Tumbling (5 page)

“We have some strategizing to do, huh?” Kerry had said when they got to her office. Her Romanian accent was similar but not identical to Katja Minkovski's Russian one. And, though Kerry was sure of everything she said, she ended many sentences with “huh?” It was a tic Wilhelmina found endearing.

Wilhelmina had smiled. “Do you think I can do it?” she'd asked.

But Kerry wasn't smiling as she had been in Germany a few days ago when Wilhelmina had won that silver medal. “That's what we have to talk about. What exactly the
it
is,” Kerry said.

Now, it was Wilhelmina who said “Huh?”

Kerry swallowed. She cleared some papers from the big desk between them. “I pulled you from the camp roster for next month.”

“What?” Wilhelmina almost-shouted. “I have to go to camp. If I don't go, Katja will be mad. At me. I can't just skip camp right after proving I'm the best US gymnast!”

Kerry nodded. “I know. She'll be mad.”

“So why—”

“I see you walking around that hotel in Germany with bags of ice taped to your hips and knees. I see you popping Advil like little candies. You think you can sneak these things from me, but you can't, huh?”

“I wasn't sneaking,” Wilhelmina protested quietly.

“You know what happens at the camps. You're overworked on old equipment. You're working out too hard for too many hours. Then you come back feeling like everyone is ahead of you. Not you personally. All the gymnasts do. Those camps create competition between our girls. A little bit of competition is a good thing, yes. But what happens is you go and you work too hard and then you come home and you keep working too hard.”

Wilhelmina had never thought about it like that. She liked the competition. She liked working hard. But Kerry was right. It always took weeks to recover from camp. Or from any event where Katja was in charge. And the camps happened almost monthly, so it was like she was always recovering. “I have to go,” Wilhelmina whispered.

“If we go to that camp, you'll come back broken,”
Kerry said. There was no
huh
. Wilhelmina knew she was serious.

Wilhelmina didn't say anything.

“We have options, Mina. We have different ways to proceed now. But if you keep going as Katja wants, if you keep going to all the camps and all the meets, if you keep training forty hours a week for years, you won't make it to the next Olympics. You're getting older. It's something I hate saying to a sixteen-year-old girl, but the sport, the way we play it, it makes me.”

Wilhelmina sat silent and shocked. Days ago she'd been on top of the world, on top of Worlds, literally. Now her heart was being broken.

“If the Olympics were next year, it'd be different, huh?” Kerry said. “So we have to talk about your goals. If you want gold at Worlds a year from now, if that's what you want most, we'll keep going like we have been.”

Wilhelmina was shaking her head.

“That's what I thought,” Kerry said. “You want the Olympics.”

Wilhelmina sucked in breath; she summoned that moment when she almost won the World medal; she reminded herself that she was good enough. Then she said it. “I want an Olympic medal in the women's all-around.”

Kerry didn't laugh. She nodded. “Okay, then. I need to keep you healthy for three more years. I need to keep you safe. I will not play by Katja's rules. I will not break your body. So here's what we do. We take a year to relax, to heal. We withdraw from all the camps, from the
national team, from everything. You train and stay in shape, go to physical therapy and get the kinks worked out. Then you come back. But we only go to the three mandatory camps each year. We don't go to the other monthly ones. We keep you healthy. And . . . you only compete on vault.”

“What?” Wilhelmina said. “No, I want to do the all-around.”

Something about specializing didn't sit right with Wilhelmina. It seemed disingenuous for an athlete like her who loved all events, who excelled at them all.

“I know,” Kerry said. “We'll train on them all. But in the years leading up to the Olympics—at Nationals, Classics, Worlds, Pan-American, whatever—we'll only enter you on vault, huh?”

Wilhelmina was shaking her head.

“It's scary, I know. But at the Olympic trials, you'll enter the all-around. You'll qualify by the vault, then enter that way, okay? And worst-case scenario, we'll keep you the best vaulter in the world, so you'll be a vaulting specialist. You know the best vaulter will always get to go to the Olympics.”

“It just feels . . . I mean, Katja—”

Kerry interrupted her. “I know Katja likes you now, because now you are a star. But look back on the other gymnasts Katja has loved, huh? What has happened?”

Wilhelmina thought about it. And Kerry was right. A lot of her friends her age or a year or two older were starting to drop the sport, whether they'd made an
Olympic team or not. They were breaking backs and spraining the same wrists over and over again. They were in braces and casts. They were hospitalized due to eating disorders or emergency surgeries. A lot of them had once been Katja's favorites, too.

“I'm not saying this is fair, huh?” Kerry said. Wilhelmina realized she must look heartbroken. “It's not fair. The Olympics being only every four years is not fair to gymnasts, huh? And Katja—the way she does this, the amount of control she has—it is not fair, huh?”

Wilhelmina was surprised. People whispered about Katja. People invoked her name to tease each other. But people rarely stated this problem outright. Katja was too scary for that.

“You know you can try it Katja's way,” Kerry was saying. “You know you can go to all of the camps and push and push and push yourself until you break, huh?”

Wilhelmina stared at her.

“But not with me. You'll need another coach for that. I'm only going to do this in a way that doesn't damage you. If you want to do it with me, you have to trust me. If you want to do it with me, you have to be okay with defying Katja. That's how we get you to the Olympics. That way, if you fail, you're still in one piece.”

Wilhelmina knew Kerry was right. She trusted her with everything she had. So, she nodded.

• • •

“Mina,” Kerry called her over to where she was pacing a few feet down the vaulting podium.

Wilhelmina turned, patting down her hair. It was cropped short, nestled close to her head and decorated with rows of sparkly bobby pins. Years ago, Wilhelmina's Level 9 team had insisted over and over again on matching hairstyles. As the only black girl on the team, she'd spent too much time wrestling her hair into silly positions like poofs or upside-down French braids to try to make it look like her teammates'. Eventually, she got frustrated. After all, she'd never asked all of those white girls to go for flat twists or dreads. But she couldn't say that, so instead she'd chopped it all off. This was gymnastics, not a fashion show.

Kerry put her arm over Wilhelmina's shoulders. “No one knows what you can do,” Kerry said, her high Romanian cheekbones tilting close to Wilhelmina's creased forehead. Her parents still called Kerry's accent intimidating. But after so many years together, Wilhelmina found Kerry's voice the most relaxing sound in the gym. “Remember that. We know you can get one of the top four spots. But no one else does.”

Kerry had been right about almost everything in that locker room three years ago. But she hadn't been able to keep Wilhelmina the best vaulter in the world. No, that spot had been stolen last year by Wilhelmina's one sort-of friend left in the sport, when Camille burst back on the scene in a new body with a totally new repertoire.

So they were blessed when the USAG announced that the Olympic team would be determined directly after the Olympic trials this year, publicly. The first-place gymnast would automatically make the team. The Olympic Committee (along with Katja) would choose the rest of the gymnasts. They were likely to choose Camille for her high-scoring vault, and then the next three finishers in the all-around. Wilhelmina knew that Grace, Leigh, and Georgette were great all-around gymnasts, but she was hoping to beat one of them. And even if she couldn't do that, the fourth spot was open.

One spot. And every gymnast in the room had her eye on it.

Mina wasn't sure she could do it, but Kerry believed in her.

She hated that she was vying for the last place on the team. She hated that she wasn't one of the gymnasts—Leigh, Grace, Georgette, Camille—whose position was almost certain. She should have been. She should have gotten her chance.

Wilhelmina stretched her forced smile wider until it felt like her lips would split. She made her head bounce up and down like she was catching Kerry's enthusiasm. She was supposed to be excited. She was not supposed to be bitter. She was supposed to forget all about how this would have felt four years ago. If the FIG was more fair. If the rules weren't so stupid.

It was what happened in gymnastics. Each girl
who was lucky enough took her turn at the top, and then slid down into anonymity as perkier, skinnier, higher-flipping teenyboppers climbed on her broken body.

“You can make this team, huh,” Kerry was saying. “You get that position. Or, if you win on the vault, you get a different one, huh.”

Wilhelmina squinted at Kerry. Vault was her best event, but did Kerry really think she could beat Camille on it?
Camille?

“And worst-case scenario, if you come in fifth or sixth,” Kerry said with a smile, “you're still going. You're an alternate, at the very least.”

“I don't want to be an alternate,” Wilhelmina whispered. It was another thing she wasn't supposed to say. She was supposed to be here as a gymnastics veteran, lapping up any of the Olympic Glory Juice that might drip off the girls at the top. But she would rather retire than be an alternate. At least she thought she would. Wilhelmina had no idea what retiring would look like (except the tiny part of it that would look like Davion). But she knew it would be impossible to stand the smell and sounds of the gym if she missed her dream that narrowly again.

And alternate was exactly where the analysts predicted her to land.

Kerry shrugged and, like Wilhelmina knew she would, said, “You only control you. You perform the best; you take what you get.”

Wilhelmina nodded.

“You don't have to be an alternate, though, Mina-Mina. You can be
it.
Just hit, huh?”

Wilhelmina nodded.

It was infuriating how wise her coach was. She wanted to be able to control it all; she wanted the guarantee that if she hit all eight of her routines, she'd be on the team.

“Go chalk up,” Kerry said.

“Go Team Fogies!” Samantha called out when Wilhelmina was climbing the steps to the podium.

Wilhelmina turned to give her a smile even though it wasn't fair. Samantha was twenty-two. She already got to be an Olympian. It made sense that she was close to retirement.

You can't control your birthday, Wilhelmina. You can only control your routines
, she heard her coach's voice say in her head as she spread chalk on her palms and her feet.

She stood at the end of the runway, crossed her arms across her chest, making an X with her forearms, and visualized her Amanar, her upper body twitching back and forth.

Wilhelmina and the other athletes who were hoping to get the chance to compete in the individual vault event in Italy—Camille, Leigh—would each perform two different-styled vaults. But only the first one counted, really. Only the first one would be factored into the
team score, and that's what Katja was most interested in: team gold for the USA.

Wilhelmina got the flag, bounced once on her toes, closed her eyes for a quick second of silence, and took off down the runway.

Roundoff
, she told herself as she got to the end.
Jump off the springboard.

So far so good.

Explode off the vaulting table. NOW!

She kept her legs together, her knees tight, her upper body held stiff with her arms across her chest. She was high enough, higher than anyone else except Camille would get, but not as high as she could be. She twisted two-and-a-half times before she sensed the floor coming up underneath her. She finished her final rotation and stretched her toes toward the mat, then—
boom—
landed on her feet with her back to the vault. She landed heavily, and before she could stop herself, her left foot darted out behind her to keep her steady.

Stand up!
she told herself.

She pulled all the muscles in her legs to attention and straightened out her body. One big step. A three-tenths deduction. Not exactly the splash she was hoping to make, and vault was her best event.

So oh well on beating Camille.

Still, when she signaled the judges, the entire arena erupted in applause and whoops, and she heard a familiar Russian accent cheering her name. She turned from
the judges to Katja Minkovski, and she saw a huge smile fill her grandmotherly face.

Well
, she thought to herself,
if that's going to make you smile, today will be better than I thought.

Wilhelmina jogged back to the end of the runway for her second vault, her heart pounding to the beat of the surrounding applause.

“You can do even better,” Kerry called up to her.

I can
, Wilhelmina thought.

And then, she did.

CAMILLE

With two feet on the ground and only the smallest hop forward, Camille landed her second vault and threw her hands over her head. The smile on her face was genuine for a fleeting moment. She forced it to stay there.

She jogged to the side of the podium but paused before hopping off.

“Comeback Cammie! Comeback Cammie!” the crowd chanted.

That was her name now.

“Comeback Cammie! Comeback Cammie!” the crowd roared.