Letters to Nowhere(66)

I sat up in bed and felt my face flush. “I’m up. I’m fine,” I mumbled, sliding out of bed and jumping to my feet. Both of them stood there for a few seconds, then turned around and left after it was obvious that I wasn’t going to say anything else.


March 30

Mom and Dad,




I take back what I said before about not wanting you to answer my letters for fear of a concrete reason to believe in ghosts. At this point, seeing a ghost can’t be worse than these nightmares. So, please, please find a way tell me what happened the night of your accident?




Love, Karen



***

“I still can’t believe Olivia survived a whole week without Stacey’s boobs,” Blair said as we walked out of the locker room for morning workout.

Stacey had ended up going with Ellen to Australia for the junior meet and had just returned last night. Ellen was back in the gym this morning, sporting two new junior titles to go with her already flourishing gymnastics career. Nina Jones was all about winning on someone else’s turf.

Once Stevie, Blair, and I heard about Ellen’s big win, we’d all started counting down the days to Chicago, knowing Ellen’s giant head would crowd the gym once she got back. It wasn’t that she was egotistical, just young and hadn’t had a huge setback yet. I’d spent more than enough time not winning, so my ego had always stayed normal–sized.

“You guys won’t believe how weird the bars are in Aussie,” Ellen squealed. “It’s like you’re in a box. I was so freaked out during the podium training, but I totally nailed my set on the first day of competition.”

“Yeah, we heard you were a star,” Stevie said, raising an eyebrow for only me and Blair to see.

“Ellen!” Bentley called, waving her over from the lobby. A man and a woman stood beside him.

Ellen turned to us, grinning really big. “I’m getting interviewed for the St. Louis Chronicle!”

She bounced over to Bentley and Ellen’s mom entered the picture, immediately fussing with her hair and whispering things in her ear. My mind wandered to my own mother and missing her. If it had been me in this situation, my mom would have stood back, not saying much, but she would have put on something extra special and fixed her hair so people might mistake her for my sister instead of the woman who gave birth to me.

Bentley stayed with Ellen and the interviewers while the rest of us ran around the floor. Stacey had the day off to catch up on breastfeeding Olivia.

“How’s Jaren?” Blair asked. It was her favorite question these past few weeks. “Are you guys seriously still keeping up the ‘no touching in the house’ policy? Because I find that really hard to believe.”

“I’m a very disciplined person. But we can’t avoid accidental contact.”

Like yesterday, when I was pulling my laundry from the dryer and Jordan was tossing clothes into the washer and my hip kept bumping into his. Otherwise, we kept to our rules, and I hadn’t lied to Bentley about where I was going since the night we had claimed to be at the movies. There always seemed to be something we could do together—grocery shopping or picking up something at the mall, grabbing dinner after Jordan got done coaching and I got done with practice. Especially on days when Bentley wasn’t home until late. Last weekend we even watched a baseball game at Ellen’s house with her parents and younger brother and Blair and Stevie. Of course, there wasn’t any touching, but we hung out.

“We’re starting on vault today,” Bentley said when he and Ellen finally joined us midway through stretching.

I sat up straighter in my left leg splits and looked up at him. “How many Yurchenko doubles do I need today to work the two and a half on the regular mat?”

Bentley’s system was becoming so ingrained in me that I knew how to jump into the conversation and avoid the first couple steps of questioning where I asked him about working on the new skill and he’d go through the pros and cons, deciding on a number of the older, safer skills.

He stared at me for a long moment before answering. “Five clean doubles and then you can move on. Five clean ones in a row.”

I suppressed a groan and flashed him a judges smile. “Sounds good.”

By the time I got through my five required vaults in a row, Stevie had already nailed five of the much more difficult two and a half twisting vaults. In only a few weeks of working on them again, she was getting more height and more consistent landings, and I was behind because today was my first time not landing in the pit with mats stacked up.

The first attempt at the more difficult vault sent me into a giant dive forward roll because I’d been training it with four mats stacked on top of the pit and now I had way too much power. The Amanar vault (aka—the Yurchenko two and a half) was a blind landing. You couldn’t see the ground before hitting it like you could with my regular vault, the Yurchenko double full.

“Slow down that flip, Karen,” Bentley said. “Keep the height. The height is good.”

When I took my next turn, I knew I couldn’t over–rotate again or Bentley would send me back to doing drills. I needed to nail it, or at least make a different mistake. This time I came close to sticking but was just a tiny bit short of rotation. My feet slid out from under me and I ended up on my butt.

Bentley gave me a nod and said nothing, so I knew I was on the right track. Neither of us had brought up the subject of me competing this vault in Chicago, but he hadn’t been fighting me on it like he had with the other skills.