Winning Team_Go_for_Gold Gymnasts Read online

  “What do you have to do for homework?” I asked. “Maybe I could help.”

  “Nah, it’s eighth grade stuff. Algebra.”

  “I can do that. My grandma taught me.”

  It wasn’t like homework was my favorite thing in the world, either. But I was determined to make Jessie see how awesome a friend I could be, and this seemed as good a way to do it as any.

  At first, Jessie looked at me as if I’d just suggested doing a balance-beam routine over an ocean filled with piranhas, but eventually she reached into her backpack and pulled out a glossy orange textbook. I turned it over in my hands.

  “So this is what it’s like being in public school, huh?” I said. “I do a lot of stuff out of workbooks and from stuff my grandma gets online.”

  There were a whole bunch of names written on the inside cover of the book, ending with Jessie’s name, written in big, bubbly handwriting with a purple pen. I flipped through the book and saw at least one obscene word that was not written in purple pen, so I figured Jessie wasn’t the vandal. My money was on the kid two names above hers, Justinn Myers. I’d act out, too, if my parents had saddled me with a random extra letter at the end of my name.

  “We all go to the public school,” Jessie said. “Our parents agreed we should have normal lives outside of gymnastics, even though we take the first period off to practice and eat grilled-chicken salads for lunch instead of pizza like everyone else. But I guess it’s better than being totally isolated.” She glanced at me. “No offense.”

  “Well . . .” I didn’t know what to say. Being homeschooled could feel very lonely, considering that it was just me and my grandmother, so I couldn’t seriously be offended by Jessie’s comment. And yet it still kind of stung. “So let’s see what chapter you’re on,” I said instead.

  One of the homework problems was to illustrate the equation 2x - 10 = x + 1 with a real-life problem. “All you really have to do is figure out what you want x to stand for,” I said, “and then fill in the blanks.”

  “Okay,” Jessie said. “I weigh twice as much as I want to, and so I’ll lose ten pounds. Whereas you weigh exactly as much as you want to, and you could gain one. Does that work?”

  It didn’t on so many levels, but where would I even begin? “If that were really true, your ideal weight would be, like, fifty pounds or something,” I said. “That’s just sick.”

  Jessie scowled, snatching the textbook back from me. “Obviously, I’m not being literal,” she said. “I thought the point was just to come up with stuff for the numbers to stand for. You never told me it had to actually make any sense.”

  I didn’t want to pick a fight, so instead I just focused on the part of her equation that didn’t work, the part that could be better explained.

  “We can’t be the same variable,” I said. “The x can’t stand for both you and me.”

  But in some ways, wouldn’t it have been easier if it could’ve? If I could somehow have been Jessie, and known the secret to earning Christina’s and Noelle’s friendship, and had a mother who cared enough to come to the gym at least sometimes? And then Jessie could have been me, and known what it was like to be scared—terrified that I’d never fit in, and worried that the only friend I had was dealing with something much bigger than I could ever handle.

  That night, when I got home after my mom finally picked me up, I locked myself in the bathroom. I stood on the edge of the bathtub so I could see all of my body reflected in the mirror.

  Everything looked familiar. My blond hair with its wisps around my face, that wouldn’t be restrained by any clips. My eyes that I had used to wish were blue-green, but that were just blue. My strong shoulders, my arms that looked normal under a T-shirt but that I knew were made of muscle and sinew and could spin me around the high bar in twenty giant swings in a row. My narrow hips, my short legs, my feet that were always too dry from all the chalk I used, so they didn’t look cute in flip-flops.

  I stared at the girl staring back at me, until the image started to warp and become the reflection of a stranger. I wondered if that was what Jessie saw when she looked at herself in the mirror—although maybe she didn’t have to try so hard to see it.

  We were split up again at the next morning’s practice, so I didn’t really get to talk to Jessie. Noelle and I spent the whole time on vault. And then, when it was over, the other girls retreated to the locker room to shower before school. Since my grandmother was coming later to pick me up and take me home for my own schooling, I didn’t need to worry about it. So what if I felt isolated sometimes? I also got to take a shower in the middle of history if I wanted to. I reminded myself to tell Jessie this, the next time she talked about homeschooling.

  But I hated to be left out, so I joined the girls in the locker room anyway. I just packed and unpacked my gym bag, trying to seem busy as I listened to the conversations behind the shower curtains.

  “Sucks to be you, Noelle,” Christina said, from stall number one. “Vault is the worst.”

  “I think it’s kind of fun,” I said, both because I liked to argue with Christina and because I wanted to make my presence known. It wasn’t clear if Christina had been addressing Noelle in order to make a point of ignoring me (a total possibility) or because she thought I’d already left (also a possibility). Normally, I might’ve waited her out, interested in hearing whatever she might say behind my back. This time, I didn’t feel up to that.

  “You would,” Christina said, as if having an affinity for vault were right up there with wanting to harm small animals.

  Noelle’s voice was barely audible over the sound of water streaming slowly but steadily from the faucets. “I don’t mind vault.”

  “You don’t mind anything,” Christina said, and somehow she made that, too, sound right up there with serial murder. “That’s your problem.”

  “Speaking of problems,” I said, “how’s that tucked full-in coming along?”

  I tried to make my tone as friendly as possible, but I wasn’t surprised when Christina peeked out from behind the shower curtain. Her face was dripping wet, and her black hair was plastered to her head. Her less than perfect look took a little of the steam out of her angry glare.

  “Shut up,” she said.

  “Fine,” I said. “Don’t listen to me. But I’m telling you, it’s all in your back handspring.”

  Christina made a face at me. “I’ve been doing back handsprings practically since I could walk. I sincerely doubt it has anything to do with that.”

  “Okay,” I said in my best bored voice. This was the same voice I used on my mom a lot when she would talk about the arts and crafts she did with the four-year-olds. Like, who cares? It was either Popsicle sticks and glue or cotton balls and glue. Sometimes, it was Popsicle sticks, cotton balls, and glue. That was when it got semi-interesting.

  “All right, Coach Brittany,” Christina said, disappearing behind the curtain again. “Let’s hear it. What’s wrong with my handspring?”

  “Nothing,” I said, “for a double twist or a double tuck or whatever. But a tucked full-in is a double flip with a twist. It needs more power. You have to get stronger right from your round-off and snap your feet under your body. Right now, your feet are too far behind, and you don’t get the height.”

  “Well, thanks for the insight,” Christina said, “but I’ll go ahead and wait for what the real coaches have to say, if it’s all the same to you.”

  “You do that,” I said, shrugging, even though she couldn’t see me, “and continue to wipe out. It is all the same to me.”

  I saw Jessie’s hand groping for the towel that was hanging on a hook just outside the shower, and I reached over to hand it to her. “Thanks,” she said when she finally emerged, the towel wrapped around her like a strapless dress.

  “How was practice today?” I asked. “I hate it when they split us up.”

  She shrugged. “Fine. Same as usual.”

  “Do you think you’ll be ready for the qualifier?”
/>   “Hmm?” Jessie brushed out her red hair, and I repeated the question. “Oh,” she said. “Yeah, I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

  She packed up her bag and retreated into one of the stalls to get changed. Noelle and Christina had already put on their sports bras in the main area and were now sliding shirts over their heads.

  I wanted to ask Christina if anything had happened during practice to make Jessie so distracted, but I knew she’d just roll her eyes and tell me to mind my own business. I wanted to ask Noelle if she was aware of anything, but she’d been with me the whole morning.

  “We’d better head out if we want to make third period,” Noelle said.

  “Hey, Jessie, are you riding with us?” Christina called through the stall door.

  It swung open, and Jessie stepped out. “Of course,” she said, and then she glanced at me. “Oh—Thanks for the help with my algebra homework, Britt. See you!”

  And then somehow I was alone in the locker room, clammy with steam from other people’s showers. It occurred to me that in the future I should take a shower, too, even though I could totally take one in the comfort of my own home, with the new showerhead my dad had put in that was supposed to make it feel like rain, and with my mom’s fruity-smelling shampoo. Right now, the fact that I was the only one who didn’t shower there just made one more way I was different from everyone else in this new gym. I wore beam shoes; I was homeschooled; I wasn’t invited to sleepovers. I was Boo Radley.

  Normally, I wasn’t the kind of person who wanted to be like everyone else. In fact, I liked being a little quirky. Dionne had always said that the thing she liked best about me was the way I could make her laugh, and that she never knew what I would say or do next.

  So far, though, Texas didn’t seem to like quirky.

  “What do you think that means?”

  It was probably the third time my grandmother had asked, but I wasn’t listening. Instead of following along with her discussion of To Kill a Mockingbird, I was doodling stick figures flipping on a beam I had drawn along the edge of my notebook page. For now, they were just doing simple layouts. It turned out that drawing a full twist was just as hard as doing one.

  “You know,” I said, “Jessie told me that they don’t read To Kill a Mockingbird until ninth grade.”

  I knew Grandma must have been getting impatient, but she didn’t let on. That was one of the best things about her. “Is that right?”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. “She’s in eighth grade. She said that it’s on the reading list for next year, when she gets to high school. She said it was crazy that I was learning it now.”

  “Do you think it’s crazy?”

  I should’ve anticipated that question. Another of my grandmother’s not-so-secret weapons is turning a question around so that you’re forced to actually think about something. It can get really annoying.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It’s just that there’s a lot of other stuff going on right now. If I have to try to understand this supertough book, too, my head may explode.”

  “That’s unfortunate,” Grandma said, but she just tilted her book to let me see the part she’d underlined. “It’s in the third chapter,” she said. “Atticus tells Scout that you can never fully understand someone until you climb into his skin and walk around in it. What does that mean to you?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Sounds kind of gross, walking around in someone’s skin. Like Buffalo Bill in that really creepy movie about the serial killer. You know, the one who makes dresses out of people’s skin?”

  Grandma closed her book in exasperation. “How in the world did you even see that kind of thing?”

  I shrugged. “Late-night television.”

  “So, you’re telling me that if I showed you the movie To Kill a Mockingbird, maybe you’d pay attention?”

  Just the mention of a movie made me perk up a bit. “So there is one? Sweet. Let’s order it.”

  “Settle down, Miss Brittany Lee,” Grandma said. My voice had been rising, and since my dad was sleeping upstairs after a late-night shift at the restaurant, I had to keep my voice low. “There’s no serial killer in the movie, either. Let’s focus on the book for now. Remember what we talked about last time. What do you think Atticus means when he tells Scout that you have to walk in someone’s skin to understand them?”

  “I guess, just that . . .” I colored in the heads of my stick figures until they were completely filled with blue ink. “Like, you have to see where people are coming from.”

  “Good,” Grandma said. “Can you give me an example?”

  “Well, at gym, my friend Jessie . . .” I stopped, glancing at my grandmother.

  “Go on.”

  By now, I’d punched a hole in the head of one of my figures with my ballpoint pen. It looked as if some stick person had lost her head in mid-handspring. “I don’t know,” I said. “It’s weird. She thinks she’s fat or something, and she always obsesses about food and losing weight.”

  “And what do you think?”

  “I think she looks like one of these people,” I said, holding up my stick-figure drawings. But I couldn’t keep a straight face, and I broke into a grin. “Not really, that would be scary. But she’s totally fine. I mean, maybe she could eat healthier or whatever, but I think she shouldn’t worry about it so much.”

  “Try to put yourself in her place,” Grandma said, “the way Atticus says to do. What do you think she might be feeling?”

  My grandmother is a huge fan of these assignments, where you learn something from a book but you also learn something about yourself. “Um, she’s scared?”

  “Scared,” Grandma repeated, but not as if she was questioning it—more like she wanted to turn it over in her mind a little bit. “That’s an interesting choice of words. Why do you think she’s scared?”

  “Because,” I said, “she hasn’t made it to Elite yet, and Noelle and I have. Christina’s definitely got what it takes, if she can just up her difficulty. But Jessie’s different. Things come slower for her.”

  “So, why do you think that would make her scared about her weight?”

  “Well, I mean, it’s true that less weight makes you flip faster and jump higher. Noelle is on the shorter side, like me, and we’re both pretty tiny. Christina is the tallest, but she’s naturally really skinny. Jessie’s just got more muscle, that’s all.”

  My grandmother nodded. One major benefit to being homeschooled is that I can bring up gymnastics examples all I want, and I’m never shut down or mocked by classmates. Dionne told me once that she felt like a freak show being in public school, where people treated her as if she was from a completely different universe. Sometimes I wanted to go to regular school, just to see what it would be like, but I also liked the fact that I could say whatever I wanted to with my grandmother. She doesn’t mind that I live on Planet Gymnastics all the time.

  “Putting yourself in Jessie’s skin, what do you think she needs right now?”

  Personally, I thought she could use a big, juicy hamburger, but I knew that wasn’t the answer my grandmother was looking for. I was about to respond when I heard the front door slam and the slap of my mom’s work flats on the tiled floor.

  “Hello, Pamela,” Grandma said. “You’re home early.”

  It was kind of weird, actually. At two thirty in the afternoon, my mom should definitely have been watching the rug rats at her day care center; it was prime time, when all the younger kids were waking up from their postlunch naps and all the older kids were starting to trickle in from school.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Why are you here?”

  “Ah, just the way a mother likes to be greeted,” my mother said ruefully, pressing a kiss on the top of my head. “Hello, Asta. Good lesson today?”

  “We were just discussing To Kill a Mockingbird,” my grandmother said, glancing at me, “and the importance of empathy.”

  I didn’t remember that word being thrown around, but I nodded anyway. “So, what’s up?
”

  It was only then that I realized my mother was seriously glowing. Like, she was practically radiating all over me. I’d never seen her that happy.

  “Well,” she said, the words coming out in a rush, “Debbie—you know, the woman who owns the center?—is looking to sell. I told her I’d definitely be interested, so we were talking about drawing up some documents to have the licenses transferred this week. Isn’t that exciting?”

  Owning a business consisting of a bunch of screaming kids? Wow, someone needed to work on her definition of “exciting.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Totally.”

  “That’s great, Pamela,” Grandma said, and obviously she’d drunk the Kool-Aid, because she seemed to mean it. “It’s what you’ve always wanted.”

  “I know!” my mom said. “It’s going to be great. I just came home for a few minutes to pick up some of the financial stuff we need to go over after work, but then I’m heading back in time for an after-school snack. So I’ll be out of your hair!”

  I rolled my eyes. Like that was my problem.

  “That’s fine,” Grandma said. “Congratulations again.”

  My mom turned to me. “I was hoping to repaint the classrooms at some point. Maybe one Sunday, when you girls are off practice. What do you think? Would you all like to come out and have a paint-and-pizza party?”

  It was weird the way she said “girls.” Like we were all such close friends and she saw the four of us as inseparable, when nothing could have been further from the truth. “Mom, we’re not supposed to have pizza,” I said. “Remember? Our bodies are our temples and all that?”

  “Well, when your father finally gets a night off, I’m sure he can make us something healthy for a celebratory dinner. I know it’ll be tough to arrange, with all of our schedules.”

  And about to get tougher still, if my guess was right. But I didn’t want to seem like a total brat, so I forced a smile. “Yeah,” I said. “Sounds awesome.”