by Caela Carter
They watched her with reverence. They didn’t scream and whoop at the height of her release moves or squeal when she transitioned from bar to bar. Instead the stadium held a collective breath in devotion to the beauty before them: a beauty that exists only when a small and perfect body does impossible things.
Inside, Grace felt peace. She felt zen. She felt what she used to when her mother would put her to sleep as a little girl after telling her the tale of the spider and the silkworm. “Wo ai ni,” she would say, and Grace would feel so loved. She’d kiss Grace on the forehead, and Grace would drop to sleep.
There was no adrenaline on her breath like there had been an hour or so ago when she was lined up on the vaulting runway. Vault was about being impressive. Bars was about being beautiful. Bars was hers.
Grace did a one-handed straddle giant, named a Cooper because she’d been the first to perfect it in international competition, and then re-grasped the bar with her left hand to begin her dismount series.
Her muscles were screaming, her breath was strained, her palms were burning despite her grips, but Grace didn’t feel any of that. Her heart was pumping sunshine and fresh running water. She was alone, practicing bars in a cave next to a babbling brook. She felt like her mother was there, somewhere, watching her and helping her breathe. Once she landed her Mustafina, Grace would be back in the gym. She’d be back to the cameras and the numbers and Leigh and, worst, her dad.
But for now it was Grace and the bars.
Then, as she piked to start her dismount, she felt that flutter in her chest: her heart divided like a swarm of moths in her rib cage, and she was back in the gym sooner than she planned. Her entire body flinched and Grace hoped the judges didn’t notice. It was so scary when her organs split like that.
Still, she released the bar and threw her legs over her head, twisting her body to the left, then finding the floor and thrusting her arms into the air. The gym swung dangerously, the judges a pendulum in her vision, but she managed to keep her body anchored and upright.
She was sucking down oxygen. It felt like she couldn’t get any past her throat and into her lungs.
All gymnasts breathe hard after bars routines, she reminded herself. No one will notice.
To prove her right, her father lifted her off the podium and immediately broke into analysis of her routine, saying nothing about her labored breathing or the fact that Grace was sure he could see her pulse punching through the skin beneath her jaw.
“Good,” he concluded with a nod.
Grace tried to smile, wishing her body would calm down enough for her to enjoy the rare compliment.
He handed her a water bottle and she sucked some down, her nerves finally slowing, her heart finally solidifying.
“Just watch the transition into the dismount.”
Grace nodded.
He didn’t understand. He didn’t know. It wasn’t her gymnastics breaking down in that moment; it was her entire body.
It was good he didn’t know.
Grace took shaky steps back to her gym bag. She tried not to collapse into her chair. She pulled out her phone so that she would look busy and avoid some of the hugs. She didn’t want anyone to feel how she was shaking.
Even though it was normal. Everyone was shaky after bars.
There was a notification on her phone.
Bet you thought that message last night was a one-and-only, Grace Cooper, but I’m actually watching and cheering for you! That uneven bars routine was HOT! <3 Dylan
Hot. He’d called her hot. Her still-not-back-together heart did little dances all over her body.
She bit her lip to keep from smiling.
Dylan Patrick had written to her again. He was actually watching. And he’d called her hot.
“Put it away.” Her dad was towering over her suddenly.
She threw the phone in her bag quickly. Too quickly? Did she do it too quickly? Was he going to guess there was something bad on there?
“You have to focus,” he said.
Grace couldn’t stop her cheeks from turning pink. It was the first time she’d ever been called hot. Why did her dad have to shove himself into the middle of it?
Grace leaned into her bag, pretending to go for her ChapStick, but really pushing the phone deeper into it, below her pants and jacket, to a place far from her dad’s demands for focus.
It was just one little thing for her to have to herself today. Just one little thing that wasn’t 100 percent about gymnastics. It was dangerous, but Grace wanted to hold on to it for as long as she could.
MONICA
Monica was awkward in her body as she paced back and forth beside the beam, waiting for her turn. Minutes ago she’d been a puffed-up member of the US National Gymnastics team. She’d been a legitimate competitor on the uneven bars, beating the national champion in her opening event.
Now she was the Wedgie Queen.
Her body was all angles. She tried to focus on her upcoming routine. She tried to push the clicking sound of Grace and Leigh gossiping about her out of her brain and, instead, imagine her long lines, her graceful transitions, her powerful tumbling. But there were too many nerves shooting back and forth between her ears.
Monica marched herself into the locker room for the millionth time since she’d heard Grace and Leigh’s biting gossip and locked herself in a stall. She pressed the blue fabric into the glue on her right butt cheek, and it yanked at the raw, freshly bare skin of her crotch. She resisted the urge to yell out in pain, to rub her fist over the itchy-burny skin at the base of her leotard where the wax job from a few days ago had replaced her pubic hair with angry red welts.
“Fifteen is too young to be getting waxed down there,” the woman at the salon had said. “Especially to be waxing away all of it.”
Monica was lying half-naked on the table, a curtain hanging at her waistline so she couldn’t see her own bottom half. She’d squeezed her mom’s hand. She was scared. All the girls at the gym said this was going to hurt.
They laughed, though. Like it was funny they had to brand themselves to stay in the sport.
“It’s okay,” her mother said. “It’s different for my daughter. Tell her, Monica.”
Monica’s mother was always pushing her to tell people she was a gymnast. She said the word so much at her mother’s prompting, she almost forgot what it was like to claim it on her own. Monica was glad her mother was proud of her, she guessed, but she wanted a chance to be humble. She felt humble.
“I’m a gymnast,” Monica had said.
“On the US national team,” her mother added, too loudly. “She’s competing with the best girls in the country. She’s a gymnast.”
The woman nodded and started stirring the wax. It was a magical word that made Monica older. She only kind of understood why.
She was an elite athlete. But her crotch burned like any other fifteen-year-old’s.
Now, in the darkness of the bathroom stall, Monica lit up the screen of her iPhone and stared at the empty spaces of her fan page. Sure there were a few good lucks from cousins and a stranger or two, but that was it. Nothing from her classmates. Only one message from one teacher. The rest of the school probably didn’t even know why she was absent. She was there so rarely—only attending half days and missing one week almost every month for Gym Camp—they probably didn’t even notice when she was gone anymore. She’d looked at the other fan pages this morning—Grace’s and Leigh’s and Camille’s and Georgette’s—and they’d been full of messages. Grace and Camille even had some from the boys in Out of Touch.
Monica had sort of hoped that a few hours into the meet her own page would start filling up. That some people would recognize her name on television and . . .
But it was like she wasn’t even here.
Grace and Leigh said she didn’t deserve to be here. And it seemed like no one outs
ide the gym, except for her family, even knew where Monica was.
Why was Monica always invisible?
Monica checked Wilhelmina’s page quickly. It was just as empty as her own, and that gave her courage. Wilhelmina had always been Monica’s favorite (though she’d missed so many camps and meets, she didn’t even know who Monica was, probably). Maybe she could be a gymnast just like Wilhelmina.
Monica darkened her phone, pressed her palms into the flesh of her butt to solidify the fabric one last time, and made herself move back into the light and the crowd.
The minute she was within throwing distance of so many hundreds of eyes, Monica felt itchy again.
Yes, Monica was spazzy all the time and it was one reason she’d never be a Leigh or a Georgette or a Grace. But she wouldn’t have felt quite this spazzy if she were currently wearing more than this skintight, revealing leo. It was so annoying how, in order to compete in this sport, you had to be basically naked. Monica knew it was necessary, but it still made her feel squeamish. Every line of her body was on display. Anyone who looked at her could see the dip where her quadriceps met her hamstring, the jutting out of her collarbone above the silver hem of her leo. The lines of her abdominal muscles and the edge of her sports bra were visible through the shimmery fabric.
She paced back to the other end of the podium just as Kristin did her leap mount. Put the warm-ups back on, Monica told herself. She usually spent the entire meet in her pants except when she was on the apparatus. Most of the girls did not. The average elite gymnast stayed almost naked for the duration of a two-hour meet, marching around the gym like she never thought twice to be self-conscious about her exact shape being on display for the whole arena.
Monica had pulled off her warm-ups too early this rotation, accidentally misreading Maria’s name as her own. She thought she’d be up right after Leigh. But she wasn’t until second to last, and now she was pacing like a leopard in a cage and completely failing at her mission to appear confident, because she didn’t have her pants on and she didn’t want anyone to notice that she put them on and took them off then put them on and took them off all between only her first two routines.
Not that anyone was paying that much attention to her.
Then again, that’s what she’d thought before when she’d tried to readjust her own leo over her own butt, and clearly the Royal Duo had noticed that. Monica shook her head to try to chase their giggles from her memory.
She kept her pants off.
She paced back toward the front of the beam and wham! Leigh Becker walked right into her. They froze and stared at each other, and the memory of Monica’s name in Leigh’s disgusted voice echoed through her ears. Monica Chase, Monica Chase, Monica Chase . . .
“Excuse me,” Leigh said, staring down at her like she was a rodent. And Monica moved around the star to prop her leg up on the podium. She bent to roll out her toes.
It had been surprising to Monica when her score trumped the national champion’s, but it turned out she had a higher degree of difficulty, so that’s what happens. When you added up the score potential for each of Monica’s tricks on bars, it was higher than Leigh’s. They both did most of their tricks well, so Monica’s score stayed higher than Leigh’s. So who cared? It’s not like Monica would beat Leigh in the all-around.
But Leigh had been so bratty about it. “Don’t apologize.”
Like Monica should apologize or something.
It was trippy, though—she had almost apologized.
It was a wake-up call. Monica could be friends with the other gymnasts here, but she couldn’t be a fan. She had to be a fan of herself alone.
If she wasn’t her own fan, no one would be.
Monica switched legs and rolled out her left toes. Her body felt more like her own when she was stretching and doing gymnastics. When she was walking around for millions to see all her muscles and organs, she almost felt like her body wasn’t hers anymore. Like it was a cage everyone else owned and she was trapped inside of it.
Monica kicked into a handstand to stretch her abs and finally started to visualize her routine.
“Just have a good day, right?”
Ted’s voice came from high above her head. She nodded, her chin moving up toward her feet, and she dropped out of the handstand.
“That’s the goal, right?”
No. Monica nodded even as she argued with her coach in her brain. Don’t fall. My goal is to do eight routines with no falls.
“Good girl.” Ted patted the top of her head like she was a dog playing fetch. “Go chalk up.”
A few minutes later, Monica’s hands grasped the four-inch beam, and her butt and abdomen pulled her legs up over her head into a handstand. She split into a full upside-down straddle. Then she walked on her hands so that she was on the edge of the beam and bent her back until her feet were on the beam behind her head.
Monica might be skinny and tiny. Her body might be all angles and her hair might not be shiny. She might sometimes have trouble getting distance on her vault and height between her tumbling body and the beam. But she was one of the most flexible gymnasts in the country. Her beam routine was designed to demonstrate that.
It worked.
For the next ninety seconds, Monica saw nothing but the beam. She did walkovers and handsprings and roundoffs. She did her double full turn, which got an ooh, so at least a few little girls in the audience were watching her. Her eyes stayed on the slightly fuzzy cream surface of the beam. She did an aerial cartwheel into a walkover that landed her seated on the beam, her legs hanging over it, her stinging crotch being flattened against the hard surface.
She laid her body across the beam, grasped it with her forearms, her chin pressed into the side of it, and kicked her legs over her into a beam-hugging handstand. Another ooh. She lifted herself onto her hands, did a back walkover, and landed at the end of the beam just in time to hear the warning beep. She had ten seconds.
Perfect.
She pointed her toe in front of her, took a deep breath, and dismounted: cartwheel (upside down, right-side up), aerial cartwheel (upside down, right-side up), double back tuck (upside down, right-side up, upside down, right-side up).
She landed on her feet with a tiny hop.
Something somewhere in her gut made Monica’s head lurch up, and her eyes landed on Katja Minkovski. She was leaning toward an ex-Olympic gymnast and laughing. She wasn’t even paying attention.
Oh well. That much Monica expected.
She was on her way to her goal. She didn’t fall.
STANDINGS
AFTER THE SECOND ROTATION
1.
Georgette Paulson
30.725
2.
Grace Cooper
30.650
3.
Wilhelmina Parker
29.650
4.
Maria Vasquez
29.540
5.
Monica Chase
29.350
6.
Samantha Soloman
28.980
7.
Leigh Becker
28.450
8.
Annie Simms
28.200
9.
Kristin Jackson
27.750
10.
Natalie Rice
27.000
11.
Camille Abrams
15.350
12.
Olivia Corsica
14.850
Third Rotation
CAMILLE
Worms of guilt crawled through Camille’s heart as she watched Wilhelmina warm up for the second of the two rotations Camille would be skipping due to her specialist status. Her friend was shooting her confused and dirty looks that made her want to shrink. She should apologize, but how?
Her phone buzzed in her hand and Camille flipped it to study the screen. Finally! Her heart leaped to her throat. Bobby wasn’t there, but he was watching from home, she figured. He was finally texting her that good-luck message.
But no. It wasn’t a text or a phone call or anything. It was just another message on her fan page. This one from male gymnastics superstar Mario Alvarez.
Good luck, Comeback Cammie! Hoping we’ll be heading to Italy together in a few days!
Camille sighed. She wanted to throw the phone into the stands and run away from this gym forever. But—bing—a little, tiny thumbs-up appeared beneath Mario’s message. Her mom had liked his post. Her mom had liked Greg Thompson’s post and the mayor’s post and her old high-school principal’s post. Stuff like this was keeping her mom going.
Camille had no choice but to be the top scorer on vault today. Sorry, Wilhelmina.
Sixteen-year-old Camille would never have sat on the sidelines like this, worrying about boyfriends or parents or trying to determine another girl’s chances because she recognized the fire in her eyes. Sixteen-year-old Camille’s fire was too bright to see past it.
What had happened to that girl from four years ago? What had happened to the singularity of her mind, to the gumption of her dreams, to the joy in her competition?
• • •
Her mother had been there that day, of course. That single day when she was an Olympian. All the parents were asked to pay their way to New Mexico to sit on a set of bleachers and listen as their daughters’ dreams were either confirmed or squashed.