Winning Team_Go_for_Gold Gymnasts

by Dominique Moceanu

  Out of the corner of my eye, I glanced at Jessie, on the other side of Noelle. I don’t know what I expected—a flicker or a nervous tick, something to show how she felt about the subject of food—but she just faced forward, saying, “Yes, Coach Mo,” with the rest of the girls.

  “Britt?”

  I turned my eyes back to Mo. “Yeah?”

  “Do you understand?”

  Why was I being singled out? “Yes, Coach Mo,” I said.

  She nodded curtly. “Good. You and Noelle, go to vault with Cheng. Jessie and Christina, you come with me to beam.”

  It was the first time we’d been split up, and it was a little weird. I mean, not that I was complaining. Having to deal with only one girl was way better than having to deal with three of them. But still. Jessie was my only real friend on the team.

  Without saying a word (of course), Cheng crossed over to stand by the vaulting table. Noelle and I went to the chalk bowl and started rubbing the dry white powder on our hands and feet. You could always tell where gymnasts had started on the runway by the white circle they left behind.

  When I was five years old and too young to need the chalk, I used to think it was the coolest part of gymnastics. Before my grandmother started teaching me at home, I used to go to school and run my fingers along the rim of the blackboard, applying the chalk dust carefully to my hands. My teachers hated when I did that.

  Of course, our chalk is totally different—it’s this powdery magnesium stuff, instead of the hard chalk that used to scratch against the blackboard. And it serves its purpose. Without it, my hands would be slick from sweat and would slide right off the bars or vault or beam. It would be super dangerous. But it also completely dries out my hands, making my skin peel off like layers of an onion.

  “So . . .” I said, trying to think of something to say. I once saw a commercial where all these people working in an office are trying to make awkward conversation over the water cooler, but it just isn’t happening. The chalk bowl is like the water cooler of the gymnastics world.

  It was pointless, anyway. Noelle was staring at Scott, who was practicing a front handspring to three front layouts on the floor.

  “That’s easy,” I said, following her gaze. “I could do that in my sleep. I thought he was practically a college gymnast.”

  She flushed, as though I’d just insulted her. “Maybe he’s just warming up,” she said. “Ever think of that?”

  “Well, if he’s going to warm up front handsprings, he could at least do them right. His knees are bent.”

  “You’re one to talk,” Noelle muttered.

  “What?” I asked, even though I’d totally heard her.

  “Nothing,” she said. Just as I’d thought. Noelle was a coward. Without her ringleader, Christina, around, she didn’t know what to say or do. In my book, that was way worse than a sloppy front handspring.

  I decided to try to make amends, though. It wasn’t like I needed any more enemies at the gym, and I still felt bad about the stuffed-animal incident with Noelle. I searched for some small talk that might make her open up. “So, he competes for his high school team?”

  Noelle nodded, a dreamy expression on her face. “Did you know that he’s already been accepted to Conner University with a full gymnastics scholarship?”

  I remembered Mo’s mentioning something like that, but since I hadn’t gotten my copy of Scottie-the-Hottie Trivia, I hadn’t known the name of the college. “Cool,” I said. “Where’s Conner?”

  Noelle reddened. “It’s only in Houston,” she pointed out. “It’s not that far away.”

  I was about to point out that I’d never said it was when I realized that Noelle was just supersensitive about the idea of never seeing Scott again. It seemed to me that she already had a long-distance relationship with him when he was practicing twenty feet away. How do you measure the distance of not going to happen?

  Down by the vaulting table, Cheng stuck his fingers in his mouth and whistled. It was startling, not just because, hello, it was a piercing whistle, but because Cheng had actually made a sound. Would wonders never cease?

  “You go first,” Noelle said uncharitably.

  “Fine,” I said. I took my place about sixty feet down the runway. A lot of gymnasts like to start farther back—the runway is just around eighty feet long—but I don’t need that much room. My legs are so short that those extra twenty feet make me feel like I’m running a marathon.

  Well, that might be exaggerating. But I get a little bored running.

  I sprinted down the runway, hurdling into a round-off onto the springboard. I propelled myself backward onto the vaulting table, my hands hitting squarely as I performed a single layout into a pit just like the one we used for floor. Vault timers, we call these. They’re just for warm-up.

  Cheng nodded, so I guessed it was okay. I started walking back to my place at the end of the runway, Noelle whooshing past me as she ran toward the vault. I didn’t bother to glance back to see how she did. Of course, it was going to be perfect. Noelle’s vaults always were.

  After a few more vault timers each, Noelle and I were ready to work on our competitive vaults. We were both doing a Yurchenko one-and-a-half twist for our first vault, so basically, we just had to add the twists to the layout. Easy, right?

  I couldn’t even imagine what kinds of vaults people had done before Natalia Yurchenko came up with pretty much the coolest one ever. Now almost everyone does Yurchenko vaults. The move consists of a round-off onto a springboard, so that when you hit the vault table, you’re facing backward. It totally revolutionized vaulting, and it all happened way back before I was born, which means I’ve never known a world without such an awesome skill.

  On my first vault, I completely sat down. It felt as if I’d landed on the very edge of my heels, and my feet slipped right out from underneath me, until I was sitting on the mat. The worst part of it was that I couldn’t count it toward my twenty vaults. I’d probably still be vaulting ten years after all the other girls were done.

  As Noelle did her vault (stuck landing, what else?), I watched Jessie and Christina on the beam. Christina was already working on the second half of her beam routine, flowing through the leaps and acrobatic skills like she was on a beam four feet wide instead of four inches. Jessie was still on the first half, jumping down from the beam after a wobbly sheep jump, her landing totally blind as she kicked both legs up behind her until her toes touched the bottom of her red ponytail. She’d have to start over.

  Jessie got back up on the beam, but she leaned too far forward and ended up having to jump to the mat on the other side. She blew her bangs out of her eyes, muttering something to herself as she climbed back up. I saw her check her balance one more time before continuing her routine. What was with her?

  “Hey,” I said as Noelle joined me at the end of the runway.

  “What?” Noelle asked, but her eyes were on Scott, who was doing a scale at the corner of the floor mat.

  I wanted to ask her if she thought Jessie was okay. I wanted to ask her if she’d noticed anything weird, like the way that Jessie picked at her food during snack or skipped it entirely, or the way that she disappeared sometimes into the bathroom. But I didn’t know how to ask without her having some questions of her own, like what I was talking about or why I cared. And besides, I’d promised not to tell.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Don’t worry about it.”

  When I got home, my grandmother was waiting, ready to discuss the part of To Kill a Mockingbird that I was supposed to read, where Jem and Scout mess with this weirdo who lives across the street, Boo Radley. They come up with this awesome game where they playact what they imagine he’d be like, making him crazier and crazier in every incarnation.

  My grandmother gestured for me to take a seat, and I plopped down at the kitchen table, dropping my gym bag at my feet.

  “Why do you think Atticus isn’t happy about Jem and Scout’s game?” she asked.

  Because he was an ad
ult, and adults never like seeing kids have fun. I wanted to say that, but I knew my grandmother would just ask me to elaborate, and then I’d have to defend it, when really I just liked to complain sometimes for no reason. So I decided to take the question at face value and respond to it the way I knew she wanted me to.

  “Because they shouldn’t be making fun of Boo Radley,” I said. “He hasn’t done anything to them.”

  My grandmother beamed her approval, making some notation in her copy of the book. She encouraged me to write in mine, too, but that seemed like a horrible way to treat a nice hardcover book. Engage the text, she would say, but I don’t go scribbling all over clothes my mother buys me, either, so it seemed like a wasteful thing to do.

  “How could they turn their playacting into something more positive?”

  My grandmother loved to do this, tie fictional characters up in knots and ask you how you would untie them. I always wanted to say, like, I don’t know, they’re not real people. So they can’t do anything.

  This time, though, I really didn’t know what my grandmother wanted me to say. I shrugged. “They could join the school drama club?” I offered. “I don’t know.”

  She considered that answer, pursing her lips and tilting her head first to one side, then the other, as though weighing whether it were right or wrong. “Interesting,” she said. “I’m not sure their school would have a drama club. But what I meant was that they could imagine how Boo Radley might feel—being an outcast—instead of vilifying him further. Does that make sense?”

  Of course it did. I found myself wishing that the other girls at the gym would imagine how I might feel, being a new girl in a highly competitive gym, with no way to make friends at school or anywhere else. But then again, I also sympathized with the kids in the book, who were just trying to have fun with their little games. It was kind of like the way I had wanted to liven things up with my prank on Noelle, but instead wound up doing something that made everyone jump down my throat.

  So the question wasn’t whether I understood the stupid book or not. The question was whether, in comparison with the characters, I was the one trying to have fun but getting shut down or I was the misfit. Was I the Boo Radley of the Texas Twisters?

  My mom called the gym to say she was running late that day after practice. I was surprised when Jessie invited me over to her house. “Your mom can pick you up from there,” she said. “Come on, it’ll be fun.”

  Jessie’s house was in a gated community where all the houses had big columns in front and were painted in variations on the same three yellows, pinks, and beiges. Compared to my small brown ranch house with its huge prickly hedges in front, it looked like a palace.

  Jessie led me through the front foyer and the stuffy-looking living room (“We never use this; it’s just for when my grandparents come.”) to a large kitchen. A teenage girl with long blond hair was chatting on a cell phone.

  “I know, right?” the girl was saying. “You get it; I don’t know why Jake doesn’t. He is such a jerk. Do you know that he—”

  She spun around and saw Jessie and me staring at her, then rolled her eyes. “Sorry,” she said to the person on the other end of the line as she disappeared behind a door into a bedroom, “I can never get any privacy here.”

  “My stepsister, Tiffany,” Jessie explained. “She thinks the world revolves around lip gloss. Come on, I’ll show you my room.”

  Jessie’s room had to be as big as the rest of the house, and it was a masterpiece of messiness. I saw what the other girls had been teasing her about on my first day at gym. She had more clothes than I’d ever owned in my life, strewn about every surface of the room, and there was just stuff everywhere. As I crossed over to her bed, I stepped on a Minnie Mouse Pez dispenser, nearly slipped on a piece of notebook paper with doodles all over it, and had to move a Scrabble board over to clear a place to sit.

  “So,” I said, “what do you want to do?” I was very aware that Jessie was my only quasi friend in Texas so far, and I was afraid to mess everything up by suggesting something babyish like painting each other’s nails. Not that nail polish was allowed at Texas Twisters—at least, other than the clear kind, and, if it’s not a color, what’s the point?

  “I have a bunch of old gymnastics competitions saved on my DVR. Want to watch those?”

  She was already selecting last year’s American Invitational from her list, so I figured she didn’t need me to reply.

  The first few minutes were filled with all that stupid commentating the announcers do—here’s the girl to beat, blah blah blah, but look out for young hopeful so-and-so, the ultimate rivalry, and all that—and so I pushed the rest of the stuff off Jessie’s bed to stretch out, propping my chin in my hands. “Do you have any other brothers or sisters?”

  “Just Tiffany, who’s fifteen, and Josh, my seventeen-year-old stepbrother.”

  “I always wanted to have a sister,” I said. “Or a brother. You know, someone to hang around with when my parents weren’t home.”

  Jessie laughed. “Count yourself lucky. I used to have it sweet when it was only me, but then Mom married Rick, and they came with the deal. I barely hang around with Rick’s kids at all.”

  I guess it’s not the same when they’re not related to you, because then there’s no rule saying they have to love you no matter what.

  “I am so jealous of her,” Jessie sighed; for a second I thought she was talking about Tiffany. But then I saw the gymnast on the screen, dancing around the floor mat on the balls of her feet as if she had all the energy in the world.

  “Yeah, she’s good. She ends up winning, right?”

  “Of course,” Jessie said. “She always wins. You can tell just by looking at her.”

  There was a close-up of the gymnast’s face, and I squinted, trying to see whatever elusive superiority might exist in her features. Her nose was kind of pointy, her eyebrows were way too plucked, and her hair was pulled back so tightly it gave me a headache just to look at it. “She does look kind of smug,” I agreed.

  Jessie had turned her desk chair around and was straddling it with her arms resting on the back. She shook her head. “She looks smug because she wins. But she wins because she’s thin.”

  Something about the way Jessie said it sent shivers down my spine. It was almost like she’d said it many times before, even if never out loud.

  “I wish I was taller, like you,” I said, “and had more muscle. That’s what’s really important—imagine if your arms looked like twigs. They’d snap in half if you tried to do a back handspring!”

  I expected her to laugh, but she simply kept watching as the gymnast on television flipped her way through her last tumbling pass. “It’s just scientific,” she said.

  “Right. Science says twigs and gymnastics are not a good combination. It is scientific.”

  The score flashed on the screen. With a high difficulty level and nearly perfect execution, it was hard to deny that she was the best.

  “See, it pays to be little,” Jessie went on. “Like you—your routines are harder than mine, and yet you barely break a sweat. If I tried the same thing, I’d have to work twice as hard just to get my body to rotate all the way around.”

  “I’m also shorter,” I said. “Christina is tall and skinny, and she can’t do all the hard stuff, either.”

  “That’s because she doesn’t want to.”

  When Christina had been crying over her failure to do a full-in, it had seemed as if she wanted to pretty badly, although now that Jessie mentioned it, I did wonder what motivated her. The other girls had more obvious reasons for being involved in such a demanding sport. Noelle’s mom had been a gymnast, so maybe Noelle wanted to follow in her footsteps. Jessie had told me that after her parents got divorced and her mom remarried, she’d latched on to gymnastics as something to make her special, to help her stand out in a house that was filling up with other people. I didn’t love the strict regime of workouts, but it was all worth it for that feeling I go
t as I was flying over the bars, or propelling my body through the air with a single push against the vaulting table. Christina was an only child; I doubted that her mother, with her perfect hair, had ever been an athlete, and Christina didn’t seem to relish the adrenaline rush of gymnastics the way I did. So, what was her story?

  Another gymnast on the screen slipped off the bars and belly-flopped onto the mat below. It was obvious she wasn’t really a contender, though, since they didn’t bother to show any of her other routines, just the one where she face-planted it. That’s why I planned to be the best gymnast ever by the time I made it to a televised meet. At least if I messed up one routine, I’d still have the other three to show my grandkids someday.

  There was a knock at the door, and Jessie’s mom poked her head into the room. Her carrot-red hair was pulled back in a French braid, and her cheeks puffed out a little like a chipmunk’s when she smiled.

  “I’m Britt,” I reminded her. “I’m new at the gym.”

  “Of course, I met you at the team yogurt outing. And Jessie’s told me all about you.” She chipmunk beamed at me. I wondered what Jessie had told her. “Jess, honey, have you finished your homework?”

  “Most of it,” Jessie mumbled.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I said I’m doing it,” Jessie replied in a louder voice; her mom raised her eyebrows as she shut the door.

  “Want me to rewind?” Jessie asked after her mom had left. I shook my head, since we’d only missed a routine that hadn’t looked very interesting anyway. I mean, it was the American Invitational, and this girl was doing a side somi on the beam, which basically looked like an aerial cartwheel with ugly tucked legs and flexed feet. Why didn’t she just yank some other moves from her compulsory Level Five routine and throw those in while she was at it?

  I shared my opinion with Jessie, but she said that the side somi was “acrobatic” and part of the “presentation.” It was so nice to chat about gymnastics without its being about weight that I immediately reversed my opinion, and we rewound the tape so we could analyze the way simple skills could add elegance to a routine.