Chapter 1

The clinic gives me one sheet of paper and Daniel Reed holds it the way you'd hold a coupon somebody printed off the internet at home.

"Limited landings," he reads. He has a nice voice. Everybody says so, parents especially, the kind of voice that makes a hard thing sound like weather. "No consecutive high-difficulty landings. Evaluation after any hard landing." He folds the sheet along the crease the clinic already put in it and hands it back. "Congratulations, Kimberly. You're a person with paperwork."

"I'm a person who's cleared."

"You're a person who's restricted." He says it pleasantly. That's the trick with Daniel. He can hand you the worst sentence of your week with the same face he uses for team photos. "Restricted is fine. Restricted is a stage. Warm up in the rehabilitation lane. I've got you in a preferred block on the good pit."

The offer lands hard enough to embarrass me. The preferred blocks are the hours when the equipment is fresh and the springs haven't been beaten flat by three sessions of twelve-year-olds. Everybody wants them. Nobody gets them by asking.

"Thank you," I say.

"Don't thank me. Land."

Reed Elite Center smells the way it has since I was eight: chalk, rubber, the sharp lemon stuff Marta sprays on the vault runway, and underneath it a sweetness like somebody spilled a Gatorade during the first Obama administration and nobody ever found it. I've missed it enough to be embarrassed. I've been away long enough that my hands went soft in the middle and I had to break in new grips, and the leather still creaks like a shoe.

The rehabilitation lane is a strip of blue panel mats along the north wall, eight-inch mats stacked at the end. It's where you go when you're broken. I've watched other girls stand there and spent one guilty second feeling sorry for them, mostly glad they weren't me. Now it's me, and Daniel drags the folding chair over from the office door and sits down at the end of my lane with his ankle on his knee and his arms crossed, and the whole gym notices.

Heather bumps my shoulder on her way past to floor. She's got her hoodie on over her leotard, the faded one with the busted zipper she refuses to replace.

"You good?" she says.

"I'm great."

"Uh-huh." She looks at Daniel in the chair, then back at me. "You want me to stand over there so it's less like a firing squad?"

"I want you to go do your floor."

"That's not a no." But she goes, and I love her for going, and also for the fact that she'd have stayed.

I do the boring part first. Ankle circles. Bridges. The rehab stuff my therapist calls activation and Jeanette calls the funeral, because you do it slow and everybody watches. Jeanette Duncan is on bars behind me with her chalk bucket and her tool roll parked on the floor beside her like she's about to fix the drywall, and she gives me a nod without stopping her swing, which from Jeanette is roughly a parade.

At the top of the lane, there is only the thing.

Here's what nobody tells you about coming back. It isn't the pain you're scared of. The pain I could handle; I've been handling pain since I was nine and my ankle sounded like a light bulb. What I'm scared of is the split second after my feet hit, that quarter-beat before the signal comes up the spine, when your whole body is a phone with one bar waiting to see if the call connects.

I take the run. Nothing Daniel could put on a highlight reel: a controlled landing off a low set, drilled a thousand times, the kind I could do in a parking lot in flip-flops before the injury. My feet find the mat. The impact goes up through my heels and my knees and into my hips.

It keeps going and arrives as pressure. Warm, dull, ordinary. The signal comes back clean.

I stand up out of the landing with my arms still out and I can't feel my face. Somewhere off at floor Heather makes a noise that is not appropriate for a training environment.

Daniel leaves the chair, crosses the blue panel, and puts one hand on my shoulder. This is the part I'll replay later: he is genuinely happy for me. His eyes change.

"There," he says. "There it is. Whatever they wrote on that paper, your body just voted."

"It felt fine."

"It felt fine because you trained correctly for years, and because you stopped listening to everyone who told you to be careful with yourself." He squeezes once and lets go. "You lost time. We're going to take it back. That's not a threat, that's arithmetic."

"I've got the restrictions."

"You've got the restrictions." He agrees with me so smoothly that it takes me a second to notice he's agreed with nothing. "Your next preferred block, we'll see. Depends how the week shapes up, depends on the schedule, depends on how much of this floor is spent waiting." He turns around before I can answer and claps twice, and the sound goes up into the girders. "Beam. Everybody, beam. We're moving."

I want to tell somebody how good my back feels. Out loud, maybe five hundred times.

I don't get the chance, because that's when he starts running the clock.

A plain white institutional clock hangs over the office door. Daniel keeps it exactly right and watches it the way other men watch a dog that's been getting into the trash. Every rotation at Reed lives underneath it.

"Mount as soon as she clears," he says. "I don't want to see anyone standing at the end of that beam thinking. Thinking is what you do at home."

So the line compresses.

Heather goes first, and Heather has this whole thing she does before beam, a shake-out and two deep breaths and a little private mutter, and today she cuts it to the shake-out. She goes up and hits her series and comes off and her chin is tucked in that way it gets. Jeanette is next and Jeanette doesn't waste motion on a good day, but she skips her chalk, which for Jeanette is like skipping church. She sticks her dismount, steps off, and glances at the clock like she's checking a receipt.

That's how you can tell the pace has changed. Not because anybody says so. Because Jeanette Duncan is looking at a clock.

And then it's Tara.

Tara Murray is sixteen and she is the most beautiful gymnast on this floor and everyone including Tara pretends not to know it. On beam she does this thing where she gets narrow — her whole body agrees to be four inches wide — and you'll be standing there with a water bottle in your hand and forget to drink out of it.

She jogs up from the far end without her breath back from the last rotation. Her shoulders give her away. Plain silver clips in her hair, tape graying at both ankles, chest moving too fast. At the beam she reaches for the elastic bands tucked into the waist of her shorts.

The finger bands. It's her ritual. She loops them and pulls, one hand and then the other, and she counts under her breath, and if you ask her about it she'll say something like it's a circulation thing, so casual it slides right off her, but I've known her since she was eleven and I know what it actually is. It's the door she walks through. It's how she gets from out here to in there.

She's maybe two pulls in when Daniel says, "Full series, Tara. Including the ending."

And she stops. Not the counting — her fingers keep going. But something in her stops.

The ending is the blind landing. He assigned it to her while I was gone and she has been living with it ever since, and the whole gym knows what it is, and the whole gym knows she hasn't put it to the beam yet the way he wants it. It's the kind of skill where you come out of the air and the floor is not where your eyes are. You have to trust your count and your hands and the shape you made two seconds ago, and you have to trust them in the dark, and either you're there or you aren't.

The landing zone under the beam is clean — the standard mat, the standard fold, nothing extra, everything the way the rulebook says and no way at all like what her body is asking for.

She puts the bands back in her waistband unfinished.

"Now, please," Daniel says.

She mounts.

For a second it's fine. It's better than fine. She goes into the series and her line comes up out of nowhere the way it always does, and her foot placement is so quiet you can hear the fan in the ceiling, and I forget I'm supposed to be doing my own drills. She swings into the connection and I think, she's going to do it, she's going to eat it alive.

Then her back foot checks.

It's small. If you didn't grow up in this building you wouldn't even see it. Her weight comes forward and stops, and her arms come down out of position, and she is standing on a four-inch beam with her hands at her sides and her eyes on nothing at all.

She doesn't fall. She doesn't sit down. She just stops, up there, above that clean flat mat.

Behind her the line backs up. Heather is next and Heather stops at the corner of the mat and does not step onto it. Jeanette stops behind Heather. Two of the younger girls come around from vault and pile up at the end of the row, and nobody says anything, and the fan turns, and the seconds go by in that specific way they only go by in a gym, which is loudly.

Daniel walks over. He doesn't hurry. He never hurries. His shoes are white and his shirt has a crease in the sleeve and the Crown Athletic watch catches the lights.

He stops at the end of the beam, about at the level of her knees, and looks up.

"You're mid-routine," he says.

Tara doesn't answer.

"Tara. You're mid-routine. Finish the series."

Her chin moves down maybe a quarter inch. That's it. She is not saying yes. I want to underline that part, because later on people will describe this differently. She is not saying yes and she is not saying no. She's just up there with her arms hanging and her breath going shallow and quick at the top of her chest, and she's flushed all down her neck, which is what happens to her.

"Look behind you," Daniel says. "Go ahead. Look."

She doesn't look.

"Your teammates are standing on a mat they can't use. That's their rotation. You want to think about it, that's your right, and it costs them, and it costs them now." He lets that sit for a second. "Finish the series."

She resets her foot. That's the worst part. She actually resets it — slides it back to the mark, squares her hips, sets her hands, and I watch her try to start, and I watch the start not come. She's like a car turning over on a January morning. Everything's there. Nothing catches.

"Tara."

Her weight drifts. Just a little, just an inch, toward the near edge of the beam, and my whole body goes cold in a way it did not go cold when I was standing at the top of my own lane.

"Finish it," Daniel says again, and he's not shouting, he's never shouting, he's got the soft voice out now, the one he uses when there's money in the building. "You are wasting this gym's time."

Heather says my name.

She says it low, from the corner of the mat, without turning her head, and it isn't a plan and it isn't a question. It's just my name, the way you'd say it if you were handing me something.

I step out of the rehabilitation lane.

The equipment bay at Reed is on the east wall past the pit, a wide alcove with the spring boards racked and the wedges stacked and the wall hooks with the straps hanging off them. And standing on its edge against the cinderblock, taller than I am, is the red practice mat. Reed's mat. The big one, the good one, the one that lives out here for when Daniel wants somebody to try something that scares them under conditions he picked.

I get both hands into the canvas handles.

It's heavy. Heavier than the last time I moved one of these, because the last time I moved one of these I had a functioning spine and a bad attitude, and now I've got a folded piece of paper in my bag and a coach who thinks that paper is a suggestion. I get my hips under it and walk it down off the wall and it comes over slow and then all at once, and it slaps the floor, and that sound goes everywhere.

Then I drag it.

There is no elegant way to drag a crash mat across a gym floor. It makes a long ugly shhhhh and it takes both arms and my heels skid and I go backward in a crouch, and I can feel every one of those seconds, and I keep waiting for something in my back to say no. It doesn't. It's just work.

The mat comes across the white powder tracked out from the chalk bucket and drags it into streaks. Red over the white, in a long smear that will still be there at the end of the night.

"Kimberly." Daniel's voice, behind me, still even.

The girls in the line come apart in front of me because they have to; you don't stand where a mat is going. Heather steps back off the corner and takes two of the younger ones with her, one hand on each of their shoulders, clearing the lane without being asked. The pile-up at the end of the row breaks and scatters. Somebody's water bottle goes over.

"Kimberly. Stop."

I get it square under the beam.

That's the part I care about. Not the noise, not the audience — the placement. I put the near edge where her feet would come down out of the blind landing if she went for it, and I shove the far edge past the standard mat so there's overlap and no seam under the fall line, and I go down on one knee and flatten the corner with my palm so nobody catches a toe on it.

Above me, Tara turns her head and looks down. Her eyes are wet and furious and I can't tell which one of us she's furious at.

"Get up," Daniel says, "and take that back to the bay."

I stand up. My hands are still on the handles. I can feel the canvas seam under my fingers, rough, a little greasy from a hundred other pairs of hands.

"No."

"That mat is the property of this facility."

"Then you can move it after she's down."

"Move it now," he says, "and we can all get on with the evening."

There's a version of this where I say something smart. I've thought about it since. In the version in my head I have a whole speech and it's excellent and it ends with everybody applauding, which tells you something about the inside of my head.

What actually happens is I keep both hands on the handles and I stand there and I don't move, and the mat doesn't move, and the blind landing has nowhere to happen.

Above us, Tara sits down on the beam.

She does it the way you'd get off a fence, sideways, one leg and then the other, and she catches the beam with her hands and lowers herself and drops the last little bit onto the red mat, and her ankles bend and she puts a hand down and that's all. No dismount. No salute. She stands up on my mat in the middle of the landing zone with chalk on her palms and she is completely, boringly, undramatically fine.

The gym is so quiet I can hear the compressor kick on in the back hallway.

The series is over. Not finished — over. It stopped in front of everybody, and everybody watched it stop, and there is no version of the next ten minutes where that unhappens.

Daniel looks at the mat. He looks at my hands on the mat. Then he does something I don't expect, which is that he turns his back on me entirely.

He faces the other three. Heather at the corner with her hoodie sleeves pushed up. Jeanette with her chalk still on her fingers. Tara standing on the red in the middle of the floor, breathing.

"All right," he says. "Let's find out whose practice this was."

And I stand there holding a mat I don't own, in a building I don't control, with a preferred block on the good pit that exists entirely at the discretion of the man whose back is turned to me, and I wait to hear what my friends say.