Letters to Nowhere (13 page)

He nudged me until my back touched the side of the house again. He was so close I could feel his heart pounding just as fast as mine. And my mind turned to hazy, warm fuzziness that covered all the bad thoughts like a thick blanket. One of his arms curved around my back, his other hand resting on my cheek. He leaned down, lowering his face to mine and my hands were reaching up, touching the sides of his neck.

His mouth barely touched mine and then he stopped. “Shit…Karen . . .”

“What?” I managed to whisper.

He lifted his eyes to meet mine. “We can’t do this. Something about it just feels so wrong.”

The world came back into focus and my face must have been bright red with humiliation. I dropped my hands and ducked under his arm. “Let’s just pretend it didn’t happen, okay? The first or the second time.”

Jordan jogged after me. “That’s the thing, I don’t really have to pretend anything with you and I like it that way. Crossing this line changes everything. It’ll be weird with us.”

I turned to face him. He looked so sincere and vulnerable it made me want to kiss him again. “You’re right. No kissing. Just friends.”

Relief washed over his face. “Great.” And then he hugged me really quick, like I had done earlier today. “Now, let’s go home before Coach Bentley figures out that neither of us are capable of eating pizza for three hours.”

***

“You guys look very…” Jordan and I both held our breath, mentally filling in the blank from Coach Bentley—
guilty
,
secretive
,
intoxicated
…”Cold.”

“Oh, yeah. I took Karen sledding,” Jordan said with the ease of a professional con man. “She’s never been before. Talk about a deprived childhood. See why I quit gymnastics, Dad?”

Damn, he’s good
. I rolled my eyes behind Jordan’s back. “It’s cold, wet, and there’s really no challenge to it, other than surviving frostbite. I don’t think I missed out on much.”

Coach Bentley shrugged at both of us and then turned his focus back to the TV. By the time I walked into my new bedroom, it smelled completely like…
Jordan
…like his aftershave stuff in the dark green bottle resting on the back of the toilet. I changed into my warmest pajamas and snuggled up under the covers, sighing with relief that I wouldn’t have to spend another night in that closet. And pretty soon, my old furniture would have a brand new scent after its new owner took it over.

Just before I drifted off to sleep, Jordan flipped on the hall light and stood in my doorway, leaning against the frame. His hair was wet from the shower and looked more brown than blond. He wore St. Louis University flannel pants and no shirt, just a wet towel hanging around his neck.

“A little more comfortable than the closet, huh?”

“Uh–huh.” I closed my eyes again so I didn’t have to stare at his bare chest.

“I’m sorry about
earlier
. I have a feeling I’m gonna hate myself tomorrow for that.”

“Don’t, seriously,” I mumbled. “It’s not like we were tangled up on the couch with your hand up my skirt.”

The wet towel hit me in the side of the face and I laughed, still too tired to open my eyes. “I am so not picking that up.”

I heard Jordan’s feet creak across my floor as he bent over to retrieve the bathroom towel, his light laughter telling me everything was okay with us. “Good night, Karen.”

“Night, Jordan.”

Even though I agreed with Jordan’s reasoning for not kissing me again, that didn’t keep me from falling asleep thinking about his mouth against mine, his hand resting on my face, the endearing nerves that caused him to spill everything he was feeling. Overall, it really was a great first kiss. I just wouldn’t tell him that. No need to further inflate his ego.

Monday morning, Coach Bentley had the elite girls come into the gym at the usual time, but only for a team meeting and physical therapy with the trainer. This was a tradition Coach Cordes started following a grueling weekend at National Training Camp, and Bentley must have agreed with it because he kept it up. We usually got the evening off as well, unless we needed more physical therapy or choreography.

Blair did, in fact, have a stress fracture in her tibia and needed a minimum of three weeks’ leg–rest to allow it to heal. My shoulder was already feeling better, so our trainer didn’t even send me to the sports medicine clinic next door for an x–ray, let alone an MRI.

Ellen had been diagnosed with pneumonia in the ER last night after returning home from Houston. She was here anyway, because we had to be on our deathbed to miss a team meeting. She had on her baggy sweats and a winter jacket when she curled up on the blue carpet to wait for Coach Bentley’s painful rehash of the weekend.

Stevie sat on one side of me, back straight, eyes wide and ready to listen, but I could see the defeat on her face. She’d been knocked down a notch this weekend and I didn’t know how that would affect her decision to return to gymnastics.

“I won’t beat around the bush,” Bentley said, pacing in front of us. “It wasn’t a great weekend, ladies. Not great at all.”

From the corner of my eye, I saw Blair blinking back tears. Knowing Blair’s mom, they’d probably spent the entire morning analyzing every angle of her injury, looking for a place to point blame. Usually that included lectures for Blair about anything from not training hard enough to training too hard. When Blair’s mom got like that, my mom used to steer me away and find an excuse for us to snatch Blair and go shopping or out to lunch.

“Obviously, Nina Jones and her committee could see with their own eyes that Ellen was ill. Ellen hasn’t lost any ground or hurt her position, but regardless, it was a missed opportunity to show what she has to offer once again.” Bentley stopped pacing. “Sometimes things are beyond our control. Blair proved she was a responsible enough athlete not to compromise her position by training with a serious injury. Not every gymnast is able to resist that temptation to push yourself when you know it will do more damage than good. Even I wasn’t able to understand this in all my years of competing.”

Blair sighed but nodded her thanks to Bentley for at least making her feel like she did the right thing.

“You may not have been able to wow them this weekend,” he said to Blair. “But the maturity you showed is worth points in the long run, and we all know this sport is more about the long–term goals than one weekend at National Team Camp.”

“It was Karen’s idea.” Blair flashed me a sad watery smile. “To tell you about my leg.”

Bentley gave me a nod of approval. “You girls do a fantastic job of supporting each other. I was told that by Nina and her team several times this weekend. And Blair, it could have been a real problem down the road had you pushed through that camp, ignored the injury, and out–performed the majority of the girls there. If they had picked you for the American Cup team only to find out days later that you were too injured to compete, that wouldn’t have sat well with your position long–term.”

I waited for Bentley to bring up my panic attack and realized quickly that it was not a topic for team meetings. More for the shrink that I’d see again tomorrow.

“Stevie,” Bentley said. “You aren’t going to be back to top form in only two months. We have to be realistic about your progress. You showed consistency in the easier versions of your routines. Every day you seem to get an old skill back again. Just give it time.”

“But we wanted to make you look good, Coach,” Ellen said. “It was your first camp with Nina Jones.”

She looked so young, curled up in a ball on the gymnastics floor, bright red circles on her cheeks, I half expected her to stuff her thumb in her mouth.

Bentley grabbed one of the sixteen–inch folded mats and scooted it closer, sitting down in front of us. “What makes you think I didn’t look good?”

Blair shrugged beside me. “I did nothing but bars and dance, Ellen puked in a garbage can in the gym and spent the weekend in bed or coughing on everyone. And Karen…well, we won’t go there…” I felt my face flush, but was glad she spoke up about the elephant in the room. “And Stevie basically did level ten skills all weekend, making a lot of people ask what she was doing there in the first place. Not that I’d ask that. Stevie’s the shit, in my eyes, always will be, of course.”

Stevie reached across Blair and gave her a high five, grinning at both of us. “Thanks, babe. I needed to hear that.”

“Your honesty is appreciated,” Coach Bentley said to Blair. “But you’re wrong. What we showed Nina and the committee is that I’ve been lucky enough to train four girls who not only support each other without losing the opportunity to compete against one another, you also have respect for your bodies. You aren’t desperate enough to lie about pain and injuries. As a group we out–performed the other kids on the physical abilities testing and all of you showed a twenty–percent improvement from the last camp.”

It was true that Bentley paid much more attention to strength and flexibility than Coach Cordes had. Over the past six months, we had all made tons of progress in those areas. Bentley had also hired a real dance teacher to specifically do ballet training with us twice a week. I’d be the first to admit that I had whined about it in the beginning, but of course Stacey was all for it, going on and on about how the Russians and Chinese have always trained ballet with their gymnasts from a very early age.

Bentley turned his eyes to me again. “And Karen? You were asked to change something, to try something new, and you did as you were told without question. I overheard Nina Jones telling another coach how compliant and willing to take direction you girls are. Apparently, some of the others need to work on this.”

Blair mumbled the name of a girl on the senior National Team whom we all referred to as the “Gym Diva.” Ellen and I both laughed under our breaths.

“I have some good news for you. The real purpose for this meeting,” Bentley said, standing again. “Nina suggested—since none of you got to show everything you could do this weekend—that I take the four of you to the big invitational in Chicago in April. It’s a little earlier than we had planned on competing, but because of the American Cup in Chicago the following weekend, the entire National Team Committee will be there, and hopefully we can show them four healthy elite gymnasts ready to perform near–perfect routines.”

Not a bad way to end our meeting, that was for sure. But I still left feeling a bit hollow about my problems over the weekend. Like Coach Bentley had intentionally danced around them without really hammering into me that I needed to figure my shit out before things got out of control.

***

After physical therapy, Blair and I were in the locker room gathering our stuff when she begged me to come over and hang out. “Please, Karen. I’m going nuts, totally nuts! My mom is practically sobbing, saying I’m going to get so behind and I’ll never be ready in time for Nationals and she should have taken me for x–rays last week. I can’t deal with her right now.”

I kept my eyes on my locker and continued stuffing items into my gym bag. “I’m totally behind in calculus. I got a B minus on the last quiz. And now I’ve got three assignments to make up…” This was a complete lie. I’d never received a B on anything and I was way ahead in all my classes. I didn’t even have any work to do this week.

Blair folded her arms across her chest and stared me down. “I’m not taking no for an answer, Karen. Are you trying to isolate yourself or something? Because that’s not healthy.”

I fumbled with the zipper on my jacket, feeling flustered by her direct approach to a subject she had not been direct about before. “It’s not that, I promise. I’m not trying to be alone.”

“You heard what Bentley said,” she demanded, stepping closer and invading my personal space. “We need to support each other. Even if it means telling your teammate that she’s too injured to participate in camp, or that she really needs to spend the day locked up in her best friend’s bedroom, listening to music and possibly eating large amounts of candy.”

Intense anger bubbled up inside me, something so fierce I hardly recognized myself or my voice when I stood up and faced Blair. “If you were my best friend you’d figure out that maybe walking into your house is going to make me think of nothing but those two policemen showing up to tell me my parents are dead!”

Blair’s eyes grew like saucers. She lifted her hands and stepped back. “I’m sorry…
God,
I’m sorry, Karen.”

It felt so good to yell that at her. Relief washed over me and my legs suddenly turned to Jell–O. I sank back onto the bench behind me. “It’s okay. I’m sorry for yelling.”

Both of us were silent for several long seconds and I finally looked up at her. “Can we just go to the mall?”

She let out a laugh filled with both kindness and relief. “That sounds great.”

***

Instead of having Mrs. Martin drive us, we took the bus to the mall and headed straight for our favorite Italian restaurant. It was barely lunchtime, but we got a table anyway because there was a lot to talk about before we could even think about eating.

“Oh my God!” Blair squealed when I filled her in on my boy drama. “Jordan Bentley kissed you? I can’t believe it! Is he a good kisser? In my imagination, he’s
really
good.”