The Accident

by Devyn Forrest

  “Hey. You’re awake,” Mr. Everton said. He said it like I might have imagined a father saying it like it was everything he’d wanted and prayed for.

  “Yes,” I said. “Found these idiots staring at me like something bad had happened. You don’t know anything about that, do you?”

  Mr. Everton gave me a crooked smile. His eyes glistened like this was the first sense of my actual personality he’d caught, and he liked it. I crossed my arms and drew even higher in the bed, although every single movement I made caused my head to feel like a weird bulbous balloon. I didn’t want to reveal the pain and made sure my face remained steady. I knew I could easily conceal my real feelings because of my years in foster care. You couldn’t exactly cry and expect to get whatever you wanted. Foster care didn’t work like that. You were always one in six kids, or even worse. Even when I had been a lot younger, I had known to keep everything locked down.

  “Listen, Rooney; I was wondering if I could speak with you for a second,” Thomas said.

  At this, my heart felt like it turned to stone and dropped into the pit of my stomach. It made me remember that I had found his expensive, jeweled ring inside my gymnastics bag, just before I had gone on for the mid-semester competition. I hadn’t put the ring there, even though I had known that the ring could have been my ticket to paying for the rest of the semester. The fact that I still hadn’t paid for that now snuck up into the back of my brain like a weird snake, slithering through the leaves.

  “Boys, Chloe, could you leave us for a second?” Mr. Everton asked.

  One by one, they all exited the room. It felt like waiting for a death sentence, watching them creep out like that. I shivered toward the back of my pillow but made sure not to show it. When Thomas clipped the door closed, he turned to find a brave-looking, stern-looking sixteen-year-old girl—soon to be a woman—the kind of person who could put up with any kind of bullshit.

  “I’m so sorry about what happened to you today,” he said.

  “Yeah. Me too,” I said, kind of haughtily.

  “You looked so good at warm-ups. I couldn’t wait to see you perform. And then, to see it end like that. I really can’t describe it. I had never seen anything like that,” Mr. Everton said.

  I couldn’t think of anything to say. I wanted to blurt like—yeah. Great. Thanks so much for the compliment, if that’s what it was? Thanks to fucking Poppy for setting up my beam to fall apart right before my landing.

  “Since you don’t have a guardian, your old trainer, Jeanine, followed us here,” Mr. Everton said. “She’s waiting in the waiting room and absolutely freaked out. She said she wouldn’t leave until she sees you again. Anyway, she said she watched you at warm-ups, too, and that you’d never looked better. Maybe that sits better with you than any compliment I could give you.”

  Mr. Everton sauntered to the grey chair beside my bed, beside which Chloe had left her fashion magazine. He flicked at it and chuckled to himself, before turning back to me and saying, “You know, when I first heard you were going to attend Denver Athletics, I knew it was going to be difficult for you. I’d known about you from Theo’s Denver gym, but I never really… I mean. Do you remember what I mentioned to you before you hit your head?”

  I tried to cut back into the array of memories just before the performance. I chewed at my bottom lip. Thomas had caught my arm and said—said something about my parents. He had asked to know if I knew anything about them… something…

  Slowly, Thomas drew something out of his back pocket. It was shiny and thick, an old photograph, and with his eyes still connecting with mine, he unfolded it.

  “I don’t know if I’m going to regret doing this,” Thomas said. He then slipped the photograph onto my lap.

  Chapter Three

  When I first spotted the photograph, Mr. Everton splayed on my lap; I burst into laughter. The photo was one I had seen all over old articles about gymnastics, back when Mr. Everton’s Olympic team had completely dominated. It was something so familiar it seemed almost outrageous to look at it now. On the left was Mr. Everton—back then called Tommy, in his late teens or, early twenties, wearing a bright smile, his dark blonde hair hanging in curls, much like Theo’s. Beside him was his rival, Rudy Eyser—the guy who had won the Olympic gold, instead of Mr. Everton himself. He was handsome and arrogant-looking, with a thick and heavy-looking medal hanging from his neck. Both were muscular in the prime of their lives and they looked out of the photograph like they had no idea what was coming next.

  “What is this?” I asked, looking up at him. I was still holding the picture in my hand. “Why are you showing me this?”

  Mr. Everton heaved a long sigh. He then dragged out his phone and flipped through it with his thumb. “I had a suspicion about it the first few times I watched you here at Denver Athletics. At first, I thought it was crazy. When I thought about the timing of everything, how it all stacked up—I figured it was actually insane. I knew Rudy for years and I… it’s not like I liked him, but I never thought he was capable of…”

  He passed his phone to me. I frowned and took it and drew it toward my face to get a better look. He had brought up a local newspaper article from some eighteen years before, a courthouse marriage. In it was Rudy Eyser, and beside him was a woman with long black hair, incredibly thin, with eyes that looked up at Rudy with more love than I had ever known in my life.

  I glanced back at Mr. Everton and arched my brow. “What is this? Rudy got married?”

  But it wasn’t like I didn’t know where he was going with this. Mr. Everton gave me this look, like, “clue in already, Rooney,” and I let my shoulders fall. Beneath the photograph in the old clipping read the words, “Denver’s own Olympic star, Rudy Eyser, weds Zelda Parkington at the downtown courthouse.”

  Beneath this was a small article, as though the whole thing hadn’t really deserved much space in the newspaper anyway.

  Olympic star Rudy Eyser returned to Denver to marry a woman he met while training for the Olympics, the balance beam superstar Zelda Parkington. When asked about their future, the newlyweds say they plan to stay far from the gym, at least for a few months. This reporter expects that they won’t linger away for long. We look forward to a bright future for the both of them and thank Rudy Eyser again for representing the city of Denver so well.

  “Zelda Parkington,” I said. The name rolled over my tongue slowly. She sounded so foreign and strange, yet when I looked at the photograph of her, I, of course, felt like I was looking in a mirror. Throughout my entire life, I had never had a doppelgänger; nobody had ever had my particularly strange and sometimes beautiful, raven black hair and large almond-shaped eyes. Jeanine had once said she had thought I was either Italian or Spanish when she had first seen me, which I thought was funny since I was nothing but a washed-up foster kid.

  “Did you ever meet her?” I asked Mr. Everton then. I could feel my heart start to thump a little harder in my chest. I wanted to remain calm and stoic, not like a girl with a head concussion that wanted to demand what the hell had happened to her parents.

  All my life, every single day, I had ached with loneliness. I’d had absolutely nothing—not two pennies to rub together. And yet, there they were: Zelda and Rudy, Rudy and Zelda. The people who had possibly created me.

  Mr. Everton took his phone back. I hesitated, wanting to stare at Zelda a little while longer. The silence stretched between us, and my head grew even heavier and my pulse thudded.

  “It’s really a horrible time to do this to you, isn’t it?” he said. He glanced toward the ground like he was ashamed.

  “Did you meet her?” I asked again. This time, my tone was harder and flatter. I stared at him.

  “I did. Once,” Mr. Everton said. “I actually met up with them after this photo was taken. They had a kind of quick thrown-together wedding party at this bar downtown, Freddy’s, which is no longer there. The entire Olympic team was there, and some of Zelda’s friends and Rudy’s dad was there, too. I don’t thin
k he had a mother anymore. We all got really, really drunk. There was always bad blood between Rudy and me, but I was happy for him that day—really genuinely happy, since he’d always been kind of this vagabond, ‘I want to be alone’ type guy.”

  That sounds like me. At least, until I met Chloe, I thought.

  Thomas seemed to be waiting for me to say something, but I just stared at him. He continued on. “Zelda was a gymnast like the article says. I never worked with her much. She had a different set of coaches, and she didn’t make the Olympic team. I know she went to Nationals, and then she had some kind of injury. I think to her shoulder, although I might be misremembering that.”

  “So you’re telling me that all this talent I have is just genetic, huh?” I tried for the joke, but it fell even flatter than my voice. I blinked down at my hands, which now seemed really foreign to me.

  “Rudy stood outside with me for a cigarette during his party,” Mr. Everton continued. “We laughed, I remember, because we hadn’t allowed ourselves to have any booze or cigarettes before the time leading up to the Olympics, and there we were tearing ourselves apart. Such a difference. Anyway, he said that he’d never thought he wanted to settle down before until he’d come back with his gold medal and looked around and realized that everything he had ever worked for, everything his life had been meant for… it was kind of over, you know? He’d been to the Olympics. He had gotten the medal he had always dreamed about getting since he was a kid. And he was like, now what? Zelda was his now what.”

  “Just another box to tick off?” I asked. I felt confused about whether it was from the concussion or from the information he was now dumping on me. Either way, there was no proof that they were my parents. Mr. Everton, I assume, was going on a hunch. He had no proof and if he did, it wasn’t offered to me—only the article on his phone and an old photo.

  “I mean, he loved her. You could see it plain as day,” Mr. Everton offered.

  I shifted in my hospital bed. Outside, the afternoon light had taken a turn toward dark pinks and purples. It was to be yet another gorgeous autumn night in the mountains, one that flung itself out like a blanket over everything and eased us into slumber.

  “Eighteen years ago,” I said. I ticked my fingers across my lap without meeting Mr. Everton’s gaze. “And I’m sixteen years old. What happened between then and the day I was dropped off at my first of several foster homes?” My voice simmered with sarcasm.

  Mr. Everton sighed. “I didn’t see him much after that. I was still pretty pissed about him getting the gold over me. That was a dark part of my life when I had turned to booze and whatever else was around. I got married a few months after that, and we were busy with a two-year-old when everything happened.”

  “Everything?” I whispered. “What do you mean?”

  “You were maybe one or two, I guess,” Mr. Everton said as he repositioned himself in his chair. “Zelda was diagnosed with breast cancer just a few weeks after Rudy learned that his father died. The cancer was pretty far along, and I heard that Zelda was taken very swiftly. I’m sure it tore Rudy apart for everything to happen at once. I don’t know exactly what happened after that. Hell, I didn’t even know that he had a kid. But I do know, the next thing I heard of Rudy Eyser was, he had started a school for gymnastics up in Washington State, a school a lot like this one. In fact, it’s the only other school in the country with the same rating as Denver Athletics.”

  I had heard of it—the Seattle Eyser Athletics Academy. In my head, Seattle was as far away as India or Argentina, and I had never given Seattle much thought. I guess I had linked it with Rudy Eyser, but I hadn’t followed his career so much since he had won the gold.

  “I can see from your face that you’ve heard of it,” Mr. Everton said, staring at me intently.

  “Of course, I have,” I replied and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. “Everyone in gymnastics has.”

  Mr. Everton rose and paced the floor at the foot of my bed, with his hands clenched behind his back. I wanted to tell him to sit back down, that this wasn’t some kind of secret operation that we were trying to crack.

  “I just don’t know why he would do this,” Mr. Everton said. “I had no clue he had a kid. He should have reached out to someone—told them that he needed help. But instead, he just…”

  “Left me to the chaos of the foster system, and went on to live his best life,” I recited. My heart sunk into my belly.

  Mr. Everton stopped and spun on his heel. “You don’t sound surprised. Did you know about this?”

  “No. But it’s never mattered to me who my parents were,” I whispered and sucked in a deep breath.

  Mr. Everton’s face was difficult to read. “Why do you say that?”

  I swallowed. “I knew that whoever they were, they didn’t want me. Or they didn’t want to figure out a way to keep me. I figured that’s all I needed to know.”

  Mr. Everton cut closer to my bed. He spread his hands across the bedspread and said, “You don’t understand, Rooney. If you’re entering this world—really entering it—you’re going to come up against Rudy Eyser. He’s one of the top gymnastics judges at Nationals, which is in April. If you continue on the way you are, you’re going to see him. And he’s going to judge you. Do you understand?”

  This information felt like a knife slipping into my belly.

  “If you want to focus on going to the Olympics—and if you’re anything like Theo, I know you do—then you need to know what you’re up against. If he figures out who you are, Rooney, then I don’t know what he’ll do. He might find a way to take you out of the organization. People do crazy things when they realize that the world might see their mistake and use it against them. You’re his mistake. He abandoned you.”

  “Jesus Christ,” I muttered under my breath as my mind swirled with so many different thoughts. The words ‘mistake and abandoned’ sounded so damn awful. Like someone that dropped off a stray at the pound that they didn’t give a shit about. I could feel the anger build inside me and felt a tear roll down my cheek. I really hadn’t wanted to cry in front of Mr. Everton. I finally looked up at him and asked, “Why the hell do you care so much?”

  He took two strides to the side of the bed and grabbed my hands. He cupped them in his and said, “Because I want to see you win, Rooney. It’s been a long time since I have seen anyone with your degree of talent.”

  I allowed his words to sink in and just stared out the window for a few moments. There was too much to process. Mr. Everton didn’t speak for a long time either. I swallowed and clenched my eyes tightly and prayed that he would just leave me alone, that this would all go away. Maybe I should have never pursued my dreams at Denver Athletics.

  But I also knew that if I hadn’t come, I wouldn’t have any kind of shot at the Olympic team considering what had just happened. It would have meant that Poppy would have a clear path ahead, though.

  With a jolt, I remembered something, and glanced to the side of my bed, where my gym bag had been thrown by someone who hadn’t been unconscious, maybe Chloe? I reached to the side and grabbed it and splayed it across my lap. Mr. Everton looked at me with curiosity. I unzipped it slowly and looked inside, where the ring glinted, sitting there on the top of my towel. Poppy had stolen it in order to frame me. But I wanted to just get that out of the way—maybe even throw myself under the bus, if I had to. Maybe that took away her power. Maybe it gave her everything she needed. At that moment, I didn’t really care.

  “I can’t really explain to you why I have this,” I began. “I can’t prove what actually happened, and there are a million reasons why I might have stolen it. But just know this… I didn’t.”

  I lifted the ring into the air, holding it delicately with just my thumb and forefinger. To his credit, Mr. Everton’s face didn’t change at all. It was almost like he had expected this to happen.

  “Huh. Would you look at that.” He reached up and took the ring and held it high toward the flickering and fluorescent hospi
tal lights. “The ring I won at Nationals.” He gave me a mischievous grin. “I know it probably looks rather impressive, but to be honest with you—it’s worth literally nothing—nothing except my memories. Which, I guess as I get older, tend to matter less and less, as well.” He paused for a moment. “I can see, however, that if you were strapped for cash… You might assume this ring was worth something,” he continued.

  I burned to tell him that someone had set me up. But instead, I just met his gaze. He studied me and said, “You know, whatever happened with this ring… I’d like to offer you something. I’ve heard through the grapevine that you have a little bit of trouble with your monetary situation. You can’t pay up the rest of your dues.”

  “I assume by the grapevine you just mean that Mr. Piper told you,” I returned and I picked at my comforter. There was darkness in my voice. I hated the thought of these better and more powerful men tossing information about me around behind my back. “You know it’s a pretty shitty feeling knowing that my finances are being discussed behind closed doors among you and the headmaster. And now, we both know that my possible birth father didn’t even care what the hell happened to me and runs one of the top athletic schools in America. I guess he doesn’t have to share his millions with anyone now that he tossed me from the picture. I mean… if this is even true at all.”