You Will Know Me(47)

It was black inside, and loud with a warm, wet wind from the open window. Devon lay there, still and helpless, one arm dangling off the bed.

Katie stood a moment, listening to the wind, watching it rush over her daughter’s body, so motionless. Her hand, palm facing out, caught the hallway light. The funny stigmata the gymnastics rips had formed in its center.

“I’m sorry” came the whisper and now she saw Devon’s eyes shimmering in the heavy dark.

“Sorry for what, baby?”

“Mom, what if it’s all my fault?”

“No,” Katie said, stepping inside. “Nothing is your fault.” She was thinking of what Teddy had said. That Hailey had told him some things about Devon. Things that were “raw” and made him rock back on his feet.

She sat down on the edge of her bed, feeling Devon’s body stiffen, nearly cracking. She rested her hand on Devon’s ankle, hot and heavy.

Devon looked at her closely, tilting her head like a cat.

“Was Coach T. here?”

“Yes,” Katie said, not taking her eyes off her.

“What did he want?” Devon asked, more awake now, body tensing. “Did he want to talk to me?”

Katie paused. “Devon, do you know why Hailey did this to you?”

Devon said nothing. Katie waited. There was something happening. She knew it. She let the silence linger and kept her gaze fixed on Devon.

Devon held that gaze for a long minute.

“Maybe she thinks I’ll tell.”

“Tell what?” Katie asked, a creeping feeling on her neck, like a pin scratching.



It was like opening a diary, Devon’s diary. Except Devon was doing it. Inviting her in. Katie had always thought her daughter never confided because she had nothing to confide.



It started a few weeks ago, she said. It was a Saturday practice, amid the sweat and chalk fog of the gym. Only a few parents were staggered through the stands, not even Katie, who was at swim class with Drew. Devon looked up in the stands and saw Ryan.

Usually, if he visited, which was almost never, he stayed close to Hailey’s part of the gym, where she reigned over the seven-year-olds, bellybands cinched around their soft centers.

But today he was sitting on Devon’s side, with a perfect view of the vault.

She focused on her routines. Round-offs to the board, drills onto stacked mats and onto the trapezoid, and especially Yurchenkos into the pit. Gaze trained on the sloping tongue of the vault table. The place she needed her hands to hit, fingers straight ahead. Telling herself: Don’t slip off the tongue.

But at a certain point she noticed Hailey had abandoned her seven-year-olds to a round-off drill and strolled over to watch her.

After Devon’s last run, Hailey approached her at the chalk stand.

Devon, Ryan thinks your vault is mind-blowing, she said, smiling but in a weird way. And the way she said mind-blowing, like it was a dirty word.

Later, Devon saw the two of them in the BelStars parking lot, leaning against Hailey’s Altima and talking very closely.

Walking past, she thought she heard Hailey say, Is that how you like them now, her voice peculiar. Like little boys. Like that one time when Hailey couldn’t get Ryan on the phone and said to Lacey Weaver, Your mom would tell me, right, if Ryan was screwing that hostess? The one who shakes her tits at him?

(“Mom,” Devon said, “that’s how she talks when no adults are around. She’s so…nasty.”)

Then Ryan came to practice again. He stopped her at the vending machine. He said he was sorry if Hailey had made her uncomfortable but not to worry about it. It was Hailey’s way. She’s always been jealous as a cat, he’d said with a shrug.

But that made Devon worry about it more. And something about the way Hailey had started looking at her, watching her on the beam, even in the locker room.

Then, last Friday, she was running, shin splints aching, in Hood Park, just off Ash Road, and Ryan spotted her, gave her a ride home.

That night, she got the first text.

I know whats up.

I know u were w him last nite. I could smell yr disgusting wrist grips in the car.

And then more came, and they got nastier.

Gym bitch, nasty whore. You’ll get yours.



(“Mom,” Devon said, “I never answered any of them. I stopped reading them. I’ve heard things about Hailey. How she’d beaten up girls. Crazy stuff.”)

The next night, Saturday, she was at Lacey’s birthday party when Hailey called.

At first, she was really nice, like the before-Hailey, the one who brought her famous funfetti cupcakes on birthdays and snuck them out for secret frozen-yogurt runs in her little purple car. She said that she was sorry about any bad feeling between them and wanted to explain in person and would Devon consider meeting up, to talk?

But the more she spoke, the stranger Hailey sounded. Her words seemed to stretch out and then speed up, and her mouth seemed too close to the phone. It gave Devon a bad feeling, and she said she couldn’t see her, she was at Lacey’s party. She didn’t even have a way to get there.

Something told her not to go. It felt like a trap.

But then Hailey said, It’s because you’re seeing him tonight, isn’t it? He goes to you after me, doesn’t he. He puts his hands on you and your little-boy body. Do you even have tits? Do you even have pubic hair? That’s how he likes them. Freaks with a freak foot.