“Totally! Put me on the list next time you all plan a trip.”

Something weird crosses her face, and it takes me a second to realize I’ve said the wrong thing. I just don’t know what.

“Our friends aren’t big skiers,” she says, and it clicks. She wasn’t inviting me to a group snow trip. She was asking me to join her sometime. Alone. In a chalet. Together.

I don’t trust myself to reply without stammering, so I opt to keep my mouth shut.

She starts to move backward, pulling me in large circles around the rink. Bit by bit, I graduate from slipping and sliding around to sort-of-kind-of skating. She lets go of my hands a few times to see how I do, but I barely last a few seconds before I start to overbalance. Every time I do, she swoops in to catch me with steady hands. At first, I’m worried I’m going to pull her down with me, but I don’t actually think I can. She’s stronger than she looks. I’m pretty sure she could lift me by the waist right now if she wanted.

Eventually, with her encouragement, I manage to skate more than a couple of steps without her. Thank Christ, because I was starting to feel self-conscious about how amazingly terrible I was at skating. Anything I learned as a kid was clearly lost. But now, I’m starting to remember. It’s fun, even,

“Next stop, the Olympics,” Rose crows as I find my rhythm. “Can you imagine the crowd cheering?”

“I’d prefer not to,” I say. “It’s kind of my nightmare.”

“What, being cheered?”

“Being center stage.” I realize I’m about to fall seconds before it happens, but it’s too late to stop myself, and Rose is too far away to interfere. I hit the ice and slide, hissing with pain. Why the hell doesn’t this sport have padding? Any other sport where people throw themselves hard at the ground has helmets, and for good reason.

“Here, here, here,” Rose says in a low voice as she crouches down to look me over for permanent damage. When it turns out all my limbs are still attached, she helps me back up, but this time she sticks closer to me. I’m a liability, I guess. God forbid she has to use the panic button. I’d die of shame.

She grins sideways at me as we skate. “Wait, so you’re a wildly talented pianist, yet you don’t like the spotlight? How do you handle performing?”

“By doing it as little as possible,” I say. She gives me a confused look, and I go on. “I mean, I’ll do it for people I trust, or to audition, or whatever. But I have really bad stage fright.”

“Oh. How will you pursue piano if you can’t perform, though? Or don’t you intend to?”