Laura trained all the time, during the school year, at summer camps, constantly. I did not know a human being could work so hard, and she was just a kid. She practically lived at her gym. She skipped food for days at a time to meet weight requirements. She did things that would have driven me nuts.
I will be everything Mommy wants me to be!
In one way I guess she did love it. In a way she was proud. I saw that in the park when she’d do the flips. She loved knowing how to do something so well.
And there were, like, benefits.
She’d never told me about her other friends. I think I mentioned that. Well, maybe it was because she didn’t have so many anymore.
But she had had them. Plenty of them.
At her gym she was part of this elite little crowd, only the best girls—only the winners—and as long as she was a winner, everything was cool.
At school, too.
I mean, it’s not hard to imagine how it was, because she was, of course, really pretty and rich, but even more than that, she did great in school because she wanted to be the best in everything. Jack was the best in everything. Even though they had lots of dough, he wound up getting a whole scholarship. And her dad’s example was, like, sort of incredible. Super achievers, all.
She’d had loads of friends; at school she was like a jewel, a little athletic straight-As princess who—as long as she kept it up—could do no wrong.
I’ve never had friends like that. When I read about how her life had been, I couldn’t understand why she’d ever wanted to know me at all. Thinking she could have ever loved me seemed crazy. Because I don’t mean she had fringe friends like I did, hanging around with Carol in an alley somewhere or crashing some rich kid’s party, like we sort of had with Biff Roberts’s. I mean friends who you go on ski trips with—and I’ve never even been skiing—or camping in upstate New York, and even trips to Europe and stuff. I mean she walked with an elite crowd. She’d been popular. And she knew all the rules: the right girls to know, the right boys to date. Everything.
As long as she kept it up.
I couldn’t relate to any of that. To me, being popular would be like trying to solve the most complex math problem imaginable, all the time. But she could manage it pretty well.
Still, her mom was never satisfied. Mommy says I can be the best and I will be! I’ll try harder. She will see how hard I train! I’ll do anything to get better! I will be in the Olympics!
Laura went to competitions, traveling all over the country with her team. Her coach and her mom designed a tough routine to display flawless maneuvers, and she practiced it over and over. At her best, she ranked in the top one hundred in the nation.
But it didn’t seem to matter. Her mom said it only proved she wasn’t number one.
I can’t wait to tell Dad how I did at the finals when he gets back from Europe!
He came back with a necklace, but he didn’t give it to her. She had only come in third.
For gifts, she had to be first.
That was the deal. And she wanted to be first. She told herself it was all she wanted. Mommy and Daddy say gold is the only color—the only color!
When she was fourteen she tore a thigh ligament doing a split. She spent a month in bed. She passed her time fooling with a painting set she’d gotten from Jack, painting scenes she remembered from drives and trips she’d taken—stuff that had absolutely nothing to do with gymnastics. She was amazed by how much she enjoyed painting, and just how free she felt exploring her imagination.
And for the first time, she was pretty upset with her mother.
She doesn’t care that I hurt myself! She says it’s my fault. She won’t believe I’m not good enough. But I’m not good enough. Coach says I have limits. I can’t get back to where I was. I’m not sure I even want to.
She wrote about talent and instinct and reflexes and being a natural and stuff she thought her mother couldn’t understand.
I couldn’t understand.
I never faced such stuff.
I had never had to.
She found reasons to avoid the gym, and she felt her father and Jack avoided her. She began to hate living in her house—a house she no longer thought she deserved.
I thought back to last night, when I had stood outside that basement window; I’d imagined living in her house would mean you could breathe, that you’d actually be on display in such a house and wouldn’t ever need to hide, because your problems would be exciting. But I hadn’t understood that being on display meant facing someone else’s expectations, and Laura felt herself falling short every day.
Mother says Jack has done so well—why can’t I? She yells all the time. “What—are you so special? Does failure make you special? You selfish monster! What gives you the right to turn your back on everything we’ve given you?”
I understood why she liked the book so much. She must have felt it was her autobiography.
But it didn’t give her any answers. At least no good ones.
The box was her life. The lid was shut tight.
She felt inescapably trapped.
Mother says I must try out for the trials; she’ll hate me if I don’t. I can’t. Coach
