Winning Team_Go_for_Gold Gymnasts Read online

  She flicked her wrist dismissively. “You not ready for that. But you could do a round-off to full twist for your acrobatic series. I think you can handle.”

  I would’ve jumped up and down, but that wasn’t the best idea when standing on a surface that was only four inches wide. Obviously, Mo could see that I was really ready to change. Otherwise, why would she have finally decided to trust me?

  Apparently, Mo was wary of letting me get too excited. “For now, you do only on practice beam. Is that clear?”

  “Yes,” I said. Kind of a bummer, but still way better than not being able to try the move at all. The practice beam was shorter and had mats stacked up on either side so you never fell too far. When I was younger, I used to love the practice beam, because it meant I was doing something cooler than anything they’d allow me to do on a regular beam. But now, it felt a little bit like being told you have to sit in a flight simulator when you’ve already orbited the moon.

  Still, I wasn’t going to complain. The New Britt would never complain.

  I was smiling as I started working on the second half of my beam routine. Noelle gave me a weird look. She was probably wondering what I could possibly have been happy about, given everything that was going on.

  It did give me a pang when I glanced over at the other side of the gym and saw Christina and Cheng at the bars. Jessie should have been there, working on her transitions from low bar to high bar and trying to stick her dismount. But she wasn’t, and it was all my fault.

  “Why would you do it?” Noelle asked, her voice low. She was still standing on her beam, hands on her hips, looking at me. Mo had been pulled aside by a parent; I glanced over to see if there was any chance she might catch us talking. She moved slightly to her right, and I saw that the parent was Jessie’s mom.

  I wanted to tell Noelle that I’d had to, but when I opened my mouth, no words came out. Had I really? What if I’d waited until after the qualifier, at least, so Jessie could’ve had her chance to compete? Should I have thought it through?

  “You don’t know any of us,” Noelle said. “You think you do, but you’ve only been here a few weeks.”

  It was weird how it felt like so much longer. I tried to remember messing around in the pit with Dionne, pretending that we were competing in the X Games as we spun like cyclones into the soft foam. Had I really been doing that only a few months ago? It was hard even to picture that Britt now—the one who just had fun without worrying about the consequences, the one who hadn’t known what it was like to compete for a team. There had been Dionne, and there had been me, and we had been friends without really worrying about how we might get in each other’s way in the gym. Maybe that was the way to do it.

  “If you think this will get to Christina and stop her from qualifying, you’re wrong,” Noelle said.

  Honestly, it hadn’t even occurred to me to worry about Christina. This wasn’t about my beef with her; I didn’t really even have a beef. Christina was the one who seemed to have it in for me. This had nothing to do with Christina, and I told Noelle that.

  “What about Jessie?” I asked. I hated the idea that anything I’d done would damage Jessie, and I needed reassurance that she’d be okay. I knew Christina was tough, but Jessie was different.

  Noelle looked down at the beam, smoothing a line of chalk with her toe. “Just give her time,” she said. “She’ll be okay.”

  Did Noelle mean that Jessie would return to her training without any problems? Was Noelle acknowledging the fact that Jessie wasn’t okay now, that she did have some issues? Or did she mean that Jessie would eventually forgive me?

  From my vantage point up on the beam, I watched Mo and Jessie’s mother talk, and I tried to figure out what was happening. Mo’s back was to me, but I could see Jessie’s mom’s face, the way her forehead was all crinkled up so that her freckles looked like little raisins. She was nodding at whatever Mo was saying, pressing her hand to her chest as though taking responsibility for something.

  Noelle went back to her drills, and I watched her execute an absolutely perfect full turn with her leg held up the whole time. She looked like one of those ballerinas in a music box, spinning on the toes of one foot without even a wobble.

  Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to take those extra ballet lessons that Mo kept telling my mother I should have. I knew that both Christina and Noelle did them once a week, and they were two of the best dancers I’d ever seen. Especially Christina, who—as much as I hated to admit it—looked like she could have starred in Swan Lake if she’d wanted to. Well, if Swan Lake had also included some back walkovers and ring leaps, which, although I’d never actually seen it, I kind of doubted. My mom took me to see The Nutcracker one year for Christmas, and I’d sat through most of the show trying to figure out how the nutcracker guy got into that crazy costume. If all they were going to do was twirl around the stage a bunch, what was the point? Why not throw in some backflips?

  We did our stretches at the end of practice as usual, and my mom was actually on time to pick me up. After the long day I’d had and the added stress of the whole Jessie situation, I was relieved to see her red car pull up near the parking lot.

  “Hi,” I said, climbing into the passenger side. I sighed as soon as my head hit the seat.

  My mom gave me a sideways glance. “Did your chat with Mo go well?” she asked.

  How to explain to my mom the completely complicated situation our talk had created? For the moment, I chose to forget about the whole Jessie part and just tell my mom what I knew she was waiting to hear. “Yeah. Mo even said I could put the full twist back into my beam routine.”

  “That’s great, honey!”

  I felt myself get excited all over again. “It was totally cool. I mean, I’ll be on the practice beam for a little while, but that’s not so bad. As long as I get to rock it in competition. Can you imagine me on TV someday, Mom? Landing a full twist on two feet perfectly, without bobbling or anything?”

  “Mm-hmm,” she murmured, but I could tell she was distracted by having to merge lanes; she put on her turn signal and started glancing over her shoulder.

  “I know I won’t be on TV for a while,” I said. “But someday, when I’m a Senior Elite, I bet I could be. Imagine if I went to the American Invitational. Or the Olympics!”

  “Noelle—she’s the state beam champ, right?” my mom asked, obviously just putting Noelle’s name together with the gigantic sign that hung on the outside of the gym. I could still remember the first time I’d ever seen Texas Twisters, driving by it at night in our U-Haul and peering through the windows.

  “Yeah. She’s really good.”

  “She’s such a hard worker,” my mom said. “And seems like a sweet girl. You should ask her for any help you need with your beam routine. I bet you could learn a lot from her.”

  I doubted anyone would ever have thought to call me a hard worker. Grandma used to give me assignments that she said she wasn’t going to look at but that were for my own “personal edification,” whatever that meant. Then she realized that as soon as she said that, I would just doodle all over my paper, or sometimes write the same nonsense sentence over and over to make it look as if I was writing. It wasn’t that I didn’t know how to do the work—I just didn’t really want to. Grandma said if I spent half as much energy actually doing what people asked of me as I did trying to get out of doing what people asked of me, I’d have been a force to be reckoned with.

  But that was the Old Britt. The New Britt would run a hundred laps around the gym if that was what Mo wanted, or write twenty pages on the themes of To Kill a Mockingbird. The New Britt could be just as hard a worker as Noelle was.

  Still, I doubted that anyone would ever have called me sweet. I wasn’t bitter or anything, but I wasn’t the kind of person who would break off half of my candy bar to give to a starving orphan, either.

  But that was also the Old Britt. The New Britt was going to be pleasant to everyone, even Christina and Noelle, who didn’t seem to w
ant to return the favor. I hoped my mom could see how hard I was trying.

  As soon as we got home, my mom disappeared into her bedroom like she usually did. I stood in the living room for a second before knocking on her door. Although I didn’t hear her tell me to, I went in anyway.

  She already had the TV tuned to some show about supernannies, where these women with British accents were always telling parents it was “all about boundaries.” I reached over and switched the TV off.

  “Britt! I was watching that.”

  “Could I talk to you for a minute?” I asked. “It’s really important.”

  Maybe it was because I was feeling energized, as the New Britt, maybe it was because I’d already braved two huge confrontations that day, with Mo and with Jessie, although those hadn’t been very successful. But all I knew was that I didn’t want things to be the same as before.

  “I’m sorry that you and Dad had to move all the way here for me,” I said. “I know you liked it in Ohio.”

  “Oh, honey.” My mom patted a spot next to her on the bed, and I plopped down to join her. “He shouldn’t have said that.”

  “I’m glad he did,” I said. “I had no idea how much I was messing everything up.”

  “You need to know that we take your gymnastics seriously. So you should, too.”

  “I know.” It was the next part that was the hardest for me to say. The part that, no matter how many times I rehearsed it in my head, I didn’t know quite how to phrase; finally I figured I would just ask it straight out and not care how stupid it sounded. “You love me, right, Mom?”

  She laughed. “What kind of a question is that? Of course I love you.”

  “You don’t wish that I was smarter, or better, or…more like Noelle?” From what I knew of Noelle’s parents, who were Romanian immigrants, it didn’t seem like they had a single bit of trouble from Noelle. She would never put glue in the water fountain (it was supposed to be a fun prank, but Dionne and I had to clean the glue out, and then it wasn’t so fun) or talk back to her grandmother about the absolute uselessness of converting decimals to fractions using arithmetic (that’s what a calculator is for, after all).

  “Of course not.” Her brows drew together as she studied my face. “Why are you asking all of these questions? Where is this coming from?”

  “It’s just that you spend a lot of time at the day care.” The words came out in a rush, as though I was worried they’d get stale if they stayed inside me too long. “Sometimes I think other people’s kids get to see you more than I do. And that sucks, because I don’t have another mother to go home to like they do. I have you, but you’re always busy. And then you say that Noelle is so great, and it seems like maybe you’d spend more time with me if I was like her.”

  “Oh, Brittany.” She pulled me close to her, stroking my cheek and burying her face in my hair. “I didn’t know you felt that way. I know I haven’t been around a lot lately—”

  “Well, you’re starting your own day care,” I said. “It’s your dream, I know, like I spend all my time at gym, because my dream is to go to the Olympics. I guess I just miss you. And Dad.”

  “We both love you very much. You. Not Noelle or the kids at the day care, but my spunky, smart little Britt. Don’t forget that. And we’ll figure out a way to spend more time together, I promise.”

  Twelve’s a little old for this kind of warm and fuzzy sitcom moment, probably, but it felt good to curl up on the bed with my mom and find an old movie on TV. After all, a lot had changed since I’d moved to the second-biggest state in the country. I’d left behind a friend who got my sense of humor and understood that, while I could be thoughtless sometimes, I was never malicious. I’d given up a spot at a gym where, even if they didn’t produce Olympic champions, they knew that having fun was just as important as winning medals.

  I couldn’t stand the thought that I might’ve hurt my parents, too, so it was good to know that they were on my side. The New Britt might have been more mature than the Old Britt, but one thing hadn’t changed—at the end of the day, I still needed my mom.

  After dinner, I picked up the phone and dialed Dionne’s number. Her mom answered.

  “Um, hi,” I said, suddenly nervous. I hadn’t expected Dionne’s mother to pick up her cell phone. What if Dionne had told her what a bad friend I was? What if she’d already told her to screen any call from me with some lame excuse about being in the shower or out with friends?

  Or what if she really was out? Dionne had had other friends besides me, and they’d probably gotten superclose after I left. Dionne might even have been wondering why she’d wasted so much time with me when she could have been hanging out with them all along.

  Meanwhile, I had no friends here. Worse, I had mortal enemies.

  “Is Dionne home?”

  “Sure, just one second.” Dionne must have deleted me from her contacts. Obviously, her mother didn’t recognize my voice, or else she wouldn’t have been so cavalier about handing her daughter the phone.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi, Dionne. It’s me, Britt.”

  “I know.” So obviously she hadn’t deleted me from her address book. Maybe she wasn’t mad at me after all. “What’s up?”

  “Not much,” I said. “Is this still your number? Or is it your mom’s now?”

  “It’s mine. The phone was just on the counter, so she picked it up. I hate it when she does that.”

  “At least you have a cell phone.” It was a familiar discussion, and I felt myself relax a little bit. “I’d rather have a cell phone with a thousand restrictions than no cell phone at all.”

  “True. So what’s up? I called you a couple times.”

  Where did I even begin? I explained to Dionne the whole situation with Jessie, the way the other girls treated me, the truth about why my parents moved here, and the conversation I’d had with my mom.

  “Wow,” she said when I was done. “You’ve been busy. I was going to tell you about how I invented a new cereal by combining Rice Krispies with Cocoa Puffs, but now it doesn’t seem so important.”

  “You were right,” I blurted out. “I should’ve stopped to think about your feelings at your birthday party. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” she said. “You wouldn’t be Britt without being totally crazy.”

  “Great. Just what I want to be known for.”

  Dionne laughed. “You’re not,” she said. “Well, okay, sometimes. But you dive right into something headfirst and worry about the consequences later, and that can be a really cool way to be.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “If you don’t end up with brain damage.”

  We chatted for an hour. I laughed at all of her stories about people at our old gym, and she tried to figure out a time when she could come down to visit. We were cool, just like we’d always been. It felt good to have a friend.

  This time, it was my mother who told us to get off the phone. “I gotta go,” I said. “I’m about to play Battleship with my mom, and I’ve got a strategy that’s going to help me win big, I just know it.”

  “Is it your thing where you put all your ships on one side of the board? Everyone sees right through that.”

  Crap. That had been exactly my plan.

  * * *

  I didn’t have a strategy for talking to Jessie after the incident the week before, except that I knew I had to do it. I told my mom that I thought I’d left something over at Jessie’s, so she stopped by the sprawling suburban house on our way from the gym to the grocery store.

  “You’ll be only a second, though, right?” she said, glancing at her watch. “You know the frozen lasagna will take two hours to cook once we get it in the oven.”

  “I’ll be quick,” I assured her. It was probably not a lie. Worst-case scenario: Jessie would see me through the peephole and unleash her hounds (she didn’t have dogs before, but she would have them now, to protect herself against me), and it only took them a few moments to tear me to shreds. Of course,
best-case scenario was that Jessie and I would totally make up, and then I would run back and tell my mom to count me out for dinner, because I was going to spend the night with my new best friend.

  Like that would happen.

  Tiffany opened the door when I rang the bell. She stared at me as if I’d come from an entirely different planet. I was still in my leotard, with my shorts pulled over it, while she was wearing a baby T and low-rise jeans and looked as if she should have been on the cover of a teen magazine, so I guess I might as well have been an alien.

  “Hi!” I smiled to let her know that I came in peace. “I’m, uh, one of Jessie’s friends. Is she here?”

  Tiffany’s eyes flicked over me again. “Come in,” she said grudgingly. “Jess is in her room.”

  She led me through the kitchen toward the closed door of Jessie’s room. I smiled again at her, trying to tell her with my eyes that everything was cool and she could leave me alone now, but she just stood there.

  “Go ahead,” she said. “Knock. She’s in there.”

  My hands were trembling a little, but I wanted to look confident, so I ended up rapping on the door way harder than I meant to. It sounded as if I was the police coming to break up a party or something. “Jess?”

  There was silence for a moment. Then, through the door: “Who is it?”

  At that point, I could have told her Adolf Hitler and she’d probably have been more likely to open the door. “Um, it’s Britt. From gym.”

  I don’t know why I felt the need to add that last part. I’m sure she knew exactly who I was.

  The response was swift. “Go away!”

  Tiffany raised her eyebrows. “I don’t think she wants to see you,” she said.

  Thank you, Captain Obvious.

  “Jess, please,” I said. “Open the door. I need to talk to you.”

  “Go. Away.”

  I glanced at Tiffany, who still showed no sign of moving. I’d seen Mo talking with Jessie’s mom that day at the gym, but I didn’t know how much Tiffany was in the loop about the situation, and it would only have upset Jessie more if I’d started blabbing everything in front of the stepsister who barely tolerated her.