by Caela Carter
And Wilhelmina didn’t care. She knew she wouldn’t go to the Olympics for this woman, no matter what. Even if she did make the team now that Grace seemed broken and Leigh had fallen, she wouldn’t get to bask in the glory of it. She’d have to deal with Katja constantly putting her down, telling the media and anyone who would listen that Wilhelmina was only an alternate promoted too soon.
Wilhelmina deserved to go to the Olympics honestly. Like a star. With her country behind her. Katja would never let that happen, even if Wilhelmina won the meet today.
So this was it. Two more routines. Then she was through.
She squinted at the balance beam until the images of the past few minutes were blocked from her vision. And she mounted.
STANDINGS
AFTER THE SEVENTH ROTATION
1.
Wilhelmina Parker
103.780
2.
Grace Cooper
102.930
3.
Georgette Paulson
102.704
4.
Monica Chase
100.305
5.
Maria Vasquez
100.230
6.
Kristin Jackson
99.350
7.
Annie Simms
98.655
8.
Natalie Rice
94.550
9.
Samantha Soloman
60.405
10.
Olivia Corsica
59.550
11.
Camille Abrams
42.500
12.
Leigh Becker
WITHDRAWN
Eighth Rotation
LEIGH
I’m lucky to be alive, Leigh told herself.
It doesn’t matter, Leigh told herself.
Her body felt exhausted between the too-starched, too-white sheets of her hospital bed; her muscles were too tired to remember they were in pain. An hour ago she’d been planning to flip and twist and contort this body in ways that would delight the judges and the Olympic selection committee. Now Leigh couldn’t imagine turning her head to tell her mother, who was trying not to weep at Leigh’s bedside, that she was squeezing her hand too tightly.
She wanted to ask her mother why she was crying—was it about the Olympics? Or was it the residual fear from Leigh’s fall? Or was it because Leigh’s whole life up to now had been pointless? Was she crying because they’d moved to Virginia? Because Leigh had given up flute and soccer and every possible after-school activity to end up in this hospital bed?
Leigh wanted her to be quiet already.
There was a knock on the door and Leigh was suddenly able to move her head. She swung it to look at the door and ignored the way a stabbing pain fired through her forehead. She was hoping for the doctor to come into the room and finally end the waiting.
She was hoping for good news.
The pain in her head was a good sign. If it was a concussion . . .
Stop, she told herself. You’re lucky to be alive.
It was only Leigh’s dad. He handed her mom a cup of coffee and she stared at it, spacey.
“How ya feeling, Leigh-bee?” he asked. He put his hand on her cheek.
“Okay,” she said. “I feel okay now.”
It was true. Other than the top of her eye, which still felt like it was being rammed with a sword, she felt usual, like she had just finished a meet. Her muscles were tired but that was probably only because of the way they stiffened before she passed out. There were currents of pain zipping back and forth under her left knee cap, but that was normal. That was why gymnasts walked around with bags of ice taped to their torsos and shins and elbows and wrists and back. Zipping pain was an athlete’s silent reality.
“I feel okay,” she repeated again. I feel like a gymnast.
Her parents looked at her doubtfully.
“You know what’s going on, right, Leigh-bee? What being here means?” her dad said.
Leigh sighed. “Yeah. It doesn’t really matter how I’m feeling.”
His eyebrows jumped. They hated when she said things like this. Things that made it seem like she was all gymnast and nothing else.
“I mean it doesn’t matter what the doctor says. I’m out no matter what. When I left the Metroplex, I disqualified myself for the team. That’s what they said in our meeting before the meet started.”
Her parents nodded, looking relieved. But Leigh clutched hope to her chest. Maybe it was only a concussion. If it was, they’d change the rules for her. The USAG changed rules constantly. They changed the rules so much that it was impossible to remember them all, to predict what would happen one year based on the last year, to determine how many gymnasts would be on a team or how many would qualify for the all-around or how many would automatically qualify based on the trials. Nothing ever stayed the same. Everyone felt like victims of the USAG’s and FIG’s shifting policies, but where there were victims of circumstances, weren’t there always the opposite? Wasn’t there always someone for whom the unfairness bore advantage?
Well, that would be Leigh. They wouldn’t let a silly concussion keep America from winning team gold. Surely, they’d want Leigh on the team once she was cleared to compete.
They’d announce five gymnasts tonight. Grace, for sure. Wilhelmina, now. Camille and Samantha and Georgette. Then, once they learned that Leigh had nothing more than a concussion, that after a day or so of rest she’d be completely fine, they’d put her back on the team.
She’d been winning when she nose-dived into the beam, after all. They wouldn’t punish her for leaving the Metroplex. Not on a stretcher.
“Let’s talk about what we’ll do when we get home,” her dad said, forcing a smile. “There are so many things you haven’t gotten a chance to try. We’ll find new activities that you can enjoy.”
He was endlessly cheerful, annoyingly optimistic. This is probably how Grace often felt about her, but now, when she was in a hospital bed awaiting the verdict on whether all her sacrifices had been smacked out of relevance eye-socket-first, the optimism was grating. Or it was wrong.
Leigh was optimistic, too. She would be a gymnast again. Next week or the day after tomorrow she’d be back to conditioning and spinning around the bars and twisting over the vault.
“What’ll be your first meal when you’re free from the nutrition plan?” her dad asked. “Ice cream?”
“Pancakes?” her mom added, sniffling.
“I’m tired,” Leigh said.
She shut her eyes. She imagined herself in an Olympic leo, climbing to the top of the podium as they played the American national anthem because she had won the women’s all-around.
“Leigh,” her father said. “We know you want to go back, honey. We’re hoping for good news for you, too. But . . . it’ll be easier to be . . . to be yourself . . . if it’s not so public.”
Her mother squeezed her hand even harder. Leigh was worried it would be even more injured than her knee.
“It’s true,” her mom said. “You might be able to come out in school, you know? If you have to be out of the gym for a while. You can do it q
uietly, right? Maybe date a few girls.”
For a second, Leigh let the picture drift in her mind. Herself and a cute girl from her school all dressed up for the next dance. A nice girl who messaged her the way Dylan had last night. A hot girl who kissed her like—
But no.
Phil said it was all about focus. She would focus now. She would focus so hard it would fix whatever might be but probably wasn’t wrong with her body. She’d be like Grace. She’d use her mind to put her body back together.
A knock at the door, and her eyes flew open.
The doctor came in, her sandy-brown hair falling across her face so Leigh couldn’t even see her eyes. She studied a clipboard, which rested against her middle, between the flaps of her white lab coat. She didn’t even bother to look up at Leigh when she said it. She didn’t even think about the words as they left her mouth.
“The good news is you’ll walk again,” she said. Flat. Unfeeling. Hardly even negative. Like she was telling Leigh that the light blue of her hospital gown was the wrong color on her.
“Walk again?” Her mother gasped.
The doctor nodded curtly. “You will. And without surgery. We were concerned based on the swelling of your knee when you came in that you might have torn your ACL, but it turns out you only subluxed the kneecap.”
Only, Leigh thought. She said only. Only was good. Only meant it wouldn’t change her life too much.
Leigh had done it. She’d focused hard enough.
As if the doctor could hear her, she said, “You’ll recover. This should not affect you long-term.”
Leigh’s heart was doing a jig in her chest, she was so happy.
“We want to take an X-ray in the morning, once the swelling goes down, to be sure the tendons heal. And you have a bad concussion, so we’re going to keep you overnight.”
The doctor turned to go.
“Wait!” Leigh called out.
The doctor turned back around. Leigh tried not to see how she was tapping her thigh impatiently.
“You said I’ll recover. But when? When will I recover?”
“We will send you to an orthopedist when you get back to the DC area.”
I’m not going to the DC area, Leigh corrected her. Rome. I’m going to Rome.
“If it turns out your knee is subluxed as we are predicting, you will need to be completely off it for about two weeks, then we will slowly transition back into exercise with a knee brace. You’ll be in a brace while exercising for a few years.”
“Years?” Her mother gasped.
“Weeks?” Leigh almost screamed.
The doctor finally looked up. “You’ll live a normal life,” she said.
“But—” Leigh cut herself off before she finished. She snapped her jaw shut.
But I don’t want a normal life.
“You were inches away from a much more bleak conversation,” the doctor concluded.
She had glasses perched on a tiny nose. She was tall and lanky and her nose didn’t fit her body at all. She didn’t look like that much, Leigh decided. She didn’t look like she was always right about everything.
“And?” she said, when Leigh still hadn’t said anything.
Finally, Leigh whispered, “The Olympics.”
“Oh,” the doctor said. She clicked her pen against her clipboard. “Yes. Well, there’s always next time.”
MONICA
After her floor warm-up, Monica found herself sitting between her terrifying coach and her terrifying teammate. Grace hadn’t warmed up at all. Almost no one seemed to care about the floor exercise anymore.
Seeing Leigh fall had cracked everyone’s focus.
Monica still wanted to finish this meet up well. She still had that word running through her mind: alternate. But it was scary now, too. She’d never heard a human body pop before.
Grace looked at her. “You should be warming up.”
Monica shrugged. I did warm up. YOU should warm up.
“I . . . I can’t. I can’t warm up,” Grace said as if she’d heard Monica’s thoughts.
Monica lowered her eyebrows. “Why?”
“It’s my fault,” Grace said quietly.
Ted whipped his head out of his hands. “Don’t say that, Gracie,” he commanded. Then he shuddered. “It’s mine.”
“Listen,” she said, her voice shaky, like she was going to cry. “I made her fall. It was me.”
Monica started to get up, feeling suddenly like she was in the middle of a family moment, but Grace put her hand on Monica’s elbow and pulled her back into the chair.
Grace looked at Monica, her eyes so tense, her mouth so serious, Monica froze and stared back. “I said this awful thing last night. I totally betrayed her. I’m sure that’s what Leigh was thinking about,” Grace was saying desperately. “And even worse: I wanted her to fall. I wanted to win so badly, I wanted her to fall. I wished for it. I think I accidentally prayed for it.”
Monica’s eyes widened. She opened her mouth. What could she say?
“You’re wrong, Gracie,” Ted’s voice said behind Monica’s head. He was still looking at his shoes and Grace was still staring at Monica and Monica decided to go back to being the quiet little mousy girl and try to be invisible to get through this moment. “It’s my fault,” Grace’s dad was saying. “Why do you think you wanted her to fall? I’m the one who taught you. Who told you all those things. There are no friends on the gym floor. What kind of lesson is that? What kind of coach am I?” He paused. “Or father?”
He used that word like a weapon against himself.
Monica’s heart was beating so quickly. Her quiet time was negated as soon as Leigh went down, but any remnants of calm were erased by this bizarre argument she was suddenly filtering.
“You need a new coach, Grace,” Ted said. “I need to focus on being your parent. Your dad.”
Grace, shocked, finally let go of Monica’s elbow. A white ring stained her skin where her teammates’ fingers had been.
Suddenly Wilhelmina was in front of them. “Monica,” she said softly. “They called your name. You’re up.”
She hadn’t even heard her own name.
She stood. But then she turned. She wasn’t afraid of them anymore. In fact, in some ways, she was smarter than them.
“You know,” she said to Grace and Ted. “Neither of you did that to Leigh. You aren’t gods.”
Father and daughter stared back at her. She wasn’t sure if they heard her. But Ted reached out and put a hand on her forearm. “Don’t fall, Monica, okay? Don’t fall.”
Don’t fall. The words, her old goal, took on a new meaning.
Monica smiled. It was almost like she had taught Ted something.
She climbed the stairs to the floor podium, visualizing her routine on repeat in her brain. She was about to turn herself upside down seventeen times. She was about to pound her legs and her arms, her ankles and her wrists, her back and—potentially—her head.
Don’t fall.
God, why did they do this to themselves? Why did she spend her entire life learning to do the tricks that could potentially keep her from ever doing them again? Why did she spend all of yesterday wanting to be Leigh when Leigh could un-Leigh herself so quickly?
Monica’s floor music started and she danced into the middle of the floor.
Don’t fall.
But Monica could feel the tension, the depression, the worry filtering out of her body through her pointed toes, her arced arms, her soft smile, her pliés and split leaps. Her muscles flexed and sprung, balanced and flew.
She backed into the corner, her heels lined up in front of the floor’s boundary, ready to flip herself around the mat for her first tumbling run.
Don’t fall.
She said it one last time. Monica was relaxed now. She was relieved that she didn�
��t have as far as Leigh to fall. She wasn’t four feet up on the beam. And more importantly, her name wasn’t at the top of the scoreboard.
Monica didn’t fall.
GRACE
Grace landed her first tumbling run on a twisted left foot. Her right foot landed behind her left ankle so her body was contorted, and she stumbled trying to straighten her stance. She felt the fuzzy floor on the soles of her feet as she took step after step backward for what felt like minutes, hours, days to regain her balance. By the time she found it, she was so far out of bounds, she had to jog back to the floor and put her hands over her head.
Her face burned with embarrassment.
You shouldn’t even be here, she told herself. You should fall on your head.
Grace moved into her dance positions, stumbling on a simple full turn. She could almost feel her father turn his back, turn away from the Olympic disaster that was his daughter and his athlete. His athlete who wasn’t even his anymore. She tried not to care.
But she did.
You’re a terrible person, she told her herself as she backed her ankles into the southwestern corner of the floor.
You’re a terrible person, but you could be winning the Olympic trials again.
Shut up!
She saw the red flag go up. She’d gone out of bounds again, this time on a simple step. She was imploding.
It wasn’t on purpose. She was trying to focus. Even if it made her a terrible person, she was trying to hold on to her spot, to get ahead of Wilhelmina again.
Wilhelmina was right about Grace, but Grace wanted to prove her wrong anyway. Grace wanted to prove that she could beat the girl who was trying to disprove Katja, even without eating. She wanted to prove that she could be the best, she could go to the Olympics, even without eating.
The rest of them needed food like Wilhelmina said, but Grace was different. Grace was so much gymnast, she was practically magical.
It wouldn’t be fair to go to the Olympics while Leigh sat rotting on a couch and watched her on TV. Not when it was maybe her fault that Leigh wasn’t focused on beam, that Leigh was obsessed with her stupid secret instead of thinking about her gymnastics, that Leigh was . . . that Leigh was . . . where she was right now.