The Go-for-Gold Gymnasts Read online

  “They’re your friends,” she said. “You can invite who you want.”

  She said it matter-of-factly, as though she really didn’t care, but she was also more distant with me now at the gym. So, when Layla called me up the next Sunday and asked if I wanted to go with her to the mall, I didn’t hesitate. It wasn’t like I had anyone else to hang out with. My stepsister acted like I was a germ on a kitchen sponge, Christina and Noelle were out of town, and I felt disconnected from Britt lately.

  The mall was packed, so my mom dropped me off in front of the Food Court, where I was supposed to meet Layla. I half expected Stephenie and Ashley to be there, too, but when I walked through the glass doors I saw Layla standing alone, texting on her phone.

  “I wanted to hang out with just you,” she said when I asked about them. I was still glowing from that when she abruptly suggested that we get our picture taken.

  I didn’t have time to protest or ask any questions as Layla pulled me by the arm behind the curtain of one of those freestanding photo booths. She swiped her credit card and tapped through the menu items with one blue-polished nail so quickly it was obvious she was an old pro.

  “Smile,” she commanded. I saw that she’d selected “Friends Forever,” with a heart frame around our faces, so it wasn’t hard for me to obey. Two seconds later, there was a clicking sound, and then a countdown began on the screen. “Now do something silly,” she said.

  When the pictures had printed out, she ripped one side off for me, accidentally tearing the bottom picture a little, and kept the untorn half for herself. I didn’t have a purse or anything to put my strip of pictures in, but I didn’t want them to get bent or messed up, so I just held them in my hand as we started walking through the mall. It felt like everything was happening very fast.

  I wanted to ask Layla, Why me? She said she’d picked me for the cheerleading squad because of my tumbling skills, but I didn’t get why she was so eager to be friends with me outside of that. She only took two friends a year to her dad’s penthouse, after all, and she already had two perfect sidekicks in Stephenie and Ashley. Only a few weeks ago, she’d been laughing at me in this very mall, and now she was linking her arm with mine as I stared down at the images of our two happy faces, pushed together in the confines of the photo booth.

  “How often do you hang out with your gymnastics friends?” she asked.

  “Well, we see each other practically every day in the gym,” I said. “But that keeps us so busy we don’t get together much outside of it.” I thought about Britt’s coming over during the first week of school, the way she’d stopped short of saying anything about my dad’s birthday card, even though I knew she had an opinion.

  “Hmm,” Layla said, stopping in front of a store window. It was so sudden that I was yanked forward by her arm, still linked with mine, and would’ve tripped if I hadn’t caught myself in time.

  “That’s what we have to be for Halloween,” she said. I followed her gaze to see a short black dress, made of a shiny fabric underneath black lace.

  “Um…what?” I asked. People going to a cocktail party? Goth celebrities? I didn’t understand what the costume was.

  But Layla was already pulling me into the store.

  “Vampires,” she said. “It’s all the rage right now.”

  “That dress doesn’t really look vampirey,” I said.

  “With fake fangs and the right makeup, it will,” she said gleefully, making a beeline for the rack where the dress was hanging in all different sizes.

  “You’re a small?” she guessed, eyeing me. I thought about what my mom said, about always trying clothes on, but I was afraid to mention anything in case Layla remembered that mortifying incident with the bras. Though maybe she’d forgotten all about it.

  “I guess,” I said, and she yanked one off the rack for me.

  Layla paid for three dresses for her and Stephenie and Ashley, leaving me to pay for mine. It was forty dollars, which was all the money my mother had given me to spend at the mall, but I didn’t mind. It felt like I was buying a ticket to fun Halloween plans, which was worth every penny.

  “Do you have any heels?” Layla asked. I started to say that I had a pair of platform sandals that I’d worn to the postparade reception just a little while ago, but she cut me off. “What am I thinking? Of course you don’t. Let’s go find you some.”

  “I have heels,” I said quickly, thinking of the twenty-eight cents in my pocket.

  “Oh, my God,” Layla said, and this time I waited to see what she was exclaiming over. I’d already learned that she had a very short attention span, and that being with her was like being with a toddler all hopped up on sugar. I’d only been in the mall for half an hour, but I felt tired, like I’d been doing vault timers, sprinting down the runway and hitting the horse over and over.

  “Is that Norman, from school?” she said, and I looked to where she was pointing.

  I saw the carousel spinning in the center of the mall and heard kids screeching with glee as the horses rose up and down in time to the music. My eyes scanned the kiosks where they were selling personalized miniature license plates, butterfly wings, and wigs, but I didn’t see Norman. “Where?”

  “There,” she said, pointing at the carousel. I squinted, and then I saw him, but only for an instant; he was on the back of a dark horse, one hand holding on to his glasses as he disappeared around the other side only to reappear again a few seconds later. He looked like he was having fun.

  “I think so,” I said.

  “Are you guys friends?” Layla asked me. “I see you talking to him in homeroom sometimes.”

  Even though I mostly hung out with Layla, Ashley, and Stephenie in homeroom now, I still talked to Norman once in a while. He wasn’t in any of my classes, probably because he was in the most advanced classes and I was mainly in regular ones.

  “Not really,” I said, but I wondered how he would answer the same question. Did he consider me a friend? I bet he would have said yes.

  “He is so weird,” Layla said. I squelched the disloyalty I felt as I agreed with her.

  The carousel stopped, and there was a flood of children as they all joined their parents on the ground. Norman stuck out like a sore thumb, taller and gawkier than anyone else there.

  Layla tugged on my shirtsleeve. “Come on,” she said.

  I didn’t ask her where we were going, but I wasn’t surprised when we intercepted Norman by the Whimsical Flights of Fancy kiosk.

  “Hey, Abnorman,” Layla said, bumping him with her shoulder. I was beginning to see that this was Layla’s thing: she liked to accidentally-on-purpose knock into people. It made me rethink my original name for her, Watch-It Girl. She’d told me to watch it, but obviously she was the one who created all of these run-ins.

  “Hi, Layla,” Norman said, ignoring the nickname. His eyes lit up when he saw me. “Hey, Jessie.”

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Shopping for your Halloween costume?” Layla asked, smirking meaningfully in the direction of the wispy dress-up butterfly wings at the kiosk, which were colored bright pink and purple.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t really think that children younger than one year or older than twelve years should trick-or-treat. Although I did once have an old man dressed as Mr. Burns from The Simpsons come to my house and ask for candy. True story. I think the liver spots were real.”

  Layla curled her lip. “I just figured, since you love rides meant for three-year-olds, that you’d want to dress like one, too.”

  “Carousels transcend age,” Norman said grandly. “Did you guys get your picture taken?”

  He was looking at the photo strip I still held. I quickly dropped my hand. For some reason, I didn’t want him to see the pictures of Layla and me acting silly together, our faces framed by big red hearts.

  Norman smiled politely at me, and Layla, watching the exchange, laughed. “You’re right,” she said to me. “He is weird.”

  My gaze flew to Nor
man, hoping he didn’t think I had really said that. I mean, I had said it, but it wasn’t like I’d said it first. I was just agreeing with Layla. I’d told myself that Norman would probably have acknowledged that fact about himself. He seemed like the type of person who would own his weirdness—who would prefer being different over being another clone.

  But Norman had taken his glasses off and was cleaning the lenses with the bottom of his T-shirt, so all I could see was the top of his head. He had a little bit of dandruff in his hair, I saw, and for one instant he glanced up without his glasses, and it was as though his face was oddly naked. But then he put his glasses back on, and he was just Norman.

  “Well,” he said, not meeting my gaze, “I have to go. Have fun shopping.”

  And then he disappeared among the throng of people walking through the mall. I thought of Layla’s earlier question: I’d been sure that Norman would have said I was a friend. Now I wasn’t so sure. Even though I’d said before that I didn’t consider him a friend, I couldn’t think of any other way to explain the sudden hole that I felt open up inside me, as though I’d lost something before I’d had the chance to appreciate it.

  Ten

  Because I’d spent most of my only day off at the mall and then hanging out with Layla at her gigantic house, I hadn’t finished my American Government homework. So I was busily copying questions from the book when Norman walked into homeroom, sliding his rolling backpack up to his desk.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  It was pretty obvious, but I still felt bad about what had happened at the mall, and I didn’t need another person mad at me. I tucked my hair behind my ear and tried to hold on in my mind to the sentence I had been about to write as I answered him.

  “Mr. Freeman’s homework,” I said.

  “Ah,” he said. “Checks and balances. The legislative, executive, and judicial branches. The foundation of democracy.”

  “What?” I said. I was watching the door, trying to see if Layla and her posse had walked in yet.

  “So, you haven’t gotten that far,” Norman said. “Well, don’t worry about it. There’s a sub today.”

  I dropped my pencil in relief. “Thank God.”

  He eyed my paper, with its barely legible handwriting. Mr. Freeman required us to copy down all of the questions and then respond in complete sentences, so I’d been scribbling my fastest, trying to complete everything in time. I was sure that Norman could tell just by looking at it that I hadn’t done a very good job. Each of his answers was probably a paragraph long, whereas mine only took up a couple of lines.

  “Busy weekend?” he asked. I couldn’t tell if he was sarcastically referring to my trip to the mall, or if he was genuinely curious.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I have this Elite qualifier coming up soon, so I’m training pretty hard for it. I spent most of Saturday in the gym.”

  “You have to be Elite to go to the Olympics, right?” he said. “So would that make you a Level Ten now, technically?”

  I gave him a surprised smile. “I didn’t know you were a gymnastics fan,” I said.

  His prominent Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat as he swallowed. “Wikipedia,” he said. “I did some research.”

  “Not bad,” I said. “Yeah, I have to make the Elite team if I even want a chance at competing at the next Olympics. Not that I think I have a shot.”

  Layla entered the room in a flurry of chatting and giggling with Stephenie and Ashley, but I didn’t feel like ending my conversation with Norman, so I avoided their gaze. “Two of my teammates are competing in this international competition next week,” I said. “They’re in the top ten gymnasts in the country, and I found out this morning that they impressed the National team coach enough to go to San Jose. Now, that’s cool.”

  “You’ll make it there someday,” Norman said, and even though he had never seen me compete and knew nothing about my scores or my skills, I appreciated his having confidence in me.

  I was excited for Christina and Noelle, who were flying directly from the National team camp in Houston to San Jose. I didn’t even think I was jealous anymore. After all, I had a whole other life now outside of gymnastics. I still loved the sport—I always would. But I felt like I was growing apart from it, little by little, as though I was carving out something else with Layla and the cheerleading squad.

  I finally glanced over at Layla, who raised her eyebrows with a meaningful look at Norman. I picked up my pencil and focused on the paper in front of me, as though I’d been doing homework all along.

  I felt Norman’s gaze on me. “Checks and balances,” he said. “You’ll get to it. It’s where one branch has to limit the other, so that power doesn’t get corrupted. It’s actually quite pertinent to high school.”

  Mr. Freeman returned the next day, and when I handed in my homework, he passed back the previous assignment. A big red number sixty-seven was at the top of the page. See me, a note said.

  I waited until the other students were filing out of the classroom, and then I approached his desk. I hoped that maybe it had all been a mistake—that maybe he had switched my grade with someone else’s in the class—but as soon as he looked up at me, I knew that that wasn’t the case.

  “Miss Ivy,” he said. “Thank you for seeing me.”

  You told me to, I thought, but I didn’t say anything.

  “Do you know why you got such a low grade?” Mr. Freeman asked. When I just stared back at him, he answered his own question. “You parroted back the information from the chapter, but you didn’t add any of your own voice.”

  He took the paper from my limp fingers, pointing to one of the questions. “Here, for example,” he said. “You cite the court case that upheld Congress’s implied powers. That’s good, but it can be easily looked up in the book. It’s even bolded, to make it easier to find. The question asks you to give an example of an implied power, and assess why Congress should have such power.”

  I’d done that assignment late one night, after a long day of gymnastics, school, then back to gymnastics, before heading out to cheerleading practice and coming home just in time to eat a leftover Caesar salad from the fridge and go to bed. There was even a spot on the edge of the paper that I knew was Caesar dressing. I’d tried unsuccessfully to wipe it off before I turned it in.

  “Sorry,” I mumbled. “There’s this Elite qualifier coming up—”

  But Mr. Freeman held up his hand. “Believe me, Jessie, I get it,” he said. “I played college football for the University of Texas, where we had to keep our grades up if we wanted to stay on the team.”

  I hadn’t known that. It made sense, though, since he was so tall.

  “Now, I know your gymnastics isn’t directly tied to the school,” he said. “But just as your coach holds you to a high standard in the gym, I hold you to a high standard in here. Understand?”

  I nodded, trying to blink away the tears that were stinging my eyes. After weeks in the gym, I still wasn’t doing any better with skills like my double tuck front on floor. I hated the thought that I was messing up in school, too.

  “You’ve joined the cheerleading team, too, is that right?” Mr. Freeman asked.

  I nodded again, and this time a single tear slipped down my cheek. I didn’t wipe it away, hoping that Mr. Freeman wouldn’t notice.

  He hesitated. “You might be spreading yourself a little thin,” he said. “Perhaps you need to think about your priorities.”

  It wasn’t the first time I’d heard that, but I still didn’t appreciate everyone telling me how to live my life. “Are we done?” I asked stiffly.

  He sighed, handing my paper back to me. “Do you know Norman Coswell? He and a few other students are organizing a study session this Saturday for the midterm. If you’re able to attend, it might help you to prepare.”

  “Okay,” I said, although I had no intention of asking Norman about it. Saturday was the USA vs. the World event, and there was a gathering at the gym for everyone to watch Chr
istina and Noelle compete. I had to be there.

  But I knew better than to bring that up to Mr. Freeman, who already questioned my priorities. I left the classroom just as other students were coming in for the next period, and I crumpled the paper in my hand, throwing it in the trash can.

  Eleven

  Mo had gotten flags representing all of the countries competing in the USA vs. the World event and hung them around the gym. She’d also rented a projector, and so the entire competition would be shown on one of the white concrete-brick walls of the gym, almost like in a movie theater.

  Britt and I hadn’t been on great terms since my birthday party, but at least we could connect over how cool it was to get a break from training to watch the competition on TV. It felt weird to be sitting on one of the benches usually reserved for parents watching their kids practice as we ate air-popped popcorn and apple slices while they showed the usual fluff about each of the athletes.

  The announcers barely even mentioned Noelle and Christina, but then, that wasn’t surprising. Mostly, people were interested in the Senior girls who were competing, since they were at the Olympic level and they were the big names. I’d even heard a rumor that one of the girls was going to appear on Dancing with the Stars.

  “Do you know what the implied powers of Congress are?” I asked Britt during the first commercial break. I didn’t really care; I just wanted to break the ice, and it was the first thing I thought of.

  She considered the question. “It’s something about being necessary and proper,” she said. “I remember my grandmother talking about it when we went to D.C. one summer. It’s kind of like this catchall clause that means they can do whatever they want.”

  “Well, then, how does that figure into checks and balances?” I asked.

  Britt shrugged. The commercial break ended, and we watched one of the Senior Chinese girls mount the balance beam. She pushed herself up into a one-armed handstand, holding that position for a ridiculously long time before lowering herself to the beam and continuing her routine.