy dogs. The policeman is standing outside doing paperwork, but when he notices the flurry of movement gently rocking the car, he glances over, disinterestedly asking if I’m okay.
“Okay” is not the word I would use to describe this situation.
But I nod and smile; I need him to turn back around so I can finish transferring the heroin from under my insole to a far less accessible spot—up my ass. I know I’m probably going to jail—at least for a few days—so I’ll do anything to stave off the impending dopesickness.
As the pills really start to kick in, the day proceeds in snapshots of clarity surrounded by dense pillars of cognitive fog. The present fades to the past, and I am seventeen and alone, sitting on a cement step somewhere around Brattle Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
I came here for Harvard Summer School; my promising figure skating career fell apart and my parents realized there was something wrong. This seemed like a fix. They know about the eating disorders, the depression. They do not know about the suicide attempt. They do not know what to do. And neither do I.
So here I am—in far too public a place for this—staring down at a brown line of heroin laid out hastily across my copy of Sons and Lovers, a high school summer reading assignment that I will never finish. These are about to be firsts for me. Both my first line and the first time I will not finish my reading assignment.
I am tightly wound, a taut rubber band of perfectionism and self-destruction. And I am about to make things worse.
The rubber band snaps, and I’m back in the present, handcuffed in the Ithaca police station.
At some point, I remember nodding out in an interview room, while police pepper me with questions I don’t remember answering. The next thing I know I’m staring up at a judge. She talks about me as if I cannot hear her, and the look on her face could be annoyance from being called in on a weekend or sheer disdain at the scabby, smelly junkie in front of her.
Time contracts, and the scene changes. Now I have Fritos all over my chest, and I’m alone in a room with a metal toilet but no toilet paper, a shower stall caked in vomit, a two-inch-thick mattress with holes in it, and two walls made of security glass. I think I’m in a holding cell in the county jail, and I’m guessing that I was just served lunch or dinner, which probably included the Fritos that I’ve nodded out on and made such a mess of.
Another flash, and I’m sitting at a metal desk in front of a jail guard, who’s asking me intake questions I’m entirely too high to answer accurately. My hair is wet from a delousing shower, and I’m wearing a two-sizes-too-big jail-issued snap-up orange jumpsuit paired with flip-flops. Someone took a mugshot, but I don’t remember it.
Everything goes black again, and this time when the world flashes back, I’m holding a blue plastic bin of jail-issue items as I stagger forward, following the commands of a sour-faced guard. I put my bin down on the bunk where I’m told. Before I can turn around again, she’s slammed shut the metal bars, locking me into what I now realize is my own cell.
I’ve been too out of it to pay attention to my surroundings—and I’ve lost my glasses, anyway, further blurring the corners of this unfamiliar world. I only realize that I’m not entirely alone here when another girl wanders up to my cell bars. I am confused. How are other people out and walking around? Why am I locked in my cell and everyone else is not? She explains: You are locked in because you are new and awaiting medical clearance. It could be a week before you get out to mingle. But she has been here some time, and it’s not her first stay. This is her milieu, and she knows how it works. When she starts peppering me with questions, I do my best to answer, but I don’t really understand any of this.
No, I don’t know what my charges are. No, I don’t know if they’re serious. No, I don’t know if I’ve been arraigned. No, I don’t know if I have a lawyer. But, I say, I do know this: I am too high to remain upright any longer, and I have a very important question. I have drugs on me right now, and if you tell me how and when I can best do them without getting caught, then I will give you some. She smiles slowly, a sly Cheshire cat in an orange jumpsuit.
You’ll fit in just fine here.
I wish, for the me I was then, that I could add one more flash, much further forward. I wish that the me nodding out in a cold cinderblock cell could see ahead five years, or even ten. I wish that she could see herself getting out of prison, getting sober, finally finishing those college papers and getting a degree. Her last class will be about mass incarceration—and she’ll get an A. That cop who arrested her will run up to her one day on the street and want to shake her hand, smiling in the face of an apparent success story. She’ll get her first job as a reporter—here, in Ithaca. And she’ll love it.
I wish that, instead of being so bitter and broken right now, she could be grateful for the opportunities and chances she’ll have that not everyone will. I wish she could see how she’ll grab at those chances and run with them.
I wish she could see the day in 2018, when she is crying alone on the bedroom floor—not because she is sad but because she did a thing and it mattered. She wrote a story about prisoners and how the prison system wouldn’t give them teeth. But then the people in charge read her story and changed their minds and decided to give more prisoners dentures. And yes, sure, it’s a little thing, in one corner of the world—but it made a difference to people who live where she is about to spend the next two years of her life.
I wish she could see who she will become, and the parts of herself she will leave behind. The darkness that she will learn to live with, and the light she will learn to let in.
But I can’t show her those things yet. She’ll have to learn the hard way, on a thin plastic mattress in the Tompkins County Jail where—right now—she really, really wants a cigarette.
Chapter 2
A former national skating star and Lancaster Country Day School graduate is in jail in Ithaca, N.Y., after being arrested in December with heroin in her possession, police and news reports say.
According to a news release from Ithaca police, 26-year-old Keri Lynn Blakinger was arrested with nearly 6 ounces of uncut heroin—about 500 doses—in Ithaca on Dec. 19.
The drug was worth between $50,000 and $100,000, police said, although various news reports later estimated the drugs’ street value at $150,000.
Police charged Blakinger, a dean’s-list student at Cornell University, with criminal possession of a controlled substance in the second degree, a felony. She admitted to police that the drugs were hers, according to a report in the Ithaca Journal.
Police arrested Blakinger in a hotel parking lot after a man who lives near the hotel called 911 to report a man and a woman acting suspicious in the parking lot.
“She appeared uncomfortable, uneasy, having a hard time standing still and of an altered state of mind,” the neighbor told police, according to reports.
—excerpt from Lancaster Intelligencer Journal, March 2011
The neighbor was not wrong. But as I read the story from inside my jail cell, I picked apart the tiniest of inaccuracies in the article: It wasn’t $150,000! There was no man in the parking lot! I was not acting suspicious! I was ready to be outraged at something, someone, anyone other than myself.
That article was nearly the last in a string of media coverage that stretched out for months, like a trail of breadcrumbs leading back to a time before I’d ever seen the inside of a jail.
Early on, there was the straight news story from the Ithaca Journal, then the quick-turn blast in the New York Daily News, the anonymous crime brief in the Cornell student newspaper, and the blog entry from The Washington Post with the headline: another ivy drug bust. In a more salacious slant, Gawker wrote that I “posed in bikinis on Facebook” (what twenty-something didn’t?) and “hung out in a notorious drug den” (okay, fair—it was my apartment).
When my hometown paper in Lancaster finally got around to the story in March, it can’t have taken them long to comb through the archives—like I did every day in my own mind—and see how far I’d fallen. Splashed across the print edition, the article described me as a dean’s-list student, an ex–Girl Scout, a former figure skater, and a writer for the student newspaper.
“In 1994, after winning the gold medal in beginner freestyle skating at the Keystone Winter Games, Blakinger—then only 9 years old—expressed a desire to compete in the Olympics,” the article continued.
“A former Girl Scout, she was honored locally with the Young Poets Award in 2000 and received a Scholastic Writing Award the same year for a short-short story. She was a member of the Spanish National Honor Society and the debate club at Country Day, and she was a writer for the school’s literary magazine.”
All that’s true: the skating, the good grades, the awards, the promise. But so is this: For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a dark side. I tried to kill myself for the first time in my mid-teens, lingering by the side of the Pennsylvania interstate in the gloaming as I waited for cover of dark and debated whether the churning wheels of semis speeding along Route 30 would make for a quick end.
Instead, my therapist—of all people—drove by and picked me up.
Before that, I dabbled with cutting, but instead settled on starving myself. I was obsessive and anxious. Overachieving and talkative. Driven, but not stable.
To anyone paying close attention, it can’t have been any surprise where it all led.
I grew up in the suburbs of Lancaster, not far from the colonial row houses of downtown or the rolling cornfields a few miles out. It was a fifty-five-thousand-person city, but in the heart of Amish country—so you might pass by a drug deal on one street and a horse-and-buggy on the next. It was also the place where my parents had grown up, born and raised in walking distance from the brick house that hemmed in our upper-middle-class life. On my bedroom shelf was a black-and-white picture of them kissing when they were three; their mothers were best friends, so they’d known each other forever, even before that staged photo with the punny little caption: “A little DAB’ll do ya’.”
My dad’s initials are DAB.
Harvard-educated and a lawyer, he was raised on athletics as a promising lightweight wrestler in high school and college. Throughout my childhood, he worked obsessively, getting up at 5 a.m. to hunch over paperwork in our living room before driving me to skating practice. Everywhere he went, he toted around a foot-thick briefcase so heavy he tilted to the side when he walked, like the Leaning Tower of Dad.
On the weekends, he did the errands and the yard work, listening to old Grateful Dead tapes in the car and baseball games on a portable radio he’d set out on the sidewalk. With his musical predilections and aversion to confrontation, he was the parent I would have most suspected of being a reformed pot head—but given his sporty background, he always swore he’d never tried it. He might have a few beers at night after my brother and I went to bed, but work, it seemed, was his real escape.
My mom was a Cornell-educated grade school teacher, a part-time reading instructor working in the same district where her mother taught before her. She was tiny, careful, and extremely organized, color-coding everything from weekly schedules to Christmas presents. She’d grown up middle class, but not rich—and was always conscious of making the most of everything, impressing upon us with almost religious conviction the value of working hard, avoiding cholesterol, excelling in school, and eschewing such brain-rotting vices as TV and video games. Both were largely banned in our house. Instead, she gave me and my brother standardized tests for fun and made sure I tried all the possible childhood activities: figure skating, piano, soccer, horseback riding, gymnastics, Girl Scouts—a smorgasbord of suburbia.
I sampled it all with the relentless drive of an Energizer Bunny and the perfectionist zeal of a little Hermione Granger. Doing it all, being constantly productive, was a badge of honor in our family; if nothing else, surely my parents instilled in me an impeccable work ethic. Even so, I was pretty sure that my younger brother, Andrew, was my mom’s favorite. He was neater, less stubborn, and a little more even-keeled.
I, however, was ready to haul off and live life like a race. When I started kindergarten at a small private school, I skipped up to first grade in the middle of the year, then skipped another year in math. But like so many other things, I only remember this because I was told. In fact, my memories are sparse before third grade.
There are some things I haven’t forgotten: One of my earliest memories is turning down food. My mom was—and is—a true believer in healthy eating, and when the pediatrician told her my cholesterol was high, she taught me how to go on a low-cholesterol diet. Starting sometime in nursery school, full-fat cheese, whole milk, and fried foods were all off the table, and I diligently refused them everywhere like doing so was a mark of distinction.
I am competitive enough to remember that I won a somersault contest in some gymnastics class when I was about five—and that I lost the cartwheel contest a year later.
I stayed out of trouble enough that I remember getting yelled at once in second grade, when the teacher caught me reading a book under my desk. I am stubborn enough that I remember I did not stop, and got yelled at for it twice.
But I do not remember a single thing I did with my first friend, the next-door neighbor. I do not remember birthday parties I had or attended, though surely there were many. I do not remember riding bikes or playing on playgrounds, though these things must have happened. And I do not remember how I got hepatitis B when I was nine. The infection is primarily transmitted through blood and semen, but on occasion also through shared toothbrushes and razors. That year, my babysitter’s husband died of liver disease, but there is nothing in my memory to explain how I got hepatitis, or how my brother got it after me. It may have been something entirely mundane and forgettable, but I only know that I felt guilty afterward as if it were my fault. I’d done something wrong, been dirty, failed to protect him. Not measured up.
That year I began having trouble making friends at school. It seemed I’d hit the age when mean girls are just learning how mean they can be. The rest of elementary school, I spent a lot of time crying in the bathroom as I learned it, too. I was smart and athletic, but not in the cool way; at recess I played sports with the boys or sat in a corner and read. I talked incessantly at adults, but was completely at sea with my peers.
Admittedly, my unfortunate decision to wear pigtail braids throughout all of fourth grade probably did not help anything. All the grade school fashion sense and social cues seemed cloudy to me, and the hours I spent devouring everything from Isaac Asimov to Shakespeare did not teach me witty retorts to cafeteria insults. In a war of words I was, somehow, ill-equipped. When put on the spot, I would panic, offer no meaningful response—and then I would block it out afterward, perpetually unable to see where I’d gone wrong because I couldn’t remember.
By fifth grade, I discovered self-destruction. Sitting at the shellacked wooden table of the school cafeteria, I listened, rapt, as a skinny blond girl in the uniform plaid kilt and white polo explained how to make yourself throw up. Take a spoon, she said. Stick it down your throat. She had the whole table’s attention, a gaggle of unpopular girls basking in our private little grade school miseries.
No one suggested this was a bad idea. Quite the opposite; we took it further. The discussion turned to cutting, then suicide. These were all things that had simply not occurred to me before, but the darkness appealed: Maybe I couldn’t be popular, but I could be tragic. I couldn’t be in the know, but I could have my own secret. I stuffed all that newfound knowledge away for future use; I was intrigued, but I wasn’t there yet. But I remember the conversation so clearly I think I must have known that at some point I would be, and sooner rather than later.
By the end of that school year—with much persuading and many tears—I convinced my parents to let me switch to public school. Some of my similarly tormented friends had either convinced or tried to convince their parents to do the same, and I was inspired. I, too, wanted out. And surely, I thought, the kids in public school would be nicer.
They were, but by that point it didn’t matter: The ice-cold world of figure skating was beginning to consume my life.
I’d taken my first lesson a few years earlier—maybe third grade or so—after my mother spotted a newspaper article about skating classes at the local ice rink. She clipped it out and showed it to me: Was I interested? I said sure.
The rink itself was an utter dump, a former iron works factory with no heat or bathrooms and a rust-lined roof that would drip bronzy spots onto the ice, as if warning us of its slow plans to collapse. Despite the utterly unwelcoming arena and my intense hatred of the cold, I fell in love.
Inside the ring of the plexiglass barrier was a different world. It was solitude, even on a crowded day. Life moved faster here. There were no parents, the skate-less elders relegated to rinkside.
Being small was an advantage. Social cues didn’t matter—because the point was not to talk, the point was to skate. And on top of all that, I was better at it than the mean girls from school, who sometimes took lessons at the same rink. Whenever they showed up, I could jump, spin, and literally skate circles around my enemies.
But even as I found my footing on the slippery ice, I became increasingly unstable everywhere else—even the friendlier public school wasn’t enough to save me from me. In sixth or seventh grade, I finally took the skinny blonde’s advice to heart, though I used my fingers and not a spoon. I started weighing myself, began memorizing the calorie counts on food, and learned to clean the vomit out of my braces. I’m not sure what was the final straw, the thing that pushed me over the edge from being miserable in one half of my life to being overtly self-destructive in all of it. Whether it was hormones or budding mental illness, I had simply become volatile. Not overnight, but in fairly short order.
One time in sixth grade I asked a friend at school one too many questions about Kurt Cobain, who had killed himself two years earlier. She got scared and told the guidance counselor, who told my parents. I’m not sure what I planned to do, but the questions weren’t entirely idle; the thoughts that led me there were those that led me to the edge of Route 30 a couple years later.
In the meantime, as I dreamed of death, my choices for escape were limited: smoking did not appeal, and the purloined beers I occasionally swiped from my parents’ liquor closet did not hold my interest. They had too many calories, and finding a time to steal the liquor closet key and clandestinely drink them was more effort than it was worth. Anything else seemed too risky, too much chance I could lose control. The first time I tried something more, I got caught: In seventh grade at the public school, I tried huffing glue and eating Tylenol 3’s in the bathroom with two friends, a trio of experimental angst. Finally, I was not crying in the bathroom alone.
One of the girls—Allie—was brilliant and badass, in my world. She had piercings, dyed hair, and an older brother who might have gotten in trouble with the law. Given her own mother’s seemingly laissez-faire parenting, she was appalled at the schedule, organization, and rules in my house. The other girl was mousy and brown-haired, and I did not know her well.
After a few days of secret lunchtime bathroom trips, she was the one who ran to the principal and confessed—and we all got in-school suspension for the whole month of December. I remember thinking that seemed unreasonable since none of the substances were illegal, and I hadn’t even managed to abuse them correctly; despite my best efforts, I never felt high. Regardless, the thing I dreaded most was my parents’ response—my dad’s sad disappointment, my mother’s stern embarrassment. She taught in the same district and worried that my mistakes would reflect on her.
The vice principal cautioned my parents that even if they grounded me—an almost meaningless action since I had almost no social life outside of school—they should still let me skate, as the ice seemed to be the primary force keeping me on a good path. Without it, I would have nothing to lose.
My parents agreed. But they insisted I transfer back immediately to the same private school I’d hated so much before, a place they thought I would be safe from trouble—as if that were an external force.
After many tears and much screaming, I made my reluctant return midway through the year, the prodigal child who apparently couldn’t hack it in the rough-and-tumble world of suburban Pennsylvania public schools. I don’t think anyone really asked questions; they all knew, the way kids know these things. Some of the characters had changed in the year and a half I’d been gone; there were now more uncool kids who’d transferred in, or maybe they’d fallen from the ranks of cool. We banded together—me, the one Black girl, a couple overweight kids, the girl with scoliosis, the tall redhead—and gave ourselves a tongue-in-cheek moniker: the Social Rejects Group-Club, a bunch of outcasts who didn’t quite fit the regular middle school labels. We called ourselves SRGC and joked that we were so rejected we weren’t even cool enough to just be a group or a club. So we were a group-club. For the most part, we had issues; one of my clearer memories of high school is when another girl in the group swallowed a bottle of pills in the dean’s office, apparently trying to kill herself when he’d stepped out and left us there. I only realized what had happened when I saw the empty bottle. I panicked, but thinking of my own impulses for self-destruction, I felt fleetingly guilty when I summoned a teacher. My friend lived, but the episode prompted a frantic midday ER trip with the upper school principal, squeezed in before I left for skating practice.
There were all the same mean kids, and a few new ones, including a much taller guy who once picked me up and threw me hard enough that the circular snaps of my off-brand Adidas pants cut into my leg and left little round scars. That bothered me less than the wars of words—those at least I felt like I should be able to win and somehow couldn’t. But this wouldn’t have been close to a fair fight. Afterward I just sat down at my desk and went to sleep, saving my limited anorectic energy for more important endeavors.
Other than that, most of my memories of high school are sparse, not because I’ve forgotten them but because they never existed. I just wasn’t in school that much: I was at the rink.
Chapter 3
Cleveland, 2000
The ice is cloudy below me, glistening like a frozen dream. I wish this moment could last forever. For a second, it feels like it will: My adrenaline is moving faster than time. This is the short program at the 2000 U.S. Figure Skating Nationals, and the music is about to start.
I’m wearing a simple blue sleeveless skating dress with Swarovski crystals on the front. My pairs partner is wearing black skating pants with a blue shirt. The lights are bright and the ice is cold.
As the cheers die down and we strike our starting pose, I look at my partner and whisper, “We made it.” I still can’t quite believe it; for almost as long I can remember, I’ve thrown my whole life at this. I love the ice—and at moments like this I think that maybe it loves me back.
I know I got here late. Not literally today, but in a larger sense. I didn’t start skating until seven or eight; most of my rink friends had already begun by four or five. One girl I know got on the ice when she was two. I’ve been behind in a race for as long as I can remember, toiling to catch up.
When I was little, at that rusty dump of a rink in Lancaster, and my friends or frenemies wanted to horse around between jumps, I’d tell them no. I have to work, I’d say again and again, like a broken record. I watched the other mothers yell at their daughters for falling too much or for goofing off, sometimes lambasting in full-on shouts and sometimes in angry hisses like vipers at the edge of the rink, poking their pointy heads through every opening in the plexiglass boards.
I was proud that my mother was not like that; she was never the type to disagree—let alone raise her voice—in public. But she had expectations, and I did not want to disappoint.
And I did not—at least not on the ice.
After a year or so of lessons in Lancaster, I needed more ice time and better coaches. My parents started driving me forty minutes to Hershey, where the whole town smelled like chocolate and the street lights were shaped like Kisses. In a paint-chipped and aging arena that felt massive by my fourth-grade standards, I learned Axels and Lutzes, camel spins and laybacks.
Sometimes, my younger brother, Andrew, would get dragged along for the trip. Between practices and competitions in other states, I think he learned his way around the pinball machines at half the rinks in the northeastern United States. Just four years apart, we were close and often commiserated about my parents. But he never complained that he spent so much of his life playing under the fluorescent glare of rink lights, and never seemed to mind that I took up so much of the spotlight.
When I got a little better, my parents started driving me a few minutes farther to Harrisburg, where there were two surfaces and even longer practice hours. My dad—who did most of the driving at that point—would make work calls the whole way there and back on his bulky car phone, the hallmark of a 1990s workaholic. Aside from the added time, the price tag went up, too. Boots—one pair a year—were a few hundred dollars. Blades, sold separately, were a couple hundred more. Then there were the lessons ($50 to nearly $100), the practice time (around $10 per forty-minute session), the practice dresses ($50 and up) and the competition dresses (anywhere from homemade to $1,000). My parents never talked about these specific numbers, but I knew that it was expensive—and I knew that this was okay as long as I made the most of it.
Around my regular school day, I packed in all the ice time I could—5 a.m. sessions in Lancaster on Mondays, Sunday mornings in Hershey, and trips to Harrisburg after class. My first competitive season—fourth grade—I skated to a medley from the musical Annie. Fifth grade was Oklahoma!. Then came Mary Poppins, Man of La Mancha, West Side Story—my life measured in Broadway hits. Though I would have preferred something darker, my mom was enthusiastic about the song selections—and my first coach had rules about what age you had to be before you could skate to Phantom of the Opera.
The first time I ever won a competition was with that Annie program. It was the Keystone State Games, which sounds important but is, in fact, not. State Games are fairly meaningless in figure skating. I didn’t start on the qualifying competitions—the ones that could, in theory, get you to the U.S. National Figure Skating Championships—until a couple years later. To me that was always the goal: Nationals. Sometimes I told people I wanted to go to the Olympics, but I felt like it was just a thing all skaters are expected to say. In truth, it seemed like an unrealistic goal. Nationals was still a long shot, but in the realm of possibility.
My entire middle school years were spent trying to learn a single jump: a double Axel. Named after a nineteenth-century Norwegian skating great named Axel Paulsen, the jump is unlike every other in that the skater takes off while facing forward, adding an extra half rotation. Lutzes, flips, and Salchows all start backward and land backward, an even number. Thus a double Salchow is an even two rotations. But because it takes off forward, a double Axel is 2.5.
Getting a double Axel is a watershed moment in a skater’s career. Once you can land it, triple jumps will typically come soon after. But not everyone gets there. A double Axel is an obstacle that many skaters never clear, effectively dooming their competitive futures.
I started trying double Axels in sixth grade. For three years, I fell on them every single day. Hundreds of times. I would try, come up a half rotation short, fall, then circle around and try again. And again. And again, for hours. My entire middle school years were spent failing. In my head, I would calculate how many times I’d fallen, multiplying the number of falls by the number of days I trained per week and the number of weeks in a year. I knew that time was working against me, and every fall counted. I had the tenacity, but I didn’t know if I really had the talent—and elite skating requires both.
Watching the lack of progress from atop the metal bleachers at the side of the rink, my parents must have wondered about the point of it all—though if they did, they kept it to themselves. My father saw me fall so often he developed a perfect sense of my timing, learning just how many lines of his legal papers he could read before looking up just in time to catch my next attempt.
Amid all those falls and failings, I realized that even if I got a double Axel, I didn’t actually have the raw ability to make it as a singles skater. I knew in my heart I just wasn’t good enough alone—so I threw my hopes into pairs.
There are two kinds of partnered skating: ice dance, the one little kids tend to describe as “boring” because it doesn’t involve any jumps; and pairs, the one where the guy throws the girl around and it looks all dangerous and shit. It feels all dangerous, too; there’s a certain wild thrill in being dangled upside down by a teenager on an eighth-inch-thick steel blade, or being hurled across the ice and expected to land on one.
With neat makeup and a bouncy ponytail, I looked the part of the prim, elite athlete—but moves with names like headbangers and death spirals appealed to me. There were risks involved, risks that not everyone was willing to take. Even if I lacked the talent to succeed in singles, I could make up for it with the willingness to endanger myself that was necessary to succeed in pairs.
On top of that, pairs didn’t require all the triple jumps that singles skating did. Typically, one triple—maybe two—would be enough for a solid pairs career. It was certainly enough to get you to Nationals, and might even be enough to get you to the Olympics.
But first, you need a double Axel. And a partner.
My first pair partnership was not very serious, with a short country kid from outside of Reading, Pennsylvania, with brown hair in a bowl cut, a permanent devilish grin, and unexpectedly big jumps. We each still trained for singles, but skated together a few days a week in Harrisburg and competed for only one season as a team, traveling to Florida to vie for a berth at junior nationals in our homemade green and gold costumes with our underwhelming Egyptian-themed routine.
We did not make it. When we later parted ways during my eighth-grade year, I was not sad. My partner had spent much of our time together in unproductive pursuits: calling me fat, refusing to work, and passing it all off under the guise of his goofball personality. But I knew that pairs was my best shot at a future on the ice, and more than anything—except, perhaps, a double Axel—I wanted a good partner.
