“You got it, Em,” I yell as she steadies herself in the corner for her first tumbling pass. Pauline has us building our endurance for the Games as much as possible, and that means multiple full floor routines each session.
I rotate my neck and twist my hips, trying to stretch away the ache exacerbated by four tumbling passes and a minute and a half of choreography. My breathing starts to return to seminormal by the time Emma’s reached her second tumbling pass. The pain isn’t gone—let’s be real, it’s never really gone, not without cortisone—but it’s manageable, enough for another clean routine.
“Make that a one-tenth, not a three-tenth, step!” Pauline corrects. Emma doesn’t react, but she definitely heard the critique. It’s been Pauline’s mantra since we got back from trials: building endurance, minimizing deductions.
Emma lines herself up for her final tumbling pass, hesitating for a moment to take a deep breath, then runs into a roundoff back handspring double pike with a small step back to steady herself.
“Good!” Pauline calls, pulling her long blond hair up into a ponytail, her attention still focused on Emma’s last bit of choreography before Copland’s “Hoedown” comes to a crashing end. “Looking more and more like gold every time!”
Emma rises from the floor and salutes the judges for the day— the group of the junior girls who threw us the party. Pauline asked them to watch, providing slightly more pressure than a normal routine run-through.
“Okay, let’s go, Rey,” Pauline says, done with her ponytail and moving to change the music in the ancient CD player from Emma’s to mine.
While Emma’s floor routine is true Americana—even though hoedown music for a girl from the Upper East Side is a bit of a stretch—mine is almost blasphemously balletic. It wouldn’t be out of place on the Russian team.
Modern American gymnastics has embraced pulse-pounding music, big choreography, and songs the crowd can clap along to. Me? I prefer to stun the audience—and the judges—into silence, maybe make them shed a tear or two.
Most of my routine’s difficulty comes from my dance elements. Tumbling wasn’t my strength, even before my injuries— well-executed leaps and turns were always more my thing. If I hadn’t fallen in love with flipping through the air, I’d probably have ended up across the East River at one of the city’s ballet schools.
“C’mon, Rey,” Emma pants between sips of water.
“Let’s go, Rey!” the juniors shout in unison. I force a smile onto my face, wanting to make sure the kids know I appreciate the support, but it’s tough to expend energy on anything beyond keeping the pain at bay.
With a deep breath, I move into my starting position, arms hanging at my sides, head down, breathing slowly to keep my heart rate as low as possible before the routine speeds it up. My music begins, an orchestral arrangement of “Moon River.” I let my arms flow around me for a moment as the harp strings lead the music into its melody, but then I’m dancing into my first tumbling pass. It’s a two and a half twist into a front full, and it’s hell on my back. I put it at the beginning to get it out of the way before the rest of the routine scrapes away my endurance along with my tolerance for the sting of stopping a twist twice in quick succession.
“I’m not seeing your connection to the music, Audrey. Sell it!” Pauline demands.
I resist the urge to roll my eyes in the middle of the routine. It’s tough to show an emotional connection to the music when your back is as screwed up as mine, but I push past it and try harder. I need that performance factor to woo the judges into a slightly higher execution score.
My routine is nearly at an end when she says, “And now push,” before I power into my final tumbling pass, a double back. I crunch down a bit and hop forward, but I’m able to control the landing before lifting my arms with the final notes of the music and tilting my head back gracefully.
“Beautiful,” Emma says, applauding when I salute.
The muscle memory of the motion keeps me from wincing as I lift my arms to the junior girls who are cheering for me, but once I’m off the floor, the pain flares to life again.
“You need more lift in the double back,” Pauline critiques, “but overall that was lovely. A solid leadoff routine for quals.” Her words don’t exactly inspire confidence; a leadoff routine in qualifications means they’re banking on my score not counting. My floor is almost useless to the team once we get into finals.
“Both of you get some water and then on to vault,” Pauline adds, releasing us for a short break.
The kids scatter back to their training as Emma and I grab our water bottles and move in the general direction of vault.
My phone buzzes. Emma is fiddling with the cap to her water bottle, so I glance at it quickly.
It’s from Leo, a mirror selfie, his bathroom clearly visible behind him. He’s got a gigantic bruise across his rib cage and he’s definitely not wearing a shirt. I swallow against the way it makes my heart race.
There’s a message too:
Serves me right for thinking about you when I’m surfing.
I bite my lip, my thumbs hovering over the keyboard. I want to respond like I have all week. He hasn’t texted me too much. Just enough to reassure me that he’s interested. It’s a relief, to be honest, that he understands why I can’t talk all the time. He gets me. I want to make a flirty joke back, a clever retort or maybe some kind of double entendre or a kissy-face emoji. I want him to know I’m interested too, really interested. That I’ve had this weird long-distance semicrush on him for years and that I want to get to know him for real and maybe actually kiss him at some point.
I’ve never felt this way about a guy. Sure, I’ve thought guys were hot, and I’ve kissed a few, but, like … more? That’s never something I’ve considered. With Leo, though, I really, really want that. I want to talk to him about things that matter and go to concerts and shows and bad movies and dinner. I want to do other stuff too, stuff that’s currently making my cheeks heat up.
It’s kind of crazy how intense these feelings are, but maybe it makes sense. He gets my dreams and knows just how hard I’ve worked for them. I’ve never met anyone who understood that before. Even if we haven’t known each other, for real, for very long, it feels like we have, at least in the ways that really matter.
I guess it’s true. The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem. I have a Leo Adams problem. Then again, should a guy with sparkling green eyes and an adorable grin, a guy who looks like he does without a shirt on and can make my toes curl with the brush of his hand against mine, ever be defined as a problem?
I don’t think so.
A kid blasts off the springboard onto the vault and jars me back to reality.
“Break’s over, ladies,” Pauline says, and I send back a quick heart emoji before tossing my phone aside.
“Who was that?” Emma whispers.
“Leo,” I whisper back, and she lets out a happy squeak before we turn our attention to Pauline.
“Both of you, full run-through like you’re warming up in the arena. A timer, then the one and a half, Rey. Emma, a timer and then the two and a half.”
Putting our water bottles down after another quick sip, we both race for the end of the vault run, just like we will in competition. The key to vault is to get as warm as you can, as fast as you can. There isn’t a lot of time to work up to your full difficulty like we’d normally do in training sessions. You’ve got to get your shit together fast.