You Will Know Me(14)

Katie opened its pages.

Today: straddle jump ?, ? & full on the beam…Working on: Giant ? + front giant ?, giant full, toe-shoot, double layout dismount.

Entry after entry about gymnastics, chronicling the minutiae, and photos of her favorite gymnasts glued onto pages, silver-Sharpied arrows and circles over their poses, stance, muscles.

It wasn’t a diary at all. It was more like a training log.

6 a.m. workout before school. Stretch, run for 15 min. Half-hour of conditioning, 25 min stretching or ballet, then squat jumps and pull-ups, then start with beam. I had trouble with my front pike half, but the rest went ok. Coach says I am achieving. He pumped his fist at me three times.

Reading it, standing the whole time, leaning against the window for light, Katie was struck by how different it was from her own private ramblings at fourteen, all boys and song lyrics and fake IDs and where to hide the purloined pint of Jack Daniel’s for Friday night.



But then, closing the diary, her eye caught a photo pasted inside the back cover.

A snapshot taken in that very room, her bedspread visible. The boomerang of Devon’s mutilated right foot, close up.

Under the light, her desk lamp, it looked like it was glowing.

It was horrifying, and beautiful.

Why was it the picture felt more intimate, far more intimate, than a secret disappointment, a boy-crush confession?

And why did looking at it feel even more like a violation?

Beneath it, Devon had written:

I had the dream again last night. The one where I look down and my right foot is ten times its size with skin like scales. So I take a knife from the kitchen drawer, the one Mom has to use with both hands, and I chop it off. The blood is like a fountain.

But Dad sees me and runs up the basement stairs. He ties his belt around my ankle and pulls it tight. The buckle is shining.

You need this, he said, grabbing my foot, twisting and molding it like art-class clay. It’s your superpower.

And I know he’s right.



What is this, Katie thought, covering her mouth. It was like turning over a heavy rock and finding something alive there, wriggling. Prying something open and pulling at its hot wires.

That can’t be Devon, she thought.

Who was this girl?



Katie put the diary back into its tight wedge and vowed never to look at it again.



“Mom,” Devon said that night, calling out as Katie walked past her doorway, “were you in here?”

“What? No. Just cleaning. Why?”

“Nothing. I just thought maybe you were.”

Katie didn’t want Devon to see her face. She was worried her face would reveal something.

All she could think of was the photo, and Devon’s dream. The strangeness of the foot, the belt. But dreams were that way, weren’t they? And they were private, maybe Devon’s only private things.

Never again, she told herself. I won’t be that mom. She needs someplace to be herself. To be messy and sad and human. Real.

To be whatever she was becoming.





II

Necessity is what you do in life when there is only one path, choice, or desire.

—Nadia Comaneci, Letters to a Young Gymnast





Chapter Four



Eighteen Months Later

“Today, some of the most anticipated moments will be when Devon Knox takes the floor,” the play-by-play announcer said, voice hushed as if this were the Olympics. “Just shy of sixteen, Devon has proven one of the most formidable talents in the region who has not yet gone Elite. That may all change in six weeks, when she’ll take her chances at the Senior Elite Qualifiers.”

High in the stands, Katie and Eric watched. The purr-purr of Devon’s feet during her floor routine, the zinging violin strokes of “Assassin’s Tango” skittering through the air—she was excelling.

Katie had seen the routine a hundred times or more, but it looked different today. She couldn’t say why.

“She’s more confident,” Eric said, as if reading her mind. “That’s what it is.”

Katie wasn’t sure, but her daughter’s body—slithering on the mat, then rising—seemed alive in ways she had never seen before, her scarlet leotard like a flame, leaping and flickering and flaring hot.



“Now at the vault,” the announcer said, punctuating with dramatic pauses, “Miss…Devon…Knox.”

Grabbing for each other’s hands, Katie and Eric watched Devon wait patiently for her cue.

Standing at the foot of the runway, the massive Flip into Spring Invitational banner behind her, all the playfulness of her floor routine gone, Devon wore the face of a stone Artemis.

It was remarkable, when Katie thought about it. How her daughter, so strong already, her body an air-to-air missile, had metamorphosed into this force. Shoulders now like a ship mast, rope-knot biceps, legs roped, arms sinewed, a straight, hard line from trunk to neck, her hipless torso resting on thighs like oak beams. No one came close. Sometimes Katie couldn’t believe it was the same girl.

“She’s up,” Eric said, pointing to the judges.

“Stick it this time, Knox!” someone called out behind them, and Eric’s head swiveled around, red charging up his face.

Katie pressed her hand on his arm until he turned back to the floor.