The Flyers

by Beth Turley

  “So dramatic.”

  A piece of carrot got stuck in my throat. I coughed and my eyes filled up.

  “I’m kidding,” I said, even though I wasn’t.

  Summer’s gaze moved to a spot over my shoulder. She smiled and waved. I turned around and saw Kendra and Sara beckoning her to their table, smiling with their teeth showing.

  “Maybe we should go sit with them,” Summer suggested. “So many people sit at their table. Well, all the popular people.”

  There were boys at their table, boys like Joey Demarco and Grayson Pilsner.

  “But they’re so… intimidating,” I said. “Remember Joey’s Halloween party?”

  Summer glared at me.

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  My heart sputtered.

  “Nothing. Sorry. Nothing.”

  I hadn’t brought up the party since it happened, when Summer had her first kiss but wouldn’t tell me about it. Even though I wanted to know everything. I cursed myself for talking about it now.

  “Whatever. It’s fine. We’ll stay here,” she said.

  For the rest of lunch, we talked about our teachers and Spread Your Wings and Summer’s spring cross-country practices. We had gym together after lunch that day. I turned toward the hall we always took, but Summer kept going straight.

  “Gym is this way, silly,” I said, pointing down the hall. Long posters lined the walls with cheesy sayings. One with a picture of a walrus in glasses asked: Are you ready to make a big splash?

  “My allergies are acting up. I’m going to get my medicine from the nurse,” Summer said. Summer had serious enough pollen allergies to make breathing impossible. Her eyes would turn glassy and red like she’d been crying for hours.

  “I’ll go with you.” I bumped into people’s backpacks trying to follow her.

  “That’s okay, I can go by myself.”

  “But we have gym. It makes sense to stay together.”

  “Elena, come on, I’ll be right there.” The words tumbled out of her mouth, but my brain replayed them in slow motion.

  Elena. Come. On. I stopped short in the middle of the hall and a kid from my art class with sandy hair and green braces crashed into me. He muttered something to his friend and they both laughed. When I looked toward Summer again, she wasn’t there.

  A black cloud formed above my head while I walked to the gym alone. I slunk through the door of the locker room. The smell of bleach and sweat was overpowering. There was a narrow hall ahead, and to my right was a line of bathroom stalls and sinks. I kept walking until I saw the rows of lockers with the benches set up between them. The fluorescent lights above were so bright, not a single shadow to hide in and change. I thought of the shorts and T-shirt in my backpack, three sizes bigger than my sixth-grade gym clothes, thanks to my growth spurt in all the wrong places. Mom said it was normal. Maybe it was, but that didn’t mean I had to reveal the new curves to everyone.

  I turned on my heel into the shower stall. It was dark and concealed by a plastic curtain. I was starting to tug my dress off when I heard footsteps on the other side of the curtain, and Kendra’s icy voice.

  “You know you could sit with us if you want,” she said. “Joey still thinks you’re cute. He was bummed you never talked to him after the party.” There was shuffling as she and whoever she was with dropped their bags to the floor.

  “Elena likes our table.”

  Summer’s voice.

  “She’s really attached to your hip, huh?” Sara chimed in.

  A blush consumed my face, the humiliation hotter than it had ever been before.

  “We’re best friends.”

  “But don’t you wish she’d leave you alone just a little bit? Don’t you think she’s kind of annoying?” Kendra didn’t sound like she was asking a question. It was like she already knew the answer.

  Summer cleared her throat.

  “Yeah, I wish she’d back off.”

  The cloud above my head cracked open, pouring down on me until I was soaked through. I stared at the wall tiles until they blurred, until the locker room emptied out and I couldn’t feel the rain anymore.

  Ms. Debra had already started talking about dodgeball safety when I came out of the locker room, arms wrapped around my middle. I stood at the edge of the group where I was near Summer but not too close. Not annoyingly close. She turned her head and smiled at me. I smiled back but kept my eyes cool so she wouldn’t see the hurt in my heart. I decided then that Summer could never know how much I needed her. I’d do whatever it took for those words she’d said to disappear.

  Chapter Ten

  The Decision

  My voice was picking up volume, singing those words about Summer, when the door opened. I slammed the notebook shut, letting it drop back into the duffel bag. Cailin walked in with a towel slung over her arm.

  “Forgot my phone,” she said. She crossed the room and picked her phone up off the dresser, then turned to me. “Were you just singing?”

  My heart wouldn’t slow down.

  “Um,” I said too sharply.

  “Hotel walls are thin,” she said. She pulled a gray scrunchie off her wrist.

  “Thanks,” I said, as if that made any sense.

  She looked at herself in the full-length mirror on the wall, tying up her hair. I tried to watch her without being too creepy about it. I knew Cailin had to be small for her teammates to toss her around, but in person she looked like a tiny, delicate doll. She had a squiggly scar on the side of her knee, and little pimples on her forehead. The candy-apple-colored streaks in her hair were brighter than on camera. In episode three of On the Mat, her team all put red in their hair to match their uniform colors. I thought back to her introduction interview on episode one.

  “I’m Cailin, I’m thirteen, and I’ve cheered at Lone Star Elite since I was five. I’ve never wanted to do anything except cheer.” Her eyes flicked up to the ceiling and back down, and she squeezed the armrests on the black office chair she sat in. She was in front of a Gatorade vending machine that made her face glow blue.

  “She’s only a year older than us and completely perfect,” Summer had said while we watched.

  “Completely,” I’d agreed, and later that night when I was back home, I’d opened up Cailin’s page and scrolled through until my eyes hurt, studying every single picture of her eating strawberry ice cream, or sitting on a park bench. And even though I’d done those things before too, I knew I could never make it look like she did. Like she was so happy being exactly who she was. Like her world was a place where bad things didn’t happen.

  I bet Cailin had never felt a gaping empty space between her and her best friend. I shook my head and turned away before she caught me staring.

  “If you’re done with your call you should meet us at the pool. If you want,” Cailin said. She tugged on a piece of her bun one more time before walking out.

  The Lyric Libro was at my feet, upside down on top of my clothes. I could unpack my duffel bag and pretend to be asleep when the Flyers came back. But I stared at the door instead. Past the adrenaline rush from Cailin catching me singing, and the hollow feeling of homesickness, was something sharp and hard to ignore. Summer. Watching TV on other couches, hanging out with someone else like it didn’t matter that I was gone. Wishing I’d back off.

  I zipped up my duffel bag and walked out of the room.

  Chapter Eleven

  The Lifeguard Ring

  The pool was at the end of the hall behind a wall of foggy glass. Inside the air was sticky hot and smelled like chlorine. It clung to my skin, making my black dress hug my legs tighter. I peeled the fabric away.

  “You came!” Whitney announced, her smile like a warm welcome. She and Cailin and Harlow were laid out on a row of white lounge chairs. There were some teenaged girls in one-piece bathing suits on the other side of the pool, and a woman who looked like my abuelita doing laps in the water with a pink kickboard. I took the empty spot next to Whitney. There was a red
-and-white-striped lifeguard ring on the wall behind us. A sign tacked underneath said, NO LIFEGUARD ON DUTY. “Did your phone call go okay?”

  Summer’s and Riah’s whispering voices filled my head.

  “It was fine,” I said.

  The water in the pool rippled. Even though the smell was strong, it was nice to be in the warmth, like being wrapped inside a thick blanket.

  “Can we address the elephant in the room?” Harlow asked.

  I clenched my jaw. Was she going to ask why I was so quiet? It was my least favorite question. Quiet people don’t always want to be quiet. Sometimes the loudness inside, the voice screaming that anything we say will come out wrong or weird, just seals our mouths shut.

  There’s a reason people call it being painfully shy. It hurts.

  The three of us looked at Harlow, waiting.

  “Cailin, you’re freakin’ famous,” she said.

  Whitney whooped and I sighed with relief.

  “Goodbye, elephant,” Cailin said, her face shifting into a grimace. She tugged the scrunchie out of her hair, then wrapped it around her wrist and snapped the elastic against her skin.

  “Do people ever call you Magnet? Like, out in the world?”

  Cailin laughed under her breath.

  “They call me that more than they call me Cailin. I mean, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, or even watched the show or whatever, but my coaches and team didn’t call me Cailin either. They called me Magnet until they… couldn’t anymore. I guess.”

  “I watched. It was amazing,” Whitney said.

  In episode one, when they were interviewing Cailin in the back room of her gym, she explained they called her Magnet because she had never fallen out of a stunt during a competition. It was like she stuck to the air. Magnetized.

  The jets on the hot tub kicked in with a loud hum and made us jump. Harlow shifted to her right so her whole body was facing us.

  “You probably have so many things you could be doing now that the show’s a hit,” she said. The humidity in the room was frizzing her hair. “Why’d you want to be a Flyer?”

  Cailin lowered the lounge chair to the flattest position and closed her eyes.

  “You ask a lot of questions,” she mumbled.

  The hot tub gurgled. Harlow blinked.

  “I want to be a journalist,” she murmured. She tucked the pencil farther behind her ear, the sharp lines of her face softening. “I just got in the zone. Sorry.”

  Cailin exhaled through her nose.

  “It’s all right. I’m here because I saw the ad and it mentioned liking photography. And I really like photography.”

  “The pictures on your profile are always amazing,” Whitney added.

  I imagined her profile, all the pictures like a glimpse into Cailin’s perfect life. She opened her eyes and rolled them back, like she was trying to stare at the striped lifeguard ring on the wall.

  “Sure. But I don’t take most of those pictures.”

  The sound of running footsteps overtook the bubbling jets. Two boys a little older than Edgar ran into the room in identical green swim trunks, with shark fin floaties around their arms. A woman with hair the same brown as theirs rushed in behind them.

  “Slow down,” she called out, but they didn’t. They jumped into the shallow end near where we were sitting. Water lapped up against the edge and spilled onto the tile. The boys bobbed back up, the floaties not letting them fall too far under the surface.

  “Should we head back?” Whitney suggested. “I have a younger brother and if that’s taught me anything it’s that chaos is about to ensue.”

  “I have a younger brother too. Edgar,” I blurted, the first words I’d said since getting to the pool. It was small, but it was something, and it was safe.

  “Cool.” Whitney smiled. “Don’t you have a brother too, Harlow?”

  Harlow snorted and rolled her eyes.

  “Allegedly.”

  It seemed like a fact that could only be true or false, plus Harlow had blamed her brother for being late to the Tappiston. I wondered why she seemed so angry about him. The four of us peeled off our chairs. We were headed for the door when Cailin veered toward the lifeguard ring she had stared at earlier on the wall. She took out her phone and held it near the tip of the ring, then lower near the NO LIFEGUARD sign, and then up close to where a block of red and white met.

  When Cailin did fall out of her stunt at the world championships, her coach gathered them all into a huddle behind the stage. The lights were dark and her teammates breathed hard. The camera found Cailin, her painted red lips pressed together, thick makeup gleaming on her face. Ponytail disheveled.

  “Everyone falls, Cailin,” her coach said. One of the boys on her team put a hand on Cailin’s shoulder.

  “I guess she’s not Magnet anymore,” Summer said while we watched. She had her head tipped into her hand.

  “I guess not.”

  The hallway outside was like stepping into a freezer after being in all that heat. I smoothed my hair down and let the air cool my face. Cailin walked the closest to me at the back of the line. She was looking at the picture of the lifeguard ring she’d taken. No one was talking. I could fill in this hole in the conversation, let them see how excited I was to be a Flyer. That I was chosen for a reason even if I didn’t know what it was. I could tell them how I was number one in my class, how I couldn’t read a poem in language arts but wrote song lyrics in my notebook, how I had a best friend named Summer who felt so far away.

  “I really liked your show, Cailin,” I said.

  Cailin turned and half smiled over her shoulder.

  “Thanks.”

  Chapter Twelve

  The Nail Polish

  We had breakfast in the Tappiston Café at seven o’clock the next morning. It was Monday, and the early wake-up call reminded me of getting up for school. My eyes were heavy and my stomach turned. It had been hard to sleep through the city noise. Nights at home were quiet, just the hum of the streetlight, the chirping crickets. If anyone else had a hard time sleeping, they didn’t show it. Whitney was still as a rock in the bed all night. And Cailin didn’t do any cheer moves in her sleep, but she did snore.

  Mindy sat at the head of our table while we ate. She wore a white shirt with red and green lightsabers that made an X across her chest, and black wide-leg pants. Her packet of paper was on the table next to her plate of scrambled eggs, opened up to the itinerary for the day. We each had a copy waiting for us on the table when we came down to breakfast, and Mindy said we’d get a new one each morning. The words were written in cursive and a thin purple ribbon was stapled in the corner, tied into a tiny bow. I scanned it while I drowned my pancakes in syrup. Every minute was assigned to an activity. I took a picture of the itinerary and sent it to Summer, wondering what she’d fill her day with. Or who.

  Whitney bowed her head over her waffle, folding her hands on the emerald-green placemat.

  “My family and I always say grace. I figure that should apply in New York, too,” she said when she lifted her head and caught me staring. My cheeks flushed and I speared a piece of pancake to give my hands something to do. Abuelita led my family’s predinner prayer every Christmas, and my heart would twinge with thankfulness for all the people around me. I wondered if Whitney felt that way about being here.

  “After this we’ll take the subway to Lot Eighty-Eight for your photo shoot. Prepare to bust out your Disney princess smiles.”

  Harlow choked on her eggs. I stared down at my plate, the corners of my mouth twitching.

  “Kidding.” Mindy took her plate to the dirty dish bin by the garbage cans.

  Cailin groaned at her phone and rolled her eyes, typing hard on the screen. She pushed her bowl of strawberry yogurt to the side before holding her phone toward my spot across the table.

  “Can you please take a picture of me?” She shook the phone a little when I didn’t grab it right away. I held it up, watched her come into focus on the little square. A fi
lter was turned on that made her look soft and sparkly. Like she was in a fairy wonderland and not a hotel café with a waffle batter dispenser. She held up her hands at chest level, palms facing in, and smiled without showing her teeth. I took the picture and handed her phone back.

  “Thanks,” she mumbled.

  “Sure.” My mind swirled. I just touched Cailin Carter’s phone. I just took a picture on Cailin Carter’s phone.

  “What’s that for?” Harlow asked. She had her dark hair tied in two low, twisty ponytails and the pencil still wedged behind her ear. Her overalls swallowed up her small body. The T-shirt she wore underneath said New York Giants, but some of the letters were hidden by denim. I looked down at my plate, trying not to think about how my clothes sometimes squeezed too tight. I raked my fork through the pool of maple syrup.

  “Sunny Days Gel Polish, the longest-lasting polish you’ll ever wear!” Cailin said the slogan in a voice like she was pinching her nose. She lifted her hands again and this time I noticed her nails were painted lavender.

  Last night, when I couldn’t sleep, I opened up Cailin’s page on my phone. I looked for the picture she’d taken of the lifeguard ring, but it wasn’t there. The last thing she’d posted was a picture in baggage claim at the airport, her elbow leaned against her suitcase, the caption reading Big Apple, Meet Cailin. There were 347 comments underneath. “You were my favorite on the show.” “Have fun on your trip!!” “You’re not even that pretty.”

  The last one made me suck in my breath and turn toward Cailin, a lump in the other bed. I had always thought of her as a fictional character from a different universe. But she wasn’t. She wore cartoon character pajama pants. She snored. Whoever left that comment didn’t even know those things.

  “Do they, like, pay you for that?” Whitney asked. She had skinny gold bangles on her arm. When she dug a fork into her waffle, they clanged together. Her short-sleeved cardigan was somewhat sheer and her white tank top showed underneath. She’d changed her outfit three times that morning. She’d study every angle of herself in the mirror, lip between her teeth, then disappear into the bathroom and emerge in something else. I hadn’t said what I wanted to—that every outfit she tried on looked perfect. I’d been the last to get dressed, and I’d slipped my Lyric Libro into the dress I picked for the day and sat on the edge of the bathtub to get a song out of my head.