Why we fly, p.4
Why We Fly, page 4
“Yes, ma’am,” he says automatically. “Be right there.”
He walks me to the car and leans to open the door for me. Even as I’m rolling my eyes, because it’s kind of a slick move, my stomach is swooping; no one has ever done that for me before. We freeze for a moment, Three looking at me with those smiley eyes. He sways closer, and for a wild second, I think he’s going to kiss me. But then he glances at the house, where his mother stands on the porch, staring at us unabashedly.
Three watches me back out, which for some reason makes me an even more nervous driver than Nelly’s constant questions about how her car’s doing. My foot’s never been as gentle on the gas as it is when I reverse out of his driveway and head home.
4
Chanel
Mom is supposed to be waiting in the airport cell phone lot when my flight arrives. Ten minutes late, she texts.
Just pulling up. Where are you?
I roll my eyes. I literally just told her. She’s probably talking on her phone and not paying attention. And yep, she is. I see as soon as her silver Lexus SUV screeches up to the curb that she’s holding her phone in her left hand, trying to pretend like she’s not talking on it so the airport cops don’t ticket her. I wonder if she lost another Bluetooth headset or if she just didn’t bother to put it on.
She throws a slight wave and a big smile in my direction and pops the trunk so I can load my bags, but she continues her conversation as I slide into the front seat beside her. I shut the door, and she pulls back into traffic. I can only hear her side of the call, but I can tell she’s talking to her assistant, Rita, about the children’s hospital charity ball. She must be getting good news, because her voice is all high pitched, like it always is when she gets her way. She’s wanted her company, Pearls and Petals Premier Events, to be the preferred partner for this fundraiser forever. It sounds like it’s finally happening.
“Really? Front page? Well, second page? Okay, I can live with that, as long as it’s a full page.” She looks over at me and flashes another grin, this time accompanied by a thumbs-up. When she hangs up, she squeals. “Baby, you will not believe what just happened!”
“Oh yeah? Tell me.”
“They’re going to display the Pearls and Petals logo—we’re an official sponsor of the ball this year!”
Official sponsor, not a hired vendor. That’s pretty cool. “What did you have to give to get that?”
“A significant discount on my fee. But it was never about that, anyway. You know how important this event is for the medical community, and I’m happy to be involved.”
Hmph. It may be important in the medical community, but it’s also a good look for her and Dad and his work. Probably half the guests will be clients on his sales roster. I bet his company made double their normal sponsorship donation this year, and that’s what that full-page ad for Pearls and Petals is really about.
“That’s awesome, Mom. Congratulations. Count me in to volunteer and help in any way you need.” This is a huge event, and the extra volunteer hours will look good on my applications. I need to remember to add it to the list I’m keeping in Google Drive.
“That would be amazing. I’ll reach out to Alana as well. I have no doubt she’ll come down and be involved.”
Even out of sight, Alana is never out of my mom’s mind.
“Oh, and I forgot to mention! I’m also heading up the planning committee for the Letterman Banquet in the spring.”
“That’s exciting. They’re so lucky to get you. Now that event can finally live up to its potential.”
“My sentiments exactly,” she says.
Mom has to go see a florist for a wedding she’s planning, so she drops me off at home, air-kissing me out the door. It’s a bit surprising that she’s taking meetings this afternoon, since we haven’t seen each other in a month. I was looking forward to telling her all about my triumphs at camp. You’d think that after all the money she and Dad spent on this experience, she’d be eager to hear about it. But I get that her business is too small to have much staff, and she can’t let her clients down. So I head straight to the laundry room, because I cannot even bring my bags into my bedroom without washing the camp funk off of everything. As soon as the first load is in the washer, I call Bunny, a nickname only I use for Leni. But she doesn’t answer. I hope nothing’s wrong. Actually, I hope she’s not stalling because my car’s not in the same pristine condition I left it in. So I text her that she better get her butt over here with my car.
You’re home?
Is she for real? She had better not be cleaning up some Coke spill in my car.
Yes. I’ve only been texting you for three days, telling you what time my flight landed.
There’s a pause, and I see the three dots appear and then disappear and then appear again.
I just forgot.
That’s weird. I thought her forgetfulness was getting better.
How’s PT going?
It’s fine.
Okay. Just checking. Anyway, is the Bumblebee really okay? You better not have scratched up my paint job.
The Bumblebee is fine, I swear.
So you on your way here or what? Missed u, can’t wait to hug my Bunny.
Lol. I know you mean hug the Bumblebee.
I laugh. She knows me too well.
Both of you.
It shouldn’t take Leni long to get here, but it will probably be about a half an hour. On time for her is fifteen minutes late. I’m used to it by now, especially since I figured out the trick—you just have to tell her to meet you twenty minutes before you actually want her to show up. But now I’m stuck waiting. I put a few things away in my room, which, thankfully, is exactly the same as I left it when I went to camp. If Alana were still living here, she would not have managed to keep herself out of my stuff. The house is so much more orderly since she left for college. Summers are quieter, though, without her asking me ten questions an hour about what I’m doing and not even waiting for my answers before telling me ten things she needs me to know about her day.
Maybe the house is too quiet. I need a distraction while I wait for Bunny. But first, I need to put away my special makeup bag, which I wedge into its home behind the old radiator.
After it’s hidden, I head out to the porch and take a seat on the swing. From the looks of it, my parents have spent the entire time I was away in the front garden. Mom’s the gardener, but Dad knows how happy a manicured yard makes her, so he spends about as much time out there as she does, even though it’s hell on his knees these days and his doctor would prefer he didn’t do it since he also refuses to give up tennis. It is the nicest yard in the entire neighborhood, with manicured shrubs that never look overgrown and flower beds that are updated seasonally, so it’s worth it.
While I wait for my perfect little Bumblebee to turn onto the street, I pull up The South Cheers, which is this blog that posts updates about everything that’s going on in the cheer community from Virginia to Florida and Georgia to the Mississippi. It can be a good source of news, and it supposedly highlights sportsmanship, but sometimes it’s just shy of a messy cheer version of the Daily Mail. The woman who runs it is a former cheer mom; her kid aged out a long time ago. Despite allegedly not having a bias toward her daughter’s former team, it’s obvious she still has favorites. There are certain teams and people she highlights more than others. She hardly mentions Franklin, for example, though we almost made it to Nationals last year.
I managed to keep myself from looking at the site while I was at camp through sheer willpower and because I know there isn’t much real news in the summer months. But now that the cheer season is about to start, useful information will go up. Maybe some of the schools that start earlier have made captain announcements, and I can trust The South Cheers to be on top of that.
And yes, there is it—the south Georgia schools are up already. I scroll through the blog, which prints not only names but also pictures with the announcements. I see a few faces I recognize from State last year. I also spot a reference to the same high-performance camp I just attended in the blurb beside one girl’s photo. I remember seeing her face, though we didn’t really engage. I’m annoyed that her summer seems to be moving faster than mine. She’s already got her C. I wonder how Coach Pearce is making the decision for our team. I’ve earned that C, and I look forward to seeing my photo on this blog in a few weeks.
I hear an engine coming up the otherwise-quiet street and check the clock on my phone. Yep—thirty-five minutes to the second from when Leni texted. She pulls my car slowly into the driveway, into my spot on the left side, and I run down the steps even before she’s out the door. I spread my arms wide and race toward her, but just as she opens hers to grab me in a hug, I dodge and lay myself across the hood of the car instead.
“Bumblebee!” I croon, patting the perfect yellow paint job.
Leni laughs, shaking her head. “Well, hey to you too.”
I throw one arm around her shoulder, squeezing her tight. “I missed you, Bunny.”
“Go ahead. I know you want to do it. Bumblebee is ready for your full inspection.” She waves a hand over the car like she’s a game-show model displaying a prize.
“If you insist.” And I really do it too. I was serious that she had better not damage my car, but she knew that. I can tell she took good care of it. There are no scratches, no dings, not even a stray piece of pine straw on the floor mats. The only weird thing I notice when I turn the car on to test the engine is that my preset radio stations have been changed to rap.
I shut the car off and fold my arms. “What did you do to my settings? When did you become a fan of Migos?”
“What?” Her face looks genuinely confused, so I’m guessing this is not a prank.
“Leni, are you okay? Did your doctor say something?”
Bunny gets kind of pink, like she does when she’s keeping a secret. “I already told you, I’m doing fine.”
“Okay, you obviously have some things to tell me. Come inside—I’ve got a six-pack of lemon-lime LaCroix, and it seems like we’re going to need all of it.”
She bounces after me to the house, making me laugh and reminding me how she got her nickname. She doesn’t actually hop around anymore like she did when we were in Miss Boston’s Tumbling Tots group when we were four, but she still walks with that little spring in her step that makes her my Bunny.
I take her out back, and we sit among Mom’s herbs, which have almost overtaken the deck. It’s nice because it always makes the air out here smell like mint and makes me think of Southern sweet tea. Leni fidgets with a trowel Mom must have left out while I crack open the LaCroix cans and set them in the koozies we had printed up for the squad last year, the ones that say FLY HIGH, DO OR DIE in green-and-blue script. She is still not ready to talk, so I examine her for a minute and notice some serious definition in her shoulders. She’s tan, too, which is a surprise for someone who supposedly spent the last three weeks resting and bingeing Netflix. I thought I was going to be the one with the captain-ready body, but Leni looks even better than she did before the first time she fell.
“Your shoulders look amazing,” I say. “Is that from physical therapy? I need that workout plan.”
She goes completely red in the face.
I thump my seltzer can down on the table and turn to her. “What is going on with you?”
“It’s not, uh, physical therapy. I mean, not completely.”
Leni does not stutter. Now I have to know what she’s keeping from me. “Just spill it.”
“I’ve been working out a little extra this summer.”
“What? The doctor said you couldn’t work out alone yet. Bunny, you should have waited for me to get home. I told you we’d have time to get you in shape before the season started. You shouldn’t have taken the risk.”
“I wasn’t exactly working out alone.”
“With who, your brothers? I thought they weren’t coming home from college this summer.”
“Actually, um, it was Three.”
I feel my face crumple up in surprise and maybe a little disgust. “Like, football Three?”
Leni glances at me and looks away again immediately. “Yeah. We ran into each other one day.”
“Where did you run into him?” I snarl.
“At the park,” she says. “I don’t know, we ended up working out together, and then I gave him a ride home.”
Now I get it. “Is that how my radio got turned into trap village?”
She grins at the table. “Yeah.”
“Well, I know you didn’t get those shoulders from one workout. Did you guys hang out again or something?”
“We’ve kind of been hanging out every day for the last few weeks.”
I realize my muscles have not relaxed since this conversation started. “Why?”
“I don’t know, Nelly.” She twists the koozie around and around the can. “We’ve been working out. Don’t make a big deal about it.”
“Do we need to have a life choices discussion right now, young lady?” I reach out and take the can from her, forcing her to look at me. “You went down this road with Roman. I thought we agreed we were not going to get distracted. This is our year to make Nationals.”
She looks at me, her big blue eyes a little watery, and I feel bad, because maybe I was shouting. Leni wasn’t a crier before the concussions, but she’s more sensitive now, and sometimes I forget to look for the signs.
“I’m not distracted, I promise. Look, it was good for me, right? You noticed the shoulders.”
I can’t argue with that, so I just sniff.
“It’s a good thing. He pushes me.”
“As hard as I do?”
“Even harder, if you can imagine that.”
“Impossible. Maybe I’ll have to come see for myself next time you guys work out.”
She laughs, and her tears recede, so I slide the LaCroix back across the table to her. He pushes her? Oh, Bunny. Why are we doing this again? It’s no different from when Roman started paying attention to her last year. When Three ghosts her, like Roman did, I’m going to have to reroute her back to our goals. This is not part of the plan. We have to focus on making Nationals.
“Anyway,” I say, “on to more important things. I’ve learned how we can take our pyramid to the next level but with some better safety precautions in place. Pull up your calendar. We need to start scheduling practices.”
5
Eleanor
In the week leading up to The Appointment with Dr. Ratliff, I ignore my 5:30 a.m. alarm twice. I turn it off without even hitting snooze. One morning, I sleep an extra four hours. My routine since freshman year has been to wake up early, eat, work out, grab a snack, and start my day. No days off. Since Nelly came home, she and I have been working on the bones of an epic new pyramid that will rack up points on the competition score sheet, plus I’ve had PT sessions with Elliott. I guess some additional tiredness is to be expected, but I haven’t been this exhausted in a while. After the first concussion, an early alarm never bothered me, and the headaches went away within a few weeks.
That one was the mild concussion, Dr. Ratliff likes reminding me.
I don’t like remembering the second fall, the not-mild one, but the moment runs through my mind like a GIF. It was December and too cold and rainy to be outdoors, so we were practicing in the gym, sharing the north end with the JV squad while wrestling warmed up on the other side. The accident happened on an advanced dismount from our very wobbly pyramid. Still, it should have been a simple basket catch with Nelly and Avery Monaghan as bases and James Prince as back spotter. We’d done a similar stunt hundreds of times. I don’t know what it was about that day. The gym was humid, and I was sweaty, though practice had only just begun. The JV girls were rowdy, and the wrestling team was loud. But I was fine. I was focused.
Until I wasn’t.
I’ve dissected that careless mistake in my mind a million times, and I still can’t pinpoint exactly what went wrong. Whether I looked down or to the side or threw my body weight just enough to get out of position. Whatever caused it, my shoulders shifted. My head was too far back. James tried to compensate. I heard him yell, “Shit!” as I came down wrong. He was a good spotter, and I’m sure he’d been tracking me closely. He and the bases tried to grab me, but I flailed, trying to save myself too. My head thwacked James’s shoulder on the way down, then hit the mat. One leg bent under me, and my ankle collapsed. I didn’t realize at first that I’d fractured it, partly because I blacked out briefly, and when I came to, the throbbing in my head blinded me to all the other pain. Nelly told me later that they didn’t know if I’d cried out, because they couldn’t hear me over the screaming of the JV girls and the wrestling coach yelling for someone to call 911. She also told me she insisted on riding in the ambulance with me rather than Coach Pearce and that my parents both showed up at the hospital within five minutes of our arrival.
I don’t remember anything else from that afternoon.
After that fall, my early-morning alarm felt like a jackhammer in my eye, even when I lowered the volume so much I could barely hear it. We bought blackout curtains for my room because I couldn’t open my eyes with any amount of sunlight streaming in the window. The longer the concussion effects wore on without improvement, the more stressed I got, and the more stressed I got, the less the effects improved. When the team went to State without me, the insomnia began. I lay awake for hours and then couldn’t get out of bed because my body was just. so. tired. I was irritable all the time.
I started using an alarm again in June, and now I’m fine with it as long as the volume isn’t too high. I haven’t had a morning where I ignored it completely in months. I know it’s the stress. Too much is riding on this appointment. Everything is.
