image of Tyler’s fingers snaking down Brianna’s taut abs. Mom listens, draws out an elongated “ummm,” and cocks her head toward me.
“Sure, I’ll put her on.” She covers the receiver with one hand. “Avery, phone for you.”
I can’t imagine who it is. Nobody knows that I’m here. I take the phone from Mom and wander into the living room.
“Hello?” I ask uncertainly.
“Avery, hi,” a male voice says. “I’m sure you don’t remember me. It’s been a million years. This is Ryan Nicholson.”
Of course I remember him. His name is seared into my memory; you never forget the name of your teenage crush. Ryan was a top gymnast around the same time that I was. He trained in Florida, and like me, he was homeschooled for most of his teenage years. Because we both competed on a national and international level, we crossed paths at meets a few times a year. When my best friend Jasmine and I made lists of the cutest boys we knew, his name was always on them. To be fair, we were both homeschooled and knew of just eight or ten boys who didn’t sport rattails—an unfortunately popular fad among male gymnasts in the 2000s—but still. His thick, dark hair; chocolate-brown eyes; and nicely muscled arms and abs made a lasting impression. He went to the Olympics in both 2012 and 2016.
“Ryan! Hi. Wow. It’s been a minute.”
“It sure has been,” he says.
“Um, so…” I say.
It’s like all normal social niceties have completely fallen out of my brain.
“I hear you’re in town again,” he says.
“How?” I blurt out.
I wonder if he read the TMZ story and drew his own conclusions.
“Winnie told me she ran into your dad at the grocery store yesterday.”
Now that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time. She’s the office manager at my old gym, Summit. I loved her.
“Oh! Right,” I say, relieved. “What have you been up to all these years?”
“Has it been that long?” he asks. “Wow. I mean, well, a lot of things. Training. I went to the University of Michigan for gymnastics, and competed in London and Rio. Did some traveling for a while. And I’ve been coaching, too. You?”
“Well, I just moved back to Greenwood,” I say, hoping that covers it.
There’s a beat of silence on the line.
“Uh, you’re probably wondering why I’m calling,” he says.
“Yeah,” I admit.
Years ago, if Jasmine and I could’ve chosen a personal phone call from Ryan Nicholson or Ryan Gosling, we would’ve picked Nicholson every time. I pace the width of the living room and wind up face-to-face with my cardboard cutout. I swivel to dodge her.
“I’m working at Summit Gymnastics now,” he says. “I know you trained there for years with Dimitri Federov before he left.”
“I did.”
Dimitri put Summit on the map in the 2000s by producing more Olympic gymnasts there than any other training facility in American history—Lindsay Tillerson, Jasmine, and plenty of others. But after 2012, he left Summit to found his own gym, Powerhouse. Summit was taken over by one of its own longtime coaches, Mary Li, but I haven’t heard much about her. It sounds like she prefers to stay behind the scenes these days, running the business, rather than training athletes on her own.
“I’m training this girl Hallie for Tokyo,” he explains, referring to the 2020 Olympics. “She’s amazing, especially on bars. Hardworking and determined like you’ve never seen before, real natural talent, total star quality. Maybe you’ve heard of her?”
“Um, believe it or not, I haven’t been keeping up much with the sport lately,” I say.
The truth is that if 2012 had gone differently for me, I might not have the hard feelings that I do now.
“I’m optimistic about her chances,” he says. “Bars is on lock. She’s strong on vault and beam, too. But floor is a weak spot for her. Her routine has an impressively high level of difficulty, especially when it comes to tumbling, but she keeps getting dinged on execution. Her artistry could be better.”
I know what he means. There are two types of gymnasts: the powerhouses who nail sky-high tumbling and have so much energy, they nearly bounce out of bounds, and the delicate dancers who captivate fans with beautiful choreography, but never attempt the toughest tricks. I was among the latter. You can’t choose—you work with what comes naturally to you. At five-foot-three, I was relatively tall and elegant for a gymnast, and my flexibility put the famously bendy Russians to shame. Floor was where I shone—I had