Cheese Tonkatsu and the T-Stop
"Nom nom."
"Is it good?"
"Yeah."
I'd decided to take up figure skating again, but today I left the rink almost as soon as I arrived. There was only one reason: I was going to eat tonkatsu, no matter what. This place always had a brutal evening wait, so you could never get a table then. Fortunately, we managed to place our order right at the end of the lunch rush, just before the break.
This is the life.
All the preparation that morning had been worth it. Ever since becoming a girl, I'd had regular tonkatsu, but never the cheese kind. And in my previous life, weight management and strict meal plans had kept me away from it entirely—so of course my eyes were spinning at the sight of it now.
Mom watched me demolish my plate with pure satisfaction, then offered,
"Want one of mine too?"
"...Huh?"
I hesitated. A single serving here was six pieces. I hadn't eaten breakfast either, so this was breakfast and lunch combined. Steal one of those six precious pieces from Mom?
It felt close enough to filial impiety that I almost refused—until she added,
"There's a new outfit I've been dying to wear, so I need to diet. Guess I'll just have to leave some, then?"
"...!"
I'd seen Mom working again a few times lately. She was both a designer and a model, after all.
"Th-then I guess I have no choice. I'll eat just one for you."
"Lucky me~ Without Seolhwa, Mom could never stick to a diet."
"Obviously."
That extra piece of tonkatsu was transcendent. At the same time, a thought slid through my mind.
If I go back to figure skating...
Figure skating was a sport that lived and died by body weight. And right now, I was a girl. Not a boy who could brute-force things with raw jump power—the usual path for women was to keep the body light and build rotational force in the air.
Which meant...
I can't eat meat anymore...?
Muscle density still mattered for skaters, so a protein-focused diet wasn't off the table. But the meat I loved wasn't some sterile protein source.
...No. My jeyuk... my tonkatsu...
When I said meat, I meant the kind swimming in fat, the kind that melted the second it hit your tongue. The thought sank over me so hard I forgot to swallow, just chewing gloomily in place.
"What's wrong? Does it not taste good?"
Not taste good? It tasted too good—that was the problem. In this life I'd planned to eat whatever I wanted without holding back.
Even so.
Right now, the regret of giving up delicious food was smaller than the joy of knowing I could carve myself into the ice one more time.
Sunday slipped by, and on Monday, at Yerim's request, Mom and I headed to the rink first thing in the morning.
"Hello, ma'am. And hi, Seolhwa."
"We'll be in your care today."
"Hello."
A lesson in the morning hours, when any ordinary kid would have been at kindergarten, was more than enough to set me buzzing. In my last life I'd started late, and I'd always envied the ones who'd been training since they were little.
"You're welcome to watch from here, ma'am—or just sit and rest. When we're done, I'll walk you through everything we covered today."
"Oh, please just run the lesson however's most comfortable for you. I'll wander around and watch."
"Understood. Seolhwa, once you've got your skates on, come on up onto the ice."
Gonna need my own skates eventually.
For now I was renting from the counter, but once I started working high-difficulty jumps, I'd need proper competition boots. Those started at around a thousand dollars, needed replacing nearly every six months—and even then, skates that ran into the thousands a year were still one of the cheaper costs in figure skating.
Ice time and coaching fees alone run close to ten thousand.
Once you were competing as an actual athlete, tens of thousands a year was the baseline. That was exactly why figure skating was called an aristocratic sport, a spine-breaking rich-kid sport.
I was still lost in that thought when a cold touch brushed my cheek.
"What are you thinking so hard about?"
I looked up. Yerim's gloved fingers were gently squishing my face.
"Nothing."
"Then shall we start? Normally day one is all about learning to go forward. But you're already solid there, so let's work on stopping instead."
"Stopping?"
"Right now when you stop, you dig in with your knees—like this, making a V shape."
"That's right."
"That's the beginner way. Athletes do it differently."
Yerim demonstrated. After building speed, she dragged one foot behind her to bleed it off.
"This is called a T-stop. You keep your balance foot planted in front and bring the other foot in behind it, so it looks like a T."
The T-stop—the most common deceleration technique in figure skating, and a performance move in its own right. Stable, versatile, good in almost every way. But...
In my last life she made me do it this way because resurfacing was a pain.
The downside was that grinding the ice with the trailing blade chewed up the surface. Those little gouges had to be patched by whoever was practicing and their coach, which was why past-life Yerim used to lose it every time I went hard on aggressive jumps.
Regardless, Yerim pointed at the blade on her own skate and kept explaining.
"People usually just call this the skate blade, but the proper term is the edge."
A figure-skating blade is slightly hollowed down the middle, with both sides curving into a tilt. Those sides are the edges: the inside edge toward the body, the outside edge away from it.
"So when you stop, which edge on the back foot should you press?"
"The inside."
"Seolhwa, you're a genius. An absolute genius."
Yerim ruffled my hair with pure pride.
"Alright, try it—like you're dragging that back foot in."
I hadn't used it much in practice drills, but the T-stop was a technique I'd deployed hundreds of times in real skating. The motion lived in my body. I showed it naturally.
"...Seolhwa, have you taken figure skating lessons before?"
For a second I wondered if I'd overdone the power control—then I recovered and beckoned her over.
"What? Come here a second."
Yerim stepped close and crouched. I leaned in and whispered against her ear.
"Sometimes at home I look up videos on YouTube."
"...Ahhh!"
My full-power performance of please don't ask, it's embarrassing that I secretly watched these without Mom knowing seemed to land. Yerim didn't press that line of questioning again.
"I was only planning to teach stopping today, but you pick things up so fast. Is there anything else you want to try? Something you saw on YouTube, maybe?"
Figure skating, broadly speaking, broke down into three elements.
One: skating itself—pure movement on the ice. Speed, flow, flexibility.
Two: expression and artistry—musical interpretation, performance. The reason people sometimes called skaters actors on ice.
Three: technical elements—jumps and spins.
And the most important is...
All three mattered, of course. But the one that carried the most points, the one everyone treated as decisive, was always technique. Great expression and fast skating alone would never put you on top of a figure skating podium.
In the end, the foundation of figure skating was technique—jumps included.
"Yeah? If you want to learn jumps... then today, how about we start with how to hop on the ice?"
Yerim rolled her neck and shook out her limbs.
"The two cores of jumping are the knees and locking the upper body."
I'd heard that line so many times in my last life the words had calluses on them. Bend and snap the knees on the right timing. Open the upper body just before takeoff, then pull it in and lock it in the air. Those two rules held from single jumps all the way to quads.
"No need to add rotation yet. Just try a simple hop on the ice."
"Okay."
"Glide forward... one, two—now. Bend the knees, then jump."
I sprang up on Yerim's count. No rotation, barely even worthy of the word jump—just a basic little lift off the ice. A tenth of a second of airtime, then the landing.
...What?
This was my first jump on the ice in this life. My body now was thin the way it had been before, but not packed with muscle—just an ordinary little kid's frame. Even a completely unskilled jump should have sent some kind of jolt through the landing.
Why doesn't it hurt?
Something was off. With a boy's body—especially when I'd been learning jumps as a middle schooler—the early stages had been rough. I tried it several more times after that. Nothing hurt.
"Mom, what are you doing?"
"Hm? Nothing at all."
In the taxi home, Jiyeon shoved her phone out of sight the second her daughter asked.
What Jiyeon had been doing was posting Seolhwa's latest updates to social media. From what she'd learned, figure skaters didn't belong to teams the way athletes in other sports did—personal branding mattered. And marketing like that was exactly Jiyeon's specialty.