I don’t know what happened, Dominique kept saying, her little body shaking from it.
You can’t eat food like that, Devon said, looking down at her silver shoes, ruined. Your body doesn’t know how.
After, leaning against the dumpster behind the restaurant, a wet paper towel in hand, she took off her shoes, her lei.
It was then she saw Ryan, ducked behind the dumpster, smiling at her and smoking a cigarette.
She decided she would talk to him, which she never had.
I didn’t know you smoked, she said, her voice embarrassingly high.
I gave it up a hundred years ago, he said, but we all have our secrets.
But what should she say next?
Don’t hide it, he said, catching her hiding her foot behind her other foot.
Her right foot, its lumpen side, the soft pad, its split thickness. (Her Frankenfoot, that’s what her mom used to call it until her dad made her stop. Thank God, he made her stop. But her dad, sometimes it felt like he never stopped looking at it. Her foot, that foot, it was more theirs than hers.) It’s ugly, she said. I hate it.
I doubt that. He smiled.
You shouldn’t smoke, she said. Then blurted: And you should stay away from the moms.
And he laughed, a loud bark, and nodded his head yes.
Okay, he said, and he looked down at her foot again, and it was like he could see it pulsing, like a second heart.
She knew he could. And he was right. It was beautiful.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Elite Qualifiers
One Month Later
The four of them walked into the conference center, the Qualifiers Day 1 of 2—Ballroom B sign rippling above them over the bank of doors.
The four of them—Eric’s hand squeezing Devon’s shoulder, Drew wheeling the mini-cooler, Katie hauling Devon’s gym bag—walked inside, and they were ready.
And Katie looked at her daughter, her hard, small little body, her muscled neck. The blankness in her eyes. Shades drawn. No one could peek through. No one.
“We’ll take her from here,” the blond official with the lanyard said, clasping Devon by the shoulders.
There was no grandstand, no booming sound system, no grease-lined concessions or foil balloon banks or sponsor banners. No bleachers, even, just a set of risers clotted with parents, fists knotted with nerves.
It was just another convention center: dropped ceiling, thirty thousand feet of industrial floor divided into quadrants, long tables and metal folding chairs in the middle, between the beams and bars, judges seated there, Styrofoam coffee cups in hand, watching.
The mats daubed with chalk, uneven bars tentacled in one corner, the vast expanse of the carpeted spring floor. A few officials were milling around, and coaches walking their girls, hands to shoulders, patting their hard little backs, the shells of baby turtles. A tracksuited volunteer dragged a springboard across the floor as a girl hinged into a handstand, turning hypnotically on the beam, releasing a smattering of claps from the risers. In one corner, a purple-leotarded sylph slashed her legs through a floor routine as a boom box echoed wanly. On a tumbling strip, another rubbed her hands frantically, counting in her head.
The smack-smack-smack of the vault.
Farther down on the risers, an unshaven father, arms across his chest, looked like he might be praying.
The night before, all the booster parents had assembled at Gwen’s house, their faces gray and hoary from four weeks of punishing driving schedules, the pit-foamed air of the gym, the precompetition hysteria of “gymjuries”—overworked girls jamming fingers, rolling ankles, popping knees. Molly Chu, twelve pounds thinner from nerves, her cheeks hollow, kept sliding antacids under her tongue. Becca Plonski’s hands cradled her jaw, which ached from gum chewing, teeth grinding.
But there was something else on all their faces too: that feeling of being on the cusp, like generals on the brink of battle, bunkered deep in the Pentagon war room.
It was probably superstition, then, that no one wanted to talk about anything related to qualifiers, about their daughters least of all, their daughters who were all at home, bodies Gordian-knotted, hunchbacked over gym videos, soaking in blood-blooming bathtubs, their feet and hands shredded.
Instead, the parents gathered in one corner of Gwen’s palatial living room, their minds fired and their bodies responding with beer-pounding, overeating, and listening to a long, dirty story from Jim Chu about the time his roommate supposedly slept with Mary Lou Retton.
It was Kirsten Siefert who brought out the joint, swiped from her son’s backpack, and they shared it, all of them, even Molly, who said, red-faced, that pot made her “erotic.”