eighteen inches, that was suspended from a ring attached to the ceiling. “Which one of you is going to be able to climb that the fastest?”
Amy gazed up at the ceiling, at least thirty feet high. Did he really expect her to climb the rope all the way up there? Just the thought of it gave her a queasy feeling in her stomach. “Wh-What if I fall?” she asked.
“How are you going to fall if you don’t let go of the rope?” Iverson countered.
“But what if I do?” Amy pressed.
“That’s what the mats are for. If you think you’re going to fall, don’t go any higher. Just come back down. Okay?”
Amy’s eyes shifted to Josh. He suddenly remembered how terrified she’d been the first day he’d been here, when they had to climb down the zigzagging stairs to the beach. “It’s okay,” he said. “Just don’t look down.”
Amy stared at the rope but made no move to climb it. Josh, realizing she was too scared even to try it, finally stepped forward and grasped the rope in his hands. He yanked on it a couple of times, then ran forward, swinging himself off the floor. “It’s fun,” he told Amy. He stopped swinging, then started up the rope, wrapping his legs around it so most of his weight was taken off his arms. Slowly, he began climbing up toward the ceiling.
“Be careful,” Amy called out when he was halfway up. “Don’t fall!”
“I’m not gonna fall!” Josh shouted down. “It’s neat.” He worked his way up to the top, slapping the ring with his right hand before grinning down at Amy. “I did it!” he crowed. “I made it all the way.”
“Come back down,” Amy pleaded.
Laughing, Josh started back down. When he was still ten feet from the floor, he let go of the rope, dropping down to the mat and rolling over to break the fall. Amy, startled by his sudden descent, screamed out loud, but quickly cut it off. “You did that just to scare me,” she accused as Josh scrambled to his feet.
“I didn’t, either,” Josh protested. “I just did it ’cause it was fun. Go on. Try it.”
Amy eyed the rope once more, then finally gripped it. Tentatively, she tugged at it, half hoping that it might break right now and come tumbling down from the ceiling.
It didn’t.
At last, taking a deep breath, she started climbing, pulling herself up and wrapping her legs around the rope, moving her hands from knot to knot in quick motions, as if she might fall if she released her grip for more than a moment.
Josh was right. It wasn’t so bad.
“I’m doing it!” she yelled, and, forgetting Josh’s warning, peered down at him.
A wave of dizziness swept over her. Her eyes widened in fear.
“Don’t look down,” Josh called again. “Look up!”
Struggling against her terror, Amy forced herself to look up, but now the ceiling, too, seemed far out of reach.
When she tried to lower herself, her sudden panic wouldn’t let her release the rope.
“I can’t do it,” she wailed. “I can’t get back down.”
Instantly, Joe Iverson shinnied up the rope until he was right beneath her. “It’s okay,” he told her. “I’m right under you. Just put your feet on my shoulders. Hang onto the rope and stand on me. Okay? Can you do that, Amy?”
As Josh watched from below, Amy’s right leg relaxed slightly and her toe touched the coach’s shoulder. A few seconds later she was straddling his head, her hands still clinging to the rope. As he felt her weight being transferred to his own body, Iverson spoke again. “That’s right, Amy. Just stand on me. I’m going to start down, and you just steady yourself with the rope. And don’t look down, okay?”
“Uh-huh,” Amy managed, her voice strangling in her constricted throat.
A moment later they were back on the floor. Joe Iverson reached up, grasped Amy’s weight in his strong arms, and swung her down to the mat. “There,” he said. “Safe. See? We made it.”
Amy, her face pale, stood trembling in silence for a moment as the panic slowly released her from its grip.
“You okay?” Josh asked, watching her anxiously.
Amy nodded. “I couldn’t do it,” she said. “When I looked down, I just got all dizzy.”
“It’s okay,” Joe Iverson assured her. He made a note on the clipboard, then patted her reassuringly on the back. “It’s just a little acrophobia. Why don’t you two go put on bathing suits and meet me at the pool. You can swim a few laps, and then we’ll be done. Okay?”
Amy nodded gratefully and hurried out of the gym.
But twenty minutes later, when she climbed out of the pool after having swum five lengths, her fear returned.
“Ever gone off the high board?” Joe Iverson asked.
Amy stared up at the diving board that loomed three meters above the surface of the pool. She shook her head.
“Want to try it?”
Amy shook her head again, her eyes moistening with tears just at the thought of having to climb the ladder, then walk out to the end of the narrow board.
“Come on,” Iverson urged. “Just try it once. If you can’t do it, you can’t. But you really ought to try.”
“She’s scared,” Josh said from the pool, where he was hanging onto the gutter, kicking gently as he treaded water. “How come she has to go off the high board?”
“She doesn’t,” Iverson told him. “But if she doesn’t try, how is she going to get over being scared of heights?”
“Maybe she won’t,” Josh challenged. “Aren’t you scared of anything?”
Joe Iverson’s first impulse was to reprimand Josh for being insolent, but then he remembered the instructions he’d been given by George Engersol. “I’m not interested in turning these kids into athletes,” the Academy’s director had insisted. “I want them to get all the exercise they need, but it’s their minds I’m primarily interested in. So don’t start acting like a drill sergeant with them. If one of them gives you a problem, tell me about it, and I’ll take care of it. But most of these children are already terrified of coaches. They’ve been treated like weaklings and klutzes all their lives, and their self-images have suffered for it. I won’t tolerate that here.”
Iverson, though he thoroughly disliked Engersol, hadn’t bothered to argue, for he’d already been told by the university’s president to do whatever Engersol wanted. “You’d be amazed at the funding he’s bringing in for that program,” Jordan Sanford had told him. “Just do what he asks, and let him worry about the kids. Believe me, he knows what he’s doing.”
So now, instead of reprimanding Josh, Iverson only shrugged his shoulders, made another note on his clipboard, and sent the kids to take showers.
Retreating to his office, Iverson switched on his computer terminal, called up the permanent records of Josh MacCallum and Amy Carlson, and began entering the data he’d collected in the last hour. Though it meant little to him, he supposed George Engersol had some use for it all.
An hour later, in his office, George Engersol called up the same records that Joe Iverson had been looking at sixty minutes earlier. Tapping quickly at the keyboard, he began studying the data the coach had entered.
What intrigued him most was the notation on Amy Carlson’s record that she seemed to suffer from acute acrophobia.
She’d been unable to climb the rope in the gym, and outright refused even to attempt the high diving board.
Apparently, her phobia was more pervasive than he’d thought when he’d watched her make her way down the stairs to the beach ten days earlier.
As he thought about it, an idea began to take shape in his mind. Perhaps there was a way to fit Amy’s phobia into his seminar.
He leaned back in his chair, the idea developing rapidly. The more he thought about it, the more he liked it.
Whether or not Amy Carlson would like it remained to be seen. But of course, what she — or any of the other students — liked, was of no consequence to him at all.
The only thing that mattered was how he could use them.
