“I just want to get floor over with,” she whispers to me.
“I know. I’m sorry. Let’s stretch,” I suggest, stepping forward to place myself protectively between her and any cameramen who might be approaching with a long lens.
She dutifully nods, slips off her track pants, and stands to begin her warm-up. She runs through the same basic set of moves she’s completed daily since childhood—bending over her knees in a pike, rolling out her wrists, straddling her legs wide—but this time, every movement is packed with intention: pointed toes, straight spine, sucked-in core. She waves at a pair of little girls in the bleachers holding up a sign with her name printed on it in colorful marker.
An announcement cuts through the noise of the stadium: fifteen minutes until the competition begins, which means it’s time for Hallie to warm up on bars. She’s on the same rotation as Delia and Brit, and the three gymnasts take turns chalking up and practicing elements of their routines. There’s an unintentional hierarchy: Brit defers to Hallie because she’s the stronger athlete, and both girls defer to Delia, because she’s become something of a legend, a mother hen, a spokesperson for the horrors of the sport ever since the accusations broke. Today, Delia’s leotard is teal. I heard Jasmine discussing it during her TV segment; teal is the color of sexual assault awareness.
At the one-minute mark, Hallie signals to us that she’s all set.
“Last-minute pep talk,” Ryan says. “Huddle up.”
Ryan wraps a protective arm around Hallie’s shoulders and slides a nonchalant arm around my waist. Hallie’s breath is shallow. This isn’t her first rodeo; it’s clear that she knows as nervous as she is, she has to fake it till she makes it. Otherwise, she’ll psych herself out.
“I just want to tell you one more time how proud I am of you,” Ryan says, locking eyes with Hallie. “You’re strong, you’re tough, and you have trained so hard for this for so long.”
She blushes. “Thanks.”
“And don’t let the prospect of floor rattle you all day,” he says. “You have nothing to worry about.”
“I don’t?” she asks, surprised.
“The new choreography? Fantastic. The updated tumbling passes? Genius. I’ve known you a long time, and I’ve never seen you as poised or as elegant as you’ve been performing lately.”
Hallie exhales. Her shoulders visibly relax.
“Oh,” she says, almost laughing to herself. “Right.”
“Avery?” Ryan prompts.
I didn’t prepare anything to say. When I was competing, it’s not like Dimitri ever gave any sort of warm, touchy-feely pep talk like this one. A gruff request to stop whining and keep my chin up, maybe, but nothing like this. I swallow.
“You have no idea how good you have it,” I say. “How easy this will be. How prepared you are. You are a natural superstar, and you have Ryan, who’s amazing, and you have an incredibly supportive family cheering you on.”
The words come easily because they’re the truth.
“Every single day, I am so proud to work with you, because you never give up and you never lose what makes you you,” I continue, ignoring the lump forming in my throat. “I’m lucky to be on your team. And I can’t wait to see you rock this competition.”
I squeeze my hand around her shoulder. I didn’t expect to be so emotional, but seeing Hallie here, just inches away from a competition that could make her a front-runner at Olympic Trials, I’m overwhelmed. I break the huddle to give her a tight hug.
“Thank you, guys,” Hallie says, her words muffled into my hair. “Seriously. Thank you.”
An event coordinator taps Hallie on the shoulder. “It’s time,” she says.
Hallie glances at each of us. “Bye.”
“You got this!” I call out.
Ryan goes with her. He’s there to hover by the high bar throughout the duration of her routine, ready to lunge forward during her riskiest release moves when she’s most likely to fall, in case he needs to catch her. I don’t want to be a distraction, so I’ll watch from the sidelines.
Hallie reaches into the chalk bowl to add one more layer of dust to her grips, and nods to Ryan that she’s ready. Moments later, an announcer’s voice booms over the loud speaker. A hush falls over the crowd in the bleachers.
“First up on bars is Hallie Conway,” the voice booms.
The audience roars a cheer. “Let’s go, Hallie, let’s go!” I call out, clapping.
Hallie strides to the center of the low bar, totally transformed. She stands tall, suddenly looking five years older and twice as serene as she really is. She raises both arms to the table of judges and beams, performing the customary salute of respect that every gymnast does at the beginning and end of each routine. I see a judge flick to a new sheet in her notebook and peer over the tops of her thick-rimmed glasses.
Hallie takes a deep breath, then jumps on the low bar and swings up into a perfect handstand with such easy grace that I forget to be nervous for her. She transitions smoothly to the high bar, then pirouettes in a handstand, and executes a clean Tkatchev–Pak Salto combo, flinging herself backward and soaring smoothly down to the low bar. Everything is tight, as it should be: vertical handstands, straight knees, pointed toes, rock-hard core. The routine concludes with a mesmerizing series of giants—swinging, 360-degree circles around the high bar—and then she’s slicing through the air into a double-twisting double back tuck. The moment she hits the mat, she’s sturdy and sure of herself—she sticks the landing. The audience erupts into a cheer as she arches backward.
Hallie waves to the crowd, turning to face each corner of the arena to blow grateful kisses.
Giddy, she crashes sideways into Ryan for a one-armed hug.
“Amazing job,” I say, high-fiving her in a burst of chalk dust when she makes it back to the bench. “You nailed it.”
“That felt great,” she says.
“Because it was great,” Ryan says.
Thirty seconds later, the judges confirm what everyone knows: It was a beautiful performance. They award her a 15.025—and anything in the fourteen range or above is incredible. By the end of the first rotation, she’s in fourth place—Emma, Delia, and Kiki have just barely edged her out for the top spots. Hallie’s face falls slightly.
“Don’t worry, you have three more rotations to go,” Ryan points out. “The rankings will change.”
“Yeah, but I just finished bars,” she protests.
Nobody has to say out loud what she really means: her best event is now over, so it could all go downhill from here.
“Vault’s next,” I say brightly. “Just focus on nice, solid landings, and you’ll be just fine.”
Per the rules of the competition, she competes twice on vault. Judges score both efforts, then take the average as her final score. Her first run, an Amanar, is impressive. But any success there is canceled out by the deductions she receives for the two extra steps she takes upon landing her second vault, a Mustafina.
I know the rules of the sport well enough to know better, but it still seems incredibly unfair that Hallie gets points docked for her dynamite energy. She’s like a high jumper in a ballerina’s body—if she were a track-and-field star instead of a gymnast, her explosive power would make her an Olympic champion. But not here. My nerves feel frayed as I watch the judges grimly turn over the final score: 13.250. Hallie slips to fifth place. The mood on the bench is tense.
Her third rotation is beam, and if there’s one event that demands confidence and precision above all else, it’s this one. When I was a gymnast, beam was always intimidating, but at least I felt in control of the experience. If I shook or bobbled or fell, it was my own fault. But now, as Hallie competes, that sense of control crumbles. My muscles spasm as I watch her move. When she pirouettes, I crane my neck, as if I can manipulate the speed of her spin. As she wobbles on the landing of a front aerial, my stomach and glutes and thighs clench hard, as if I can keep her centered on the beam through sheer force of will. Her tu
mbling pass—a back handspring, whip back, back layout that’s usually just pure fun to watch—tilts slightly off center. One foot curls desperately around the beam, while the other leg ricochets sideways in a last-ditch attempt to regain balance. She stays on, but just barely. After her dismount, she salutes limply to the panel of judges and trudges into Ryan’s arms.
Hallie makes it back to the bench just as the stony-faced judges reveal her score: a flat 12.850. That means she’s officially slipped down to ninth place. I feel sick. As long as she doesn’t completely bomb floor, she should qualify to compete at Olympic Trials. (The top fourteen competitors will go to Trials.) But there’s no guarantee of that—anything could happen at a competition, especially with her confidence at an all-time low right now—and ninth place is a brutal, embarrassing spot to be in, even out of seventeen total spots. Ideally, she’d be in the top five or six, if not fully in the top three for medal contention. I hate to imagine Jasmine’s commentary right now. It can’t be good.
Ryan spots Hallie’s empty water bottle and goes to refill it.
“I’ll be back in a minute,” he promises.
Hallie scowls and slumps down further in her seat. There’s a beat of silence between us.
“I’m completely failing,” she says morosely. “I’m messing up over and over again on live TV, looking like a total idiot.”
“Hey, scoot,” I say, moving to sit next to her. “You’re not an idiot. At all. I promise.”
She slides over a few inches but doesn’t look at me. She’s staring at the big screen, transfixed as Emma sticks a powerful double-double on floor and makes it look easy.
“I’m in ninth place,” she spits out. “Ninth place. That’s for idiots.”
“You have to stop calling yourself an idiot,” I say.
She gives me a look full of skeptical contempt that reminds me she is still a surly teenager. She might have traded in the typical trappings of a teen girl’s life for the discipline, demands, and pressures of a fully grown adult athlete’s, but this is one thing she can’t change. She’s a sixteen-year-old girl, behaving the way any sixteen-year-old would.
She scrunches up her face. “I didn’t work this hard to be all the way down the scoreboard.”
“I know,” I say carefully. I try to figure out what to say to lift her spirits. “But maybe there’s more to it than that. What if you can just appreciate the fact that you’ve worked so hard to be here? I know you get so much joy out of performing. Just go out there and have fun showing off what you can do, you know?”
She tilts her head and stares at me.
“You’re nuts,” she says. “You’ve lost it.”
“I’m just trying to show you the silver lining,” I insist. “Because there is one.”
“If you kind of squint,” she adds.
“Squint really carefully, yeah,” I say. “You’re here. You deserve to be here.”
She takes a long sip of her water and shakes her head slowly.
“You sound extremely yoga right now,” she says.
“I’m just jealous that you get to go out there and deliver the hell out of your next routine,” I say. “You’re living my dream.”
She sighs dramatically.
“I’ll go slay on floor if you promise to stop talking like a corny Oprah knockoff,” she says.
“Deal,” I say, extending my hand.
She shakes it. “Deal.”
An event coordinator waves Hallie over to start warming up for floor. I shout ridiculously supportive comments as she walks away. But once she’s gone, the pit in my stomach returns.
* * *
Floor warm-ups fly by. Brit delivers a surprisingly lovely performance to a delicate piece of classical music, and Hallie whispers to me that she must have gotten new choreography. Up next, Delia strides calmly onto the floor to perform a knockout routine that inspires the audience to give her a standing ovation. On the big screen, you can see tears glittering in her eyes as she waves to her fans and hugs her coach. The moment is powerful and heartbreaking. When the judges award her the breathtakingly high mark of 15.275, it’s clear she’s earned every bit of it.
Meanwhile, Hallie is trembling. She rises from the bench and shakes out each leg so her knees don’t buckle beneath her. More than any other moment in her life, the pressure is on.
“Let’s go, Hallie!” I call out.
“Come on, Hal, you got this,” Ryan says loudly.
“We had a good talk while you were gone,” I say. “I think she’ll be okay.”
“If she’s not, I think her parents will skin us alive,” Ryan mutters.
Hallie’s name rings out over the loudspeaker, and the judges flick to new sheets of paper in their notebooks. She salutes at the edge of the blue mat, then struts into position. There’s a high, clear beep to signal that she should prepare herself, and then the opening notes of her new floor music. This is her first time performing the routine I crafted in competition, and I’m anxious to see how it’s received.
Hallie throws herself into the first few fierce steps of her choreography, just like we practiced, and I am so proud. She’s a swirl of limbs and piercing gazes as she pivots, backs up into the corner, and lunges into her first tumbling pass. She whips across the floor with enough energy to power a fleet of Maseratis, rocketing skyward at the end into the stag jump we drilled on the trampoline. Her leg levers up elegantly behind her, and she lands on beat.
She beams and surges onward through a frenzied attempt at her leap series. She’ll get a small deduction for failing to hit the full 180-degree split, but it’s a marked improvement from the first time she tried that combination. When she slides down to set up her wolf turn, I cringe and grab Ryan’s hand. His palm glistens with sweat. Hallie’s brows knit together as she steels herself to spin. I can’t breathe as I watch her rotate cleanly. It’s the best wolf turn I’ve ever seen her do.
On her second tumbling pass, she flies high above the floor and sticks the landing. As she prances through her choreography, I whisper a prayer. Please keep this up. Please let this be okay. Hallie attacks her third and fourth tumbling passes with pure grit. She spirals through the air and digs in her heels when she lands. As the music hits its final note, she throws her head back into the dramatic pose we practiced so many times in the Summit mirror. Her chest heaves as she tries to catch her breath. There’s a second of silence, and then Hallie climbs to her feet, saluting the judges with all the energy she has left. The crowd claps as the judges continue to scribble down notes.
Ryan and I intercept her along the side of the floor for high fives and hugs, and we walk back to our spot together. Her breathing is ragged.
“Hallie, that was unbelievable,” I tell her excitedly. “The best I’ve ever seen you perform.”
“You were awesome,” Ryan confirms.
She pants and gives a half-hearted thumbs-up. “Don’t congratulate me until the score is ready,” she warns.
“Don’t worry about the score; that was phenomenal,” I insist.
I hope, of course, that the judges reward her for one of the best floor routines she’s probably ever done in her entire life. But I’m also nervous—they don’t award medals for personal improvement. Her score will be compared to the other gymnasts’.
The judges deliver their score: 13.475. It moves Hallie up to seventh place.
Hallie lets out a low moan. “That’s not good enough,” she wails.
“That’s a full point higher than you got at Worlds!” Ryan crows. “That’s a real improvement, Hal. You should be very proud of yourself.”
A full point! Selfishly, I glow with excitement.
“If this were Olympic Trials, seventh place wouldn’t be enough to make the Olympic Team,” Hallie says, sounding panicked.
Ryan kneels down in front of her and takes her hands. “But this isn’t Trials,” he points out. “You have months to go. So much can change between now and then.”
Hallie looks suspiciously around the a
rena. “Yeah, but everyone else will be training to improve, too.”
I want to say something reassuring or encouraging, but everything I come up with sounds hollow or worthless. Seventh place is a complicated place to be: she’s not knocked out of Olympic contention by any means, but she’s not a shoo-in, either. It would be exciting to land here if this were Hallie’s first elite competition, but it’s not. She didn’t come this far to only make seventh place. It’s an uncomfortable middle ground, achingly mediocre when gymnasts are used to flashy wins or spectacular failures. Hallie could go either way from here… or she could float into obscurity, never quite making a name for herself in this sport.
“I know today wasn’t what we hoped for, but I’m still proud of you,” I say finally.
Hallie zips up her tracksuit and pulls the hoodie down low.
“Bars was beautiful,” Ryan adds. “Vault was pretty solid, too. Next time, we’ll work on—”
“I can’t think about that now, all right?” Hallie snaps.
She shoves her feet into her Uggs and slings her gym bag over her shoulder.
“I can’t stay here anymore. Bye.”
She makes a beeline for the nearest exit.
“Wait!” Ryan calls out to her.
“I’ll catch up with you later, okay?” he tells me, darting after Hallie.
My first instinct is to follow them, but I know Hallie doesn’t want a full audience right now. If she wanted me with her, she would’ve told me. Instead, she wants to grieve today’s results alone. I don’t blame her. So I sink down onto the bench and watch glumly as other gymnasts gleefully celebrate their wins. My heart hurts.
• CHAPTER 20 •
I’m still alone an hour later. I don’t want to be. Ryan and Hallie never returned to the arena, and my text to him went unanswered. I head back to the hotel. I had originally assumed that Ryan and I would share a room—we spend two or three nights a week at each other’s places, anyway, and I was even looking forward to our first trip together as a couple. But Ryan had pointed out that it’d look suspicious for us to share, especially since Summit had already paid for us to sleep separately. Our rooms are at opposite ends of the seventh floor; Hallie and her parents have a larger suite on the eighth.
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