The Bunny Slope

There was a fact about Dev, known to everyone including Dev, and the fact was this: Dev was good at sport. All of it.

Football — captain. Swimming — county times. Athletics day was basically a ceremony held annually in his honour. New games bent to him within an afternoon; his body simply got things, first try, the way some kids got maths. Eleven years old, and he could not actually remember the last time he’d been bad at something physical.

Which is why the school ski trip undid him in a single morning.

He’d assumed — everyone had assumed, that was the thing, the assuming travelled with him like luggage — that skiing would go the way everything went. He pictured himself carving down the mountain by day two while the others tumbled about. On the coach he’d said, out loud, regrettably, “How hard can it be? It’s just standing.”

It was not just standing.

Skiing, it turned out, was a sport that had never heard of Dev. His first hour on the beginners’ slope — the bunny slope, an area decorated with cartoon rabbits, populated principally by five-year-olds — he fell nine times. Not dramatic, heroic falls: slow, stupid, sideways ones, skis crossing like uncooperative chopsticks, while children the size of his kit bag zipped past him in fearless little wedges. His body, his loyal, brilliant body, sent back error messages in a language it had never used with him before: no idea. you’re on your own out here.

By lunch, Dev had located the real problem, and it wasn’t his legs. It was that everybody could see. Rohan from his football team, filming on the chairlift. The five-year-olds, overtaking. Being bad at something, he discovered, wasn’t actually the unbearable part — the unbearable part was being watched being bad at it, after a lifetime of being watched being good. He had no muscles for it. He’d skipped that entire part of growing up, the being-rubbish-in-public part, the part everyone else had done years of training in.

So he did what people do when their reputation is drowning: he protected it. Claimed his boots hurt. Skied “casually,” stiff with carefulness, avoiding falls by avoiding trying. Spent the afternoon being mediocre on purpose — which is the strangest place a proud person can hide.

It was Noor who called it, on the gondola, on day two. Noor was in his class — quiet, glasses, picked somewhere mid-line at football — and she skied like water finding its way downhill. Third year on skis, it turned out.

“You’re not scared of falling,” she said, watching him watching the slope. “You’re scared of being seen falling. It’s completely different. The little kids fall forty times a day. Nobody films them. You know why they learn so fast?” She pushed off the gondola into the snow. “No reputation. Nothing to protect. They’re free.”

Then, over her shoulder, not unkindly, the sentence that reorganised Dev’s whole week:

“You’re the only one on this mountain who thinks you’re famous.”

Dev stood at the top of the bunny slope for a long moment, among the cartoon rabbits, considering eleven years of being The Best Athlete In The Year — and how the title had quietly become a wall around the things he was allowed to try.

Then he took a breath, found Noor, and said four words he had genuinely never assembled in that order before:

“Teach me. From zero.”

She was a good teacher — patient, specific, merciless about his weight distribution. He was, once he stopped defending himself, a good student: it turned out all those years of sport had given him one real gift, which was knowing how practice works, and once he aimed that gift at the falling itself — fall forward, laugh, count it, up again — the falls stopped being evidence against him and became what they’d been for the five-year-olds all along: the actual curriculum.

He fell thirty-one times on day three. He counted, out loud, and made it a bit — “THIRTY-ONE!” — and Rohan’s chairlift videos changed from mockery into a documentary of a comeback. By the last day, Dev could get down the long green run in linked snowplough turns, upright, slow, unremarkable — a standard the five-year-olds had cleared on Tuesday, and the proudest athletic achievement of his year, by a distance, because it was the first one he’d ever had to be humble to reach.

On the coach home, someone asked how the ski trip had gone for the best athlete in the year.

“I was the worst one on the mountain,” said Dev, comfortably, and discovered the sentence cost him nothing at all. “Noor’s the best. Ask her about the black run.”

The title, it turned out, had never been the thing worth protecting. The thing worth protecting was the part of him that could still be five years old on a bunny slope — free, unfamous, falling forward.

He’d nearly buried it under eleven years of trophies.

Skiing gave it back.