Winning Team_Go_for_Gold Gymnasts

by Dominique Moceanu

  “Apologize?” I repeated, like an idiot. Surely I must have heard wrong. They wanted to apologize to me?

  “You were right,” Noelle said. “About everything. Jessie’s been acting weirder and weirder for a while, and if we had bothered to look closer, we would’ve seen it wasn’t just stress about the qualifier. I don’t know if we didn’t want to see it—”

  “—Or we were just too busy with our own drama,” Christina broke in, shaking her head in disgust. “Honestly, I was so wrapped up in my competition with you that I barely noticed Jessie. If it hadn’t been for you, nobody would’ve ever spoken up.”

  I wondered if this was a dream, or if there was a way to ask them to repeat all the nice stuff they were saying to me into a tape recorder so that I could play it back whenever I started thinking they hated me.

  “Jessie asked me not to tell anyone,” I said. “I should’ve handled it differently—made her tell someone or whatever. I shouldn’t have brought it up at your sleepover.”

  Christina waved her hand. “I was being a brat about that sleepover, anyway,” she said. “I’m sorry I didn’t invite you.”

  “You did,” I said, “eventually.”

  “We should have another sleepover soon,” Noelle said, “and maybe we should skip Truth or Dare.”

  I bit my lip. “It won’t be the same without Jessie, though.”

  Noelle drew her eyebrows together. “Why wouldn’t we invite Jessie?”

  “I just don’t think she’ll come,” I said. “She’s really mad at me. I doubt she’ll ever forgive me.”

  It might’ve been different if Jessie and I had been friends for years, if we’d grown up together and gone through Girl Scouts together and told countless secrets to each other. Maybe then, Jessie would someday have realized I’d been acting out of concern. But what did we have holding our friendship together, really, except for a couple of conversations during our snack break and one homework help session?

  Christina and Noelle glanced at each other.

  “Let us take care of that,” Noelle said.

  I shrugged. I doubted there was much they could do, but it was nice of them to want to try. Turning back to my locker, I took out a roll of athletic tape and started wrapping my ankle.

  “Are you hurt?” Christina asked. It was going to take a while to get used to hearing her speak without any sarcasm in her voice, but it was definitely a welcome change.

  “Nah,” I said. “But since we’re going back out on the floor, I thought I’d tape up my ankle just in case. For some reason, I’ve been landing my passes with more weight on this side, and I don’t want to put any extra stress on it.”

  “Don’t take this the wrong way,” Noelle said. “But you’d better not. Mo and Cheng have very strong feelings about using bandages or tape in practice.”

  “We’re not allowed to use tape?”

  “Only if you’re hurt,” Noelle said. “They think that using it when you’re not is just a crutch that weakens your body.”

  A few weeks earlier, I would’ve assumed that they were messing with me, making stuff up in order to get me in trouble or make me look stupid. But I believed them now. I started unwinding the tape, wincing as I ripped off a strip around my anklebone. “Thanks,” I said.

  “Any time,” Noelle said. “We’re teammates, aren’t we?”

  Excitement was in the air on the day of the qualifier. I climbed to the top of the bleachers with Noelle, since neither of us was competing. I don’t think I’d ever just sat and watched a gymnastics meet before. Even back in Ohio, once when I’d gotten really sick in the middle of a competition, I’d waited out the rest of it in a back room with my head between my knees.

  “This is fun, right?” Noelle asked. We were both wearing our new team jackets, which Mo had ordered in a bright red with white stitching across the back advertising our gym. The logo depicted a gymnast with a bunch of swirls around her, as though she were a cyclone.

  “Totally,” I said. “It’s weird, though. Don’t you feel like we should be out there, somehow?”

  “Yeah.” Noelle grew quiet; I was sure she had the same images running through her head that I did: sitting perfectly still while someone spritzed hair spray all over your hair; the premeet pep talk from your coach; the adrenaline rush as you walked out onto the floor for the first time, taking in all the equipment that had been set up and the other teams as they began to stretch.

  In order to qualify for Elite competition, Christina had to get a certain all-around score. Noelle said that she’d gotten scores that high before, at a competition last year, but it hadn’t been an official qualifier, so it hadn’t counted.

  “Well, if she’s done it before, she can do it again,” I said.

  Noelle nodded, but she looked a little worried. I guess when you’d seen a friend compete at ten separate meets, the fact that she got such a great score at one of them wasn’t a big confidence- booster.

  “She’s got the full-in now,” I pointed out.

  Christina had gotten much more consistent at performing that skill in the last week. I liked to think it was because of the advice I’d given her, which she was now finally willing to listen to—but I knew it was probably all Cheng’s general awesomeness. He didn’t talk much, but my experience working with him over the past couple of weeks had taught me that he didn’t have to. He had a way of showing you what you needed to do in the fewest steps possible, so that it seemed almost effortless. One minute you were hitting a brick wall, and the next minute you were flying. It was incredible.

  An announcement came over the loudspeaker, asking everyone to stand for the national anthem.

  After the anthem, we sat back down. The program said that Christina was in the first group, which started on vault. I knew she would be relieved by drawing Olympic order, which goes: vault, then bars, then beam, and ends with floor. She likes to get vault out of the way early, so that she can focus on the events she says actually interest her.

  I saw my mom at the bottom of the bleachers searching for me, and I waved to let her know where we were. She’d dropped Noelle and me off in front and then circled around the parking lot to find a space. It was totally insane how crowded places could get for these things.

  “It sucks your mom couldn’t be here,” I said to Noelle. I realized I’d never met any of Noelle’s family.

  She shrugged. “It’s hard with the store. My older brothers can’t run it on their own, so my parents pretty much always have to be there.”

  “I didn’t know you had brothers.”

  “Four of them.” Noelle rolled her eyes. “The twins are eight, and then Radu and Mihai are both in high school. And before you ask, no, they are not cute.”

  Like I’d have been interested. I still thought boys were, for the most part, complete wastes of time. Who wanted to go to the movies with some kid who’d rather tell fart jokes than watch the thing he’d paid eight dollars to see? It was stupid.

  “Cute like Scott, you mean?” I teased, waggling my eyebrows.

  As expected, Noelle flushed a little.

  “What’s the deal with you and him, anyway?” I asked.

  “There’s no deal,” she said. “I get that he’s older than me, and it could never happen. It’s just…I like dreaming about it, I guess.”

  “Has he ever actually spoken to you? I mean, other than—” I didn’t want to remind Noelle of the time I’d taken her stuffed animal. Not when we were finally getting along. “Other than a little bit here and there?”

  “Not yet,” she said, lowering her voice as my mom reached our row. “But someday.”

  “Hi, girls.” My mom smiled at us, unaware of our topic of discussion—which was a good thing, because I didn’t even want to think about the way she would have squealed with delight if she’d thought I was talking about boys.

  I knew it wasn’t easy for her to spend her whole Saturday here when she still had a lot to do to get the day care ready. But she was making an effort, and so
was I. I told her that I’d be happy to spend the next day going through kids’ toys with her in exchange for her coming to the meet.

  “Hi, Mrs. Morgan,” Noelle said. Sometimes I still felt a little jealous of my mother’s obvious affection for Noelle, but I knew my mother cared about me. And honestly, it was hard not to be completely charmed by Noelle. She was good at everything, but she didn’t have a big head about it.

  And then it was Christina’s turn at vault, and we all grew quiet. She ran down the runway, did a round-off onto the springboard, and then flipped backward to push off the vaulting table into a full twist. It wasn’t at quite the level of difficulty of some of the other girls’ vaults, but she landed fairly solidly.

  I didn’t pretend to care about the other competitors. I was really only there to watch Christina. So, while some short, mousy-looking girl got set up for her vault, I turned to Noelle.

  “I can’t wait for the Classic. I really want to get back out there on the floor. It feels like I haven’t competed in forever.”

  Noelle sighed. “I know. I’m not competing at the Classic, although there’s Nationals later this summer. I want to go so badly I can taste it, but . . .”

  I waited a few seconds for her to finish her sentence; when she didn’t, I prompted her: “But what?”

  “It costs a lot of money,” she said. “They’re in Philadelphia, so there’s the flight, and the hotel, and the new leotards. . . .”

  “You’ve gotta go,” I said. “If you don’t, who’s going to be my competition?”

  I hadn’t meant to make it sound like I didn’t think Christina would qualify—because I totally did—or like I didn’t consider her competition. Even though, if I had been honest, I really saw Noelle as my biggest rival…at least, gymnasticswise. Obviously, she was the best, since she’d been hand-selected to compete at Nationals. Christina—if she qualified—and I would have to score big at the upcoming Classic for that privilege.

  Noelle smiled distractedly.

  Then a girl took a particularly nasty fall on the bars, and we both winced.

  “I wouldn’t want to be feeling like her in an hour or so,” I said. “One time I belly-flopped on the mat like that, and I didn’t think it hurt so much at the time, but by the time I got home, my muscles were all stiff and sore.”

  Noelle and I traded gymnastics war stories while we waited for Christina to rotate to her next event. Neither one of us had ever been seriously injured. The worst I’d ever had was a sprained ankle; Noelle had broken a few fingers and pulled a muscle in her leg.

  Then Christina was on the bars, and we watched as she swung gracefully back and forth, switching between the low and high bars with ease. She really did have the most beautiful lines. I wondered what her secret was—metal rods implanted in her legs, to keep them so perfectly straight?

  She stuck her dismount, and I finally let myself breathe. I knew Noelle was doing the same.

  “Next is beam,” she said. “That’s one of Christina’s best events. So far, she’s doing awesome.”

  I couldn’t wait to get out on the competition floor again. That was when I really came alive. There was just something about the atmosphere, the pressure, the other girls in the background competing for the same thing…It always revved me up.

  Okay, so I’d been known to get too revved up and totally choke in a crunch. But I was getting better. And it’s better to have too much energy than too little, right?

  My mom must have been thinking the same thing, because she leaned over and said, “Do you remember the time you fell off the beam three times in one competition, and the last time, you actually slapped the beam, you were so frustrated?”

  “Mom!” I didn’t need for Noelle to hear a highlight reel of my greatest misses.

  “What? You were only seven years old. It was cute.”

  “Losing is not cute, Mom.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Noelle smirk. Note to self: whenever I do get to meet the Onestis, ask them to regale me with embarrassing stories about Noelle.

  When Christina finally got to the beam, I could see what Noelle meant. Sometimes you hear commentators for gymnastics meets say that a gymnast “works the beam like it’s floor.” (Actually, you hear it all the time, because apparently, gymnastics commentators are like those old Barbie dolls you pull a string on and hear the same stupid phrase over and over.) Well, that’s exactly what I thought of when I saw Christina. She danced from one end of the beam to the other as though she had no idea that it was only four inches wide or that she had a long way to fall. She might not have felt so fearless, but I could see she had more courage than she gave herself credit for.

  The audience applauded when she landed her series of flip-flops into a front aerial linked to an immediate sheep jump; this meant that they were watching her and not the other girl who was performing on floor at the same time. Every now and then, the other girl’s floor music was perfectly matched up to Christina’s movements, so that it looked almost as if Christina was leaping and twirling to the beat. For a moment, I felt as though there were something magical in the building.

  “She’s going to qualify,” I said. “She has to. She’s having the best competition of her life.”

  But Noelle was more cautious. “She’s doing great, but floor is next. She loves all the dancing parts, but that one tumbling pass is still not a sure thing.”

  “Then why throw it in there at all? Why risk a mistake?”

  “Christina had to improve either her vault difficulty or her floor difficulty to be competitive,” Noelle explained. “Cheng decided it was easier to upgrade her first tumbling pass to a full-in than to try the new vault, since that’s the event that scares her the most.”

  It felt like forever before the girls rotated to their last events. Christina was competing toward the middle of the pack, which wasn’t a terrible position to be in. Usually, girls competing toward the beginning of the rotation get scored lower, because the judges want to give themselves room to raise scores as the competition progresses. You don’t want to give an almost perfect score to the first girl and then have the next one hit her routine out of the park, because then all the scores get inflated. So it was better for the competitors to go toward the end, but middle wasn’t all that bad; in this case, it meant that Christina wouldn’t have to wait around as long, with all that time for her muscles to get cold and for her to psych herself out.

  I was on the edge of my seat as the girl before Christina took her place on the floor, performing a decent routine to some classical music I’d never heard before. Somebody, punch me in the face if I ever do a routine to boring dead people playing harps and stuff.

  The girl finished her routine with a flourish, and I felt my heart jump into my throat. This was it. The big moment. I was surprised at how badly I wanted Christina to qualify, even though she’d been my archnemesis just a few days ago.

  There was a rustling next to me. I glanced over, annoyed at whoever was choosing this moment to get up and go grab a hot dog and a bag of chips. But then I forgot about hot dogs, about Christina, and about the competition.

  “Jessie?”

  “You didn’t think I’d miss it, did you?” She smiled brightly at Noelle and me.

  My mother raised her eyebrows at me over the top of Jessie’s head. I’d ended up telling her everything that was going on and had expressed my confusion over why Jessie’s mom had chosen to pull her out of the gym right before what would have been the biggest competition of her life. My mom had said that someday, when I had children of my own, I’d understand. Gymnastics might have been our dream, but making sure we were healthy and happy was our parents’ dream, and it had to come first. I pretended to gag when she said stuff like that, but deep down, I liked to hear it.

  “You’re just in time,” Noelle said. She didn’t look nearly as surprised as I was. Maybe she’d just known that Jessie would show up to support her teammate, no matter what. “Christina’s about to go on.”

  Right on c
ue, Christina’s music started, a swirling Latin beat that wasn’t too fast but still managed to sound cool. Christina was in her starting pose, one arm crooked behind her back and the other held high in a gesture that almost screamed, Watch what I’m about to do.

  The big tumbling pass was right at the beginning. It would have made more impact if it had been the last pass, but by the end of the routine you were usually totally out of breath, so sometimes it made sense to play it safe then. Cheng had said that if Christina got more comfortable with the move, they might change it, but for now it was in the first ten seconds, so that she could concentrate all her energy and focus on landing that skill.

  She danced into the corner, placing her feet with the heels just inside the white line. I saw her shoulders rise and fall, and then she was off.

  Her back handspring was much better. I knew as soon as she hit it that she would have enough power to fling herself backward into the double flip with a single twist. The question was whether she would stick it.…I held my breath as I watched her body flip through the air.

  The sound of her feet hitting the springboard-loaded mat could be heard throughout the building. It wasn’t until she threw both of her arms up in a triumphant salute that it fully registered.

  “She did it!” I cried. “She did it! She did it!”

  But Noelle was biting her lip. “No. She stepped out of bounds,” she said. “That’s going to cost her a couple of tenths. And if it throws her off her game, it might cost her even more.”

  I’d been so focused on the fact that Christina was up and on her feet that I hadn’t even noticed where she’d landed. But sure enough, her back leg was way over the white line.

  I did some quick calculations: Christina needed a 9.5 or better on this routine to secure her Elite status. It was totally possible, but depending on how much they decided to deduct for the out-of-bounds step, it might not happen.

  Christina kept a brave face on, getting through the rest of her routine with only minor shakiness on one of her leaps and finishing with a relatively conservative double twist. That 9.5 was looking a little further out of reach.