The Go-for-Gold Gymnasts Read online

  “You need to do in pit?” he asked. The foam pit was where we usually tried new skills first, so that we could practice them over and over without risking our bodies. I remembered when I’d first started at Texas Twisters, I’d looked forward to any time I could play in the pit, even if it was just jumping down the runway like a pogo stick and then flinging myself into the soft squares of foam at the end. We trained in the pit all the time toward actual goals, but it still felt like playing.

  But now, it felt almost like an insult, as if Cheng was saying I couldn’t do the skill. I shook my head, but he was already leading me to the pit. “Come,” he said, gesturing to an assistant coach to take over on floor where he’d left off.

  There were younger girls using the pit, but Cheng asked them to take a break. I might not technically have been an Elite yet, but this was one of the ways I knew I had reached the top at this gym. Mo and Cheng gave the four of us a lot more attention than they gave to the lower-level gymnasts, and if we needed equipment, we always had first dibs. At one point, I’d been the girl being asked to move. This time, I was the girl that others were moving for.

  There was something kind of cool about that, but I also didn’t want the younger girls to think that I was so bad that I couldn’t even get this tumbling pass without extra help. A double front tuck was an E skill in the code of points, which USA Gymnastics updated every few years to reflect the number of points you could get for a skill in a routine. A single tucked flip would be an A skill, and the code of points went all the way up to G, which meant that an E skill was on the hard side, but not the hardest. I felt like I should have been able to do it by now.

  Once the younger girls had moved off to work on the trampoline, Cheng made a sweeping gesture toward the pit. “Go,” he said.

  I ran up the length of floor, throwing my body into a front handspring, and then curled my body up for the double tuck. I landed in the pit, cradled by the foam squares, and yet I didn’t feel comforted. If we’d been on the floor, I would’ve ended up on my butt for the thousandth time. It might have been a different venue, but I was getting the same results.

  I climbed out of the pit, feeling dejected, but Cheng stopped me, clasping my shoulders. “You need to commit,” he said, and then let go, indicating that I should do it again.

  I wanted to ask him what he meant by that. Commit to what? What was I not committing to? But with Cheng, four words was already a speech, and you couldn’t count on getting any more out of him.

  I took my place at the end of the strip of floor, flexing my toes by curling them under and pressing them on the carpet. I ran forward, leapt into my front handspring, and then tucked my body for the double flip, but I knew I was short.

  “Commit,” Cheng repeated, and I set up to go again, even though I still didn’t know exactly what he meant.

  We did this three more times before I got frustrated. I felt like the gymnastics equivalent of a broken record. Why would he make me do this over and over without telling me what I was doing wrong? It seemed pointless. The Elite qualifier was that weekend, and so far I had a twenty-five percent chance of landing on my butt for this skill, and a one hundred percent chance that I’d get at least a couple of tenths deducted for that.

  But Cheng twirled his finger, telling me again. So I got set again, squaring my shoulders and standing very straight, like there was a steel rod where my spine should have been. If he wanted me to waste my entire morning practice doing this one thing, then, fine. Meanwhile, the other girls were perfecting their dance moves on the floor, but I was stuck in a loop, running into a foam pit.

  This time, when I launched into my front handspring, I was kind of angry, and so I pushed the floor with my hands, as if I were pushing someone away.

  My feet pounded the springy mat, making a satisfying thunk, and then I felt my body lifting almost on its own, curling instinctively into a tight little ball and doing two rotations in the air before I floated down into the pit.

  That was what was weird. I’d started out so mad, but by the time I was done with the double tuck, it was like all that fury had gone away, leaving me feeling light and calm. My body weighed nothing, suspended in midair until I came down feetfirst, straight as an arrow, into the center of the pit.

  “Yes!” Cheng shouted, and I realized I was still standing, surrounded by foam squares. I’d landed it perfectly! If I had been on the floor, I would’ve drilled it.

  “How’d I do that?” I asked, but I didn’t really need an answer. I’d felt the strong, decisive movements in my body, almost like I was fighting with the floor. But in the end, it had been the floor that helped me, giving me the lift I needed and propelling me through two flawless tucked flips. I’d committed to my gymnastics, and I felt like I had gotten commitment back.

  Sixteen

  “You seem to have figured out a lot since the last time I saw you,” Dr. Fisher said at our next session. I had just finished telling her about quitting the cheerleading squad, landing my double front, and taking my American Government test, which I thought I’d done really well on. I even felt good about the question on the necessary and proper clause, thanks to Norman and his flash cards.

  “Yeah,” I said. “It’s been a crazy week.”

  Dr. Fisher’s mouth curled up slightly at the edges. I wondered if that was a therapist’s way of saying, I told you so. She was the one, after all, who’d basically challenged me to figure out what I wanted, rather than focusing on what I thought other people wanted for me or for themselves.

  Maybe that was why Dr. Fisher didn’t ask many questions. She knew the answers, but she wanted me to find those answers for myself.

  There was one question, though, that I’d been wondering about for a while, and I still didn’t have any closure on. “Why don’t we talk more about my eating?” I asked.

  “You want to talk about your eating,” she repeated.

  “Yes,” I said. “I mean, no. I don’t know—but it’s why I’m here, isn’t it? I was trying to lose weight, and so I wasn’t eating. We discussed it sometimes when I first started coming here, but lately it’s like we don’t ever mention it. Does that mean I’m cured?”

  Dr. Fisher leaned back in her chair, looking at me from behind those funky glasses. “Do you feel like you’re cured?”

  Wasn’t that what she was supposed to tell me? I wasn’t the doctor. Obviously, I hadn’t been able to diagnose myself in the first place, so I was hardly going to be able to declare myself cured.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “You haven’t said so, and I’m still coming here, so I guess not.”

  Dr. Fisher set her notebook down on the table, and I tried to crane my neck to see what was written on it. I wondered if it was stuff I’d said or her ideas about me. Maybe she just doodled on the thing during our sessions, pretending she was listening when really she was thinking about her grocery list.

  “We don’t talk about it because I don’t want you to feel confined by words like cured,” Dr. Fisher said. “It’s not about a label that says you’re magically better. Getting better is a process. Does that make sense?”

  “So, then, why don’t we talk about my eating?” I said. “I still freak out about the way I look in a leotard sometimes, or how much I weigh before a big competition. It’s hard for me not to think about how many calories are in a slice of birthday cake, even though I’ll eat it.”

  “And that’s a normal part of the process,” Dr. Fisher said. “Mo hired a nutritionist to talk to you girls about your health, is that right?”

  For the past several months, our nutritionist had visited the gym regularly and shown us charts about food groups and the anatomy of the human body, discussing the fuel that we need from food and the best way to keep our bodies running efficiently. She even gave us recipes to take home, including one for a fruit smoothie with protein powder that my mom had started making for me as a treat.

  “I know that with the help of that nutritionist, you’re working on your eating be
haviors,” Dr. Fisher said. “Of course, I’m always open to talk about that, too. You lead these sessions, Jessie, not me.”

  I tried to think back on things we’d discussed in the past, and realized that she was right. Usually, I’d brought up the topic of conversation in some way or other, whether at the beginning of our sessions or in response to something she’d said. “But if I’m not talking about food,” I said, “you might think I was trying to hide something, right?”

  Dr. Fisher pursed her lips, moving her head back and forth like she was considering two options. “Not necessarily,” she said. “It’s not about the food, really. It’s about whatever else is going on in your life that makes you unhappy, or stressed, or angry. So, if that’s what you want to bring here to me, then that’s what I want to help you with.”

  When I remembered my worst times—for instance, right around when Britt had started at Texas Twisters and I’d been consumed with practicing for my first Elite qualifier, the one I’d never gotten to compete at—it was true that I’d been feeling a lot of those emotions. Like, right now, I felt immense pressure about the upcoming qualifier, even though I knew I was ready. I felt anxiety over Mr. Freeman’s class, even though I thought I’d rocked the test. But I also felt hopeful about the future, and excited about gymnastics and school and my friends, both old and new.

  “There is one thing I want to talk about,” I said.

  Dr. Fisher picked her notebook back up. “Anything,” she said, smiling.

  I realized that I’d often thought her smiles were smug or insincere or patronizing; but this one really didn’t seem that way. It looked nice, like she was interested, and open to whatever I had to say.

  “You know my parents are divorced,” I said. “And my dad lives in Austin, only half an hour away from us, yet I only see him a few times a year.…”

  I filled Dr. Fisher in on everything that I’d never told her before, about how he sent cards always before or after my birthday, but never on it, about how he’d say he’d be somewhere and then cancel or never show up, about how he didn’t like me coming to his apartment because, he said, I’d be “bored” there, about the time he called me on my cell phone randomly and I was so happy because he barely ever called, but then it turned out he’d pocket-dialed me and I heard him laughing with someone at lunch.

  Talking felt a lot like the reps that Mo made us do, where we strapped weights around our ankles and practiced our leaps. While the weights were on, my calf muscles would burn and my thighs would feel like lead, as though they couldn’t possibly extend any further or do any more work. But once the weights were off, that was when I could finally fly.

  It turned out that I got an eighty-eight on my American Government midterm. Not as great as Norman, who got a 105 for answering everything correctly and getting a bonus question right, but still a lot better than the sixty-seven I had gotten before. Mr. Freeman even pulled me aside after class to congratulate me, and it felt nice to be singled out for a good reason for once.

  “Mr. Freeman?” I said before I left.

  He was shuffling papers at his desk, tapping them against the surface until all the edges lined up. “Yes?”

  I cleared my throat. “I just wanted to say that I was paying attention. Before, when I said that I believed that the end justified the means, I wasn’t really thinking about it. But now I get why there are checks and balances to make sure no one goes too far.”

  I hoped he figured that I was talking about our government, and not about myself. Even though I was kind of talking about both. Of course, I understood why no branch of the government should have absolute power, but I also felt like it was a good thing to keep in mind in life, too. My friends kept me in check about my gymnastics, my therapist kept me in check about my health, Norman kept me in check about my schoolwork. So did Mr. Freeman, and I wanted him to know that I appreciated it.

  “I’m sorry if I was hard on you,” he said. “But, like I said, I know about being an athlete, and I know that an athlete always strives for excellence. You have a competition coming up, isn’t that right?”

  There had been a little article about it in the sports section of the newspaper, which I knew Mr. Freeman read at his desk while we did our class-work from the board. “Yes, sir.”

  I thought for a moment that he was going to remind me not to slack off on my studies, but he just smiled. “Then you know what you have to do, right?”

  I shook my head.

  He winked at me. “Be excellent.”

  The day of the Elite qualifier, my stomach was in knots and I kept playing with the clips in my hair, snapping and unsnapping them in an attempt to burn off the restless energy coursing through my body. I was waiting to compete on my first event—vault—when Mo stopped me and took my hands, looking me right in the eye.

  “You will do this,” she said.

  And I didn’t have time to doubt her, because the judges were holding up the green flag, letting me know that it was my turn to go. Mo gave me a pat on the small of my back, and then she stepped away, leaving me alone at the end of the vault runway.

  I sprinted toward the vaulting table, throwing my body into a round-off onto the springboard, then adding a half twist so I was facing forward as my hands hit the vault. My vault was a front pike with another half twist, and I bent my knees slightly to absorb the shock of the landing. I’d stuck it!

  “That’s it,” Mo said, hugging my shoulder as I climbed back into my warm-up suit and waited for the score. When it flashed, it was one of the highest I’d ever gotten on vault in a competition, and I knew that I was well on my way toward qualifying for the Elite team.

  Mo and Cheng always cautioned us against paying too much attention to our scores or to other competitors, worrying that we’d get distracted, or complacent, or anxious, and that that would affect our performances. But the truth of the matter is that it was hard not to think about those things. Math was one of my worst subjects, and still I was able to figure out this equation fairly easily. My high vault score meant that I had a little bit of wiggle room, but I still had my hardest events coming up, so I couldn’t breathe freely just yet.

  The uneven bars was not my favorite event. Noelle was very efficient on them, as she was on everything else—she would mount the bars, get the job done with straight legs, pointed toes, and knees together, and then stick her landing and move on. Christina had a slow, easy rhythm to her bar work; her routine wasn’t the most difficult of all of ours, but her pirouettes and stalder skills fit her long lines and graceful body. For Britt, the uneven bars were one gigantic playground—she loved to try daring moves, swinging fast and flipping high. Right now, she was trying to learn a Comaneci on the bars; this was a superdifficult release skill that she crashed on more than she actually succeeded in. That might have been enough to discourage me from putting it in my routine, but Britt saw it as a challenge.

  Sometimes, just getting from one bar to another felt like a challenge to me. During practice, I often had more difficulty with my uphill transition from the low bar to the high bar than I did with my release skill—which was weird, because technically, the release skill was a harder move, with a higher point value.

  So, once I mounted the bar and started my routine, I allowed myself a single second of relief after I made it through that transition, where I touched my toes on the bar, my body completely piked as I circled the low bar once and jumped to the high bar. But then I was swinging all the way around the high bar, letting go at the top to spin and catch it again.

  That was how it was on bars: there was no time to think, no time to question. My momentum kept me going, and I didn’t stop until my feet touched the mat. I took one step back, which would cost me a couple of tenths at the most, but my hands had grabbed the bar when they were supposed to and let go when they were supposed to, and I was done with two of my events.

  We moved on to beam, where I had to wait before my chance to compete. It took a while for each gymnast to go, and then it was eas
ily the most nerve-racking of all of the events, so every minute on the sidelines felt like an hour. I did stretches to keep my muscles warm, lifting one leg at my side until my calf nearly touched my ear, and using a line in the carpet to work on my sheep jump. In a sheep jump, you throw your head back and touch your toes to the back of your head, so the landing is completely blind. Not only is it blind, but your equilibrium is off a little, as though you had just gone on the spinning teacups ride at the fair and now you were trying to stay balanced on a four-inch-wide surface. I did a couple of reps of the jump on the floor, and each time, my feet landed squarely on the line in the carpet.

  Although I couldn’t stop myself from checking out my scores and taking notice when another competitor got a loud cheer or a gasp, I had been trying to avoid searching the crowd for my family and friends. I knew that they were all there—my mom, Rick, Tiffany, and my three teammates. I even knew where they were sitting; after all, this wasn’t the USA vs. the World event. It was just a local qualifier, where girls of various levels were competing to move up to the next one, and so the crowd was decent but not huge.

  Plus, Rick had worn his favorite orange hunting cap, which I could see as a bright spot out of the corner of my eye. The funny thing was that he didn’t even hunt.

  My dad had called at the last minute and asked if I wanted him to be at the competition. That was exactly how he phrased it, too—not that he would like to be there, or that he was looking forward to it, but almost checking to see if I absolutely needed him there. I told him no, I didn’t, and he seemed relieved. I wasn’t sure if I was ready to confront him yet, but I was definitely ready to stop expecting him to be something he wasn’t—a real dad. He congratulated me and said he was proud of me, and I said thank you and pretended I thought he meant it.