“Hey, doll,” she said when she saw me. “Excited for your floor routine?”
She turned on the tap and swished her hands beneath the hot water. I watched her soap and rinse them, stunned into muteness. I had witnessed Noe doing this at least a dozen times since the Skittles incident in ninth grade. Now, for the first time, I saw it for what it was: Noe wasn’t exempt. She wasn’t different. She was a girl making herself puke in a toilet bowl.
I couldn’t believe I’d never seen that before. I couldn’t believe I’d told myself that not seeing it made me special and understanding, instead of simply a coward.
“Noe,” I said. “I know what you’re doing.”
She kept on washing her hands, patient and businesslike. Her face in the mirror was undecipherable. She had put on lipstick and mascara so she wouldn’t look “washed out” under the bright lights. Up close, the makeup made her look ghoulish, even vampiric.
“Emergency measures,” Noe said. “My floor event got moved an hour earlier. No warning. If there’s anything in your digestive tract, it can give you cramps.” She patted my arm. “Trust me, I know what I’m talking about.”
She was the same old Noe, amused and reassuring. Poor dear this and poor darling that. She pecked at the pins in her hair, rearranging them to fasten stray strands of hair out of the way.
“No,” I said. “It’s not emergency measures. It’s crazy. Normal people don’t make themselves throw up ever. You’re hurting yourself.”
I wanted her to soften, to yield, to let me gather her up and say, Tell me everything. Instead, Noe raised her eyebrows at me.
“Sphinx said not to eat a minimum of three hours before an event. Any less than that and it affects your fluidity. If they hadn’t changed the stupid schedule, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. I didn’t work this hard all year just to let my floor routine get sabotaged.”
“I don’t think he meant for you to throw up.”
“Actually, he said it was okay in emergency situations.”
I hesitated. The light in the bathroom hummed. Noe put a hand on her hip. “Sphinx was an Olympic gymnast, Annabeth. Are you going to tell me he doesn’t know what he’s talking about?”
“He sounds like a dick.”
“Can we table this?” said Noe. “I have to go stretch.”
“Noe,” I said. “You can talk to me about it. You don’t have to be so invulnerable all the time.”
“I need to go, Bethy. Seriously, don’t worry.”
She breezed past me and pushed the door open with both palms. I trailed after her, stunned and hangdog, and watched her curved shape disappear into the churning gym.
I didn’t know what to do with myself until my next event, so I sat on some bleachers and took How to Survive out of my backpack. I was reading the part about poisonous plants when the coach, Ms. Bomtrauer, tapped me on the shoulder.
“Were you in the bathroom just now?” she said.
I nodded, surprised.
“Was Noe doing something she shouldn’t be doing?”
I froze. I hadn’t decided what to do yet. Instead of nodding or shaking my head, I made a slight shrug with my shoulders, as if to say, Don’t ask me, I don’t want to be involved, Noe will kill me, I wasn’t going to say anything, I don’t know.
Ms. Bomtrauer sighed and drummed her fingers on her clipboard. “That’s all I needed to know.”
She started to walk away.
“Ms. Bomtrauer?” I said.
“Mm-hmm?”
“The coach from Gailer told her—he said it was okay in emergencies.”
Shit shit shit. I wasn’t making it better at all. Ms. Bomtrauer frowned, and a deep furrow formed between her eyebrows. “What coach at Gailer?”
“Sphinx Lacoeur,” I squeaked, regretting the moment I opened my stupid mouth.
“Hmph,” she said, and walked away.
87
NOE WAS GOING TO KILL ME.
Noe was going to kill me.
Guilt bloomed inside me, hot and loud and red. If I hadn’t gone to sit on the bleachers, if I hadn’t been just sitting there, if I’d thought to compose an innocent face and say, No . . . in a surprised and wondering way. Noe would think I had sold her out, Noe would think I had betrayed her. As I watched her perform her floor routine, the guilt tossed and turned inside me until I felt like I was the one who was going to throw up. When would Ms. Bomtrauer confront her? Today? Later? I could feel the clock ticking, the moment approaching when a furious Noe would storm up to me and say, Next time, how about you give me a little warning before you tell our coach that Sphinx Lacoeur gave me a personal puking lesson?
I copied Noe and drank a bottle of water during lunchtime, rationing evenly so that it wouldn’t slosh around inside me as she’d warned me that it could. I walked away from the spot on the floor where everyone was eating and practiced my switch jumps, my stomach panging with vindictive jabs of hunger. I wished I would faint or break my ankle so I could be driven away in an ambulance, the medical emergency rendering me saintly, making me innocent and lovable again. On one side of the gym, a photographer was taking team photographs. Flocks of gym birds posing for the camera flash.
A few minutes before my floor event, Noe walked over.
“Hey, squirrel. You look amazing,” she said, holding me at arm’s length to inspect me like a creation of hers that had turned out particularly well. “Did you eat?”
“Not yet.”
“Good girl. We’ll go to Subway after this, Alicia and Kaylee are going to need food too.”
I gazed at her miserably. A bunch of girls came to join us on the bleachers where Noe and I were sitting. Soon Noe was chattering up a storm with them, analyzing the day’s victories and defeats. The organizer called my name. I stood up to go to the floor. Noe tore herself away from the conversation for a moment.
“You look amazing, doll,” she said again.
I grunted my thanks.
The music started. I sailed through the first cartwheel, the hip swivel and shoulder thrusts, aware of the fluorescent gym lights on my bare arms and legs. I’d wrestled my hair into a clumsy French braid and shellacked it in place with some of Kaylee Ito’s gel. Now my own head smelled foreign to me, like a head out of a magazine.
I landed the second cartwheel smoothly and remembered to smile on the landing.
From the sidelines, a blinding flash. I glanced over and saw the photographer from the Tribune crouching there with his camera. He took another picture, snap, and grinned at me encouragingly. I threw myself into the round-offs. The next time I came up for air, I spied Ms. Bomtrauer approaching the bleachers where Noe was sitting. Step, step. I watched Ms. Bomtrauer summon Noe away from the rest of the girls and lead her to the wall to talk. Stag leap, stag leap. Noe’s face changing from sunlight to storm clouds. Noe stalking back to the bleachers alone while Ms. Bomtrauer walked toward the vault area.
Half turn, stag leap, round-off. Noe sliding back into the front row. I came up from a somersault.
Bitch, Noe mouthed at me.
I faltered. The mat stretched out before me, blank and impenetrable. I wished it would turn to water so I could dive under its surface and swim away. If this was a legend, I thought to myself, it would turn to water and I would swim away, and forever be known as the ghost mermaid who pulled hapless gymnasts into the mat to drown.
I turned, glimpsed Noe’s face again, and this time I lost my grip on the smile. I could almost hear it dropping on the mat, a muffled tink. Lindsay Harris’s tampon fell out in the middle of her beam routine, Noe had said. And Annabeth’s smile slipped off her face and shattered into a hundred pieces. With the smile gone I lost control of my face, then my body, as if it had been the one thing pinning everything together. I thumped across the mat, feeling more and more angry with every slap of my feet.