"C'mon, Beks, do your thing," JJ said, grinning. "I gotta keep my streak, man."
He held out the dice with a wink. The black paint had begun to rub off, leaving the nine and seven as incomplete connect-the-dots, constellations of chance. Yellowed plastic glinted in the light that poured over JJ's table, framing the nicks and smudges in reflected fluorescence.
His lucky dice, he called them.
"I'm playing against you," Otabek objected mildly. "And this is backgammon."
"So?" JJ shrugged. "You never win anyway."
I do with other people, Otabek thought. For a moment, he hated the brittle cockiness of JJ's smirk, the way he reached for victory like no one else could want it – could need it – like he did.
Because, as he'd noted, Otabek never won.
For a moment, Otabek hated the brittle cockiness of JJ's smirk, the way he reached for victory like no one else could want it – could need it – like he did.
Isabella Yang leaned forward, snagging JJ's bottle of sparkling water.
"JJ, aren't you supposed to ask me to do that?" She pouted playfully and took a sip, leaving a smear of scarlet where her mouth had brushed the plastic. In a moment, Otabek knew, Isabella would slip away to check her makeup. He wondered if JJ noticed how she wore her confident smile the same way she applied her eyeliner, sharp and hard and carefully monitored for perfection.
"Nah, Belle, Beks is magic," replied JJ, rolling the dice between his fingers. "He wishes you good luck, you get good luck."
She giggled, and Otabek wondered if Isabella could see the flash of panic that lit JJ's blue eyes like lightning whenever he began to lose.
"You don't believe me?"
"I don't believe in luck," she said with a shrug, and finished off the water. "Be right back."
She slipped into the bathroom with her purse. JJ turned back to Otabek.
"Please?" JJ whispered, flicking his eyes in the direction Isabella had gone. "Just this once."
New girlfriend, new season, same JJ, desperate to prove himself the king.
Same Otabek, too: friendly competition was always the friendliest when one didn't fear defeat.
He blew on the dice, more of a sigh than a breath, and JJ beamed at him.
"You're the best, Beks," he said as Isabella emerged with a fresh shine to her lips. "Let's do this-"
"JJ, don't you dare," Otabek grumbled, holding back a quiet laugh.
"-JJ style!"
Fifteen minutes later, Otabek lost, and JJ clapped him on the shoulder.
"Good game, yeah?"
"Yeah," Otabek agreed. It had been close. "I'm off for the night. See you at the rink tomorrow."
:: :: ::
Otabek Altin was lucky. He always had been.
He was, he reflected (with some bitterness), lucky in the same way that a rabbit foot was lucky – it never did the rabbit any good.
"Ботам," his mother told Otabek when he was a child, crying after another of his innumerable second-place victories, "if you believe it, of course it will seem true. Don't let it hold you back."
Otabek's father, when he was asked, was more contemplative.
"I don't know, Beka. It is what it is," he said quietly. "Just remember that winning is an achievement, but lifting up others is a blessing."
And so Otabek congratulated his sister when she scored the winning goal in their lunchtime soccer game, gave a thumbs-up to Rashid when his best friend aced each exam, and wondered to himself if he'd stumbled over his own subconscious while racing after the ball, marked the wrong answer on purpose at the last second.
He breathed a soft sigh of relief when he was assigned to a math lesson full of complete strangers, and beamed when the teacher informed his parents that his scores were the highest in the class. For a nine-year-old who had spent his life a hair's breadth from the top, winning felt like finding water in a desert after countless miles of shimmering mirages.
His friends weren't so happy.
"I don't get it," Rashid grumbled one afternoon, showing Otabek his homework. It was covered in red marks. "Do you think the teacher hates me or what?"
"Maybe it's just harder," Otabek suggested, pushing yesterday's quiz deeper into his own bag.
Rashid sighed glumly, shredding one corner of the paper into tiny scraps.
"He was copying off you," Otabek's sister Gulshat told him, rolling her eyes with all the certainty of her three years' seniority.
"He wasn't!" Otabek protested, glaring at her. "Besides, he did better than me."
The next time they had class together, Otabek's free time had been entirely consumed by skating, and Rashid had begun to hang out with another group of boys who spent their afternoons playing soccer and video games instead of carving solitary gashes into the ice rink. They nodded awkwardly at each other, old enough to know that something had changed in their friendship, but too young to understand exactly what.
Otabek sat in the corner and stared out the window, counting down the hours until he could get back to the ice, while Rashid and his new friends flicked spitwads at each other when the teacher wasn't looking.
"Guess that year was just a fluke," Rashid said in passing, flashing him a wry grin. "Let's hang out soon, yeah? Haven't seen you around."
:: :: ::
It was hard leaving Almaty.
It was even harder for Otabek to admit that his country was both unwilling and unable to help him push out towards the furthest reaches of his talent and determination, as he watched the careers of young Russian and American athletes rise on the wings of scholarships and dedicated facilities.
At thirteen, he was brushing up against his first growth spurts, struggling with a coach who had neither the time nor experience to help him.
His family was well-off, but figure skating required as much from the bank as it did from his body. His father's mosque, with little fanfare and a few murmurs about potential and if this were Russia, raised enough money to fill in the gaps and send Otabek to St. Petersburg.
There, he met a human hurricane with green eyes. Yuri Plisetsky didn't seem to notice the waves crashing around him as he danced, the startled approval of their teacher or Otabek's own red-faced struggles as he tried to keep up with children two years younger.
Yuri would never need Otabek's luck. He carved out his future by himself, fighting a battle no one else could see.
I will do that too, Otabek told himself, ignoring the burn of his muscles. I can't do it like this, but I'll do it.
He moved to America, an ocean and a language farther from home, riding a meager scholarship that was offered on the off-chance of his success instead of the certainty of it. Otabek's skating – like his English - was more than passable but less than noteworthy when he resettled in Colorado Springs.
His social skills were rather less refined. His teachers described him as serious and, occasionally, shy, more focused on practice than play. Otabek wondered if he was choosing to avoid close friendships instead of merely ending up without them, and tried not to think too much about how his luck seemed to improve when he didn't share it.
Otabek felt his heart sink when he was introduced to his new roommate: Leo de la Iglesia was a year older than he was, with a soft smile and a softer voice, and he greeted Otabek (or, more accurately, Otabek's jetlag and the zombie-like form that carried it) with a lazy wave.
Leo was almost permanently hidden under huge headphones that only served to accentuate the bobble-headed proportions of teenage boys, stretched upward before their frames remembered to fill out, and they were friends from the moment Leo tugged the headphones from his floppy brown hair and offered them to Otabek.
I'm going to lose to you, Otabek thought, sinking into the music, but he thought that maybe, this time, it was worth it.
Between skating and school, their lives wove together. Leo showed Otabek how to tweak songs with a bit of software he'd downloaded almost legally, and bobbed his hair through Otabek's first stumbling remixes when he found that working within the music was even better than listening to it. In return, Otabek taught Leo how to navigate the subway system in whatever city they landed in (without the backing of sponsorships, the commute between airports and hotels and competition venues was both inconvenient and pricey, and as a result, Otabek had learned public transportation like another language).
That summer, Leo got a boyfriend and Otabek got acne.
"Your double axel is really nice," Guang Hong murmured as they watched Leo tumble out of a spin, skittering across the ice like a baby deer. "Can you teach me?"
"Thanks," replied Otabek. He thought to himself that he had it easier than his friend – zits were covered up by makeup when he performed, but Leo's new two and a half inches of height could be neither hidden nor ignored. "Um, I can try."
"I just can't get it," Guang Hong continued, pouting. "Plisetsky did a quad sal in competition, did you hear?"
"Yuri Plisetsky?" Otabek's mind flashed back to hard green eyes, tinted with a drop of blue and an ocean of determination. If any twelve-year-old was landing quads, it would be him. "He's still a novice."
"Russians," came the sighed reply. "They're crazy."
Without looking over, Otabek knew what Guang Hong was thinking, about if – when – they fought their way into the senior division, Viktor Nikiforov would still be competing. Everyone wanted to skate against him, to pit themselves against the living legend, but even their overactive teenage egos had to admit they'd all be skating for silver while he was on the ice.
"Yeah," Otabek agreed, waving a sweating Leo over when the coach finally released him. "Russians."
Leo and Guang Hong left the rink hand in hand, jokingly wrinkling their noses about practice stench and sweat cooties, but Otabek caught the coach's eye and sat on a bench to wait for her.
Yuri Plisetsky would be entering juniors soon, and Otabek wanted to meet him there – not just as competitors, but fellow soldiers.
It would feel a bit like victory, to have the little blond boy who hadn't given him a second glance in the ballet camp look at him, remember him, to say look, I'm fighting too.
Otabek would need to be a lot better than he was.
He asked the coach for extra practice time, more drills, more supplementary exercises, and she tilted her head in thought.
"I have a friend who coaches in Montreal," she said finally, "at the CPA. He might be a better fit for you. Come talk to me tomorrow, if you're interested."
When Otabek got back to his room, he googled club de patinage artistique and downloaded a course on Canadian French.