My parents are never going to get that investment back with a full ride, either. Not like they’ve said anything–sure, Dad tried to run analytics on my YouTube channel to see if he could tell which schools had viewed my routines (“You’re getting hits from Alabama–Roll Tide!”)–but neither he nor Mom made me feel that if I didn’t get a scholarship, I’d be a black sheep.
God, I ache. Everywhere. If I say I have to go to the bathroom, I can hide out until this soreness passes.
“Savannah and Emery, you’re leading stretches,” Vanessa calls.
Great.
DURING OUR WATER break, while Erica and Nicola argue over who took whose ankle brace (“You guys are the same size!” Emery intervenes, but to no avail), I surreptitiously pull out my cell phone.
NEWS! Cassie writes, and the subsequent texts appear like a news ticker across a TV. Coming home tomorrow + no school just yet = life is better.
“Oh, my God,” I say.
“Savannah agrees, and she’s nicer than me,” Emery says to the twins. “You guys need to get a grip.”
Nicola glares. “Gymnastics puns aren’t going to fix this.”
When can I come over? I text Cassie, then perch the phone on the edge of my bag as I drink my entire water bottle in one gulp. My heart’s pounding faster than it did during the tiny bits of tumbling earlier. She’s okay enough to be sent home. Halfway to recovery. There’s so much to catch up on, like how she spent her days in the hospital and what her life will be like now. How I’ve not only stepped back in the gym but agreed to compete again, and that there’s one college coach who hasn’t forgotten my name.
“Savannah, come here,” Matt calls from where he’s keeping one eye on the Level 3s. They’re taking turns flipping into the foam pit, which means they’re one second away from landing on each other.
He saw me texting. Busted. Last year, he took Jess’s cell phone (she who quit gymnastics for her unattractive boyfriend) and tossed it into the dredges of the pit. Lesson learned.
I stand next to him contritely.
“I wanted to make sure that we’re on the same page,” he begins, cringing as one of the girls dives headfirst into the pit. “Lexi, this isn’t a swimming pool. Anyway, I don’t want you to feel pressured. If you don’t want to compete, that’s fine. You’re a senior; I’m sure you have plenty of stress already, and this can just be a fun place for you.”
It’d be easier that way. I could tumble into the foam just like the little ones, leap on balance beam, and swing on bars without judgment. No chance of having another very public disaster. Ease my way out of gymnastics, since cold turkey hasn’t gone so well.
Yet there’s so much that I’ve missed. The “I’m going to pee myself” feeling of waiting for the judges to raise their hands so I can begin, the feeling of drilling a vault landing into the mat and hearing the crowd applaud, even wiping out in warm-ups and knowing that it doesn’t count, that I’m still in this. To me, that was the fun.
I’m afraid of breaking myself again, absolutely. But I’ve never feared competition.
“I don’t want Regionals to be my last meet,” I say.
“Neither do I.”
My teammates do deer runs down the vault runway–front leg bent, back leg straight. Erica plows into Nicola and they start laughing, the ankle brace situation forgotten.
“The thing is, if it seemed like you were genuinely done with gymnastics, that’s fine,” Matt continues. “Plenty of athletes don’t make it to their senior year. They get injured, they move on, whatever.” Like the rest of my teammates–new gyms, new boyfriends, new lives. “You? I’m not buying it.”
He’s right. Standing here is giving me the old antsy feeling, just like Baby Savannah jumping up and down on the springboard, waiting for her turn to mount bars. I want to follow the girls on the runway, then find my measured spot (72 feet, five inches) so I can vault next.
There’s still something to address, though, and as the Level 3s scamper away for water, I take my chance. “About paying for practice and meets.”
Matt’s already grinning–meets, plural–but I bypass it. Freudian slip. “I was wondering if I could work here and count it toward my tuition.”
“Mom and Dad cutting you off?”
My parents know I’m practicing. Competing again–that’s a whole other beast. More money down the drain if I get hurt again. At least this time, it’ll be mine. Couple that with the fact that if I’m footing the bill, Dad can’t hold whether or not I return over me. I might not have a car (or hell, a license), but this is the tiniest sliver of independence that I can claim.
You work hard, Marcos told me. It’s time to do so now, even if walking is a little too uncomfortable for my liking.
What’s worse: being in pain for something that I love, or being sore from standing for hours on end at Pav’s Place, whipping up burrito after burrito?
“Not exactly,” I say now. “I just…I feel like I need to do this on my own.”
“Well, consider yourself hired.” He nudges me toward the runway. “Friday, 3:30. Four- and five-year-olds. Be ready to get sneezed on.”
“HOW WAS PRACTICE?” Mom asks in her I’m-trying-not-to-sound-excited-but-I’m-really-excited voice, picking up the leftover newspapers on the coffee table. She knows I’m skittish.
I’m sprawled on the couch, head sinking into the pillows and bag of ice secured to my knee. It’s been a while–the initial contact of cold plastic against my skin makes me grit my teeth and hold my breath. A few minutes later, I can fully exhale. “Not too bad.”
I catch the most recent headline: FBI Rules that County Agency Mishandled Investigation in Immigrant Death. No mention of activity overseas, though, so I suppose that’s something.
My phone pings and I sit up so quickly that the ice slides down to my ankle, leaving a chilly trail in its wake. Most likely it’s Cassie, and I hope it’s all still good news.
My wolf jumps have surpassed my memory for trigonometric functions. Math for real tomorrow at lunch?
I fall back against the pillows with a smile. My mother goes to the computer, humming under her breath as she clicks around. The steady tapping on the keyboard, not rushed, means that all is well. Richard must have e-mailed her.
The stairs creak as my father maneuvers his way downstairs. School concluded hours ago, but he’s still wearing pressed khakis. He takes in the ice on my knee, the phone in my hand, and perhaps the red shade of my ears.
Then he utters two words. “Marcos Castillo.”
Mom’s hands are still on the keyboard. If she was excited about me returning to gymnastics, then the mere insinuation that I might have a boyfriend will thrill her for days.
How much does my father know? Did Max Pfeiffer, a student in AP Calc, make a comment to him? Goddamn Dad’s excellent poker face. He settles in across from me on the ottoman, stands back up, and then sits down again. Good. Someone else feels awkward here.
Mom breaks the silence first. “Who’s Marcos?” She’s trying not to sound eager. “Do you have a prom date you didn’t tell us about?”
Prom’s only a million months away.
“I’m tutoring him for math,” I say evenly.
“Is that right?” Dad’s already smirking. He knows. I’m screwed.
“All I know about the boy,” he continues, “is that he’s in Paul Andreotti’s class.” Right. Trigonometry. “I believe he’s retaking the course.”
In my father’s eyes, retaking a course is positively criminal.
“He works a lot,” I reply. “At Pav’s Place. He’s there twenty-five hours a week. So maybe math isn’t on his priority list.”
The smirk slips. “Hmm. That’s proactive; I’ll give him that.”
“Also”–why am I defending Marcos? We’ve shared one (pretty excellent) kiss. It’s not like we’re life partners– “his brother wants to join the military.” The perfect response that causes Dad to shake his head and Mom to say, “Wow, how about that?” No doubt it’l
l cause them to murmur tonight in low voices, not quite arguing but neither conceding, hoping I confuse the sound with the distant waves.
“It sounds like you know him pretty well.” Of course my father manages to make an innocuous statement sound ominous. “Just…” His eyes shift left and then right. Oh, this is not good. Something super uncomfortable is about to be unleashed, like when he walked into my physics class last April to tell me my MRI results.
A cough, one ink-stained fist to his chest. “I know how kids these days think they know all about each other because of social media. Please don’t make bad decisions.”
So he heard about El Pueblo, too? Well, I’ve obviously lived to tell the tale. “Like what, Dad? Please elaborate.” If the man thinks he can smirk, then as version 2.0, I’ve perfected it.
For perhaps the first and only time in history, my dad’s cheeks flush. That doesn’t stop his eyes from latching onto mine with the steely resolve he reserves for kids that he’s about to send to Mr. Riley’s office. “Surely you remember health class?”
Oh, shit.
That’s what this is about.
My dry lips part and then close because what the hell do you say to that?
“Rich, I think you’re tired,” Mom interrupts. Bless her. Bless her so much. “You’ve graded too many exams today.”
Dad rises from the ottoman, ankles cracking the way mine do. “Be careful,” he says like it’s a mandate, his eyes carefully skirting away from me.
When I make it up to my room on creaking legs, I call Cassie. There’s no way I can miss hearing her reaction to this.
Hey, mates, you’ve reached Cass’s phone. Her recorded voice giggles. We were in her room when she recorded the message, experimenting with fake British accents. It was during our British-boy-bands-are-way-better-than-American-ones phase. Looks like I’ve got something better to do. Leave a message.
I call again. Hey, mates–
Four calls later, I bury the phone in a mound of pillows.
She’s asleep, she has poor service, she needs her rest so she can come home tomorrow; I know all of this, yet as soon as I turn off the lights, I can’t shut my eyes.
What if she changed her mind tonight?
She seemed happy enough, at least through her typed words, but if I’ve learned anything, it’s that I can’t read Cassie the way I thought.
I watch each digit on my clock glow. 1:01. 1:02.
It’s the way we wait for Richard when a week passes without a word. Mom tries to examine every possible angle, printing out maps and smoothing them on the coffee table to mark what she’s inferred from news stories, while Dad and I have always retreated. A need-to-know policy only.
Otherwise, there’s too much awful possibility in every moment of silence.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“DO YOU WANT to come with me?”
“Do I want to what?” Juliana’s still pissed from the last time we talked. That much is evident by the way she yanks thick strips of hair into a single braid. I wince at each tug.
“To Cassie’s. After school.”
She continues to braid with less force. “One of the guys owes me for covering his ass last week.” I suppose that’s her way of saying yes.
That’s how Juliana, Marcos, and I wind up taking a field trip.
“If Andreas cries to me one more time about the season ending too soon, he’s gonna get a punch to the nose,” Juliana calls over the rumble of the engine. She’d slid into the backseat as I wavered by the passenger-side door, uncertain about the politics of car seating arrangements with your (possible) boyfriend and his (definite) ex-girlfriend.
When Marcos doesn’t respond, she turns to me. “How’s your friend from the bonfire?”
“Emery?”
“Yeah, Galway Beach girl. She was funny.”
It figures that Juliana has known Emery for point-five seconds and already likes her better than she likes me.
“Ugh,” says Marcos. “Don’t bring up Galway Beach in my car.”
“What’s your problem?” She leans between our two seats. Marcos’s sharp avoidance of the Main Street pothole isn’t enough to shake her.
Marcos’s eyebrows are pinched together. His thumb taps rapidly against the wheel. “Did you forget Nelson’s?”
“What about Nelson’s?” Juliana says.
Nelson’s. The summer party Cassie had gone to, the one that made her warn me away from Marcos.
“What those idiots were saying?”
Juliana’s lips twist in contemplation.
“That guy?” Marcos tries again.
“Oh.” The two words make her cringe. “Yeah.”
“Then Cassie up and–” He stops short at that. “Sorry. Going too far.”
I know that Marcos punched a guy. I know that Cassie was shocked while Marcos viewed it as defending his best friend. Cassie having any kind of hand in this–now that’s new.
Juliana manages to slide up further so that her face is even with my shoulder. She looks at me, then seems to remember that I wasn’t there that night. Frankly, I’m starting to feel glad that Cassie didn’t invite me, either. “What Marcos is trying to say is that he was shocked when Cassie peaced out because our hero here decided to start an MMA career on the spot.”
Marcos exhales a short, quick breath. “Didn’t she drive you there?”
Juliana shrugs. “So?”
“Then she up and left.”
“I walked home. It wasn’t that big of a deal.”
“I sure as hell wouldn’t leave my friend behind.”
Leaving in the thick of things–that doesn’t sound like Cassie. She loves the excitement, the voices that pick up momentum and collide.
Juliana rolls her eyes. “You do a lot of things that nobody else would.”
The car jerks to a halt. Both Juliana and I buck forward. The seatbelts catch and squeak.
Tension ripples off of Marcos. He doesn’t remove his eyes from the rearview mirror as he says, “I did it because Andreas was in over his head, and I wasn’t going to wait until someone called the cops.”
“It wasn’t that bad.” Nothing about Juliana wavers. Not her stance, not her tone, and definitely not her scowl. “Nobody was gonna call the cops.”
“That’s because the cops don’t care.” He balls his fist against the wheel. “You know that.”
Do they remember I’m still here?
“I got more important things to worry about,” Juliana shoots back. “Believe it or not, some of us forget when a jackass runs his mouth.”
Marcos hits the gas and the car rumbles forward. “Well, good for you. I don’t.”
A stormy silence settles over the car.
Thus, with all the happiness and good vibes that, say, a funnel cloud would bring, we pull up to Cassie’s house.
Her pale face presses against the window. In the next instant, she runs outside in bare feet. It’s a flash of the girl who would grab my hand as we sprinted over the sand on summer days, hair flying free behind her. My heart leaps at the manifestation of the mantra I told myself last night. She’s okay.
“Where are your shoes?” Juliana scolds as Cassie leaps into her arms. Then it’s my turn, Cass nearly crushing my face against her shoulder. I inhale the lavender and cinnamon, the steady scent that hasn’t been changed by hospital beds and ice cold water. The wind whistles over us, and I hold her tighter. Then she’s gone, out of my reach, tucking hair behind her ears only for it to loosen again in the wind.
When she approaches Marcos, they’re both subdued until Cass says, “Thank you, Marcos,” and squeezes him so tightly that he takes a surprised step backward. “Shit, it’s cold,” she says, releasing him. “Get inside, kids. My mom has leek-and-tofu soup just for you.”
Juliana catches my eye. What the heck?
Welcome to the Hopeswell house.
We settle around the kitchen table, Marcos and I on one side with Juliana and Cass facing us. I automatically reach for a bamboo napkin ho
lder and roll it to Cassie. “How’s everything going?” I say. Juliana sniffs the air, grimacing like she’s about to choke. Incense burns thick in here, and with the bubbling and hissing of water boiling on the stove, it’s like inadvertently entering a witch’s lair.
Cass pushes the napkin holder back to me. “Tiring. It’s not easy wowing your doctor, resident, social worker, nurse practitioner, and nurse every day.”
“Whoa,” says Marcos under his breath. Her words, though, make me feel hopeful. If five medical professionals approved Cassie’s release, then she has to be improving.
“They said I’ll need to be home for the next week or so. Once they all agree that I seem stable enough, I can go back to school.” She smiles faintly. “I’m sure that my academic output is missed terribly.”
“Hell, yeah, it is,” says Juliana, missing the reference. Cassie’s eyes meet mine. Sarcasm without any despair. She seems steady. I relax a little more.
“Of course,” she continues, “Mom thinks burning a shit ton of incense will be just as helpful. I smell like the love child of frankincense and myrrh.”
I roll the napkin holder back to her. Juliana’s eyes track it. Just between us, Juliana.
“Why the incense?” Marcos shifts his weight and the chair creaks. Like Juliana, it’s evident that the smell’s getting to him, too.
I open my mouth to answer. Juliana beats me to it. “Her mom ran a pharmaceutical company and thinks all the drugs are bullshit.”
“It smells good.” I fight the burning in my throat from the overload of smoking spice. “Uh, soothing.”
Cassie rolls her eyes. “Shut up, Savs, you don’t need to lie to me. Never helped before, did it?”
She’s smiling; the bamboo circle’s already on its way back to me. So why do I let the napkin holder wobble and tip over without making a move to catch it and push it back?
Lessons in Falling Page 13
