“Air awareness, girls! Impress me.”
I shake out my ankles and then take a deep, steadying breath before striding at a measured speed down the runway. I vault a simple timer, letting my body flip just once through the air before landing on the mat and bouncing to kill the rest of the power. It feels okay—I mean it hurts, obviously, but the normal hurt—and I move back to the board to adjust it so Emma can go next.
“Good, Rey. Nice block on that one. Almost like old times.”
I was never a spectacular vaulter, but I’d been consistently landing a double and working my way up to a two and a half when my back let me know it wasn’t on board with that upgrade to the famed Amanar vault that every elite gymnast aspires to land. There wouldn’t even be double twists anymore, replaced by a comparatively easy one and a half that I need to nail almost perfectly to avoid getting hammered by the judges.
It’s a pretty well-accepted reality in elite gymnastics that the lower the difficulty, the harsher the judges will be on execution. Sometimes it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. An athlete might have lower difficulty because she’s not a good enough gymnast to execute more complex skills and routines, but after studying it pretty carefully over the years I’ve come to realize that it’s mostly just the judges being pretentious dipshits.
I move back to the end of the run as Emma vaults her own timer and wait until Pauline resets the springboard before I go through my vault routine again.
A deep breath, up on my toes, and then forward to the horse, a roundoff back handspring and block backward off the vault. I tuck my arms into my body, making myself as aerodynamic as possible as I spin, and then I’m opening up. It’s a blind landing, but I know exactly where I am in the air. I hop forward once, then stand tall and salute. That was a good one, but it hurt like a bitch.
“Nice! Bet it didn’t feel great, though,” Pauline echoes my thoughts, and I fight back the laugh.
I nod once, not wanting to dwell on the pain. “You want another?”
“Yep,” she says. “If this were Tokyo, that would have been the warm-up.”
As I walk back to the end of the run, Emma salutes with confidence and launches herself down the runway into a beautifully executed two and a half, with a small step forward for control.
“Yes! That was it, Emma!” Pauline yells with a sharp clap of her hands. “You bring that vault to Tokyo, and Kareva won’t be able to touch you—with or without her triple.”
They set up the springboard again for me, shifting it a little farther away from the horse.
Emma gives me a thumbs-up as I prep one more time, a graceful salute, toeing the perfect spot on the run to begin and then a back handspring into the one and a half. This one is a little overcooked, with a sharp lunge at the end that will cost me at least three-tenths in execution. Damn it.
“Well done,” Pauline says, but her eyes are narrowed and her mouth is tight. There isn’t much point in correcting it. As the weakest vaulter on the team, I’ll probably only go up in qualifications, when we’re allowed to drop our lowest score. Still, doing your best work in warm-ups is a waste.
I rise up and down on my toes. My back doesn’t feel any worse than before. “I’m going again.” Pauline opens her mouth to argue, but then closes it and doesn’t protest, so I spin away and make for the end of the run.
“Audrey, that last one was fine,” Emma says, taking a long drink from her water bottle.
“Just one more,” I whisper.
This rotation I do a timer and then a full and then finally the one and a half, and the final vault is much cleaner than my previous attempt.
“Good job, Rey,” Pauline says. “It’s noon. You two are done for the day.”
I shake my head, distracted. I want to go again, make sure that this combination of warm-ups is what will work. “Nah,” I say, walking away again, twisting back and forth at the waist. The pain is the same, no better, but no worse, so I push it to the back of my mind. I’ve gotten really good at that over the last two years. I’m fine. I can go again.
“I just wanted to go one more time,” I grumble from my seat in the pedicure chair in the salon around the corner from Emma’s apartment. It’s tradition to get mani-pedis before we head out to a major competition. The salon is super chic, way nicer than the one my mom and I go to back across the river in Queens, but Emma’s treating, so I wasn’t about to argue.
“And she let you go three more times. You always want to go one more time,” Emma retorts from the chair beside me. “It’s how you ended up with that whole situation to begin with.” She motions vaguely to my back. She’s right. I know she’s right, but there’s just so little gymnastics left in my future, I want to do as much of it as possible before it’s all over.
“And I know how you feel, Rey—you want it all to be perfect— but haven’t you learned by now that it’s impossible?”
I send her a side-eye and mutter to myself.
“What’s that?”
“You know me too well,” I repeat, louder this time.
Our phones buzz simultaneously. It’s the group chat we’ve got with all the other girls. Sierra sent a video of her bars routine.
I click out of the clip before it even ends.
“She’s just trying to psych you out,” Emma says, shrugging.
“I know, and I refuse to take her seriously. She’s not better than me on bars.”
“It’s Sierra—like, what do you expect?”
“I expect my teammate to stop passive-aggressively hinting that she’s going to beat me out for a spot in the bars final.”
“Well, it’s the only event final she has a shot to make, you know?”
“Yeah, just that and the all-around,” I shoot back, trying not to sound bitter. With Dani out, Sierra is the next-best all-around gymnast we have, and while I’ve resigned myself to the fact that an all-around medal probably isn’t in my future, it still hurts to think about.
“Excuse me?” a little voice asks from beside Emma’s chair. The woman doing Emma’s nails tries to shoo her away, but Emma shakes her head.
“Hi,” she says, smiling down at a little girl, probably, like, seven or eight, with a piece of paper and pen in her hand.
“Can I have your autograph and will you take a picture with me?”
“Sure!” Emma says just as the pedicurist finishes the last stroke of polish on her pinkie toe. She gingerly gets down from the raised chair, signs the paper for the little girl, and then poses for a picture. The girl’s mom takes a few shots with her phone before she quickly draws her daughter away.
“You’re so famous,” I tease as we head over to the dryers to lock in the polish for at least a few days before training completely destroys it.
“It’s so weird,” she says. “Like, a few people recognized me after worlds, but now, after those commercials launched …” She trails off. Emma is the new spokes-athlete for Nike. There are a bunch of billboards around the city with her face on them and a whole series of commercials airing during the lead-up to the Games.
“My best friend is a star, so it’s my duty to give you crap about it.”