Hallie makes it back to the bench just as the stony-faced judges reveal her score: a flat 12.850. That means she’s officially slipped down to ninth place. I feel sick. As long as she doesn’t completely bomb floor, she should qualify to compete at Olympic Trials. (The top fourteen competitors will go to Trials.) But there’s no guarantee of that—anything could happen at a competition, especially with her confidence at an all-time low right now—and ninth place is a brutal, embarrassing spot to be in, even out of seventeen total spots. Ideally, she’d be in the top five or six, if not fully in the top three for medal contention. I hate to imagine Jasmine’s commentary right now. It can’t be good.
Ryan spots Hallie’s empty water bottle and goes to refill it.
“I’ll be back in a minute,” he promises.
Hallie scowls and slumps down further in her seat. There’s a beat of silence between us.
“I’m completely failing,” she says morosely. “I’m messing up over and over again on live TV, looking like a total idiot.”
“Hey, scoot,” I say, moving to sit next to her. “You’re not an idiot. At all. I promise.”
She slides over a few inches but doesn’t look at me. She’s staring at the big screen, transfixed as Emma sticks a powerful double-double on floor and makes it look easy.
“I’m in ninth place,” she spits out. “Ninth place. That’s for idiots.”
“You have to stop calling yourself an idiot,” I say.
She gives me a look full of skeptical contempt that reminds me she is still a surly teenager. She might have traded in the typical trappings of a teen girl’s life for the discipline, demands, and pressures of a fully grown adult athlete’s, but this is one thing she can’t change. She’s a sixteen-year-old girl, behaving the way any sixteen-year-old would.
She scrunches up her face. “I didn’t work this hard to be all the way down the scoreboard.”
“I know,” I say carefully. I try to figure out what to say to lift her spirits. “But maybe there’s more to it than that. What if you can just appreciate the fact that you’ve worked so hard to be here? I know you get so much joy out of performing. Just go out there and have fun showing off what you can do, you know?”
She tilts her head and stares at me.
“You’re nuts,” she says. “You’ve lost it.”
“I’m just trying to show you the silver lining,” I insist. “Because there is one.”
“If you kind of squint,” she adds.
“Squint really carefully, yeah,” I say. “You’re here. You deserve to be here.”
She takes a long sip of her water and shakes her head slowly.
“You sound extremely yoga right now,” she says.
“I’m just jealous that you get to go out there and deliver the hell out of your next routine,” I say. “You’re living my dream.”
She sighs dramatically.
“I’ll go slay on floor if you promise to stop talking like a corny Oprah knockoff,” she says.
“Deal,” I say, extending my hand.
She shakes it. “Deal.”
An event coordinator waves Hallie over to start warming up for floor. I shout ridiculously supportive comments as she walks away. But once she’s gone, the pit in my stomach returns.
* * *
Floor warm-ups fly by. Brit delivers a surprisingly lovely performance to a delicate piece of classical music, and Hallie whispers to me that she must have gotten new choreography. Up next, Delia strides calmly onto the floor to perform a knockout routine that inspires the audience to give her a standing ovation. On the big screen, you can see tears glittering in her eyes as she waves to her fans and hugs her coach. The moment is powerful and heartbreaking. When the judges award her the breathtakingly high mark of 15.275, it’s clear she’s earned every bit of it.
Meanwhile, Hallie is trembling. She rises from the bench and shakes out each leg so her knees don’t buckle beneath her. More than any other moment in her life, the pressure is on.
“Let’s go, Hallie!” I call out.
“Come on, Hal, you got this,” Ryan says loudly.
“We had a good talk while you were gone,” I say. “I think she’ll be okay.”
“If she’s not, I think her parents will skin us alive,” Ryan mutters.
Hallie’s name rings out over the loudspeaker, and the judges flick to new sheets of paper in their notebooks. She salutes at the edge of the blue mat, then struts into position. There’s a high, clear beep to signal that she should prepare herself, and then the opening notes of her new floor music. This is her first time performing the routine I crafted in competition, and I’m anxious to see how it’s received.
Hallie throws herself into the first few fierce steps of her choreography, just like we practiced, and I am so proud. She’s a swirl of limbs and piercing gazes as she pivots, backs up into the corner, and lunges into her first tumbling pass. She whips across the floor with enough energy to power a fleet of Maseratis, rocketing skyward at the end into the stag jump we drilled on the trampoline. Her leg levers up elegantly behind her, and she lands on beat.
She beams and surges onward through a frenzied attempt at her leap series. She’ll get a small deduction for failing to hit the full 180-degree split, but it’s a marked improvement from the first time she tried that combination. When she slides down to set up her wolf turn, I cringe and grab Ryan’s hand. His palm glistens with sweat. Hallie’s brows knit together as she steels herself to spin. I can’t breathe as I watch her rotate cleanly. It’s the best wolf turn I’ve ever seen her do.
On her second tumbling pass, she flies high above the floor and sticks the landing. As she prances through her choreography, I whisper a prayer. Please keep this up. Please let this be okay. Hallie attacks her third and fourth tumbling passes with pure grit. She spirals through the air and digs in her heels when she lands. As the music hits its final note, she throws her head back into the dramatic pose we practiced so many times in the Summit mirror. Her chest heaves as she tries to catch her breath. There’s a second of silence, and then Hallie climbs to her feet, saluting the judges with all the energy she has left. The crowd claps as the judges continue to scribble down notes.
Ryan and I intercept her along the side of the floor for high fives and hugs, and we walk back to our spot together. Her breathing is ragged.
“Hallie, that was unbelievable,” I tell her excitedly. “The best I’ve ever seen you perform.”
“You were awesome,” Ryan confirms.
She pants and gives a half-hearted thumbs-up. “Don’t congratulate me until the score is ready,” she warns.
“Don’t worry about the score; that was phenomenal,” I insist.
I hope, of course, that the judges reward her for one of the best floor routines she’s probably ever done in her entire life. But I’m also nervous—they don’t award medals for personal improvement. Her score will be compared to the other gymnasts’.
The judges deliver their score: 13.475. It moves Hallie up to seventh place.
Hallie lets out a low moan. “That’s not good enough,” she wails.