“I guess and yes, I’m good. I’ll be up for sure,” I agreed.
Was it possible that we could become friends? It was strange to stare at her, my gymnast idol. She sat there on the grass and said the right things effortlessly. I dug into my frozen yogurt and grinned at her feeling at ease. I remembered what Jeanine had said about trying to make friends and hell, maybe that’s what this was all about—letting bygones be bygones and all that.
“Coach Jonathon is probably going to pit us against each other a lot,” she said, studying me with her eyes. “He likes to create drama wherever he can.”
“I didn’t get that read from him,” I said, tilting my head at her.
“Oh, sure. He’s just obsessed with his old gymnastics years and wants to... you know. Relive the glory days. He got injured really badly when he was in his early twenties and he hasn’t done many stunts since, but he’s still in excellent shape. I think he lifts in the gym even before our practice starts. The man doesn’t sleep.”
I laughed. Look at me! I was already in on the gossip about my new coach! It made me feel like I was fitting in just fine. I ate up the rest of my yogurt while Poppy excitedly told a story about something that had happened at World Competition the previous year when Jonathon had eaten some bad Thai food and vomited in the bathroom during the performance. “He felt horrible, obviously, but I actually liked not having him out there, gaping at me and praying for me not to fuck up. Not that I ever do. Mess up, that is,” she said, smoothing out her shiny hair. She gave me a little half-smile and then hopped back up. “Well, I’ll see you tomorrow, bright and early, Rooney. Make sure you don’t sleep in, okay? I know it can be tough on your first day of practice.”
“I appreciate it, but I won’t have any trouble,” I assured her. I knew I had this like the back of my hand.
After Poppy disappeared, Chloe and I decided to head back to our dorm to settle in and think about the next few days of practice. On the way back, I thought about how simple this new life really was. Just loads of people my age, endless gymnastics practices, all the food I could eat and, of course, a bit of school and studying. No kids crying. No dinners to prepare. There was the issue of that tuition, but I would consider that another day.
“Poppy seems okay, actually,” I told Chloe. We were still a bit away from the dorms.
“Yeah. I mean, I hear she can be a bit bipolar, good one day and not the next, but maybe you’ll find a way to work with her. The only thing you need is to team up with someone with more skills, right? So maybe you can help each other out and learn from one another’s strengths,” Chloe said. “I wouldn’t be anywhere if I hadn’t raced some of the girls and guys of my past. I left them in the dust.”
I chuckled and blinked a few times, trying to focus. It suddenly felt strange inside my head, like I had a permanent brain freeze. I swallowed and walked a bit slower.
“That second thing of froyo tasted a little bit different,” I said. I felt as though even my words weren’t coming out right.
“Did it? I tried to get a second, but Coach Izzy wouldn’t let me,” Chloe sighed.
“Um. Chloe?” I gripped her arm. I sensed something terribly wrong. I felt like I was somewhere deep underwater.
“What’s going on?”
“I’m just really tired. I don’t think I’ve ever been this exhausted,” I said and rubbed my temple with a free hand.
“We’re almost back. You can go straight to bed if you want. Did you set your alarm?” she asked.
“Yeah. And you did, too?”
“Of course. I have them starting at four a.m., just in case. Sorry about that. But I need the constant reminder. Otherwise, I’ll panic,” she said.
But I was too tired to respond. She gave me a half-worried glance and added, “It’s been an insane few weeks for you. Don’t worry about it. You’ll feel better in a few days.”
I hardly remembered lurching into my bed. I fell full-asleep in my clothes, unaware of Chloe’s movements around the room. I felt completely zonked, unconscious. I had never felt that way before. It was like having a huge rock on top of my body, one that nobody would ever be able to move.
Chapter Eight
I hardly felt the smacks against my cheek the next morning.
At 5 a.m., thirty minutes before practice, Chloe climbed up the ladder of my bed. I felt it shaking a little bit as she did, but I was totally unable to open my eyes. I literally felt like a dead person. She smacked my face once, then twice. Then, she called my name. “Rooney? Hey, Rooney. Get up, girl! You’re going to be late and the coach will be more than pissed. Get up!”
But I couldn’t open my eyes. They felt like dead weight. I felt like she was calling my name from all the way down a very long hallway. I tried to open my mouth to answer her, to tell her what was going on, but there was nothing I could do.
Chloe was and is a damn good person. Which is why what she did next wasn’t exactly reasonable, but it did have my best interests at heart. She actually grabbed my arm and started to drag me out of bed. I kind of sloppily followed her lead. I managed to grab the edge of the bed and slowly pad down the ladder. I found myself standing down below, still in my clothes from yesterday. My eyes were still just slits.
“Dude, I did not want to do that...” Chloe said. She sounded breathless like she had actually carried me down the ladder herself. Maybe she had. I was having trouble remembering anything.
Finally, I found a way to string together for my first words. “Chloe... I think there’s something wrong with me.”
“No, shit! Are you normally like this in the morning?” Chloe asked sarcastically, but I could hear the worry in her tone.
“No. This is... I think there was something wrong with the froyo.”
Minute by minute, I was coming back to life. Here I was, on my very first day of practice at Denver Athletics, and I was pretty sure that Poppy had put something in my frozen yogurt. My muscles felt completely depleted. I yanked my eyes open wider and grabbed my shorts and a sports bra, along with a leotard.
“She knows better than to do something like that,” is what Chloe said before she left. She looked at me quizzically, like she wasn’t sure what my whole deal was. “But I’ll see you at lunch, okay? Good luck.”
Great. My only new friend thinks I’m a whack-job, now.
But I had to find a way to get to practice. I had to find a way to wake up. I struggled through the door on wobbly legs and meandered down the hall. Mallory spotted me on her way to practice and stopped for a second like she was considering waiting for me.
“Come on, Rooney,” she said. Her voice seemed to do far away. “You’re going to be late, walking like that.”
I used Mallory as a guide to get the rest of the way to the gym the same one try-outs had been at. When we arrived, the rest of the girls were already there, wearing similar shorts and sports bras. Coach Jonathon faced the line of girls and gave Mallory and me an eager smile. He looked like the devil himself to me, but I was still feeling a little out of it.
“Hey, girls. I was just telling the others, we’re going to get started with a three-mile loop around the grounds. How does that sound?” Coach Jonathon said, looking around at everyone.
Mallory grumbled and I didn’t have the energy to do anything but drop my stuff. I glanced toward Poppy, who stood on the far end of the line. She looked at me with her mouth wide open. Honestly, it seemed like she hadn’t expected me there at all.
I shrugged at her and mouthed, “What?” She turned her head quickly back to face Coach Jonathon like I had caught her. There was no way I could prove to anyone what she had done unless I took some kind of blood test. And I didn’t want to cause that kind of drama. Not on my first day.
Coach Jonathon led us out of the gym. It was pitch-dark, still, and chilly, which was normal for up in the mountains—a chill that goes away the minute the sun blares across you. I blinked a lot and tried to draw back my consciousness. I am a top-level athlete. Don’t mess this up.
Don’t get sent home.
“All right, girls. Come on. I’ll lead,” Coach Jonathon said.
The run began. I hobbled around in the back and tried to count my steps to keep my mind going. I could feel each foot-pound on the grass beneath me, could smell the crisp pine tree smell and could feel the other girls on either side of me. Somehow, I was keeping up. My muscles twitched and grew tense and I wanted to sob and scream, but I kept my lips together.
Somehow, I made it through the first mile. Coach Jonathon hollered out, “That’s mile one! Two more left!”
Two miles. That was nothing, right? But I felt my energy depleting within seconds, like a balloon deflating all of its air. I bit down on my lip to try to stay upright. Maybe the shock of it would keep me going. But as I slipped forward like some kind of zombie, Poppy ambled back through the group of girls to find me. I could hardly see her, but she matched me stride for stride for a while and whispered at me under her breath.
“I don’t know who you think you are, Rooney Calloway. But I need you to know that this kind of thing? This will happen to you all the time if you come after me. You’ll find yourself in little accidents. You’ll fall asleep at practice. You’ll stumble and you’ll make Coach Jonathon think you’re weak and wonder why they even gave you a scholarship in the first place. I’ve done it before, and I’m more than willing to do it to you.”
A confession. Great. But there was nothing I could do with it. It died out there between the trees as the sun rose up between the mountains.
“I’m not here to come after you, Poppy,” I muttered. My voice was sloppy and slurred. I sounded really drunk. “I’m just here to get... better...”
We were about a mile and a half from school when she did it. She stuck her foot out beneath me and I tumbled forward and cracked my chin on a rock. The whole thing happened so fast, like a flash or a car accident. The impact made me lose my breath for about five seconds. Mallory called out for the rest of the girls to stop and come back for me. Coach Jonathon hustled to me and kind of bobbed around like he didn’t want to stop the run. I blinked up at him, no longer really able to pretend that I wasn’t messed up.
“Hey, Rooney. What happened?” Coach Jonathon asked.
I wanted to die. Or commit murder.
Vengeful wasn’t a feeling I was familiar with.
I coughed and tried to lift myself from the rock. Warm blood trickled down my chin and I lifted my hand to touch the cut. The red blood on my finger was almost cartoonish. I wanted to laugh at it.
“It doesn’t look too bad,” Coach Jonathon said. “Just a little cut.”
“It’s not. It doesn’t hurt,” I managed to say. Again, the words were sloppy.
Coach Jonathon frowned. He squatted down, so he was eye-level with me and said, “Rooney, are you feeling all right? I don’t see all that extra effort you were putting in at try-outs. You aren’t running this warm-up like a champion.”
I wanted to roll my eyes so bad. I managed to point my finger at my head and say, “I have the worst migraine of my life.”
“A migraine?” Coach Jonathon looked incredulous like he had never heard the word before. To be honest, I had never had a migraine, either, but Karla had said she had them all the time as an excuse not to make me dinner. It seemed like an easy out that would be believable.
I suddenly turned to the left and vomited across the stones and grass. It was so disgusting and so embarrassing to be a sixteen-year-old girl, vomiting in front of her new team. I wanted to huddle up in a ball and scream and cry. The vomit was cleansing, it woke me up a little bit, and it made my head ring with panic.
But it turned out the vomit was to my benefit. It made my lie seem a bit more realistic and honest. Coach Jonathon reared back with the others to avoid vomit splash-back, but he then added, “Why don’t you walk on back? Maybe another girl can help you. Mallory? Make sure she gets back to the dorm, okay.”
Mallory hadn’t exactly been friendly to me, but she was pretty thrilled to get out of running that second-half and charged forward to help me up. “I’ll take care of her and meet you guys back at the gym,” she said, sounding as helpful as possible.
During the walk back to the gym, my head grew even clearer. Mallory seemed lost in her own thoughts, and I was grateful she didn’t poke fun at me. Again, I wiped my hand across my lips and sighed, “I can’t believe how bad that went.”
“What? Oh. Yeah. Throwing up on your first day isn’t hot, is it? But at least none of the boys saw,” Mallory said, as though that was supposed to make me feel better.
“I think Poppy did something to my frozen yogurt,” I muttered. But Mallory didn’t hear me, or at least, she pretended not to.
On our walk back to the dorm, we passed by the outdoor track, where Zed and several other very tall, very lanky boys stretched together. The sunlight caught Zed’s dark brown hair. As I passed, he gave me this devilish smile, which made me slow down. I realized that their coach was nowhere in sight. Suddenly, Zed sprung toward the fence and wrapped his fingers around it. He leered at me and said, “What’s the matter, Rooney Calloway? Why aren’t you at practice?”
I glared at him. Why did I have the sneaking suspicion that he knew exactly what had happened to me?
“You going back to bed, little princess?” he asked. He stuck out his bottom lip and made it bounce. “Poor baby can’t hack it at the academy, can she? Oh, and look. She got a little cut on her chin.”
Mallory burst into laughter, as though what Zed had said had been at all clever. I glowered at Zed. “I have a fucking migraine, asshole,” I seethed at him.
“She just vomited in front of all of us,” Mallory announced with a smile on her face.
I glared at her. So much for solidarity on the girls’ team. Zed burst into laughter and said, “You’re joking. Did you throw up on your first day? During your first mile? Holy shit, Calloway, you’re a bigger fuck up than I thought.”
I swallowed and remembered something Chloe had told me. I dug my heels and shot, “I hear you’re like us, Zed the runner. I hear you’re a basement dweller. Me and Mallory love the basement, don’t we, Mallory? It suits us bottom-dwellers.”
Zed’s smile faltered and I watched a layer of anger wash over his face. Exactly one boy on the track team laughed a little bit and Zed bucked around and told him to “shut the fuck up.” He returned his steely gaze to me and scoffed, “Poppy was right about you. You don’t belong here.”
“Maybe not, but none of us belong at such a fancy school—none of us from the lower class. Not good enough to lick Theo and Poppy’s shoes, huh?” I returned. His face grew paler and I knew these were thoughts he lived with all the time. I held a mirror up to his personal image and he hated what he saw.
“Have a good practice, Zed,” I smirked. “I can’t wait to continue this conversation later.”
When we reached the dorm, Mallory broke her stunned silence. She pushed open the door, so I could enter and whisper, “What the hell are you thinking, saying shit like that to Zed?”
I turned a bit too quickly and nearly stumbled again. God, it was going to take forever to feel normal again and get whatever was in my system, out. “Why do you just laugh at whatever he says like he has this power over you?” I demanded.
Mallory rolled her eyes. “You don’t get it because you’re new here,” she muttered. “If you don’t play by their rules, they’ll mess with you until you do. I guess maybe you already know that.” She did a once-over with her eyes. I saw pity there, and I hated her for it.
“You don’t have to feel sorry for me,” I said, annoyed with the look that she wore on her face. “I can take care of myself.”
“You’ve already made a pretty epic mistake, trusting Poppy,” Mallory said. “So I’m not so sure you can take care of yourself, actually, although I hope you find a way to. Otherwise, it’s—“ She kicked her thumb behind her shoulder and then laughed. “Sorry,” she said. “It’s just honestly so nice not to be the only that everyo
ne hates. I’ve made it all the way to junior year without it happening to me. Almost all the way through.”
Mallory left without another explanation. I studied the door as it closed behind her. I felt like shit in about a hundred different ways. With everything in me, I wanted to run back out the door and all the way back to the gym and insist to Coach Jonathon that I was fit enough to practice. But my head still felt filled with fog. I turned and grabbed the ladder rungs to my bed and escaped back beneath the folds of my new sheets. I wanted to come up with some kind of revenge, something that would prove to Poppy that I wasn’t someone to be fucked with. But it seemed like Poppy, Theo, Zed and Clinton and probably a few of the others were all a rich hive that everyone worshipped. They did what they were told so they would not get shit on. They were a specially selected group in the hierarchy of the teenaged school kids that you did not mess with, ever, or be prepared to get buried six feet under.
But worst of all, all I wanted to do that day was train. I tossed and turned in bed all morning and then through the afternoon, easing in and out of sleep. Whatever Poppy had given me had been strong. Whenever I thought I was starting to feel a little better, another wave would crash over me.
Chloe came in some time mid-afternoon and peeked up into my bunk. I sighed and opened my eyes to the insane stench of chlorine when she got up there. My wide-eyed look made her nearly tumble back to the ground below.
“Ah! Why did you do that?” she asked. “Are you pretend-sleeping?”
“No. Not really,” I said. “I can hardly keep my eyes open. I just wanted to—to say hi. And thank you for trying to get me up this morning.”
Chloe’s eyes were filled with compassion. “I heard it didn’t really work out in your favor.”
“Everyone’s talking about the vomit, huh?” I muttered.
Out for Blood Page 7