Page 2 of It’s All in How You Fall
Lower back tensing, I land with just a slight hop, which is totally annoying because after beam, floor is my best event—my music is a compilation fromHamilton, and it isamazing, let me tell you—and immediately file behind Sunny so Jada can have the opposite diagonal to do the very same thing. She and Avalon are level nines, and somehow we always divide up like this: the two level tens and single elite, and the two level nines. Hierarchy, even among the best.
When I step into line behind Sunny, she turns and lifts a beautifully maintained brow, her voice low but laced with concern turned up all the way. “The appointment?”
“Yeah.”
Everyone knew I was going to see Dr. Kennedy in the lunch break between our summer two-a-day workouts. My teammates, my coach—heck, probably even the delivery guy who visits every day around noon because Dad’s preferred method of grocery shopping is Amazon Pantry. I really need to get Dad to the farmers’ market on the Saturday mornings I have open these days.
My back has been bad news for a few years now, but nothing that a ritual of prepractice ibuprofen couldn’t fix—or at least mitigate. My range of motion has been slowly worsening since I won a third state beam title in the spring, my first at level ten. I tweaked my back during that routine, but within a week it was right back to the usual dull ache of muscles worn stiff. It’s chronic and annoying—a dissonant undercurrent running through my life. A constant chorus ofdun-dun-dunnnnnnn.
When I couldn’t hide it anymore and Olga and Dad began to make noise about getting my back checked out, I thought the whole procedure was going to be a cakewalk. Maybe as simple as Dr. Kennedy taking one look at my file, muttering “mmmhmmm,” lining up a big ol’ cortisone shot with my lumbar curve, and sending me on my way.
Though I did demandandreceive the shot, the reality was… not that.
What Dr. Kennedy doesn’t get is that gymnastics is my life. That is not me being dramatic. That’s the truth.
I can’t quit when I’m a breath away from not only repeating as state beam champion, but maybe winning the all-around. When I’m a blink from cracking open the last remaining level of my dreams: elite status, a college scholarship, a trip to nationals. When I’m so close I can’t just metaphorically taste it, I canseeit every day at practice with Sunny. My dreams, 3D printed on one of my oldest friends.
Said friend doesn’t look at me like I’m being dramatic. Instead, her face softens and tilts, her curly bun slanting with it. She’s very serious about her role as the team’s big sister, and even though I still have a year with her before she heads to UCLA on a full ride, something wells up in my throat. I already miss her and she’s standing right in front of my face. “You want to talk about it?”
Fresh tears spike in my eyes, sliding into the same spots still wet and red-rimmed from earlier. My lips begin to tremble, that lump growing and blocking my windpipe and any chance I have at verbally responding. I nod.
Peregrine arrives after her own double-back sequence, and for the length of Avalon’s next pass, the three of us are together. The two of them exchange a glance, and Sunny announces, “I’m going to tell Olga we need five.”
I vigorously shake my head. Wipe the tears that have collected with the back of my hand so as not to get chalk stuck to what’s left of my mascara. Words crawl out, my voice off, hurried and hushed. “She and Dad are already talking about it. I don’t want it to be athing.” I swallow as more tears form. Gah. This is so hideously embarrassing. “Not here.”
Peregrine bites her lip and tugs on her purple-and-black braid. “Salad Bros after practice?” Peregrine asks me but looks to Sunny—the only one of us with a car.
Dinner is a possibility because we’re done at five o’clock, which is part of the reason we love summer workouts. Thirty-five hours of practice per week yet we get more time to ourselves than any other time of the year. It’s glorious: Friday nights, full days to do whatever we want on Saturdays and Sundays. During the school year, we’re not so lucky—in the gym until nine o’clock every weekday and for hours on end each weekend for practices or meets.
I nod in agreement and Sunny whispers, “Deal,” as Olga loudly clears her throat from the tumble track, coach stare going full tilt at the back of our hair-sprayed heads.
“Sorry, Coach.” Sunny apologizes with a wave and then launches herself into a ridiculously perfect full-twisting double back.
2
“Done. Three tickets. We’re going.” Peregrine shoves her phoneunder my nose to prove she’s acquired prime center-of-the-theater seats for the latest Marvel offering, then swivels to push it on Sunny.
We’re at our team lockers filling up on midpractice snacks between floor and our final apparatus of our two-practice, seven-hour day: beam. Peregrine used this opportunity to inform us we’d be adding a side of Spider-Man & Co. to our salads. She’s decisive in a way I am not and knows exactly how to short-circuit any objection from me. In this case, by blatantly announcing her intentions as she wasdoing it, which also happened to be while I had two apple slices shoved into my mouth.
Sunny closes her locker with a metallic clang and crosses her arms over her chest. “Maybe I had after-dinner plans.”
Peregrine doesn’t blink. “Because I love you, I won’t make a dismissive joke about your elite-level life as homeschool homeroom party of one.”
A mock gasp. “Being homeschooled doesn’t mean I don’t have friends, Peregrine Liu,thankyouverymuch.”
Sunny exits the fake fight with a quick flip of the bird that means very little except that she’ll pretend she doesn’t have any cinnamon Orbit to share as the previews roll. I mean, she has like twenty times the friends as the two of us combined, as evidenced by her massive lake house birthday party literally every August. Hell, she knows more people at Northland High than we do, and she’s been gone from the building as long as we’ve been in it. I’d like to believe that’s because Peregrine and I aresoexclusive that we only hang out with each other, but yeah, no, that would be a lie. It’s more likely that my older brother, Nat, sucked up all the social butterfly genes in our family, leaving me with none; and Peregrine, for all her bluster in the gym, only says full sentences to people she knows deeply.
I will my molars to do their job on the remnants of my Honeycrisp and swallow-cough-hack for a second before downing a gulp of water. When it’s just Peregrine and me and my throat is clear, all I’ve got is: “Well, then. Men in tights on Friday night. I feel better already.”
Peregrine tosses her phone into her locker and slams it hard enough that the various clippings of The Cure taped to the door flutter in a wave of hair spray and goth/Beetlejuice glory. Last fall, Peregrine wore black lipstick to a meet and Olga flipped out, calling her Robert Smith as she literally dove at her to wipe it off before warm-ups. Neither of us knew who she was talking about, so the next day I found pictures and taped them up as a joke, but Peregrine liked them, so they stayed. “Considering the amount of time we spend in leotards, viewing dudes in spandex is good for a gymnast’s soul. It’s medically proven, Caro—ask your dad.”
I make a face. I have enough problems as the teenage daughter of basically a single dad—my mom mostly parents via text since he gained full custody—and waxing poetic about what little Spidey’s suit leaves to the imagination is not going to get me anything other than Dad blubber about tampons in the linen closet. “Don’t need to ask. Totally checks out.”
Peregrine’s definitely trying to distract me from everything she doesn’t know yet about the appointment and from whatevershethinksIthink Olga and Dad are talking about. Love her for trying, but I’m too stubborn for it to work.
While we were taking five and being bullied into watching buff actors prance around in bodysuits, Dad and Olga moved from the tumble track into her little office behind the Balan’s Gymnastics front desk. And though it’s impossible to see much beyond the doorframe that separates the main gym from the lobby, my eyes can’t stop flitting that way as we head over to the rows of beams lined up near said doorframe.
I mean, they talked for ninety minutes and now they take it private? It can’t bethatserious if they don’t include me, right? I’m not relieved when Olga sends her college-age daughter, Elena, to mind us, because that probably means they plan on being in there for a while.
