Tumbling (19 page)

She would compete in college. She would be part of a team. She would be part gymnast and part everything else.

“I think you're throwing your life away,” Helen had said when Camille told her the new plan over dinner. Her hair was oily, the gray and blonde roots matted to her skull, and the brownish locks hung from her head in chunks. She picked up her fork again and it waved around in front of her face, her red eyes watching it.

This wasn't fair.

“What about
your
life?” Camille had asked.

She didn't think her mother would understand the jump in the topic. But she did.

“Our life,” her mom had said. “You're throwing our life away.” Her voice didn't match the anger of the words she chose. She was whispering. “You're a kid, so you don't know it yet. You can choose school and boys and all sorts of other things. You can say I should be happy to have you for so long, but you're wrong.”

“Mom, you're not making sense,” Camille had said.

“I am,” she said. “You just aren't listening. We used to do everything together. We used to spend our whole day in the same room, working toward the same goal, doing it together. All I wanted was to see you be an Olympian, and you can do it. I know you can do it. And I know you can choose not to, but me, I can't. I'm too old. There are no men left for me, nothing else for me to do with my
life than to be an Olympic mom. I just wish you'd try.”

Then she'd finally taken a bite of fish.

“I want to try the NCAA,” Camille said quietly. “I love gymnastics, but I want to be on a team. And I love other things, too.”

“Don't you miss it?” her mom had said while she was chewing.

“I did miss it. I was missing it.”

Her mom looked alarmed. “Not anymore?”

“Because I'm doing it, Mom. I'm going to be training twenty hours a week. I want to keep going through college and get a scholarship so you don't have to pay for me to go. I'm happy. It's . . . like . . . a balance or something.”

“No,” Camille's mother had said. “Don't you miss
it
 . . . us?”

Camille's eyes had welled up. She did miss that. She loved her time with Bobby. She loved her new gym routine and how it left time for silly stuff like movies and flirty texting. But she missed her mother. She missed the closeness they used to have. Singing Wham! in the car when her mother drove her around. Talking about the highs and lows of every workout before she went to bed each night. Cuddling under blankets and watching the other countries' National Championships on live streaming. She missed sharing a small world with this one woman, this one person who would always love her more than anyone else could.

So she said, “I'll ask Andrew about the Olympics.”

Her mom had perked up immediately. “Okay!” she'd
said. “I'll meet you at the gym after school tomorrow and we can ask him together.”

And Andrew had come up with the plan to make her a specialist. He'd explained that was how Camille could graduate from regular high school and still have some time for studies (and her boyfriend, though he didn't say that). She'd be a vaulter.

Camille's heart had broken: she loved the floor and the beam. She didn't want to be only a vaulter.

But when Andrew told her mom about the vault, how it had the highest DODs and the lowest chance for deductions, how Katja had consistently chosen the top vaulter for all Olympics and Worlds teams for the past ten years, whether that gymnast could contribute anything else or not, Camille knew it was over. The smile on her mother's face was huge.

“See, Cammie?” she'd said. “It's perfect. You can train part-time and still make me an Olympic Mom.”

Camille had swallowed and her cheeks had burned with the lie she was about to tell. “Sounds perfect,” she said.

“Let's talk about going professional,” her mother had said immediately. “You have such a great story with the car accident, I'm sure we could get your name out there quickly.”

Camille had looked at Andrew, panicked, and he'd come to her rescue right away.

“There's no rush here,” he said. “The Olympics are still a few years away, and most of the public will not be
interested in the athletes until it's over. A lot can happen in a year, as you both know. Camille should hold on to her NCAA eligibility until she makes the team.”

“Good idea!” Camille had said. “Might as well play it safe.”

And so they'd struck a deal. Camille would keep her NCAA status and she'd become a vaulter. She wasn't worried.

Andrew had never had an Olympian. Andrew would never get her to the Olympics. That's what Camille had thought. That's what it seemed like back then. Camille didn't know she was committing to sacrificing her future. She thought she was only buying her house a few months of peace.

WILHELMINA

They were walking down the hall, side-by-side. It was a comfortable silence. Wilhelmina's legs were tingly from the ice and Monica's were bright red.

Monica's voice was repeating over and over in Wilhelmina's brain.
Just don't fall.

Kerry would love that goal: it was in Monica's power and control. It was a goal no one else could ruin.

Could Wilhelmina get through a meet with a goal like that? It'd been years, a lifetime, since she thought that way. But Monica and Kerry were right. If she didn't find a goal like that, she was here depending on other
gymnasts messing up just a little bit more than she did. Wilhelmina couldn't control how much they messed up. She could only keep herself on her feet.

Just don't fall.

Was that enough?

She looked down at Monica's floppy ponytail. Was this girl a genius or an underachiever?

They reached Wilhelmina's room and she could still hear Camille's voice going-going-going on the other side of the door. Wilhelmina froze. “Hey,” she said. “Do you want to come to Leigh's room with me?”

Monica made a face. Wilhelmina thought it must be confusion but it looked more like disgust.

“Katja's doing some interview on espnW. I guess I want to see what she's thinking. . . .” Wilhelmina smiled.

“You do?” Monica asked. “I didn't think you'd care about stuff like that.”

“Everyone needs to care about stuff like that,” Wilhelmina said.

Monica seemed to shrink. “Oh,” she said.

Oh.
Like Monica didn't care about what Katja thought. Maybe Monica was only able to focus on herself so well because the rest of the gymnastics world was fair to her.

Oh.

Wilhelmina forced her eyes not to roll. Gymnastics had been so unfair to her. Life was being so unfair to her. How could she explain that to this little gymnast without sounding like a whiner? It was awful that no
one ever understood the particular kind of unfairness that plagued Wilhelmina's gymnastics. It should be obvious just to look at her.

“Well, I do care. I want to hear what she'll say. So . . . come with me?” Wilhelmina said. “I can't stand anyone else.”

“Okay,” Monica said. “Let's do it.”

There were already a few girls gathered in the hotel room, and several more wandered in just as Wilhelmina and Monica arrived.

Wilhelmina hovered inside the doorway as the rest of the gymnasts huddled together on the two beds and the floor between them. She watched them link arms, giggle, gossip, theorize about whom Katja loved, whom she hated, what she would say. But they talked about other things, too. She listened to them compare fan pages and celebrity mentions and pictures of crushes. She watched them tease and brag and pout. She observed them as if they were animals on the Discovery Channel: a totally foreign species to Wilhelmina's world.

It wasn't just that she didn't give a flying split leap about white boy bands. It was that she, and apparently she alone, didn't give a flying split leap about boys. She was focused on her gymnastics. Her mind was so firmly rooted in her meet tomorrow that it didn't even matter that she had a freaking awesome boy waiting to give her a huge hug after it was all over. She was making him wait.

Wilhelmina looked around the room for the gymnasts who might beat her. Maria Vasquez and Samantha
Soloman sat on the corner of Leigh's bed giggling and whispering, even though they were both twenty-two and should know how to focus. Leigh Becker was showing something on her iPhone to Georgette Paulson. Grace Cooper, who sat by herself in the office chair at the side of the room crunching ice cube after ice cube between her teeth, could not tear her eyes from the ticker on the side of the TV screen that was slowly scrolling through women's Olympic updates in track and swimming to “Gymnastics Trials First Day Breakdown with Katja Minkovski.”

Maybe there was one other pure gymnast in the room.

Grace looked lonely, like Wilhelmina felt. Her legs were much too skinny as she kicked back and forth in the black chair. Her wrists were barely thicker than the cubes of ice she popped into her mouth. Wilhelmina had mortified herself outside those elevators earlier that night. She had thought Grace might be as mad about Leigh's triple-twister as Wilhelmina was. Wilhelmina had been so concerned about that vault that she hadn't remembered until right now what was weird: Grace was leaving dinner with a tray full of food.

Wilhelmina watched the bones in Grace's ankles shift as she swung her chair back and forth. A familiar sickness climbed into her throat. Wilhelmina suspected what was going on. She'd seen it over and over again in so many gymnasts for so many years.
But there wasn't anything she could do about it.

Wilhelmina found a spot on the wall next to the door and leaned against it. She pretended to watch the screen while instead she watched the chummy competition around her. At least Camille wasn't there. Maybe Camille was getting ready for bed. Maybe Wilhelmina could stay in Leigh and Grace's room long enough to avoid Camille all night.

Then the door slammed and in she came: purple pj's, wet, frizzy hair piled on top of her head, tiny star necklace hanging around her neck. Damn.

LEIGH

“Yeah, he was totally flirting with you,” Georgette confirmed. This plan was working perfectly. Grace was still pissed, Leigh thought. But she didn't care. Grace's feelings didn't matter anymore. And as far as everyone else knew, Leigh was straight.

Georgette passed Leigh's iPhone back to her, and Leigh smiled. She was having fun with Georgette. Leigh took in the long, black braids down her back and her high, dark cheekbones and her vanilla-smelling body lotion and wondered if Georgette might be a good roommate in Rome.

“Flirting? You think?” Leigh asked. She fake-squealed. She snuck a look around to Grace, who was sitting about
three feet away from them, to see if she had heard.

Instead she caught a glimpse of a curvy body in purple pajamas.

Camille was here!

Leigh's breath caught. She lost herself for a second, staring at the way her hair was pulled back from her face, the way her necklace rested in the crook of her collarbone, the way the satin fabric moved across her silky skin.

“Totally!” Georgette was saying. “I'm so jealous! I wish someone famous would write on my fan page. Like, someone I actually find hot. Not, like, the governor's husband or whatever.”

Leigh shook her head to clear it and tried to give Georgette a laugh. Probably a little too late.

Camille was in her room. Leigh's room. Right now.

It wasn't going to be like it had been in Leigh's fantasies last night. When Camille had sat down with Leigh on her bed and told her she was dumping her boyfriend because she'd realized she thought Leigh was so much hotter. And then had laid down next to her and . . .

But Camille was here. In Leigh's room—well, her room for the weekend. Her feet touching Leigh's carpet. Her hand on Leigh's wall.

Leigh had to stop staring at her. Leigh's eyes fell on her roommate sitting alone in the office chair.

Grace was scowling, but that was usual.

Leigh had invited all of these people into their room
to make Grace squirm. She'd done it to prove, once and for all, that though Grace might be winning in the gym, Leigh was winning everywhere else. (And, okay, a little bit to see if maybe Camille would show up and say something to her about her vault or the fan message or anything.)

Grace spun on her chair and chomped down on a handful of ice.

Leigh wanted to smile, but didn't. She was surprised to see how well this little get-together had worked. She didn't know that gymnasts had this kind of socializing in them, not in the middle of the biggest meet of their lives anyway. There were so many gymnasts she deeply respected in this room—Camille and Samantha and Maria—Leigh decided it had to be a good thing. They all needed a break. They needed to turn their brains off for a minute before performing tomorrow. They needed a reminder that their competitors were also people.

Then Leigh felt Georgette squeeze her upper arm. “It's starting,” she whispered.

Katja's face filled the television screen that Leigh had hooked up to her computer. They were suddenly all silent and attentive like good little girls. Good little gymnasts.

CAMILLE

Camille thought about approaching Wilhelmina right there in that crowded, chatty, giggly room. She thought about walking up to her where she stood frowning against the wall by the door and explaining that it had been a mistake. But what would she say? “I don't want to go to the Olympics anyway”? “I sort of wish you'd beat me so that they'd choose you over me”? Wilhelmina wouldn't believe any of that. Plus, she had been kicking butt all day ever since Camille had made her so angry. Maybe Camille should let her stay angry until the end of the meet. If Leigh's vault somehow meant Wilhelmina got to go to Rome and Camille got to stay home, she'd try to explain after that.