“You never want to hear what it’s like being me,” she whispered.
“What?” Katie asked. “What do you mean?”
But Devon didn’t seem to be listening, her face in her hands now.
They sat for a second, a draft nudging the door open. Katie could hear Drew’s deep, throaty breathing down the hall, the walls humming with it.
And she looked back at Devon, cross-legged on the bed, and reached out to touch her cheek. As she did, Devon’s face seemed immediately to unlash itself, to grow tender and young and unruined. It was the face of a little girl sprawled on her bed, or the back lawn, her foot caught beneath her.
“I’m a monster,” she repeated. “I am.”
“No, Devon,” Katie said, pulling her close, her hands on her hair, smoothing it, “you’re my girl, you’re our girl. You’re mine.”
They were so many things she and Eric had tried to buffer Devon from, the shocks and trauma of the world. Anything that might distract her, hurt her.
The gym and her home were both siloed tight, the floors padded, all the noises of the world sucked out.
All so Devon could stand—beam, runway, corner of mat—and only hear the sound of her own breath, her own heart beating, only see the air, the ground, the air and ground again. Only worry about herself.
Which is what all parents want to do for their children, after all.
All of Devon’s life she’d been nestled in that amniotic swirl, the swirl she inhaled and exhaled. Nestled, smothered, choked. By her parents. Wasn’t that right?
And the minute she’d forced her way out, kicking spastically at all corners, been sucked out by the grappling hands of that handsome boy, she hadn’t known what to do, how to live in this world. Everything had been too much.
She hadn’t learned, no one had taught her—Katie and Eric hadn’t taught her—that the things you want, you never get them. And if you do, they’re not what you thought they’d be. But you’d still do anything to keep them. Because you’d wanted them for so long.
V
I could hear thousands of eyes watching us.
—Nadia Comaneci, Letters to a Young Gymnast
Chapter Twenty-Two
There were three things Devon would never tell her mother.
The first was what Mrs. Weaver had said before she left Lacey’s birthday party that night. Sneaking out of one of the half dozen bedrooms, Devon felt a hand on her shoulder. There was Mrs. Weaver, and Devon knew she’d heard her on the phone with Ryan. Had heard everything.
For a second, Devon thought it was all over, and in some way she was relieved. That everyone would know and it wouldn’t be hers anymore.
But instead, Mrs. Weaver just shook her head and said, in the iciest of voices, “I hope your mother never has to know this.”
The second thing she’d never tell her mother was what happened after, when she saw Ryan on Ash Road that night.
Driving, hardly breathing at all but almost flying, she thought: My life is ending, my life is over.
Once Ryan had asked her if she ever thought about him when she was on the floor, the beam. Of course she never did, and never would. It was a place she would never let him in. (Single-mindedness, Coach T. always told her, is the greatest of your great gifts.) But that was when she’d known she’d never feel for him what he felt for her.
There was not enough space in her heart.
Her heart was different.
She was different.
This is what she knew: you win or lose everything with a flick of the wrist, a turn of the ankle, not enough lift, a slipped hand on the beam.
And everything changes, everything goes dark, and is gone.
What if we just tell everyone, won’t it be wonderful, he’d said, even as he knew she was pulling away. Because he knew she was pulling away.
She’d turned on the high beams.
All the dust and sand and road salt glittering up into the air.
The hot yellow of the center line, like an arrow straight to him.
Headlight-struck, face like blasted marble and eyes filled with love.
He was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen.
Her hands on the wheel, for a second she thought, Forget what Dad said, what Mrs. Weaver said, what anyone thinks. He was so beautiful. What did anything else matter?
Strange that it was in that moment that she did it.
The moment she made the turn and saw him waiting for her, waving to her, seeing him so rapturously handsome, lit by her headlights, that great golden flame of a face.
Standing at the fog line, his feet planted on the shoulder
Waving to her, slowly waving, his arm swaying
That that was the moment she—
You must be in control of your landing, that’s what Coach always said.
Bounding down the vault runway, feet hit springboard, hands hit table, the push— —flying through the air, soaring, a spinning weightlessness, arrowing down, the surge of feet to ground, body electric.
Thump, thwack, smack, and she felt it, down there: