Her brother, Drew, always slipping around corners in the house, small and invisible, told Katie he’d peered through Devon’s half-open door and seen something.
“She made a mess,” little Drew said, shaking his head. And he told her how Devon had pulled a milk crate of old stuffed animals out of her closet and dumped them all over her bed, teddy bears and Beanie Babies, so many monkeys in leotards, and a bright, blazing stuffed tiger she’d so loved.
Katie looked in later and found Devon buried under them, sound asleep, surrounded.
“What matters is that she doesn’t let this shake her,” Teddy told them, having summoning them to his home for the postmortem. “You can’t let her see your disappointment.”
“We’re just disappointed for her,” Eric clarified. “She wanted it so much.”
“Well, don’t be,” he said sharply, eyes on them both, chin lifted. “Because she’s not like us. She’s better than all of us.”
On the car ride home, Katie put her hand over her face.
“I made it worse. I shouldn’t have said that thing about the Olympics. About—”
“No,” Eric said, eyes on the road, “you shouldn’t have.”
In the weeks that followed, Katie decided to give Devon her space. She spent more time with Drew, their little stalwart, just starting first grade, capon head perpetually bent over his science projects, the ant farm, the earthworm composter, the tree-bark samples lit over a can of Sterno, stopwatch ticking in his hand. There was so much going on in his head that she hadn’t known before.
Each night, however, Eric sat beside her in bed and watched the footage from the qualifiers over and over. Studying it, rubbing his face, trying to make sense of it. It was all he talked about, his eyes twitching from the screen.
“Eric,” Katie finally said one night, “stop.”
But the following day, he came home with a thick catalog from Champeen Athletics.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about this,” he told Katie, nearly bouncing on his toes. “We all know it. The equipment’s been holding Devon back. We need to push Teddy. We need that inground landing pit.”
“A landing pit?” Katie said. “She doesn’t need a pit. Teddy always spots her and he’s never missed.”
“Katie,” he said, his eyes glittering with energy, his hand pressed on her wrist, “I’ve been reading about it all day. There’s so much I didn’t know. Gymnasts who practice their vaults with a pit to cushion the impact have fewer injuries and perform better in competition. It’s easier on their joints.”
And then, more quietly, he added, “And it helps control the fear.”
“But Devon has no fear,” she said, and he wouldn’t look at her. For the first time, it felt like he knew something she didn’t about Devon. Or thought he did. Watching the video from qualifiers again and again, he thought he’d figured something out.
But Katie had her own theory. After all, the foot that had bobbled—why, it was the same foot that had been caught in that mower blade. Part of her wondered if that slim bit of flesh where the skin-graft tissue sealed over might have played some small role.
Sometimes, she caught Devon looking at her foot, examining it very closely, and wondered if she was pondering the same question.
“The landing pit is the solution, Katie,” he said, his hand on her arm, eyes fixed on her. “I’m telling you.”
It was so hard not to believe him, his palm pressed on the catalog’s glossy page, the photo of the enormous pit dug deep into a gym floor, filled to the brink with bright foam cubes like casino dice.
“I want to support this, Eric,” Teddy told them, “but I ran the numbers.” He jabbed the catalog page, his butcher’s thumb over the price. “That dog won’t hunt.”
“Teddy—” Eric began.
“It’s gonna have to come from the boosters,” Teddy said. The BelStars Booster Club, a barely functioning klatch of four parents who held an occasional bake sale to buy competition tees, preshrunk.
“Tell you what,” Teddy said, “why don’t you show them the Eric Knox charm?”
And Eric did, inviting them to the house for dinner, making his famous (only) dish, Cajun gumbo, extra hot sauce, and drawing each of them out with earnest questions, lavishing them with attention. Within days, an election was called just for him. Four votes were cast and Eric was the new president of the BelStars Boosters.
“We’ve always hoped Eric would get involved,” Kirsten Siefert, the booster secretary, said, adding snidely, “I guess this is what it took.”
Within days of the election, the BelStars Boosters issued a calendar of revenue generators: summer camp, free gym days for the community, party-room rentals, a car wash, smoothie days, a pro shop carved out of the parent lounge. And Eric recruited sponsors, a local dry cleaner, a tanning salon, their logos splashed over leotards, water bottles, tracksuits.