by Caela Carter
Wilhelmina stared at her.
“But not with me. You’ll need another coach for that. I’m only going to do this in a way that doesn’t damage you. If you want to do it with me, you have to trust me. If you want to do it with me, you have to be okay with defying Katja. That’s how we get you to the Olympics. That way, if you fail, you’re still in one piece.”
Wilhelmina knew Kerry was right. She trusted her with everything she had. So, she nodded.
• • •
“Mina,” Kerry called her over to where she was pacing a few feet down the vaulting podium.
Wilhelmina turned, patting down her hair. It was cropped short, nestled close to her head and decorated with rows of sparkly bobby pins. Years ago, Wilhelmina’s Level 9 team had insisted over and over again on matching hairstyles. As the only black girl on the team, she’d spent too much time wrestling her hair into silly positions like poofs or upside-down French braids to try to make it look like her teammates’. Eventually, she got frustrated. After all, she’d never asked all of those white girls to go for flat twists or dreads. But she couldn’t say that, so instead she’d chopped it all off. This was gymnastics, not a fashion show.
Kerry put her arm over Wilhelmina’s shoulders. “No one knows what you can do,” Kerry said, her high Romanian cheekbones tilting close to Wilhelmina’s creased forehead. Her parents still called Kerry’s accent intimidating. But after so many years together, Wilhelmina found Kerry’s voice the most relaxing sound in the gym. “Remember that. We know you can get one of the top four spots. But no one else does.”
Kerry had been right about almost everything in that locker room three years ago. But she hadn’t been able to keep Wilhelmina the best vaulter in the world. No, that spot had been stolen last year by Wilhelmina’s one sort-of friend left in the sport, when Camille burst back on the scene in a new body with a totally new repertoire.
So they were blessed when the USAG announced that the Olympic team would be determined directly after the Olympic trials this year, publicly. The first-place gymnast would automatically make the team. The Olympic Committee (along with Katja) would choose the rest of the gymnasts. They were likely to choose Camille for her high-scoring vault, and then the next three finishers in the all-around. Wilhelmina knew that Grace, Leigh, and Georgette were great all-around gymnasts, but she was hoping to beat one of them. And even if she couldn’t do that, the fourth spot was open.
One spot. And every gymnast in the room had her eye on it.
Mina wasn’t sure she could do it, but Kerry believed in her.
She hated that she was vying for the last place on the team. She hated that she wasn’t one of the gymnasts—Leigh, Grace, Georgette, Camille—whose position was almost certain. She should have been. She should have gotten her chance.
Wilhelmina stretched her forced smile wider until it felt like her lips would split. She made her head bounce up and down like she was catching Kerry’s enthusiasm. She was supposed to be excited. She was not supposed to be bitter. She was supposed to forget all about how this would have felt four years ago. If the FIG was more fair. If the rules weren’t so stupid.
It was what happened in gymnastics. Each girl who was lucky enough took her turn at the top, and then slid down into anonymity as perkier, skinnier, higher-flipping teenyboppers climbed on her broken body.
“You can make this team, huh,” Kerry was saying. “You get that position. Or, if you win on the vault, you get a different one, huh.”
Wilhelmina squinted at Kerry. Vault was her best event, but did Kerry really think she could beat Camille on it? Camille?
“And worst-case scenario, if you come in fifth or sixth,” Kerry said with a smile, “you’re still going. You’re an alternate, at the very least.”
“I don’t want to be an alternate,” Wilhelmina whispered. It was another thing she wasn’t supposed to say. She was supposed to be here as a gymnastics veteran, lapping up any of the Olympic Glory Juice that might drip off the girls at the top. But she would rather retire than be an alternate. At least she thought she would. Wilhelmina had no idea what retiring would look like (except the tiny part of it that would look like Davion). But she knew it would be impossible to stand the smell and sounds of the gym if she missed her dream that narrowly again.
And alternate was exactly where the analysts predicted her to land.
Kerry shrugged and, like Wilhelmina knew she would, said, “You only control you. You perform the best; you take what you get.”
Wilhelmina nodded.
“You don’t have to be an alternate, though, Mina-Mina. You can be it. Just hit, huh?”
Wilhelmina nodded.
It was infuriating how wise her coach was. She wanted to be able to control it all; she wanted the guarantee that if she hit all eight of her routines, she’d be on the team.
“Go chalk up,” Kerry said.
“Go Team Fogies!” Samantha called out when Wilhelmina was climbing the steps to the podium.
Wilhelmina turned to give her a smile even though it wasn’t fair. Samantha was twenty-two. She already got to be an Olympian. It made sense that she was close to retirement.
You can’t control your birthday, Wilhelmina. You can only control your routines, she heard her coach’s voice say in her head as she spread chalk on her palms and her feet.
She stood at the end of the runway, crossed her arms across her chest, making an X with her forearms, and visualized her Amanar, her upper body twitching back and forth.
Wilhelmina and the other athletes who were hoping to get the chance to compete in the individual vault event in Italy—Camille, Leigh—would each perform two different-styled vaults. But only the first one counted, really. Only the first one would be factored into the team score, and that’s what Katja was most interested in: team gold for the USA.
Wilhelmina got the flag, bounced once on her toes, closed her eyes for a quick second of silence, and took off down the runway.
Roundoff, she told herself as she got to the end. Jump off the springboard.
So far so good.
Explode off the vaulting table. NOW!
She kept her legs together, her knees tight, her upper body held stiff with her arms across her chest. She was high enough, higher than anyone else except Camille would get, but not as high as she could be. She twisted two-and-a-half times before she sensed the floor coming up underneath her. She finished her final rotation and stretched her toes toward the mat, then—boom—landed on her feet with her back to the vault. She landed heavily, and before she could stop herself, her left foot darted out behind her to keep her steady.
Stand up! she told herself.
She pulled all the muscles in her legs to attention and straightened out her body. One big step. A three-tenths deduction. Not exactly the splash she was hoping to make, and vault was her best event.
So oh well on beating Camille.
Still, when she signaled the judges, the entire arena erupted in applause and whoops, and she heard a familiar Russian accent cheering her name. She turned from the judges to Katja Minkovski, and she saw a huge smile fill her grandmotherly face.
Well, she thought to herself, if that’s going to make you smile, today will be better than I thought.
Wilhelmina jogged back to the end of the runway for her second vault, her heart pounding to the beat of the surrounding applause.
“You can do even better,” Kerry called up to her.
I can, Wilhelmina thought.
And then, she did.
CAMILLE
With two feet on the ground and only the smallest hop forward, Camille landed her second vault and threw her hands over her head. The smile on her face was genuine for a fleeting moment. She forced it to stay there.
She jogged to the side of the podium but paused before hopping off.
“Comeback Cammie! Comeback
Cammie!” the crowd chanted.
That was her name now.
“Comeback Cammie! Comeback Cammie!” the crowd roared.
Thanks to the great skills of her new publicist, these fans liked her story even more than her gymnastics. The story that was plastered on every gymnastics blog on the Internet, printed in the gymnastics magazines, highlighted on espnW and CBS Sports and even the Jewish Week. Her story was everywhere, even though Camille, until the American Cup six months ago, had been nowhere.
She was living the old fantasy, the dream she had during every gymnastics meet she watched as a little girl: that it would one day be her name squealed from the plastic seats of the stands; that it would be her face on the posters in little girls’ bedrooms; that it would be her signature Sharpied across gym bags. That politicians and talk show hosts and even boy band singers like Greg Thompson would write “Good luck out there” on her fan page the day before the Olympic trials. Camille had a second of joy when she saw that “Good luck” from the lead singer of Out of Touch on her fan page this morning. But it fell to pressure quickly.
At the edge of the podium, Camille threw her arms over her head the way she had seen so many gymnasts do before her. She waved both her hands at once and the audience got a little louder, as if they were saying hello back to her.
Camille always thought it would be more fun than this.
She imagined her mother’s smile floating somewhere far above her head and made herself keep waving.
“That’s my star!” her coach said, giving her a double high five before wrapping her into a hug. Camille hated that nickname. She hated that he was yet another person depending on her gymnastics. “You couldn’t have done that any better. That’s exactly what we need.”
He put her down, and she was smiling. Because she liked making him happy. Because she liked making her mom happy. Because the blood pumping through her veins when she landed a vault like that one always felt like exclamation points.
Because they all expected her to smile.
When the cameras turned away and the gym focused on Olivia, the last performer on the bars, Camille seized a private moment to check her phone. No messages. No missed texts. Nothing.
The morning of Classics, Bobby had texted her to say good luck. The morning of Nationals he’d texted. And this morning, he’d texted nothing.
• • •
Camille remembered Bobby’s voice coming through her cell phone last night. “Please, baby, don’t do it,” he’d begged.
Camille had pushed her frizzy dark brown bun against the tiled wall of the hotel bathroom in frustration. “Can you just come? If you leave Long Island tonight, there won’t be any traffic. You can be here in four hours,” she’d whispered, not knowing how to cover up her desperation and stay quiet enough that Wilhelmina wouldn’t hear her through the bathroom door. “It won’t be the same without you in the stands.”
“You don’t want to do this,” Bobby had said, his voice heavy and masculine. Camille could picture him in his kitchen, his curly-haired head resting on the white tablecloth, his blue eyes blinking nonstop as he waited for her answer.
Bobby was so heartbreakingly cute. In the almost three years they’d been together, Camille forgot that sometimes, as if by getting used to his good looks, his dark hair and light eyes, his muscled shoulders and crooked smile, she could start to ignore them. But he always seemed hottest in the moments when it felt like they were ending.
“I need to . . . finish it.”
“You’re twenty now. You’re still there. What does ‘finish it’ even mean?”
“It’s my choice, baby,” she’d said.
“No, it isn’t.” His voice sounded lethargic, like a barbell hung on each word. It was the conversation they kept having, over and over, for almost a year as Camille fought and strived for a comeback, as her body turned to rock and her brain turned to mush, as her vault got higher and her mood got lower.
After his initial objections when she said she was returning to the sport, Bobby had supported her. He helped her find Coach Andrew, listened to her play-by-play of every workout, massaged her sore legs and arms and back, and showed up to every meet in his lucky green polo.
But he told her to quit. Over and over again he asked her to quit. And she thought about it, a little bit.
But her mom was depending on her. Her mom was depending on her gymnastics for everything.
Bobby’s voice had a new kind of desperation to it the night before the trials began.
The tile floor was cold through Camille’s pajama bottoms. She glanced at her watch. It was 10:55; Lights Out had been more than an hour ago.
“I have to go to bed,” Camille had said at the same time Bobby said, “I can’t do it.”
“You can come,” Camille said. “You have to.” She hadn’t gotten through a meet without him since before they met, since before . . .
“No. . . .” he said. “I mean I can’t do this. I can’t support you if—”
“I have to go to bed,” she interrupted. “Please come. We can talk about this in person when the meet’s over.”
“Camille!” he’d gasped, like it was hard to say her name all of a sudden. “I’m breaking up with you.”
She’d dropped the phone. It clanged off the tile floor in the darkness, and she didn’t even care if it woke up Wilhelmina or the entire hotel.
His voice was coming at her ear so quickly when she’d picked it up again. “—I love you but gymnastics is killing you and you don’t even want to do it anymore. I can’t watch you flush more and more of our time down the toilet. I . . . will you stop? For me?”
“Bobby!” she’d said. “You can’t ask me that.”
She didn’t want to stop, that’s what he didn’t get. She didn’t want to be here. She didn’t want gymnastics to take over every little bit of her life. But she didn’t want to stop cold turkey again, either.
He spoke quietly. “I feel like if I don’t come, maybe I’ll finally get you to stop. And then we can be together. Fully committed.”
“That’s not fair,” Camille had whisper-screamed.
He’d sighed. “I don’t know what fair is anymore,” he’d said.
She was ready to tell him the stuff she hadn’t before, ready to bare her soul if it would only mean he’d come to the meet. “My whole life I’ve followed the rules. When I met you, I was seventeen and I’d never kissed a boy. I’d never even stayed up until midnight.”
“That’s my point,” he said.
“But—” she said. She didn’t know what followed.
But I like being a girl who follows the rules.
But I don’t understand your rules for me.
There was a long pause, and then he said, “I’m sorry. I can’t.” And hung up.
Rap rap rap. The sound was sharp on the door. “We should be sleeping.” Wilhelmina’s voice snuck under the wood, each word pointed like a pencil stabbing Camille’s thigh. “Go to bed.”
Camille’s face had burned. Wilhelmina sounded like a teacher and, even though she was older, Camille felt like a misbehaving child. She couldn’t face her friend, so instead she waited until she heard the squeak of Wilhelmina’s mattress before promising herself she’d make it up to Wilhelmina tomorrow, somehow, and climbing into her own bed.
Camille had whimpered herself to sleep, half hoping that she’d be so tired she’d miss her vaults and not make the team so she could limit the gymnastics in her life without her mom blaming Bobby for it.
• • •
So, of course he didn’t text. Of course he wasn’t in the stands.
And of course Wilhelmina was still acting cold and distant.
All of that hadn’t stopped her at all. Vault was the shortest event, so it was possible to get very few deductions on it. The best vaults earned more points than the best scores on any other
event. The Olympic Committee would always choose the best vaulter for the team because the best vaulter added the most points to the team score, and the committee was always after team gold.
The best vaulter was Comeback Cammie.
Camille was two vaults closer to her second first Olympics.
STANDINGS
AFTER THE FIRST ROTATION
1.
Camille Abrams
15.350
2.
Wilhelmina Parker
15.050
3.
Georgette Paulson
15.000
4.
Grace Cooper
14.800
5.
Monica Chase
14.750
6.
Leigh Becker
14.550
7.
Maria Vasquez
14.500
8.
Annie Simms
13.850
9.
Kristin Jackson
13.700
10.
Natalie Rice
13.000
11.
(Samantha Soloman)
0.0
12.
(Olivia Corsica)
0.0
Second Rotation