The Go-for-Gold Gymnasts

by Dominique Moceanu

  Then came the moment I was dreading, when we approached Christina’s house.

  “Let’s not go there,” I said.

  “Why not?” Layla asked. “This house is gigantic.”

  “It looks…haunted,” I said, seizing on the only excuse I could think of. I could’ve kicked myself. I wasn’t in an episode of Scooby-Doo.

  Layla snickered. “Should I have gotten you cat ears instead of fangs?” she asked.

  “Scaredy-cat,” Stephenie said, as though I hadn’t gotten the joke.

  “Whatever,” I said. “I have to make a quick phone call. My mom wanted me to check in.”

  Just shut up, Jessie. Everything I said made the situation worse. Now they were going to think I was a scaredy-cat who went crying to Mommy.

  Layla glanced at Stephenie and Ashley and shrugged, and they started to walk away. I turned my back to them, making a show of digging through my little purse for my phone, even though I had no intention of calling her.

  But then I heard Britt’s voice, and my heart sank.

  “Jessie?” She bounded down the front steps of the house but stopped at the bottom, before she reached me. I saw that her hair was crimped so that it stood around her head like a bunch of crinkly fries.

  “I thought so,” she said quietly. “I saw those girls at the door, and I had this sneaking suspicion that I’d find you out here. You’re not here to hang out with us, are you?”

  “I—”

  “What are you wearing?” Britt asked, and the look she gave me made me feel as if I was wearing a giant sandwich board that said Gymnastics Is for Losers on it.

  “You were the one who said we should reinvent ourselves, remember?” I blurted out. “You said it’s a new school and a new year, and this is our chance to do something different.”

  “I meant, like, talk in an English accent for a day, because it’d be funny,” Britt said. I couldn’t remember ever seeing Britt angry; mostly, she treated everything like it was a big joke. But now, she was definitely mad. “I didn’t mean this.”

  “That’s easy for you to say,” I said, getting irate myself. “You know exactly who you are. You’re the second-best gymnast in the country on vault. Who am I?”

  “You’re better than me on vault,” Britt said, “and you know it. So don’t make this about gymnastics when it’s not.”

  “What does it matter?” I said. I wanted to yell, but I was keeping my voice no higher than a harsh whisper, so that Layla and the other girls didn’t catch any of our argument. Stephenie and Layla were huddled around Ashley on the sidewalk inspecting a huge hole in Ashley’s tights. I just hoped that that would occupy them long enough for me to handle this situation. “I’m not even an Elite yet, so no one knows whether I’m the best on vault or not. I might as well be nobody.”

  “If you really believe that,” Britt said, “then I feel sorry for you.”

  She turned and stomped back up the steps to rejoin Christina and Jessie, who had just come out of the house and were staring at me. She glared at Layla as they passed each other. Layla glared back, before confronting me on the sidewalk.

  “What is that girl’s problem?” she said.

  Me, I wanted to say. That girl’s problem is me.

  Thirteen

  In homeroom on Monday morning, I was racing once again to finish my homework in time for Mr. Freeman’s class. My mom had driven me from gym to school again, and since I’d told her I was finished with my homework, I couldn’t very well do it in front of her. So now, I had twenty minutes to try to complete the whole assignment.

  “Did you enjoy your All Hallows’ Eve?” Norman asked as he fell into the seat in front of me. It seemed like Norman always made an entrance, like he couldn’t stop himself from crash-landing into a scene.

  “Yeah,” I said, without looking up. In truth, it had been a crappy night. We’d trick-or-treated for another fifteen minutes after my confrontation with Britt, and then Layla had wanted us all to go somewhere else, but I’d begged off, citing early gym practice as a reason. So I had my mom pick me up, and I dodged her questions about why I was in Christina’s neighborhood, and did I just want to spend the night and ride to gym with Christina in the morning? Finally, I gave my mom a Three Musketeers bar to silence her, and when I got home, I threw the rest of the candy in the pantry, where I knew Rick or Josh would find them.

  During Saturday’s practice, I tried to focus only on my gymnastics, since none of the other girls were going out of their way to talk to me. That was the funny thing about workouts: it could be easy to gloss over a falling-out. When we were all getting along, which was most of the time, we joked around a little and whispered to each other if Mo turned her back for a minute, but we still had to put most of our concentration into our reps. But if one of us was mad, it wasn’t hard just to put your head down and pretend you were really, really working on improving your routines.

  Not that mine was improving. I could land the double front okay on a softer mat, but ended up on my butt one out of every five times I attempted the pass, and the other four passes weren’t exactly pretty. I felt Mo’s gaze on me whenever I took my place in line to try again, but when I landed the pass—or especially when I didn’t—I’d look up to find her paying attention to the Level Ten girls over on the balance beam, or strolling over to the front desk to talk to a parent.

  I felt Norman’s gaze on me now, and so I finally glanced up. “What?” I asked impatiently. In five minutes, we were all going to have to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance, which would cut into my homework time.

  “I figured you would elaborate,” he said, “but you didn’t.”

  “You knew I was going out with Layla,” I said. Layla, Stephenie, and Ashley were over in the corner, poring over some note Ashley had received from a boy. A part of me was happy to be left alone to work on my assignment and relieved that Layla didn’t harass me about being friends with Norman anymore. But another part of me wondered if I was so unimportant, that Layla could act like we were best friends at cheerleading practice and then completely ignore me in homeroom.

  “So, how was that?”

  I felt like Norman knew somehow that the night hadn’t exactly gone as planned, and his coyness irritated me. “It was fine,” I snapped. “Listen, I really have to get back to this homework, okay? Mr. Freeman will jump down my throat if I get another bad grade.”

  “Ah,” he said. “Jessie Ivy versus Mr. Freeman continues.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “and I’m losing.” And then I had an idea, one that normally would’ve never occurred to me, except that I was desperate. “Hey, maybe you could help me with this homework,” I said. “You just came from this class.”

  “I hardly think there’s enough time for a tutoring session,” Norman said, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose with one finger.

  “Well, not a tutoring session, exactly,” I said.

  “I’m not going to give you the answers,” he said. “That’s cheating. It’s against the honor code. You can fail an assignment or even a class for that. True story.”

  “I didn’t say to give me the answers,” I said. I was conscious of the minutes ticking away. “But you could tell me where to find them in the book, maybe. It would help me get this done in time.” He looked at me for ten seconds. I knew precisely how long it was, because I was counting Mississippis in my head, wondering how many lines I could’ve written out by then.

  “I can’t do that,” he said.

  “Whatever,” I said, returning pencil to paper. I knew I couldn’t finish the whole thing in time by myself, but I wasn’t going to force Norman to help me.

  “You know,” he said, “I thought you were different.”

  I didn’t want to bite, but I couldn’t let that comment go. “What does that mean?” I demanded.

  “On the first day,” he said, “I figured, here’s someone who knows what it’s like to be a little weird. You’ve been competing in gymnastics meets since you were seven—I kn
ow; I looked it up online.”

  I blinked at that. I couldn’t believe he’d researched me.

  “I memorized the periodic table when I was in fourth grade,” Norman continued. “And I get it, no one wants to be friends with the guy who can recite every element and its atomic weight, but those same people don’t seem to have a problem with using me to do their homework.”

  “I wasn’t—” I began, but Norman shook his head.

  “You were,” he said. “And I thought you were better than that.”

  The morning announcements started, and Norman turned around to face the front. And even though I had a few more precious minutes while the anchors droned on about the lunch specials for the day, I couldn’t concentrate on anything in my textbook. I stared at the bits of dandruff in Norman’s hair and wondered if he knew that he had dandruff. Something told me that, even if he did, he wouldn’t care what people thought of him for it. And then, for some reason, that reminded me of Britt’s crazy, crimped hair on Halloween night, and it occurred to me that she hadn’t cared if she looked ridiculous or not, either. I was the only one, with my hair that had taken an hour of straightening to tame, who had minded how people saw me.

  The announcers on the morning show called for the Pledge of Allegiance, and so I forced all of those thoughts out of my head as I stood, putting my hand over my heart.

  That Friday, I had to miss some gymnastics practice for a pep rally after school. It was my first time actually cheering with the team, and I was nervous.

  I saw Norman in the bleachers as I marched out onto the basketball court with the rest of the squad, and I almost waved, before I remembered that he was mad at me. I don’t know how I could’ve forgotten. It seemed like everyone was mad at me these days, except for Layla and the rest of the cheerleading team. Britt was still avoiding me, since Halloween; Mr. Freeman had handed back another paper with a big red F on it; and I knew Mo would be disapproving of the missed practice hours, given that the Elite qualifier was only two weeks away.

  I took my place off to one side and crouched down until the tip of my ponytail brushed the floor.

  The song started—a grinding techno beat that I was already totally sick of—and I waited for my cue. But it was actually hard to make out the music, what with the crowd and the bad stereo system, and behind me, the routine sounded different from the way it did in practice. Everyone’s tennis shoes squeaked on the polished wood, and the coach wasn’t yelling out directions as she normally did. But then there was a cheer from the crowd, which told me that the three flyers had probably just been lifted for their first toss, and so I jumped up from my position and bounded into my tumbling.

  I felt like clothes in a dryer, going end over end over end, one back handspring leading into another. I ended with the full twist and then launched into the same tumbling pass going back the other way. Once I’d reached the other side, the song was winding down, and I leapt up into a straddle jump. In cheerleading, they called it a toe-touch, but I was having a hard time with both the name and living up to the name. In gymnastics, you’re not supposed to touch your toes when you jump up like that, and it was a difficult habit to break. Still, I knew that my straddle was the highest and my legs the straightest of anybody’s, thanks to those ankle weights that Mo made us wear all the time.

  We ended with a final pose, one hand on the hip and the other thrust into the air, holding up one finger. It was supposed to declare that our team was number one, but I thought it looked like we were trying to point out something on the ceiling, personally.

  It only hit me as we were running off the court that I’d just performed in front of the whole school. I’d competed in front of larger crowds than that before, like at the Texas State Championships the previous year, but it was different when it was all people your own age, whom you would potentially see again, rather than a bunch of parents of gymnasts from all over the state, who really didn’t care what you were doing, as long as their daughter won a medal. Now, I couldn’t remember if people had even clapped after our cheer. It felt as if I was just coming out of a vacuum of time and sound, and now I was trying to go back and figure out what had happened.

  “Did people like it?” I asked Layla worriedly. “I heard them cheer once, but it all happened so fast. I’ve never…”

  I almost said, I’ve never felt so disconnected before. And I realized it was true. When I competed in gymnastics, sometimes it felt a little surreal, just like it had out there today. But each move I did, down to even the minuscule dance moves I did to get from one end of the beam to the other, felt like mine. I felt aware of my body, of the experience of being out there on the floor or racing down the vault runway or letting go of the bar, spinning in the air, and catching it again. Today, I’d been more aware of how sweaty my armpits felt in the itchy long-sleeved shirt that was part of the cheer uniform than I had been of my movements.

  “They loved it,” Layla said. “No thanks to you.”

  I had been trying to find a way to hold my arms casually away from my body, hoping to discourage the sweat from soaking through my shirt. But now I crossed them over my chest defensively.

  “What do you mean?” I asked. “I did the full twist in the layout position, like we talked about.”

  Even though it was just a full twist, I was kind of sorry that Mo hadn’t been able to see it. Twists were not generally my forte, but I thought the two I’d done today out on that basketball court had been really tight, especially given that I wasn’t getting the usual bounce from the floor mat.

  “Yeah, and then we talked about a double twist,” Layla pointed out. “Remember? If you’re not going to come up big, why do it at all?”

  As far as I knew, Layla could do a cartwheel, a back walkover, and splits, and that was it. So I took a deep breath and tried to explain it to her. It was possible that she wasn’t meaning to be a jerk, but just didn’t have the gymnastics background to understand what she was asking of me.

  “In a cheer competition with the mats, I could do it,” I said. “No problem. But on the basketball court…the impact could really hurt my ankles, or worse, if I don’t land it. It’s hard to get the height I need on the wood floors.”

  “So, lose some weight,” Layla said, “and maybe you could fly higher.”

  I stared at her, stunned. Was that a personal dig, or a general comment? I hadn’t told her about my therapy, but I couldn’t help being paranoid. “This is muscle weight,” I said, repeating the words I’d heard from the nutritionist Mo had hired. She came to talk to us once a month, giving us recipes and meal plans for how to keep ourselves healthy. “I can’t lose weight—I’m already in really good shape.”

  It was weird. I felt like I’d heard other people say those words a thousand times—Mo, Britt, my mother, my therapist—but I’d never felt one hundred percent like I believed them until now, standing there defending myself against Layla.

  Layla shrugged, as if she was already over this conversation, and turned around to chat with Stephenie and Ashley. I heard them talking about their tosses, Layla claiming that she could almost touch the ceiling of the gym, that was how high she’d gotten. I didn’t need Norman’s math skills to know that that was impossible and was intended to be a dig at me.

  I thought back to the photo-booth pictures I’d taken with Layla, at the way she’d directed the whole thing so easily. Smile, be silly, now give your best fierce face. It was almost like she’d done it a bunch of times before, and I was starting to think that “friends forever” really meant friends for as long as it suited her.

  I glanced up at the clock on the wall. The pep rally wasn’t supposed to be over for another fifteen minutes, but I bet if I called Mo, she’d pick me up on her way to the frozen yogurt place in time for me to do some serious team-building.

  Fourteen

  Britt, Christina, and Noelle all looked surprised to see me when I ordered my usual fat-free white chocolate frozen yogurt and sat down with them at the booth.

 
; “Love your outfit,” Britt said sarcastically.

  I glanced down at myself. I’d forgotten I was still wearing my cheerleading uniform, which was blue, with BHS in big white letters going diagonally across the chest. Instead of the classic pleated skirt I’d always associated with cheerleading, we wore straight skirts with a little slit in the thigh. I’d been excited to change into my uniform after gym that morning, and it was kind of cool to walk around school all day wearing something that so clearly declared me part of a group. But now, I felt silly.

  “It’s not all it’s cracked up to be,” I said, and smiled through a spoonful of white chocolate yogurt.

  Britt looked at me skeptically. “Just like that?” she said. “You’re back?”

  “Oh, give her a break,” Christina said. “I’m actually kind of curious about cheerleading. Is it like in all the movies?”

  I spent the next twenty minutes describing the practices, which, looking back on it, hadn’t been all that fun. Even gymnastics workouts, which were way more intense and left my muscles aching sometimes for days afterward, were better. At least I felt like I was challenging myself, and surrounding myself with people who cared about me and were interesting to talk to.

  “Listen,” Britt said, cutting in at a random point. Everyone got quiet. It was clear from the tone of her voice that she had something to say other than a comment on pom-poms. “If you ever don’t want to be my—our—friend, then fine. Just say so, okay?”

  “Believe me,” I said, “I want to hang out with you guys. I’m sorry I ditched you on Halloween; that was really stupid. I had such an awful time that night.”