When It Counts Page 2

  “I totally can,” I grin, dusting my chalky hands on my thighs. “One more time?”

  “No, just throw your dismount into the pit. Three times, please.”

  I climb onto the beam and work a few jumps and then a back handspring to get my bearings. My dismount is one of the most difficult in the world, but for me it’s just a matter of focus. As long as I hit the sweet spot and get my big punch off the end, I have more than enough power to rotate both flips fully around, and more than enough finesse to stick the blind landing. And I don’t even have to stick today. Blammo. The good life.

  “One!” Polina yells as I soar into the pit. Seriously, the hardest part about this morning’s workout has been freeing myself from our pit’s foam blocks.

  Back up on the beam, I repeat the dismount. “Two!” Lather, rinse, repeat. “Three!” Polina claps and I only have floor left.

  “One more routine until we’re free!” Ruby sings. “I’m gonna nap so hard.”

  “I’m with you, actually,” Emerson yawns. “It’s almost like this practice was too easy. Boring, in a way. It’s putting me to sleep.”

  “Yes, boring is exactly the word I’m looking for when describing the first workout of my life that hasn’t made me sweat out through my internal organs or need to encase myself in an ice tomb for a year,” Ruby laughs.

  “It’s not about being easy!” Sergei yells, clearing his throat. “It’s about making sure we don’t burn out. Appreciate it now because the last few days leading up to our departure are all about pressure sets and nothing else.”

  Polina fiddles with Ruby’s floor music and then we work our routines at full performance level, which is actually really hard to do without a crowd here. Ruby always manages to bust out something good, though, and I’ll never stop being jealous. With the energetic “King of Swing” by Big Bad Voodoo Daddy blasting through the sound system, her huge personality is explosive even in front of the five of us watching here in the gym; when she steps out in front of thousands in an arena, it’s practically a Beyoncé concert. People lose their minds.

  Emerson’s routine, set to a song called “Arwen’s Virgil” by the Piano Guys, is slower and more dramatic like mine, but she forms this insane emotional connection with the crowd and can seriously make people cry with her expression and movement.

  It’s actually blasphemous to have me going last. They’re both seriously so good, it makes me look like literal garbage in comparison. I’m not terrible in front of a crowd — hearing people cheer really gives me that little extra oomph I need to get in the zone — but performing in the gym is super awkward and I can barely get through it.

  When choreographing my routine, Natasha and Polina jokingly decided that I best portray “creepy.” Ahem. At first it was a joke, but Natasha ran with it, had our music guy put together a ninety-second mix of the final theme from the horror movie Saw, and that was that. My creeptastic but effing awesome routine was born.

  I try my best to be on today so Polina doesn’t once again laugh about my inability to relate to human emotions enough to portray them in front of other humans, but my focus is always more on my tumbling. I have endurance issues, so passes that should be easy for me end up looking terrible at the end of a routine when my energy is completely zapped.

  Thankfully, the beginning of my set today goes well, but with only one pass left, I’m feeling a little sluggish, like I need to stop for an energy gel pack or something. But that would mean starting over and doing this whole routine again. I’m not stupid.

  I half-ass the rest of my choreo and gear up for my final pass, a roundoff back handspring into a double tuck, the easiest of my four tumbling runs, but tacked at the end of a long routine, it’s the one I’m most likely to screw up.

  The run feels off from the beginning. My back handspring doesn’t get low enough, my set doesn’t reach the height I need, and I know in the middle of my first flip that I’m not going to make it around a second time and still land on my feet.

  In gymnastics, the first thing we learn is how to fall. I know I have a way out of this, a way to save my ankles and knees from the disaster of a crunched landing, but my reaction time lags and I’m rotating through the second flip before I start readying myself for a crashed but safe landing.

  I prep, planning to drop onto my hands and knees. Bent elbows, forearms first, stomach and ribs pulled in, almost like a plank. But the ground approaches faster than I’d like, and I miss a crucial piece of the puzzle — turning my head to the side.

  My face smashes into the floor and my head snaps back from the impact. I stay still for a minute, breathe in, breathe out, listen to the noises of the gym around me, register my coaches and teammates rushing toward me, see flashes of light through my closed eyelids.

  “I’m fine,” I whisper.

  Then everything goes black.

  ***

  “We’ll keep her a few more hours for observation, but it’s only a mild concussion and a hairline nasal fracture. She can go home tonight.”

  “When can I go back to the gym?”

  “No kid I know is that eager about getting back to working out,” Dr. Fairchild guffaws. “A couple of weeks. Take it easy. Think of it as an extended vacation.”

  I can’t hold back the tears. Natasha holds my hand, my surrogate mom for the day because my actual parents are stuck at work. I’m usually pretty hardcore and almost never betray my emotions, especially in front of Natasha. But now, everything’s blubbering out of me like a feelings tornado.

  “We’ll see the national team doctor,” Natasha whispers, trying to reassure me. “If it’s as mild as they say, you’ll be back conditioning right away.”

  “What doctor?” Dr. Fairchild inquires.

  “She’s a national-level gymnast,” Natasha explains. “She has Olympic team trials in two weeks. Exactly two weeks from right now. The national team staff is going to want their doctor to look at her and clear her to compete.”

  Dr. Fairchild looks impressed, but also concerned. “The Olympics, huh?”

  “She has a shot,” Natasha says proudly. “A big one.”

  “Well, that’s incredible. I’ve never treated an almost-Olympian before.” The doctor jots something down on his notepad. “Listen, your prognosis looks good, and I don’t think two weeks is a reach. But if you push it and try to get back to the gym too soon, you’ll only make it worse.”

  “No one is pushing anything,” Natasha hisses, clearly offended. “Obviously her health is our biggest concern.”

  “My biggest concern as well.” Dr. Fairchild clears his throat and unnecessarily shuffles his papers. “The nurse will be in to check on you in a few minutes.”

  “My one wish in this universe is for people to stop basing their opinions about gymnastics on books and documentaries that came out twenty years ago,” Natasha grumbles after he leaves. “Trust me, I was still competing in the glory days of abuse. Shit still goes down, but it’s like a whole new world now. You kids don’t know how lucky you have it. In my day, we walked barefoot through the snow to every competition, and my mom used to give me concussions right before every meet as an extra challenge.”

  She’s trying in her own irreverent way to make me laugh, but I can’t stop the tears, no matter how hard I fight to pull them back. All I can think about is not being in shape for trials and missing out on competing and not getting to go to the Olympics and seeing my dreams crushed into dust all because my energy was a little too low today. Seriously?

  “You’ll be fine, kid.” Natasha senses my fears. “At least school’s out and you won’t have to worry about missing that, too. Sunday’s a day off, so you’re really only missing this afternoon and tomorrow. That’s nothing. Monday, we’ll reevaluate and get you back to non-impact conditioning, and then we’ll take it from there. I’ve seen girls with far worse concussions than yours come back within a week.”

  “I just can’t have this be it,” I finally utter. “What if I lose my skills?”

&n
bsp; “Mal, you’re not going to lose your skills! You’ve taken a week off for vacation before, right? Think about it like that.”

  “As if you’d let me casually take a vacation two weeks before trials, or any competition? Come on.”

  “No, I would never. But still. We have to approach it from that mindset. It’s only a week, not the end of the world. It’s not like you broke your leg or ended up in a neck brace, or…ruptured your Achilles.”

  That stings. Poor Ruby. She’s probably more upset than I am, having gone through a pre-Olympic injury drama of her own about a million times worse than this, given that her injury ended her season entirely. She’s probably hella worried that my prognosis will be just as harrowing.

  I sigh. I’m on an IV cocktail of pain meds so I can’t even feel my busted up nose, which bled all over the floor at the gym. Trying to keep me from going insane after I came back from my one-second knockout, Ruby pretended to be a vampire and volunteered to clean the floor with her tongue. I better text her and let her know it’s not so bad.

  “Call your mom,” Natasha says, pushing herself up off my bed to grab my phone. “She still doesn’t know.”

  “Nah, I’ll wait until she comes home. It’ll be easier if she sees me so she knows it’s not so bad. She’s crazy busy at work and I don’t want her to think she has to leave early or something. It’s fine.”

  “Fine. I’m going to get something to eat. Don’t play with your phone. It’s bad for concussions. I’ll grab some fruit and yogurt for you, okay?” I nod. “I’ll check in with Sergei and Polina as well, give them an update and make sure your teammates are working twice as hard in your honor.”

  I smile meekly.

  “Cheer up, Mal. Focus on right now. Don’t think about the future. Everything will work out.”

  When she leaves, I sink back into the pillows and sigh again, long and low, tears beginning to fall once again. I don’t close my eyes because based on my medical knowledge from every TV show ever, if you shut your eyes for even a second with a concussion, you’ll most likely fall asleep and immediately die. I listen to Natasha and don’t mess with my phone, either, since the bright screen will also make things worse. My only option is staring into space, breathing in and out, counting to ten repeatedly to stay centered and focused.

  But counting and focused breathing never works for me. Instead, my mind produces a never-ending streams of f-bombs. Centered and focused my ass.

  Saturday, June 25, 2016

  41 days left

  “Why didn’t you call me, Amalia?!”

  “You were at work! You always freak out when anything happens. I’m fine, I was fine. If I called you, you would’ve assumed I had a gaping flesh wound or severe paralysis or something. When I broke my finger, you reacted like the doctors said they’d have to amputate all of my limbs. The last thing I need right now is you overreacting.”

  “This sounds like a private family only conversation,” my best non-gym friend Jack says nonchalantly, picking up his backpack and laptop. “I’ll come by later, Mal.”

  “Bye, Jack.”

  He waves and happily slips away from our drama through the front door.

  “If anyone should be overreacting, it’s me, just FYI,” I huff, running my calf muscles over my black foam roller. Gotta do something, right? “You’re the one who didn’t come home all night and didn’t answer her phone all morning and showed up at noon like that’s normal. Naturally I assumed you had been brutally murdered.”

  “I told you, Amalia, I worked until three in the morning. The firm said they’d pay for a car home or a hotel by the office. I opted for the latter so I could finish a few things in the office this morning. I drove up assuming you’d already be long gone, at the gym. I had no reason to suspect otherwise.”

  “But you couldn’t call me or text me back? I called you a million times this morning.”

  “My cell phone was on do not disturb, as it always is when I’m busy with a project. You know that. Again, I had no reason to think you’d even know I was gone.”

  “Whatever.”

  I’m still pissed about my injuries and am just redirecting that rage toward my mom. Natasha ended up spending the night with me, and then she had Jack and his mom come over this morning when she had to leave for the gym.

  “No work all weekend,” she promises, ruffling my hair like I’m six. “God, Amalia, your nose. You look like Rocky. ‘Eye of the Tiger’ is going to be even more meaningful to you now.”

  “Yep, that’s me. The underdog fighter.”

  She goes into the kitchen to make lunch while I do leg lifts, listening to but not watching a marathon of Law and Order: SVU. My head already feels a billion times better, and I never got dizzy or nauseous, so I assume I’m pretty much fine, but I can’t shake the feeling that I won’t be back at a hundred percent in time to get in a good enough number of routines before we leave for trials.

  With everything going on with my various head traumas and my missing-presumed-murdered mother, the upside is that it made my reunion with Jack way less intense. The last time we saw each other was after nationals in Boston, where we shared a ridiculously embarrassing moment in the hotel and then a long and painfully awkward flight home before retreating into our respective finals bubbles. Going to different schools in addition to me spending every non-school second either at the gym, studying, or asleep meant this morning was the long-awaited first meeting back in Seattle.

  Having his mom tag along also didn’t hurt. By the time she trusted him enough to watch me on his own so she could go back next door and work in her garden, we were communicating with each other like two champions of the spoken word. We completely talked our way around our confessions of love, and let the mundane chatter about school, gym (my obsession), computers (his obsession), and concussions fill the air instead. What happens in Boston stays in Boston.

  “Natasha said she got you all set for a follow-up at the hospital tomorrow,” my mom shouts over the running sink. “Very quick turnaround, no?”

  “The doctor said it was mild. I seriously don’t even feel…concussed. Neurologically, I’m totally intact. They’re just playing it safe.”

  “How are you supposed to tumble with a broken face?”

  “It’s barely broken. Hairline fracture. I’ve done worse damage dropping my phone on my face.” No joke. I gave myself a black eye from this act of self-violence two years ago. “Do not use while lying in bed” should be a warning label on every iPhone box.

  “Amalia, I know the Olympics are your dream and this is the chance of a lifetime, but you need to know that no matter how you feel right now, your health is the most important. I can’t let you risk your health.”

  “So what, that’s it? I’m done? All this work for nothing?”

  “No. Maybe you are fine. But we’re going to need several opinions here. Natasha already emailed me about the national team doctor. I’ve read about team doctors giving air casts to girls with broken legs while telling them it’s fine to keep training. The national team cares about team results, not your long-term health. You can see the team doctor for clearance, but you’re also going to see that neurologist from the hospital as well as your pediatrician before I let you back into the gym.”

  I grit my teeth but it’s not like I have any say in the matter. Which is probably a good thing. If it was up to me, I’d be back in the gym doing double backs this very second, ignoring the pain and potential long-term damage because I don’t have my priorities straight at all.

  “The chicken is done!” my mom announces like a fifties housewife a few minutes later as I’m working on my nine-billionth scissor kick. I figure my lower extremities are far enough away from my head that I’m safe getting a few leg workouts in. One last set, and then I gingerly push myself off the couch and head to the kitchen, scowling the entire time.