The Go-for-Gold Gymnasts: Winning Team (Go-for-Gold Gymnasts, The) Read online

  “That would explain a lot,” Christina muttered.

  I was kind of stunned by Christina’s open animosity, and I couldn’t formulate a decent comeback. I was grateful when Mo finally called us to line up at the corners of the forty square feet of blue carpet we called “the floor.”

  “Tumbling passes!” she said. “Warm up.”

  For several minutes, we took turns flipping across the floor. They weren’t the passes we were actually going to do in competition or anything, just easy stuff, like handsprings and layouts, which are basically just flips with or without hands. No twists, no extra flips, nothing fancy. It got us ready for our big moves, and for me, it had the added benefit of getting me used to the floor.

  Every floor mat is slightly different. This is weird, because they’re regulation size and made out of the same materials, but each one has a different feeling under your feet. Like, the one at my old gym was a little spongier than this one, somehow. Even though I knew that the carpet was probably bought from the exact same place, the one at my old gym used to feel like you could sink your toes in it if you pressed down hard enough. This new floor felt nothing like that. It was like linoleum—flat and hard, but with springs underneath it, of course.

  “Okay,” Mo said, after telling me my legs had come apart as I did back handsprings. (This was not the first time I’d heard that, believe me. So far, the only solution I could think of was to superglue my ankles together. For this year’s state competition, maybe I would try it.) “Jessie, you stay on floor to do combo pass. Other girls, to the pit.”

  The pit is the reason I am in love with gymnastics. Seriously, I want to marry it. The pit is where you get to do crazy tricks and land on an eight-inch-thick foam mat, and you don’t have to worry as much about hurting yourself. If you’re trying something really new, you get to do it and land in a pit filled with loose foam, which is like flipping into marshmallows, only less sticky. My old coach used to spot me on a triple tucked somersault in the loose foam pit, even though I probably never would’ve been able to do it on the actual floor. I hoped Mo was that cool.

  I lined up behind Noelle and Jessie at the pit and glanced at Mo. “What should I do?” I asked.

  “What can you do?”

  I shrugged.

  “Show me,” Mo said.

  Noelle did a back double pike into the pit, her body folded in half and rotating two complete times in the air. Then Christina turned out a double twist that was pretty good, I had to admit (when I did twists, I had a tendency to overdo them; at one competition back in Ohio, I just kept spinning like a cyclone, even when my feet had already hit the mat. I lost a few tenths of a point for stepping out of bounds on that one).

  Then it came to me. All the other girls were lined up by the mirror on the wall, and they stared straight at me as I took a deep breath and prepared for my pass. I could feel Mo’s eyes on me, too, and I knew this was big. I had to impress her. I had to impress them.

  Technically, I hadn’t done gymnastics in a week—I mean, other than some aerials in our brand-new front yard (which had a huge cactus in the middle of it—not good if your flipping gets a little wonky, like mine does sometimes), and I walked around the house on my hands until my mom told me to quit, but that was all. I knew I probably should play it safe on this first pass, and ease myself into it.

  But that just wasn’t my style. Instead, I ran as fast as I could, my arms pumping as my instincts took over, and then I was leaping into a round-off to a back handspring. I could feel the momentum in my body, and I knew I would pull it through before my feet even left the ground: a full-twisting double somersault.

  I could’ve piked it to make it a little harder; it would’ve been the same move that Noelle had done, but with a twist added to make it interesting. But instead, I tucked my legs up close to my chest, just to be sure I could make it all the way around. I landed in the pit with room to spare, so I knew I would’ve rocked it if we’d been on the actual floor. As I sank into the soft foam, I threw my hands up in a salute, even though this wasn’t a competition and there were no judges.

  At least, not the kind who give you scores. I heard light applause from Mo’s direction. “Not bad,” she said.

  Just then, Christina burst into tears and ran for the locker room. Noelle shot me a look before heading after her.

  I glanced at Jessie over on the floor.

  “What?” I asked. “What’d I do?”

  Jessie bit her lip, and her green eyes looked worried. “Christina’s been trying to do that move for months,” she said. “She can do it with a spot, but without one…she wipes out every time.”

  Later, I came up with about fifteen appropriate responses to that, like: Oh, I’m sorry to hear that and Maybe I can help her. But for some reason, my channel-surfing brain garbled the message, and I ended up blurting out a snarky line from one of the reality shows my mom liked to watch when she came home from work. “If you can’t stand the heat,” I said, “get out of the kitchen.”

  When the head chef on the reality show declared that exact same thing, all the contestants had laughed. But Jessie wasn’t laughing, and I wondered how I was supposed to land on my feet when I always had one firmly planted in my mouth?

  Mo gave us a five-minute break, and Jessie joined the other girls in the locker room. Mo said it would be a good time for me to claim a locker and put my stuff away.

  I really didn’t want to go in there. I mean, I wanted to say something to Christina, but what? I barely understood what I’d done, much less how to fix it.

  Then again, I felt kind of stupid hanging out all by myself. I inched over to the water fountain, but there was only so long I could pretend to gulp down the frigid water. I didn’t really want to drink a lot, because then it would have sloshed around in my stomach for the rest of practice, and I hated that.

  I thought about working on my leaps on the floor; my last coach had always been telling me I could use some serious improvement in that area. Don’t get me wrong, I could jump super high, and getting at least a 180-degree split was absolutely no problem. But it was the whole too-much-energy thing again. Sometimes, I had trouble controlling my leaps and connecting them to other dance elements, which meant I lost valuable bonus points from my score.

  But then I started imagining all the things they might be saying in there behind my back, and so I crossed over to the locker room and pushed the door open. Like the rest of the gym, it was state-of-the-art, with lockers that actually looked as if they’d been painted in this century. At Loveland, my old gym, I’d chipped almost all the orange paint off the front of my locker. If I’d stayed there for another month or two, I probably could’ve gotten the whole thing down to the metal.

  “—big deal,” Noelle was saying. “She’s just a kid.”

  So, they had been talking about me. “Hey, guys,” I said.

  You know that phrase If looks could kill? Yeah, so did Christina, apparently. She was glaring at me with her dark eyes, her expression intensified by the sheen of tears.

  Noelle and Jessie just looked uncomfortable. I decided to try to make amends. “Look, Christina, I’m sorry if—”

  “How old are you, anyway?” Christina asked.

  “I’m twelve,” I said. At least that would make it better, right? That I wasn’t some kind of wonder kid?

  Although I did kind of like the idea of being a wonder kid.

  “You’re twelve?” Noelle said. “So am I. When will you be thirteen?”

  “Next February.” My birthday had just passed, so I hadn’t been twelve for very long.

  “I’ll be thirteen in December,” Noelle said.

  “Cool,” I said, turning to Christina and Jessie. “How old are you guys?”

  “I’m fourteen,” Jessie said, cautiously adding, “Christina is thirteen.”

  Christina just rolled her eyes.

  I wondered if I should try to apologize again. “Hey,” I said. “I’m really sorry that I upset you, with my full-in, I
mean.”

  Sometimes gymnastics can be kind of confusing. If you do a double flip with a full twist on the first flip, you call it a full-in. If it’s on the second flip, it’s a full-out. And if you split the twist evenly between both flips, it’s a half-in, half-out.

  Maybe that explained why I was so good at math—even doing a floor routine could be like a word problem.

  Christina stood up, and I remembered how much taller than me she was—I only came up to her chest.

  Noelle picked at some dry skin on her hand (one of the many side effects of being a gymnast, unfortunately—all that chalk that we use makes our hands like parchment), acting as if she didn’t even notice the tension between Christina and me. But Jessie’s eyes darted between the two of us.

  “Come on, Christina,” Jessie said. “You know she didn’t mean anything by it. So she can do a move that you can’t; big deal. Maybe she could teach it to you, ever think of that? Then you could finally make the Elite team.”

  “Wait,” I said. “You’re not an Elite yet?”

  Christina put her hands on her hips. “I practically am,” she insisted. “I train with the Elite squad, don’t I? I just haven’t gotten the scores at a competition to make it official yet. So, please, spare me. Like I need you to teach me anything.”

  Um, excuse me. I wasn’t the one who’d brought it up in the first place. It’d be like teaching a rattlesnake the etiquette of formal tea—totally impossible. Right then, I couldn’t think of anything less appealing. Maybe beam reps. That was it.

  “Hey,” I said, holding up my hands defensively. “Don’t take your failure out on me.”

  In my head, that hadn’t sounded so harsh, but for a second, Christina looked seriously stung. I started to apologize for the second time. “Okay,” I said. “It’s like this. I—”

  Just then, Mo came through the door. “Pity party over,” she said, clapping her hands. “Yes?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Christina said, her eyes lowered.

  “Sometimes practice is hard,” Mo said. “That makes you stronger. But we do not run out. This will not happen again.”

  “No, ma’am,” Christina said, although it hadn’t been a question, but more a command.

  Mo looked at all of us. “Good,” she said. “Now, back to work. Get your grips—we go to bars.”

  Once she’d left, I thought about trying one more time to fix things with Christina. But then she looked up, and I saw a new gleam in her eyes that made any words I’d been about to say stick in my throat. She’d been crying, but she wasn’t hurt anymore. Now she was just mad.

  I was beginning to somewhat get that T-shirt that said: don’t mess with texas. ’Cause I had the feeling I had just messed with it, at least a little, and it didn’t look pretty.

  After bars practice with Cheng (Mo’s husband and also the quietest man in the universe), we took a fifteen-minute snack break. I used my money to buy some apple slices and a Gatorade, and I was trying to find a place to eat by myself when Jessie gestured to me to come over.

  “Hey,” she said when I reached her table. “Come on, sit with me.”

  “Won’t Christina and Noelle be mad?” I asked.

  “Nah,” she said. “They usually eat their snacks up front, by the pro shop. Christina’s mom sometimes fills in at the front desk, since she practically lives here. Christina’s dad is some big-shot cardiologist, so her mom doesn’t need a job. Other than Christina and her gymnastics, at least.”

  I tried to remember who’d been sitting in the parents’ viewing section. “Was she the woman with the long, wavy black hair?”

  “Yup.”

  I noticed that Jessie didn’t have anything in front of her, even though it was our snack break. I asked her if she needed to borrow some money, but she just shook her head.

  “Oh, no,” she said. “I’m not really hungry.”

  I was always starving after a workout, especially after doing something like floor, which required a lot of energy. But whatever. To each her own, I guess.

  “So,” I said, crunching on an apple slice. “Is Christina just mean, or does she not like me?”

  Jessie hesitated.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “You can tell me if it’s me.”

  “Christina can be really sweet once you get to know her,” Jessie said. “But I think she’s just intimidated by you. I mean, you’re only twelve, but you can do stuff that she can’t and you’re already Elite.”

  “Are you an Elite?”

  Jessie made a face. “No,” she said. “I have to compete at this Elite qualifier, too. Only Noelle is already Elite, but Christina and I are almost there.”

  When I became an Elite, I had been so excited. No more compulsory routines like in some of the lower levels, where you all have to do the exact same thing to the exact same mind-numbingly irritating music. And even after I’d gotten to do my own routines, the competitions were always held in some tiny gym with a handful of parents in the bleachers. But now, I’d hit the big time.

  Elite is the absolute top level in gymnastics. Once you turn a certain age, you can become a Senior Elite instead of a Junior Elite, but that’s it. Only Senior Elites can qualify for the Olympics, and there are tons of gymnasts who are awesome when they’re juniors and then choke when they’re seniors.

  “Well,” I said. “I hope you guys both make it. And I hope Christina gets over herself soon. I don’t want to have to practice with her glaring at me.”

  “She’ll come around,” Jessie said. “We’ve been training together for three years, so it’s just weird to have someone new in the mix. And Noelle’s really nice—she’s Christina’s best friend, so she goes along with her a lot. Get her by herself and you’ll probably end up being friends.”

  “Great,” I said. “I’m glad that the girl who happens to hate me has so much influence. That’s really encouraging.”

  Just then, Christina and her mom passed by, and I hurriedly popped an apple slice into my mouth, hoping it looked like I’d been chewing the whole time. I wondered if she’d heard me.

  “You’re not trying hard enough,” Christina’s mom was saying. She was just as beautiful as Christina, I noticed, with the same coloring and dark curly hair. “You have to put in a little effort.”

  “Mom, I’m working my butt off,” Christina said. I raised my eyebrows and looked at Jessie.

  “Obviously, it’s not good enough,” Christina’s mom continued. “You think they give out medals for trying your best?”

  “I know, I know.”

  “And now with that new girl, you’re going to have to try harder.”

  Before I could look away, Christina glanced at me, and I knew from the look in her eyes that Jessie was wrong. She was not going to change her mind any time soon.

  “She really doesn’t like me,” I said to Jessie.

  “Well, I like you,” Jessie said. “I’m glad you moved here. It was getting kind of old being third wheel to Christina and Noelle all the time.”

  I grinned at her. “Well, that’s one thing you definitely don’t have to worry about with me. Right now, you’re the only wheel I’ve got.”

  For once, I was kind of grateful that the coaches had a strict no-talking rule during the final team conditioning and stretching exercises of the day. As much as it sucked having to sit in a split or straddle position until my legs were numb, it would’ve been way worse if I’d had to listen to the other girls whisper and snicker through the whole thing.

  I was the first one packed up and out of there, even though I knew my mom still wouldn’t be there to pick me up. I sat on the sidewalk in front of the entrance to the gym to wait for her. The early spring air was a little too cool to take my hoodie off, and my butt was like an icicle as the cold pavement cut through my thin workout pants. I tried to use the Jedi mind trick to make my mom hurry.

  The door opened, and the other girls stepped out. They were giggling and talking, but they didn’t see me. The way I knew this was that they kep
t laughing, instead of stopping to shoot me various dirty looks. I tried to seem nonchalant, so that if they did glance my way, they wouldn’t think I’d been waiting for them. Because I hadn’t.

  “My mom said the sleepover is totally on,” Christina was saying. It was weird to hear her talk in a normal tone that wasn’t all snotty. “I got Rock Band, so I was thinking maybe we could make it a rock ’n’ roll theme? What do you guys think? Oh, and of course we’ll play Truth or Dare.”

  “Sounds like fun,” Jessie said. “My stepdad won’t let me go unless I clean my room, though. So I guess I’d better get on it.”

  “Clean your room? Don’t you need to call in disaster relief for that?” Noelle said, and the girls giggled. See, if I’d said something like that, I would’ve gotten a huge eye-roll from Christina. Life is so unfair.

  “Maybe cleaning Jessie’s room should be a dare,” Christina said. “It’s the only way it’ll get done.”

  “Hey,” Jessie said. “I didn’t ask you for a truth right now, okay? So leave me alone about my room.”

  “Whatever,” Christina said. “This is going to be so fun! Way better than last year’s, not that we didn’t have an awesome time then, too. But we didn’t even really know about Truth or Dare, and I didn’t—”

  Just then, Christina spotted me. I tried to paste on my nicest smile.

  “What?” Christina demanded.

  Supposedly, smiles are the universal language, but if that’s true, Christina wasn’t fluent. “Nothing,” I said. “Your party sounds cool. I had a rock ’n’ roll–themed party when I was ten, and we did karaoke. It was a blast.”

  “If you think it’s so juvenile, I’d like to hear you come up with something better,” she snapped.

  “No, I—” Why did she seem to take everything as sarcasm? “I didn’t mean it like that. I really do think it sounds cool.”

  “Well, I guess you’ll never know,” Christina said, “since I already sent the invites out before you got here. Sorry.”