Letters to Nowhere(13)

Bentley said nothing for a long time, listening to them. Finally, he cleared his throat and all three of us looked right at him.

He placed a clean white sheet of paper on his clipboard and wrote Layout Jaeger on the top. He hung it on a screw that stuck out of the side of the pit bar. “We’ll keep a tally sheet. Karen has to catch the release a hundred times and mark them all here. Then another hundred with the rest of the routine added after the release. Then another hundred with full routines on the uneven bars. If you can do that, we’ll add it in to the nearest competition.”

He hadn’t said “no” or “let’s wait for the off season,” which I guess was something positive, but still, those goals were pretty impossible, considering I had three other events to train. With ten routines a day, I should be able to hit one hundred in about ten days, but first I had to get my numbers in on the pit bar and get brave enough to even try the skill without the protection of soft foam blocks underneath me.

One step at a time, Karen.

The discussion was over after Bentley presented his compromise. It was genius on his part, really. He left everything up to me, instead of forbidding it and having me or Stacey bug him about it every day.

Before we took our usual mid–practice snack break, I joined Blair and Ellen, who looked more than distraught about me getting that much attention in a single practice.

“Awesome job,” Blair said without really looking at me.

“Yeah, totally cool,” Ellen chimed in, giving me her crowd–pleasing smile.

I was pretty much on cloud nine at that point, even if my teammates were jealous. But my big accomplishment was quickly forgotten. During a bathroom break, I noticed a reddish brown stain. One that had seeped through my nude colored briefs all the way to the very expensive pink leotard my mom had given me for my seventeenth birthday a few weeks ago. My heart pounded. It wasn’t like I didn’t know this moment was coming, but I didn’t recognize the low–level cramp or the lower back pain. My mom always got back pain with her period.

I had prepared for this and yet I was totally and utterly petrified at the sight of blood leaking from a part of my body that had never bled before. I hustled out of the bathroom stall and retrieved my gym bag, where I kept both feminine products and an extra leotard. Even with my previous tampon training, my hands were shaking so much that it took a while to get it in.

Stevie and I really hadn’t talked about period stuff, but I was pretty sure she’d had hers for at least a few years now. I knew for a fact Blair and Ellen had not. I knew this because the three of us were in the bathroom during a competition last season and we overheard this mom and girl in a stall basically in utter distress because the girl had just started, obviously for the first time, and she had no idea how to use a tampon and had two more events to compete.

With gymnastics, pads are not an option. Leotards hardly cover anything and our legs are constantly coming apart with straddle jumps and splits. Then you have sports photographers snapping pictures with their fancy closeup lenses. You can’t hide anything.

Ellen and her flippant little girl nature didn’t think much of it, but Blair and I both freaked out, knowing that could be us any day now, and we didn’t want to be stuck in a bathroom stall forcing our mothers to give us a tampon lesson during Nationals or World trials. After that, we had a sleepover and pored over the directions on the Tampax box, and then we went through three boxes until we had mastered the art of it.

By the time I made it back into the gym, the others were five minutes into beam workout and Stacey looked more than livid at my disappearance.

“Did you change leotards?” she snapped at me.

I felt my heart speed up again. I could tell Stacy the truth and I probably should, but for some reason, I freaked out, maybe out of fear that she and Bentley would be concerned about this new change affecting my gymnastics, like with Blair’s growth spurt. “I…uh…spilled Gatorade.”

She let out an angry breath. “Gatorade?! That’s pure sugar, Karen. You know that.”

I leaned close and whispered, “I had diarrhea this morning. I’m feeling much better now.”

She sighed, looking less pissed off and reached in Olivia’s diaper bag, pulling out a banana. “Eat this. It works better than sugary drinks.”

Like I would actually eat something from a bag that holds diapers.

I watched her bend down to the little car seat resting on the floor by the beams and place a pacifier in Olivia’s mouth. She used her foot to rock the seat back and forth while keeping an eye on Stevie’s beam routine.

Grief heavier than I’d ever experienced in the last three weeks swept over me. Would Stacey be there for Olivia when this happened to her years from now? Most likely she would. The odds were in her favor. And most likely she’d be around for all the events that followed this one.

But my mother had already missed this and everything after. She might have been a little materialistic and self–centered at times, but she would have made this whole period thing so much easier. I could practically hear her voice in my head.

“Yeah, it sucks, Karen, but at least you don’t have to keep worrying about when it’s going to happen.”

She would have done something special, but not humiliating. Like planning a girls’ night downtown. Maybe even stay in a hotel and shop and watch movies all night. She would know exactly how to tell my dad and not have him feel like his little girl was suddenly going to move out and get married to some *. And Mom would never let me feel bad about growing up. Not that Coach Bentley or Stacey would out loud, but silently…