You Will Know Me(13)

“But then you stop?” he said, smiling. “Feeling deeply?”

She was startled to hear her own laugh, sharp and fast, almost like a bark.

Then, in an instant, Hailey was behind him, smiling at Katie, giggling. “This creep!”

Her arms wrapped tight across his chest, like a shield.



When they returned from the trip, Coach T. convened a strategy meeting at his home, Mama T.’s famous sun tea and biscuits, Eric and Katie in those stiff-backed dining-room chairs.

Pulling out his flow chart again, he directed their pensive faces back to the Track, dog-eared, coffee-rippled.

“It’s not over,” he said, his voice firm, eyes intent. “Not for our girl.”

“You think she can try again? For Junior Elite next year?” Katie asked. They’d talked and talked about it, she and Eric, endlessly. But Devon refused. Didn’t even want to hear the word Elite.

“She could,” Teddy said. “But I think she feels like she’s going backward. And she’s aging out soon, and if she—she won’t—but if she fails again, the crush to her confidence, the impact on her ranking…”

“So what are you saying?” Eric asked. “Tell us.”

“I didn’t want to raise the possibility before, but that pit, it’s a game changer,” he said, slapping one hand on the damask tablecloth. “Listen to me, you two: There’s a loophole. A shortcut.”

With the thickest marker he had, he drew a line that went from Level 10, through the doomed Junior Elite, and straight to the next arrowed box.

Stopping there, he circled Senior Elite, drew a looping star around it.

“You can do that?” Eric asked. “You can skip?”

“No one does that,” Katie said. “Do they?”

Teddy looked at them, the pouches under his eyes quivering with intensity.

“Very few. But there are exceptions.” He drew another line, even thicker this time. “And we all know Devon is deeply exceptional.”

Eric nodded, Teddy nodded, their eyes locked on each other’s.

After countless nights spent talking about Devon, raising money for the gym, watching footage of Devon’s routines, standing below her as her feet fastened on the practice beam, the two of them didn’t even need to speak.

“And she’s stopped the clock,” Coach T. added. “You know?”

At first Katie didn’t. Then she did.

“Devon’s going to get breasts, Teddy,” Katie blurted. “And hips. And everything else. She’s going to be a woman.”

“No one’s disputing that,” Teddy said, laughing a little too loudly. “After all, only Peter Pan gets to keep his baby teeth!”

Katie turned to Eric, but his gaze was fixed on the chart, on the thick black arrow leading off the page.



“But what if she doesn’t want to?” Katie asked Eric that night, brushing their teeth side by side. “Is it even good for her, all this pressure? It’s been so hard since qualifiers.”

“Well, we’ll ask her,” Eric said. “She’s the one that has to decide.”

So they did. And her eyes shuttled between Katie and Eric, watching them, doing that one-sided lip-biting thing that meant she was thinking.

Then she said, “Okay.”



The plan was in place. The new one.

For the next twenty months, Devon would compete as much as she could, increase her ranking and improve her prospects and get better and better and better. It would mean out-of-town trips, out-of-state trips, invitationals, classics, all the state and regional and national competitions—which meant arrangements had to be made with Devon’s school, Eric pleading Devon’s case, pointing out this unique opportunity, her strong GPA, her immense promise. He would handle everything, get tutors, pay for private lessons. Whatever it took.

Then, in July of her sixteenth year, Devon would try for Senior Elite. The first qualifier of her sixteenth year.

Just knowing they were back on the Track, even if it was a new one, made everything better. Brought order back into their lives.



So Katie had forgotten about it, or tried to. The possibility that the foot injury could have been to blame for what happened at qualifiers, and everything that might mean. Until months later.

She hadn’t meant to do anything but deliver the laundry, the teetering basket of leotards and warm-up sweats, and change Devon’s sheets. Tugging the mattress pad, that awkward crawl to the corner that pressed too close to the built-in bookshelf, her hand hit something soft. The felt fabric of a fat diary—I Heart Everything across its crimson cover.

The idea that Devon kept a diary, and hid it between mattress and wall, felt so charmingly old-fashioned, or out of time entirely. Devon wasn’t ordinary or typical in any way, after all.

Katie, her hand on the cover, hesitated.

These are the things you just don’t do.

But your child’s privacy, what did it even mean after you’d spent so many years with your daughter’s body at the center of your life? So much energy focused on whatever hurt most—the once-sprained arm, the soft-backed left knee, the chest bruised after Devon drove her own knees into it. All the talk, the open talk, about bras and panties, which ones might show during meets and lead to deductions, and when it was time for bikini waxes. And all those nights: hard strokes on her calf muscles, ice on her bar-bruised pelvic bones, on the inside of her beam-bitten thighs, and, not in years, but still, rubbing Vaseline where the seams of her leotard rubbed and bristled.