flightless ━ kevin day

I. Free Fall

one                       free fall

𐦍༘⋆

In physics, we learn that free fall is any motion of a body where gravity is the only force acting upon it. Gravity, like fate, is unavoidable. In physics, there are variables that might try to fruitlessly fight it — air resistance, friction, balanced and unbalanced forces. In cheerleading, these variables come, too, in the shape of a pyramid dismounting at the speed of light, trying to catch the flyer dropping from a twelve feet height.

Free fall is the moment when gravity and fate conspire to remind you how fragile you truly are.

As a child, Aileen would sit next to her mother and beg her, time and time again, to tell her the story of how she came to cheerleading. She had been too young to remember it clearly, but it was now some sort of family myth.

Rachel always began the story in the same way, because, to Ali, there was no other way to start it: the accident. Thinking about it now, it almost seemed ironic that an accident could be at the beginning of something so fierce and beautiful such as Ali's passion for cheerleading.

(And now, she refused to let it be the end of it).

Her mother had been behind the wheel, though she never mentioned it. Ali, at three years old, sat on the backseat on the driver's side. Her father sat beside her because she had been crying all day and he was the only person who could calm her down. When the truck came barrelling through the passenger's side, her father got stuck under the wreckage, but Ali had been spared. She and her mom had both made it out alive, though Ali had needed knee surgery and a back brace.

"It could have been worse," the Doctor said, somber, as if her mother hadn't been aware that they both could have died. As if they hadn't already lost someone that they loved. "She may have some balance issues now that the back brace is off, but if you do something about it soon enough, she'll be fine."

So he suggested soccer, figure skating or tumbling, to help strengthen the spine.

A few days after that Doctor's appointment, Ali started at Sarah and Jack Fisher's cheerleading gym.

That was how everything started. In years to come, this would feel like a moment of shimmering predestiny. Fate, retroactivated by a ten ton truck.

To other people — the ones who always wondered if it had been healthy to put such a young girl through the pain of cheerleading —, Rachel would say she had always known that Ali would grow up to be a cheerleader. That she could feel her in the womb, arching and tumbling like a promise.

As soon as she had started the baby tumbling classes, it became obvious that cheerleading was second nature to Ali. The coaches had called her a prodigy. The other cheer moms had wondered what Rachel had done differently with Ali, who could tumble like girls who were twice her age.

"Once in a generation," one of the other parents said, watching Ali.

You never think you'll hear a phrase that big in real life, much less find yourself believing it. You never think your life will be that big.

And so, Rachel spent hours (and a fortune) making their house into a cheerleading haven. She demolished the basement in order to install spring mats, she covered the walls with foam and bought balance boards and cheerleading quickly became the center, the mighty spine of everything for them. For so long, their world had been a cheer mat and a dream built on the fragile foundation of ambition. Their lives revolved around constant, vein-pulsing work, five-hour practices, out-of-town meets, countless jammed fingers and torn palms. The lightweight feel of soaring in a basket toss or in a tumbling pass and the echo of her mother's voice were inextricably linked in Ali's mind.