The Go-for-Gold Gymnasts

by Dominique Moceanu

  “Which birthday was this from?” she asked.

  “This one,” I muttered.

  I could see Britt’s thoughts written on her face, but she didn’t voice the question of why the card was so obviously designed for a seven-year-old. Instead, she just said, “I thought it was in a few weeks.”

  “It is,” I said, reaching for the card. Britt gave it up without a fight, and I shoved it into a desk drawer. I’d only had it in my bed because…well, because sometimes I liked to lie there and look at it, and wonder if there was a reason he’d picked it for me. “He sent it early, that’s all.”

  “Cool,” she said.

  “It’s better than sending it late,” I pointed out.

  “True,” she said. “That’s cool.”

  We were silent for a moment as I ran my finger along the back of my desk chair and Britt stared at the ceiling. “He’s going to take me out to dinner for my birthday,” I said. “Somewhere fancy. My mom said I might need to get a new dress.”

  “Don’t let it be anywhere French,” Britt said. “They make you eat snails and frog legs and stuff. Go to an Italian place. Spaghetti is good no matter how much weird stuff they put into it.”

  Britt had gone to New York City once with her grandmother for a field trip, where they went to art museums and explored historical places. She was probably the most cultured person I knew, so I appreciated the advice.

  Mostly, I appreciated her not saying what I knew she was thinking: that my dad had promised to take me camping earlier this summer, and hadn’t. Or that he’d shown up for the parade and then left fifteen minutes later. I knew his track record wasn’t great, but he was still my dad.

  Suddenly, there was a grinding noise that I couldn’t place, until I remembered my cell phone on the desk. My mom had asked me to use it only in emergencies, and I didn’t talk to many people on the phone anyway, so I often forgot I even had one. Britt’s mom wouldn’t let her have one at all, so she couldn’t understand how I didn’t spend every waking minute using mine.

  “Sorry,” I said, checking the screen. It said I had a text message from a number I didn’t recognize.

  I frowned as I clicked on the little envelope. UR IN, it read.

  “What is it?” Britt asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. The number had an Austin area code, so it was definitely local. WHO IS THIS? I texted back.

  A nanosecond later, my phone vibrated again. LAYLA, it said, and even through the screen I got the feeling she was frustrated that I’d needed to ask. U GAVE UR # ON YOUR APP? NEWAYZ, PRCTICE ON MON AT 4. C U THERE.

  “Who is it?” Britt asked.

  “No one,” I said, but I had a hard time hiding my smile. “It’s nothing.”

  Seven

  I’d looked up a glossary of cheerleading terms online and watched more YouTube videos in preparation for my first cheerleading practice, hoping that it would make me fit in a little better with the other girls. I’d seen a couple of competitions on television—there were only a few gymnastics competitions televised each year, so I had to take what I could get, which meant I DVR’d anything remotely acrobatic.

  At cheer practice, I mostly tumbled. Our coach, who happened to be the psychology teacher, Ms. Hinnen, called out positions to each of the girls, and they would get into pyramid formations. Some girls formed the bases, meaning that they held the other girls up, and we had three “flyers”: Layla, Ashley, and Stephenie. I asked the coach if I was going to be a flyer or a base, and she pointed to a spot on the football field a few yards away.

  “Wait there for your cue,” she said. “When the flyers get lifted up, but before the basket toss, you tumble a path in front of them. Got it?”

  Not really. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Tumble in front of them,” she repeated impatiently. “Stephenie! Get that leg up!”

  I had meant specifically what moves she wanted me to do—front tumbling, back tumbling, cartwheels. But I didn’t want to bother her again, so I stood on the mark she’d indicated and waited for the three girls to be lifted into the air. Once their arms were raised to the sky, preparing for the basket toss, I started flipping, performing a round-off into back handspring after back handspring after back handspring, and ending with a back tuck.

  “Good,” Ms. Hinnen said, but she wasn’t looking at me. “Again.”

  “What about the full twist?” Layla asked.

  “You’re not ready for a full-twisting basket toss,” Ms. Hinnen said shortly, and Layla flushed.

  “Not me,” she said, “Jessie.” She turned to me, blowing her bangs out of her eyes with one puff. “I thought you were doing a full twist!”

  “Oh,” I said. That had been exactly the kind of information I was looking for from Ms. Hinnen—the exact skills I was supposed to be doing. “I mean, I can…”

  I really didn’t want to. Doing a full twist on the floor, which was springy and padded, was no problem at all. That skill was hardly even worth anything in gymnastics, it was so easy. But doing it over and over on grass seemed like a recipe for disaster.

  “Okay, Jessie,” Ms. Hinnen said. “Put the full twist in there at the end. Again!”

  I took my place and waited for my cue, and at the right moment, I took off into the same tumbling pass, with back handsprings to travel the length of the field in front of the other cheerleaders, and then a tucked full twist to finish.

  We took a break to drink some water, and Layla came up to me, breathing hard. “You tucked it,” she said.

  It took me a second to catch up with her. “Oh,”

  I said. “Yeah.”

  “At tryouts you laid it out,” she said, swigging an entire paper cup’s worth of water in a single gulp.

  Doing the twist with a stretched-out body was a little harder and required a stronger push-off from the back handspring to get the right air. Otherwise, you risked not being able to make it all the way around, and landing on the grass.

  “Do you think I could ever be a flyer?” I asked tentatively. I could do these tumbling passes in my sleep, but doing a full-twisting basket toss seemed like a challenge. None of these girls could do it yet, but I thought with my intense gymnastics training, I might be able to get it.

  “We kind of decided who got to be what during summer practices,” she said. She had taken her cell phone out of her purse and was busy texting. “Sorry.”

  I nodded, even though I knew she wasn’t looking at me. “No problem,” I said. “I just want to help the team.”

  She glanced up at me, pushing her bangs out of her eyes. Her nails were painted blue, one of Birchbark High’s school colors. I hardly ever painted my nails a color, because it wasn’t allowed at competitions, and so we all got into the habit of using clear polish only. Tiffany always said it was the stupidest rule she’d ever heard.

  “Your full twist is awesome,” she said. “That’s what this team needs. Seriously, when Ashley told me you were a gymnast, I was, like, so excited.”

  “Really?” I said. I winced at the squeak in my voice.

  “Totally,” she said. “If you could just lay it out, it could be amazing. Actually, what about a double twist? Is that something you could do?”

  I’d never done a double twist on anything other than a mat or into anything but a foam pit, but I supposed it was possible. “If I tucked it,” I said, “it might be doable.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Stephenie and Ashley watching us as Layla smiled at me. “Maybe you could come to my house sometime,” she said. “We could work on it together.”

  It looked like Stephenie was frowning, but at that moment, I didn’t want to dwell on it. I was pretty sure that this was exactly what Dr. Fisher had meant when she’d talked about my making friends outside of school. I’d just been invited over to someone’s house—and not just anyone’s, but Layla’s—one of the most popular girls in school.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Definitely.”

  I was dying to talk to Brit
t about Layla and the cheerleading practice, but it still felt awkward, so I left it alone. I wished I could’ve avoided the discussion with Mo, too, but coaches were a lot harder to dodge than best friends.

  “Jessie?” she said when I arrived for practice. “I see you in my office.”

  It wasn’t a question, so I followed her into her office. The last time I’d been in that room, it had been when Mo had had to give my mom the speech about how she wanted to make sure that all Texas Twisters athletes were healthy, and that she had reason to be concerned about me. It made me want to shrink to two inches high just remembering it. Logically, I knew it had all been for the best, but it still made me cringe to think about it.

  Now, I couldn’t shake the feeling that this was going to be another one of those conversations. I took my seat across from Mo’s desk and watched her close the door.

  “You miss team time,” she said.

  I was quiet, not sure if I should apologize or act like it was no big deal. But it was impossible to outlast Mo’s silences, so I ended up doing both.

  “Sorry,” I said. “It was this school thing.…It was kind of last-minute.”

  “So you join cheerleading squad,” she said, but again it wasn’t a question.

  “It’s almost like extra workout time,” I said. “I may have to miss an hour or so a week of practice, but I’m mostly tumbling, so it’s similar to the reps we do on floor.…”

  I trailed off, intimidated by Mo’s level gaze. It was hard to tell what she was thinking, or how much trouble I was in. When she spoke, her voice wasn’t angry, but it was firm.

  “You can’t do both,” she said.

  I started to protest, but Mo held up her hand.

  “I not saying you have to pick gymnastics,” she said. “But you are training to be Elite gymnast. That is not hobby. Cheerleading is hobby.”

  So I wasn’t allowed to have interests outside the gym? I knew better than to voice this thought, but it turned out that I didn’t need to. Among Mo’s other powers, she could apparently read minds.

  “You want to have fun outside of gym,” she said, “you read. You watch movie. You knit.”

  Knit?

  “You don’t put more stress on body,” she continued. “You put enough stress here. At home, your body needs to rest. Yes?”

  Now, it was almost like I could read her mind. I could tell, even though she didn’t say it, that she was thinking about the same conversation I’d been remembering when I went in there. She hadn’t felt like I was ready to compete in the Elite qualifier then, and she didn’t think I could take on cheer-leading now.

  “I’d like to try it,” I said. Mo raised her eyebrows slightly, but nobody could have been more astonished than I was at the words coming out of my own mouth. “If I can do it without it interfering with my training here, I’d really like to keep doing it.”

  “The next Elite qualifier is in November,” Mo said. “Will that be problem?”

  Only a week ago, I’d sat in Mr. Freeman’s class, and he’d been handing out his syllabus. When I saw that his midterm was right around Halloween, I’d blanched for a second, and he’d stopped and asked, “Is there a problem?” I had said there wasn’t then, and I said there wasn’t now.

  Mo rose, and so I stood up also, but before I could leave, she said, “Did you like Ms. Carroll’s talk?”

  “Yes,” I said, even though I hadn’t understood why I’d had to listen to it. I wasn’t the one being offered money by USAG for gymnastics. “Very much.”

  “Good.” She nodded. “I hope it make you think about long-term, not just short-term. Yes?”

  “Yes,” I said, although I still didn’t see what Ms. Carroll had to do with me. At this point, I only wanted to get out of the office and onto the vault, where I could lose myself in timers, running toward the vaulting table and attacking it over and over, doing simple flips that allowed me to get the feel of the springboard for takeoff and the mat underneath my feet on the landing.

  More and more, I was learning to appreciate the repetitive, mindless aspects of gymnastics, the things that I felt like I was actually good at. Let Britt, with her fearlessness, take the full twists on the balance beam. Let Christina, with her grace, take the ring leaps on the floor. And let Noelle, with her precision, take the release skills on the uneven bars. I’d be the one who did four back handsprings in a row into a full twist, again and again and again.

  Eight

  Dr. Fisher’s appointment before mine ran a little over, so I had to stay in the waiting room longer than usual. When she finally opened the door to let me in, she offered me something to drink.

  “I have water, juice, Coke…” she said, and it occurred to me that even now she was giving me a statement, instead of a question.

  “Water,” I said, although I wasn’t that thirsty.

  She poured some from a pitcher into a glass with no ice, and I took my seat on her leather sofa.

  “Last week you were telling me about that girl—” She consulted her notes. It occurred to me how weird Layla would think I was if she knew I talked about her like this, in this room filled with books and plants, where my therapist wrote her name down on a yellow pad as part of my case file. “—Layla. She’d invited you to try out for the cheer-leading squad.”

  For once, I was eager to talk about something, hoping that Dr. Fisher, at least, would be on my side. She was the one who’d wanted me to do more outside the gym, after all. So I told her everything: about how I had made the squad, even after I thought I’d embarrassed myself with my cheer, and about how Layla had complimented me in practice and wanted to hang out, and about how Mo seemed to think that I couldn’t do both.

  “And you think you can,” Dr. Fisher said in that annoying way she had, where it was impossible to tell if she was agreeing with me or doubting me.

  “I think I should be able to try,” I said. “Cheerleading only takes up a couple hours a week, and it’s mostly tumbling, so it’s like I’m practicing for gym, anyway.” I realized I was repeating the same argument I’d given Mo, and the one I’d told myself over and over again.

  “Plus,” I said, warming to my subject, “a cheer-leading squad is a real team. Texas Twisters isn’t a real team.”

  I hadn’t fully put that into words before, but now that I did, something about it resonated within me. At Texas Twisters, my teammates were my direct competitors—they’d made the Elite team when I hadn’t, and if we ever competed at Elite meets together, they could end up the ones who would knock me out of contention for a medal. As a gymnast, you could represent your country or your gym, but when you got up there on that balance beam, it was just you.

  “Like, a cheerleading squad has bases and flyers,” I explained. “Without the bases, who would hold up the flyers and toss them in the air? And without the flyers, what would the bases do?”

  “And you are a…” Dr. Fisher paused, waiting for me to fill in the blank.

  I took a sip of my water, which was lukewarm and tasted slightly of lemon. “I’m their tumbling expert,” I said proudly. “No one else can do all the stuff that I can, so it adds another layer to all their routines.”

  Dr. Fisher nodded, but she looked like she was thinking something else. One of the problems with therapy was that she got to ask all the questions—or make statements for me to elaborate on, as the case might be. But I was left to wonder what she made of everything I told her, because she didn’t always say, even when she was writing stuff down in her notebook.

  “You wanted me to get friends outside of the gym,” I said accusingly. “You were the one who said that.”

  “I suggested it might benefit you,” Dr. Fisher clarified. “Remember, Jessie, that in this room it’s not about what I want or what anyone else wants; it’s about you.”

  That sounded like her way of weaseling out of it. She’d told me I should have friends with other interests, and now that I’d made a few—and not just any friends, but girls who were popular and wore makeup
and straightened their hair—she was hedging. I didn’t get it.

  “Nothing I’ve been doing until now has gotten me anywhere,” I pointed out. “I didn’t make the National team.…I didn’t even compete. I’m not even an Elite yet, technically.”

  She consulted her notes, flipping back to a previous page. “I thought you said you would be able to qualify soon,” she said.

  I stared at my glass of water. The sun’s rays were refracted through the glass and made a couple of light stripes on the wooden table. I’d put a coaster under my drink, even though it wasn’t sweating, because this seemed like the kind of place where you always used coasters.

  “The next qualifier is coming up in a couple of months,” I said. “And I’m still going to compete. I’m just going to be cheering at the same time. Why is that so hard to get?”

  I would’ve never talked to my mother or Mo in that tone, but Dr. Fisher was different. That was one thing I kind of liked about therapy: I could say anything I wanted to, and Dr. Fisher didn’t yell at me.

  Instead, she treated my question seriously. “I think it’s hard for people to understand, because it’s unlike you,” she said. “For years you’ve been working toward your goal of being a gymnast, and now you’re making a choice that could be viewed as going against that goal.”

  “I’m reinventing myself,” I said, slapping the arm of the couch. My open palm against the leather made a louder sound than I had expected, and I closed my hand into a fist. “I thought that’s what you wanted.” Noticing the expression on Dr. Fisher’s face, I corrected myself. “Okay, not what you wanted, but what you thought would be good for me.”

  Dr. Fisher regarded me from behind her glasses. They were funkier than what I thought a therapist would pick out, with red frames and three tiny little rhinestones on each side. “I apologize if that’s how you construed it,” she said. “It was never about reinvention. You’re a very special person, Jessie Ivy. It would be a shame to reinvent yourself. It’s about learning how to grow within yourself.”