Head Over Heels Read online

  The turbulence up here doesn’t bother me much. I’m more afraid of whatever lies ahead, once the flight lands back at home.

  • CHAPTER 2 •

  Mom and Dad meet me at the arrivals gate at Logan airport with faces scrunched in concern.

  “That’s all you brought?” Dad asks, taking the two bags from me.

  “Oh, honey,” Mom says, pulling me in for a hug. She kisses my hair. “We’ll get you fixed up.”

  I had returned home plenty of times since moving to LA, but this time, it has a sense of finality. I’m not here for a quick Thanksgiving visit—when Mom hits the clicker and rolls her Honda into the cold, musty garage, I’m returning for good. I take a suitcase in each hand and trace my old, familiar steps through the house.

  A corner of the living room serves as a shrine to what once was. There’s a life-sized cardboard cutout of me, frozen forever at seventeen years old, in a red-white-and-blue spangled leotard with chalky thighs and a pile of medals around my neck. Trophies, medals, and competition photos fill the floor-to-ceiling bookcase behind it. I heave my suitcases past the living room, up the stairs, and into my childhood bedroom. It’s still painted a childish shade of pink, and there’s a smattering of glow-in-the-dark stars stuck on the ceiling. Once-glossy posters of gymnastics greats like Nadia Comaneci, Mary Lou Retton, and Shannon Miller cling to the walls.

  I flop on the bed. Compared to the king-sized one I shared with Tyler, this twin-sized mattress feels like a flimsy pool float. I’m no longer a hundred pounds of pure muscle; I don’t fit here anymore. I look at my phone with a sigh, wishing desperately for any sort of distraction. I have no texts; barely anyone knows I’ve moved.

  I open Twitter. At first, it’s a mindless stream of news, memes, and snippy comments from people I can’t remember following in the first place. I see missives about gratitude and accountability from Krista, my old college roommate; according to her tweets, she’s been sober for a year now. But then a headline catches my attention. My heart lurches as I open the story on TMZ: TYLER ETTINGER NEWLY SINGLE? SPOTTED COZYING UP TO A SWIMSUIT MODEL.

  I read it over—once, twice, three times—but the words seem to swim on the screen. Someone on Twitter recognized Tyler at Bootsy Bellows, a celeb-studded club in LA, and took a grainy video of him grinding up on a woman that TMZ identifies as model Brianna Kwan. She apparently had a four-page spread in the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue this year. In a fit of self-loathing, I hit play on the video. He nuzzles her neck as his hand trails down the front of her dress; she tilts her head back to whisper something in his ear. Paparazzi caught them outside the club, too, striding hand in hand from the back door to a waiting black car. Tyler knows what he’s doing—he knows better than that. He’s the one who taught me how to ditch the paps or throw them off the trail: don’t show affection or even walk within the same photo frame when photographers are around unless you want the attention. He never did. He said he didn’t like too much publicity around his personal life, but now I just wonder if he didn’t want it with me.

  TMZ concludes that Tyler has likely split from Avery Abrams, his ex-gymnast girlfriend of four years. “Or if not, he’s sure to hear from her soon…” the site snarked.

  I shove my phone under my pillow and bury my face in it. While Tyler is moving on, I’m spiraling into the worst version of myself: lethargic, self-pitying, aimless. The same way I felt after Trials. The version of myself that he didn’t want anymore. I want to scream. I feel full of bitter rage in a way that makes me tear up. I went so many years without crying: not when Dimitri assigned me triple sets of conditioning because I talked back one day; not when a fall off beam knocked the wind out of me; not when I developed a stress fracture in my spine at fourteen. The Olympic Trials failure opened up a floodgate I couldn’t close. Ever since then, the littlest things set me off. It’s embarrassing, how quickly hot tears spring to my eyes now.

  This isn’t little, though. I wish it were.

  I pull up Tyler’s Instagram on my phone and scroll down, scanning for the occasional photos he posted of me or of us together. There should be one from a month ago, when we attended his cousin’s wedding together—but it’s gone. So are the pictures from our anniversary getaway to San Francisco. It’s like he’s erased me. My stomach drops when I see he’s unfollowed me, too. Worse, still, I see he just recently followed that swimsuit model.

  I feel sick. I can’t remember the last time Tyler touched me the way he touched Brianna in the club, like my skin gave off the oxygen he needed to breathe. I knew our relationship had its issues, but Tyler always said that if you love each other, you stick it out the whole time, no matter what. Nothing a person could say or do would push you away forever. I believed him, because he was the first guy I’d ever really dated, and he had had a serious girlfriend in college. He knew. He and Megan had the kind of relationship where they went on summer vacations with each other’s families and talked about future baby names. It only dawned on me later that he eventually left Megan, too.

  * * *

  When the phone rings at dinner, I’m grateful for anything that cuts through the conversation. Mom plated an endive salad and asked probing questions about why I think Tyler broke up with me; she served grilled tilapia and suggested jobs I could apply for; she refilled our water glasses and peppered me with updates about childhood friends I haven’t seen in fifteen years. She can’t do silence or stillness. She picks up the call on its second ring.

  “Abrams residence, Michelle speaking.”

  I push a bite of fish across my plate and try to shut out the unwanted 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.

&nbs
p; “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 a sense of poise and presence to my artistry that’s almost impossible to teach. You either have it or you don’t.

  “I’m looking for an assistant coach to come on board to lead her training on floor,” Ryan continues. “There’s only so much I can do to help her.”

  Gymnastics is split by gender: women and men compete on both floor exercise and vault, though women also do balance beam and uneven bars, while men do parallel bars, high bar, rings, and pommel horse. But even though Ryan and I both did floor, the event is drastically different for men and women. We both performed difficult and exciting skills, but his focused on brute strength while mine were interwoven with dynamic choreography. It doesn’t matter that Ryan earned an Olympic gold team medal, a gold on high bar, and a bronze on parallel bars. His skills don’t fully translate to women’s gymnastics, although plenty of men coach women. That’s how it’s always been. The greatest coaches in the sport’s history—like Igor Itzkovitz and, yes, Dimitri Federov—are all men.

  “I’m wondering if you would want to come by the gym this week and meet Hallie,” he says. “See if you’d want to work with me to train her.”

  I can’t help it. I actually laugh.

  “I’m serious,” he presses.

  “Ryan, I’m flattered, but this isn’t a good time for me,” I explain. “I just moved back, and I’m not really looking for coaching jobs. I mean, I’ve never coached at that level before.”

  “So you’re not interested?” he asks. “I mean, Avery, we’re talking about the Olympics. I promise you, this girl has what it takes. She just needs to be polished up a bit. That’s where you’d come in.”

  I hesitate. It’s dark outside now, and the row of gold trophies on the top shelf gleam menacingly in the living room window.

  “I can’t,” I say.

  He sighs heavily on the other end of the phone. “Why don’t you take my number in case you change your mind?”

  “Uh, sure,” I say.

  I add his number to my own phone, even though I know I won’t use it.

  “It’s not like there are dozens of qualified coaches with Olympic experience running around this town,” he jokes.

  His words make me pause. It’s like UCLA all over again, when my name was bigger than my actual achievements.

  “Just Olympic Trials, actually,” I say curtly. “I never made it any further. I have to go; my family’s having dinner. Take care, okay?”

  I say goodbye and hang up. When I turn back to face the kitchen, Mom and Dad’s eager faces already look hungry for news.

  “It was nothing,” I say, taking my seat. “Just a call about whether I’m looking for a coaching job. I’m not interested right now. I just got back, you know.”

  They exchange glances.

  “It could be a good opportunity,” Dad ventures.

  “And you should have something to do,” Mom adds. “It’d be good for you to get out of the house.”

  They’re eager because that’s all they know. Gymnasts don’t ascend the ranks to become Olympians unless the whole family is committed from the start. My ambition burned out, but theirs never did.

  “It’s really no big deal,” I say. “Let’s just eat.”

  * * *

  That night, I can’t sleep. The TMZ video loops cruelly in my head, interspersed with my most romantic moments with Tyler. I see him hand-delivering a bouquet of two dozen white roses and lilies, just because it was Wednesday and he missed me. I flash to his eyes shut tight, head bopping to the beat of the club’s house music. I remember the sexy, sleepy way his hair stuck up in bed when he woke up on Sunday mornings, and the time he bought out an entire theater so I could see a showing of Stick It on my birthday. My brain cuts to the way he slipped his hand into Brianna’s as they exited the club, heads ducked from the flashing cameras. And then there’s Mom’s voice: You should have something to do. Something other than this: lying sweaty in a twin-sized bed in a room decorated by an eight-year-old.

  Fuck it. If Tyler can move on, so can I. I download a dating app and throw together the bare bones: a full-body photo from my skinny days before the Freshman 15 set in; a close-up from Tyler’s cousin’s wedding, when my hair and makeup looked good; and no bio at all, because what’s there to say? I set my location radius to thirty miles. Even after all this time, my name is easy to recognize in this small town. People still think of me as that girl who almost made the Olympics.

  It’s past 11 p.m.—probably too late to swipe without looking like I’m only here for hookups. But I feel a morosely intoxicating combination of sadness and loneliness, so I swipe anyway. I reject the first seven men right off the bat because once you’ve dated a pro football player on People’s 50 Most Beautiful list (number forty-one, but still), it’s tough to recalibrate your standards. But I find a groove eventually, indicating interest in a local firefighter, an accountant, and a middle school math teacher I vaguely recognize as someone who grew up in Greenwood a couple years ahead of me. I match with the teacher—Lucas—and involuntarily shudder. He’s not Tyler. It’s disorienting to actively seek out other men. I don’t know if I really feel ready for this.

  hey, Lucas messages me. what’s up?

  Not much, I write back. Just moved back here this week from LA, actually.

  You grew up here? he asks.

  I hold my breath. Yeah, I write.

  But miraculously, he doesn’t seem to recognize me. Instead, he asks what I’m up to tomorrow. When I answer truthfully that I have nothing major going on, he invites me out for a drink tomorrow night. I hesitate, then swipe quickly through a few more potential matches. Nobody else stands out to me. So I say yes. It’s not like I have anything better to do.

  * * *

  Jade Castle is a mediocre Chinese restaurant with one of the few liquor licenses in this formerly Puritan dry town. My family never came here; we always preferred to ea
t at Ming’s House—not that I could ever have anything besides the steamed chicken and broccoli—because Jade Castle has always attracted a less family-friendly crowd. When I arrive at seven thirty tonight, I spot the father of one of my middle school classmates sitting at the bar with a girl half his age, and a large round table crowded with boys in matching lacrosse team jackets, probably using an expired ID swiped from an older brother. I take an empty bar stool; I’m not sure if Lucas intended for us to eat or not. When a bartender asks if she can get me a drink, I awkwardly decline. It’s been a very long time since I’ve been on a first date, and it feels like the muscle has atrophied. I felt optimistic setting up the date on the app, but now my confidence has evaporated.

  Lucas walks in at seven forty, when I’m on the verge of losing my nerve and leaving.

  “Avery?” he asks, tilting his baseball cap up to reveal a baby face and a smattering of freckles. He has a narrower frame than I expected; a Boston Red Sox jersey hangs from his shoulders.

  “Hi,” I say, unsure whether to rise and hug him.

  I make an attempt to stand, but my feet get tangled behind the leg of the bar stool. He slouches onto the seat next to me instead and leaves his phone faceup on the bar.

  “You want a beer?” he asks, not quite making eye contact.

  “Uh, sure,” I offer.

  When the bartender glances our way, he holds up two fingers, and mouths, “Two.” I get the distinct sense that he’s been here on plenty of dates. He drums his fingers on the bar in a staccato rhythm, then visibly relaxes once he sees her returning with our drinks.

  “So, LA, huh?” he asks finally.

  “Yeah.”

  “Why’d you move back?”

  The question makes me frantic. “Uh, I just needed a change.”

  “Must be wicked nice out there,” he comments. “Warm. Beautiful. You go to the beach a lot?”

  I feel stupid telling him I spent six years in LA and can count my number of beach days on one hand because I wasn’t confident enough to wear a bathing suit.