Letters to Nowhere #1 (Completed!)

Letters to Nowhere: Part 10

Anger and adrenaline both flamed inside me. I could see Stacey, baby Olivia latched to her breast, stop her beam coaching with the level 9s and 10s to glance over in this direction. Most of the other coaches in the gym had stopped to watch, therefore the gymnasts were also at a halt.

            Finally, Bentley turned around and walked in our direction. "Karen?"

            I glanced wearily at Stevie, who was still grinning. Realistically, I wasn't screwed. I had several options. I could do something he already knew I could do and pretend to be excited about it. Or not. Hadn't I said that the dead parent excuse was the best get-out-of-jail-free card? Sure, normally I would have been worried about getting in trouble for taking risks without permission, but seriously, what would he do to me?

            I felt a determined anger surge through me as I swung into the new release. This time, I felt the perfection of my timing and knew before I even saw the bar again that I'd catch it perfectly. When I did, everyone in the gym clapped.

            "So awesome," Stevie whispered after I'd climbed out of the pit.

            Bentley just stood there with his arms crossed, face totally unreadable. Stacey handed baby Olivia over to one of her team girls and came striding our way, looking either really impressed or totally pissed off. Both expressions were very similar on Stacey's face.

            I busied myself in the chalk bowl, waiting for one of them to say something.

            "It would be an easy upgrade," Stacey said right away. "She wouldn't have to redesign her bar routine at all."

            "She caught it on, like, the third try," Stevie chimed in. "That has to mean something."

            I was surprised Stevie got involved in this discussion, but I wasn't about to stop her. However, I knew better than to open my own mouth. Stevie and Stacey went back and forth for several minutes weighing the risks and rewards of upping the difficulty during the season. Neither of them mentioning me heading off to UCLA in June. Neither of them mentioning the end of my elite career. Maybe I wasn't the only one secretly planning to stick around longer?

            Bentley said nothing for a long time, listening to them. Finally, he cleared his throat and all three of us looked right at him.

            He placed a clean white sheet of paper on his clipboard and wrote Layout Jaeger on the top. He hung it on a screw that stuck out of the side of the pit bar. "We'll keep a tally sheet. Karen has to catch the release a hundred times and mark them all here. Then another hundred with the rest of the routine added after the release. Then another hundred with full routines on the uneven bars. If you can do that, we'll add it in to the nearest competition."

            He hadn't said "no" or "let's wait for the off season," which I guess was something positive, but still, those goals were pretty impossible, considering I had three other events to train. With ten routines a day, I should be able to hit one hundred in about ten days, but first I had to get my numbers in on the pit bar and get brave enough to even try the skill without the protection of soft foam blocks underneath me.

One step at a time, Karen. 

            The discussion was over after Bentley presented his compromise. It was genius on his part, really. He left everything up to me, instead of forbidding it and having me or Stacey bug him about it every day.

            Before we took our usual mid-practice snack break, I joined Blair and Ellen, who looked more than distraught about me getting that much attention in a single practice.

            "Awesome job," Blair said without really looking at me.

            "Yeah, totally cool," Ellen chimed in, giving me her crowd-pleasing smile.

            I was pretty much on cloud nine at that point, even if my teammates were jealous. But my big accomplishment was quickly forgotten. During a bathroom break, I noticed a reddish brown stain. One that had seeped through my nude colored briefs all the way to the very expensive pink leotard my mom had given me for my seventeenth birthday a few weeks ago. My heart pounded. It wasn't like I didn't know this moment was coming, but I didn't recognize the low-level cramp or the lower back pain. My mom always got back pain with her period.

            I had prepared for this and yet I was totally and utterly petrified at the sight of blood leaking from a part of my body that had never bled before. I hustled out of the bathroom stall and retrieved my gym bag, where I kept both feminine products and an extra leotard. Even with my previous tampon training, my hands were shaking so much that it took a while to get it in.

            Stevie and I really hadn't talked about period stuff, but I was pretty sure she'd had hers for at least a few years now. I knew for a fact Blair and Ellen had not. I knew this because the three of us were in the bathroom during a competition last season and we overheard this mom and girl in a stall basically in utter distress because the girl had just started, obviously for the first time, and she had no idea how to use a tampon and had two more events to compete.

            With gymnastics, pads are not an option. Leotards hardly cover anything and our legs are constantly coming apart with straddle jumps and splits. Then you have sports photographers snapping pictures with their fancy closeup lenses. You can't hide anything.

            Ellen and her flippant little girl nature didn't think much of it, but Blair and I both freaked out, knowing that could be us any day now, and we didn't want to be stuck in a bathroom stall forcing our mothers to give us a tampon lesson during Nationals or World trials. After that, we had a sleepover and pored over the directions on the Tampax box, and then we went through three boxes until we had mastered the art of it.

           

[If you liked this story please take a moment to vote]