Letters to Nowhere #1 (Completed!)

Letters to Nowhere: Part 65

"Who wants to go first?" I heard Jordan say during evening workout.

            I paused at the top of the climbing rope and glanced down at him and his class of wild little boys. Jordan had chickened out of asking his dad about teaching. I'd had a feeling he wasn't planning on asking him, so I told Stevie and she asked Bentley about it. Of course Bentley had shown some resistance at first, but here Jordan was, assisting Todd, one of the boys' recreational coaches. I was starting to think that Stevie could get away with just about anything. I thought my get-out-of-jail-free card was useful, but hers seemed to be even better. The responsible almost Olympian who was already of adult age had more pull around here than I did.

            "Let's go, Karen!" Bentley shouted at me from the ground.

            My pause at the top of the rope to stare at Jordan in his warm-up pants and coach's polo had lasted at least five seconds. I scurried down as fast as possible, but Bentley was shaking his head when I touched down.

            "You're three seconds over," Bentley said. "Two more."

            Because of extra physical therapy sessions and two more dance classes Bentley had recently added to our schedule, and a big load of tests I had to take online, I'd hardly seen Jordan over the past few days, and I couldn't help being distracted for those short five seconds.

            I suppressed a groan and headed back up the rope. By the time I'd finished my two punishment climbs, Ellen and Stevie had moved on to standing back tucks and Blair had gone to the training room for ice, since she was still resting her leg.

            That left only Bentley to count my back tucks, and he was relentless with conditioning, not letting us get away with even an ounce of bad form or less than a hundred-and-twenty-percent effort. And I was pretty beat tonight.

            "If you want to compete that tucked full on beam, you should be doing tucked fulls for your conditioning," he said. "I don't know why you haven't been."

            I stood on the line, my arms still shaking a little from the extra rope climbs, and did my first tucked full.

            "Your chest has to be higher," he said. "That one doesn't count."

            Okay, Nina Jones...

            Stacey walked up beside Bentley. "And tuck your hips under."

            I did another backflip, landing square on the line, but Bentley shook his head again. Then he got up and grabbed a long foam, stuck it out in front of him, lining it up so it was just below the level of my shoulder. "I want you to land with your shoulders higher than this."

            I took a deep breath and went again, not making the cut for a third time. At this rate I'd be here until midnight before I finished twenty of these. After ten attempts, I got one right, and I thought he'd let me go on to the next thing, but he just nodded and said, "Nineteen more like that."

            Eventually, Bentley elected one of the injured level 7 girls to sit on a mat, icing her leg while holding up the foam for me. Bentley threatened her with forty pull-ups if she cheated for me. It took an hour for me to finish and my leotard was soaked with sweat.

And this wasn't the first time he'd had done something like this to me. We had had several similar situations last summer, and I remembered crying to my mom in frustration, saying that the new coach hated me. Now I knew Bentley didn't hate me, but I wondered if he was trying to make me feel better about my old safe routines and maybe make me think about just letting these new skills go.

            I watched, fuming with anger as Ellen got all the praise and attention from Stacey during beam workout while I finished up the rest of my conditioning. I didn't even get a chance to do any full beam routines before it was time to move on to bars. By then, I was pretty pissed off at my head coach.

            "You can't miss those handstands, Karen," Bentley said after my third full bar routine, even though I had caught my layout Jaeger in two of the three routines.

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