Katie was back up now, balancing on one foot, and I saw it again, the wobble in her leg matching the shakiness of her smile. She didn’t just look precarious, she looked like she was in pain. And in the blink of an eye, she was coming back down—not in time with the music, not with the rest of the flyers, and not into the arms of her bases, who weren’t prepared to catch her. She fell straight through to the floor with a sickening smack.
I was on my feet before I realized it, pushing my way down through the stands. Katie’s bases were clustered around her on the floor, but the rest of the team hadn’t even noticed she’d fallen yet. The routine could keep going, if Katie got up, but she wasn’t getting up. God, she wasn’t even moving.
Sometime between when I left my seat and reached the floor, the music stopped, and Katie’s coach rushed out onto the mats. Someone held me back from the floor, several someones in fact, people in uniforms and nametags who wouldn’t let me get any closer. I noticed my dad receiving the same treatment, five feet to my right. He shouted that he was Katie’s father, but they still wouldn’t let him through.
At some point, medics came through with a stretcher, pushing through the cluster of Katie’s teammates and loading her onto it. My stomach dropped. A stretcher couldn’t be a good sign.
The whole arena was a weird mix of hush and pandemonium, and I was grateful to get out of the oppressive gaze of thousands of eyes watching to see what happened. I trailed the stretcher out into the hallway, followed it around a corner and then another, until we reached the medical hall, my dad still shouting angrily that Katie was his daughter and he should be allowed to see her.
A tall, boxy-looking man in an EMT uniform blocked the entrance to the room the medics brought her stretcher into. Katie’s eyes fluttered open and shut as they transferred her to a cot and began checking her vitals.
“Are you family?” he asked, folding his arms across his chest.
“Of course I’m family,” my dad bellowed. “That’s what I’ve been saying for the past five minutes. Now let me in to see my daughter.”
The EMT looked at me as though to confirm my dad’s story and I gave him a hurried nod. “Dad. Brother,” I said, pointing to my dad and myself. “Is she okay?”
“She fainted when she fell,” the EMT said. He glanced back into the room briefly. “Looks like she’s coming back around now, but she’ll be disoriented. Try not to upset her.”
I nodded gratefully, following my dad into the room, and heaved a sigh of relief as I saw Katie’s lips move in response to a medic’s question. They pushed up the back of the medical cot she was on, bringing her into a semi-seated position. My relief was short-lived, though, because as soon as he got into the room, my dad advanced on the bed.
“What the hell do you think you’re playing at?” he said, his voice booming. Trapped on the cot as she was, Katie couldn’t go anywhere, but she shrank back as my dad reached it. “It’s not enough for you to slack off for weeks, you have to go and ruin your entire performance just for attention?”
“Dad, she didn’t do it on purpose,” I said, putting a hand on his shoulder and attempting to pull him back. It was like trying to move a boulder with a teaspoon.
“You stay out of this,” my dad snapped, shoving my hand off. He turned back to Katie. “You’re going to get back out there, young lady, and then you and I are going to have a talk about consequences.”
Katie blinked in confusion, and her eyes were glassy as they landed on me. “Where am I? What happened?”
“What happened,” said Chuck Thorpe, Katie’s trainer, as he entered the room and joined us on the opposite side of the bed, “is that you fell during a stunt, and passed out.”
“I fell?” Katie swallowed, looking between my dad and Chuck, fear splashed across her face.
“We need to get you checked out,” Chuck said gently. “Make sure there’s nothing broken. What’s the last thing you remember?”
“She’s faking it,” my dad said before Katie could answer. “Humoring her is just playing into her ploy for attention. What she needs is to reflect on right and wrong, and