Heroes' Day

by Jesse Gordon

  “Shh,” John whispered, holding her close and brushing her hair with his hand. “It’s guerrilla politics. They would have done it anyway. It had nothing to do with you. This is above our heads.”

  “But everyone knows…everyone knows what Heroes’ Day is. I knew, and still I had to compete for myself instead of for the team…instead of for my country. Oh, I was so foolish!”

  “It’s okay, Monica. It’s going to be okay. Just be still. It’s going to be okay…”

  John went on like that for several minutes, long after Monica had fallen into a sullen trance. She felt the strength in his arms, felt the hard muscles of his chest straining as he braced himself against the door—she could also feel his pulse, could feel how frantic it was keeping his whole body alert and shaking and flooded with adrenaline.

  Any moment, she thought, starting to cry. Any moment now some bloodthirsty terrorist will come barreling through the door and they’ll find us and it’ll be over.

  The scary thing was, she wanted it to be over, whether by way of a daring rescue or by a bullet to the head—

  —she wanted it to be over.

  EPILOGUE

  The afternoon was calm and quiet, the pre-autumn breeze lazily tousling Monica’s hair as she pulled into the parking lot, turned the car off, and sat for a moment savoring the nostalgia. It was was comforting to no end that the place was still standing after three decades. For twelve of those years she’d kept away, but now…well, it was as good a time as any to take the plunge.

  She left the car, crossed the small parking lot, with its cracked asphalt and faded parking grid, and entered the gym. There was a group of eight girls being tended to by Donna and her assistant. Most of the girls were busy, though a few paid her brief glances, offered polite smiles—they were all too young, really, to know who she was despite the fact that her face was plastered on several hall of fame walls around the club. She could remember (fondly, now) being that young, being so absorbed in her own little world that everything on the news was just fantasy.

  How precious was that while!

  Greg was in his office, arguing with someone on the phone. When he saw Monica standing in the doorway, his face immediately brightened, and he excused himself before hanging up.

  “Small-town politics again?” Monica asked, entering more fully, closing the door behind her.

  Greg chuckled, stepping out from behind his desk and embracing her briefly, then holding her at arm’s length. “Nothing that can’t wait. My, you’re looking absolutely lovely these days!”

  “I try.”

  He gestured at one of the infamous plastic foldout chairs, reclaimed his post behind his desk, where he leaned back and sighed. “How is Patrick?”

  Taking a seat (I still fit! she thought, mildly amused that even into adulthood she’d never grown past the five-foot mark), Monica said, “The model husband.”

  “And the kids?”

  “Little handfuls. Getting into everything now that they’ve mastered walking upright.”

  “Some things never change, eh?”

  “True.”

  Greg shook his head, his attention momentarily diverted by a newscast on his desktop video screen. “Rough times. They say the fed rate is going up again. Jobless claims, too.”

  “And yet we’re still here. How long has the middle-class been an endangered species?”

  “Since before I was born.”

  “Good lord,” said Monica, smiling playfully. “That must have been during the, um…what came before the analog days?”

  “The Ice Age, my darling.” Greg paused a moment, studying his screen. “Look at this.” He swiveled it around so that Monica could see as well. There was a documentary on, The Rise and Fall of Patriot America. What caught her eye was a snippet of footage taken from the day John and herself had been rescued from the storage closet aboard Olympus. There, in front of two-dozen reporters (and more than a billion Americans watching from the comfort of their homes), Darren Hades was hefting fourteen-year-old Monica Sardinia in front of the microphones. There, brushing a stray lock of hair from her face, she was reciting her impromptu speech: “I think it’s really unfortunate what’s happened, but I’m glad that it’s over, and I just want to go home. What? Will I compete again? I’m sure…but right now I’m just trying to get a grip on everything…no, I don’t regret it. I don’t know what I’d do without gymnastics. I’d go crazy—it’s prepared me for anything I will ever face in life.”

  “Wow,” murmured Greg. He lowered the volume. “That must take you back.”

  Monica nodded, remembering. Numerous athletes and more than a hundred spectators had lost their lives that day. The Olympic Arena had suffered serious structural damage. At least a dozen terrorist organizations had claimed responsibility for the bombing (though there was never any proof that they’d planned to coincide it with the completion of her balance beam routine).

  “That wasn’t even how it happened,” she said.

  Greg waited, listened.

  “When they first found us in the closet, it was John who carried me—but the news crew thought it would be more patriotic if Darren ‘found’ me. So they brought him over. They scribbled some words for us to say, and we said them. Can you believe that?”

  “You know how I feel about the media in general.”

  “I think I do.”

  “Do you still keep in touch with your teammates, with…John was his name?”

  Monica blushed. “God, he was so in love with me—and I was in love with him.”

  “Ah. First love.”

  “Yeah, but not true love. We met during training—it was all so new to me. Competitive energy, hormones, the works. We never really talked after what happened. We were so young. I think in distancing ourselves from the tragedy we distanced ourselves from each other. He was there for me when I needed him, that’s all. As for the girls, most of them left the sport. Jackie stayed, but dropped down to the junior level. She’s an actress now, I think.”

  Out in the training area, the Keenes’ girls cheered loudly.

  “Sounds like someone mastered a new trick,” said Greg.

  “You know you’re going to miss that.”

  “All the way to my little patch of sun and surf in Cancun, thank you very much.”

  Monica looked out the window, imagining Greg in an oversized T-shirt and a Speedo. She still couldn’t believe he was retiring. “I was thinking about Darren on the way over.”

  “Hmf.”

  “He once told me that a single person can’t change the world overnight.”

  “Pessimistic fellow—if it weren’t for you, we’d still be stuck with the Patriot System today.”

  “That’s not it,” said Monica. “I was only a small part of something that had been building for decades. It merely reached a crisis on that first Heroes’ Day event—though for the longest time I was convinced it was my fault.” Indeed, it had been hard for the first few years. The media liked its icons, and as Hades had once become the poster boy for the launch of the Patriot System, so had she become the poster girl for its demise. “I used to think you were crazy for ‘limiting’ yourself to this dinky old gym, but Darren’s statement made me realize I didn’t need to change the world—I just need to be a part of it. I feel like I can finally do that now.”

  Greg smiled. “It’s good to know you’ve come to your senses—but look here, let’s keep your first day on the job light and easy.” He rose from his chair. “No soggy memories?”

  “No soggy memories.”

  “Excellent. Let’s go meet the girls, then.”

  Monica followed him into the training room.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Demons, gymnasts, and treachery. That was the original premise for Heroes’ Day, back when it was just a 10,000 word short story titled, “For Little Girls Who Wish.” Now that the novel is complete and beginning its slow infiltration of various online bookstores, I think it’s safe to reminisce over what was, what might hav
e been, and what should never have been.

  Heroes’ Day came in three distinct drafts, with a handful of smaller minor edits sprinkled in between. The first was “For Little Girls Who Wish” / “The Spandex Hero.” Believe it or not, my idea was to have a young gymnast sell her soul to a local demon named Father Hades (you’ll notice I kept the name for the final draft—it tickled me so) in exchange for Olympic gold. Very original, I know. Monica (then named Danielle McAllister) was such a bitter little tart that I got sick of her early on. Hades was a plastic-looking demon who came and went in little puffs of smoke. Linda Baimbridge was a dude, a hack photographer (ala Joe Grifasi in Brewster’s Millions, I now realize). The whole thing had a wolf-on-the-prowl sort of feel to it. There was to be a demonic rape scene in which Hades siphoned off Danielle’s soul, but in order for that to work, I had to make her older, seventeen or eighteen—and that was pissing me off because I kept thinking, “She should know better. This is ridiculous. This is crap.” So, I filed “…Little Girls…” away and moved on to other things.

  Phase two came during the 2000 Olympic Games, and was the result of a sudden light bulb over the head moment. I was working on something—an Urban Prophets story, I think—with the TV (muted) and the boombox on in the background. I happened to look up during a women’s gymnastics awards ceremony just as Mike Oldfield’s “Summit Day” started playing—and an idea hit me about how elite gymnastics is the great facade event, all about poise and grace, neatness, prim and proper lines. But behind the scenes it’s like any other competitive sport: there’s blood, sweat, and tears, bruised bodies, bloodied palms, broken dreams. I knew this was one of the prime ingredients I needed in my hero stew, which now had some of the framework laid for a futuristic look at competitive athletics (Olympus, the Patriot System, global ranks, etc.). I set the main characters’ ages at twelve, and had them go to Olympus together as a brother-sister pair, with chapters alternating between their respective viewpoints. Cody, the brother, had to deal with Coach Hades’ merciless work ethic, as well as the detrimental side effects of a “standard” nano-therapy tonic meant to give him increased stamina and muscle mass within a short period of time (even in this intermediate stage of the book’s development, the pop culture cliches were there—meaning the boys were expected to be powerful, super-muscular, the girls small and dainty). Danielle, the sister, had to endure Coach Tracie’s strict dieting guidelines, as well as a sexually-abusive member of the Canadian boys’ team (an early version of John Matusik). I liked this revision a lot, though I ultimately chose not to stick with it because it was too much like Ender’s Game (which I happened to be reading at the time). But I was getting close.

  I worked on other projects for a while, coming back to Heroes’ Day every now and again to add a note or two here or there. Finally, in late 2007, I sat down with the conviction that if I didn’t make things happen by the 2008 Games in Beijing, they would never happen. I started a new draft, and stuck with it, revising, editing, and polishing on through the spring of 2008. Along the way, I found Monica’s story, and I ran with it. There was still a hint of Ender’s Game in there, but the bulk was truly Heroes’ Day, a social science fiction novel about a gymnast, a gymnastics novel with an emphasis on social politics. And it wasn’t Stick It. That was important.

  Of all the changes resulting in the final incarnation of Heroes’ Day, Monica’s evolution as a character was the most dramatic. In the beginning, I was still writing “young,” using my then-favorite elite gymnast as a crutch and defaulting to whatever angst-ridden tendencies I saw, read, or heard around me. Danielle was shallow, her emotions genuine enough, but her lessons learned in a “no duh” sort of way. That’s where the Ender’s Game influence once again came into play. Orson Scott Card wrote about children often, and he always made them intelligent, sophisticated, interesting to an adult audience (this was evident in his Homecoming series, for example). In short: I had to have Monica grow up even though she was still physically thirteen years old. Once that happened, and once she was based on herself and not on any real-life athletes, the story came, and there was no doubt that I’d at last made the right revision.

  So, there you go. Obviously for me, as well as a good many other authors, I suspect, writing a novel is, more often than not, a months-long (sometimes years-long!) process that can span both inspiration and patience. Some books come easily, others take some coaxing, and heavy karma always goes down in between. Heroes’ Day has reminded me just how much of a team effort it is to get a book out. My team this time around: my family, who offered their undying support during the ups, downs, and all-arounds; Diane Cardenas, my editing maestress (she’s going to hate that word, I know); Philip Malan and Katie Monson, keepers of the flame; Susan Jackson and Aleksas Trotter, my technical consultants regarding the wacky world of gymnastics. You all mean more to me than words can ever say.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Jesse Gordon knows that you’ve never heard of him, and that’s the way he likes it. From time to time he writes books or screenplays. Sometimes, even, he updates his SuperMegaNet webserial…much to his characters’ chagrin. His Web site can be found at http://jessture.com/.