Worth It

Prologue

Please watch the video above so you can appreciate the story more. It'll help you get a basic idea of what Naomi and her team do.

Third Person POV:

"Will all my Cali fans stand up and let 'em know."

The opening words were, quite literally, music to her ears.

"Who's in the house?"

She used to get unreasonably nervous while performing, despite the unreasonably large smile and sassy attitude that was required on the mat.

"This is not redemption, this is repetition(who's in the house?)"

But years of performing for large crowds and spending hours a day practicing had conditioned her to be used to it, and by now, she even get excited about performing.

"Smoed this, smoed that, ha, you know where it's at."

Besides, who doesn't want to show off the running quadruple full they worked so hard to get?

Fourteen years ago, a tiny little three year old girl walked into a cheer gym in west Pennsylvania holding hands with her mother. Fourteen years ago, a little girl idolized the girl who did a standing full like it was nothing, the girl who connected whip after whip after whip to arabian to a double full, the girl who held a needle so effortlessly in the air, the girl who, in the girl's mind, could do anything humanly possible. The girl who, in the girls mind, couldn't be beaten by anybody else in the world.

Maybe, had she not seen that girl(to this day, she still doesn't know her name), she wouldn't have come back afterwards. Maybe, had she not seen her, she hadn't fallen in love with the clean tumbling and sharp movements and feeling of limitlessness that came with cheer. Maybe, had she not seen her, she wouldn't have wanted so badly to be her.

And the older girl hadn't even seen her at all. The older girl hadn't known that on another mat, thirty feet away, there was a little girl, struggling to do a roundoff, looking at her and thinking "I want to be her." She had no idea that, just by coming to practice that day and doing what she always did, she changed the course of somebody's life.

That girl, in her own eyes, was just average. Just a scrawny eleven year old who was struggling to keep up on a level three team at a gym that went mostly under the radar compared to most big name all star gyms.

But yet, the little girl would keep her on a gold pedestal for years, because to her, she seemed unstoppable.

That little girl, now seventeen years old and living in California, breathed heavily as she walked off the mat with her teammates, many of whom she'd been with since she moved to California at the age of six. They had spent the larger part of their lives together, and were still not at the point of realization that,within a few years, many of them would most likely not see each other again.

The team, sweaty and tired, would most likely not be thinking about it any time soon, because their thoughts were too consumed by the idea that worlds seemed so much closer than it had seemed only a day ago, and while they were excited to once again compete for the title of world champions, they wished that they could slow down the clock and give themselves just a little bit more time before having to face the overwhelmingly large audience and intimidating judges.

***

Naomi POV:

I wiped the sweat from my forehead as I walked through the main hallway of the convention center, still trying to wrap my head around the fact that next time we performed for an audience other than our coaches, we would be in Florida, crossing our fingers that we went home wearing ring and a gold jacket.