Personal Attention Roleplay

MAVERICK

I first fell in love with a girl to the theme song of Top Gun. This probably sounds like an obvious move, now that the entire internet appreciates how gay that movie is, with its smouldering locker-room staredowns and cocky wingman banter. At the time, though, I had no idea that Top Gun was a movie, or who Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer were, or what other kids meant when they called each other homos during recess, because my mother had banned all TV and movies, and all radio stations except Classical 96.3 FM. So, I was sure that Larisa Nicolescu was doing her competition floor routine to the #1 Hit of 1996, because I couldn’t imagine anything cooler or more heart-wrenching than those swelling guitar riffs.

I knew the song was called Top Gun because we had all handed in our floor-routine music on labelled cassette tapes, which the coaches stacked in a crate by the boom box in order of first name. I was H and she was L so we were nearly touching, which I took to be a Good Omen, while resenting the three Jennifers in the program for coming between us. Turns out the Top Gun soundtrack had peaked a decade prior—gymnastics often favoured the cheesy over the hip. Regardless, my palms would sweat every time it came on, and that was often, because Larisa was the coaches’ favourite, a showstopper.

I was new to Level 3, eager to ditch my bumbling, uninformed reputation from Level 2, where I’d get tripped up by the pop culture references that everyone else traded as easily as friendship necklaces. I affected disdain, as if my encyclopedic knowledge of the great concertos of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries made me cultivated and interesting, but I knew I was kidding myself. At ten, I was now one of the youngest at practice, and I dreamed of becoming the program’s prodigy, applauded uproariously as I bent from my position on top of the podium to accept yet another gold medal around my neck. But of course I was more intimidated than ever; the Level 3s and 4s shared cigarettes instead of necklaces and acted like I didn’t exist.

The spring session was a flurry of preparation for fall competition season. Outside, the world was thawing, but in the gym, everyone was stressed. Present, don’t flap! yelled Paula, the Level 3 coach. Elongate, point your toes, chin up, tighten your core, don’t land out of bounds! I was overwhelmed immediately. The front handspring walk-outs, split leaps, and round-off dismounts that had earned me praise before were now entirely unremarkable. My prodigy fantasy evaporated like sweat on the crash mat.

I idolized Larisa and her crew, Level 4s whose landings were as unruffled as their bangs. As they swaggered longlimbed between apparatuses, decked in Tensor bandages, I whispered their names like an incantation, Tiffany Alexis Danielle Larisa—like I could magic myself into their midst. Larisa matched the skills and confidence of the other three, but her presence had a different texture to it, a fluidity—her execution was like nothing I’d ever seen. She had trained in Romania, before immigrating to Canada with her family. Rumour was that she had also been a competitive rhythmic gymnast, which was why her artistic elements were so seamless, why she was so flexible. She was the only one who could do a perfect illusion turn. She was the only one who could do an aerial on the beam. When she tumbled, she barely touched the ground. Even her warm-up stretches looked like art. The coaches knew they were out of their league with her. They’d step in to spot her and find themselves grasping at air. They asked her to lead technique trainings on the uneven bars and allowed her to choreograph the dance elements of her floor routines because they were tired of being corrected.

I, on the other hand, had lost whatever grace I’d ever possessed. My glasses never stayed on, despite their embarrassing rainbow-coloured strap, and my underwear was always bunched up in my leotard. I was a tragic tumbler because I was afraid of the moment when my entire body was in the air. I would freak out midway through a back handspring, forget my arms, and land on my head. My advancement had clearly been a fluke. I was barely holding on to the ledge of Level 3, and couldn’t imagine making it further. I longed to be in Level 4 with Larisa, practicing in the same rotations, standing on podiums together, sharing technical tips. As it was, we rarely crossed paths. Since I had no friends, I spent all my downtime squinting at her across the gym, memorizing her every flip and turn.

The first time she spoke to me was a Saturday afternoon. It was a break between rotations, and I was sitting on top of the vault—my chosen lookout spot. I sensed the air change around me and Larisa pounced up like a Lycra-clad cat to crouch at my side. Panic bubbled in my gut. Why had she come to sit with me? Did she even know who I was? We had never been so close to each other before.

Hi, she said near my ear. You’re so weird, always sitting up here alone. I couldn’t tell if this teasing was good or bad. As usual, she was stretching as she crouched, limbs tangling together, somehow keeping her balance on our shared perch.

Her hair smelled tangy and sweet. She settled even closer to me. A shiver ran along my calves, as if her leg hairs were touching my leg hairs. I was too afraid to look, so I focussed on the sensation loosely, the way I would when my cousin and I played Ghost Arm. One person closed their eyes while the other person slowly ran their fingers up the first person’s forearm, towards the soft crook of the elbow—the one with the closed eyes had to guess when the fingers had reached their destination. That little pit of feeling. The fun of the game was that we always guessed wrong, called out too early, due to the confusion of slow anticipation. Ghost Arm gave me a feeling partway between relaxed and electrified, the same feeling I got from dancing to classical music in my room, or watching Larisa perform.

I could feel Larisa staring at me. She was asking me something about my round-off back handspring, like why was it that I kept letting my wrists buckle the second I wasn’t being spotted, why was it that I didn’t trust myself, why was it that I was such a wuss? You could be much better. Her voice was a soaring guitar in my ear. You should be less afraid! What’s there to be afraid of ? Attention? Actually winning something? No one will ever notice you if you fall over before you even begin.

Was she really saying these things to me while we sat up there on the vault? Were these words really emerging from the face I’d stared at for so long, with those perfectly crooked canine teeth that flashed when she grinned, that halo of frizzy hair filtering the gymnasium lights? Why was I staring like a dummy across the gym at the trampoline where Tiffany-Alexis-Danielle were turning back layouts, their scrunchied ponytails whipping the fluorescent air? There was such a loud rushing in my ears from being near Larisa that I couldn’t tell whether she was speaking to me at all. I wanted to turn to her, but I remembered the story of Orpheus from Gluck’s 1762 opera, and worried that if I faced her she would disappear. Even though, unlike in the opera, I wasn’t saving her—maybe she was trying to save me? My neck was locked in place. Stupid, stupid, stupid, you have to look at her, what’s wrong with you, just look, use your eyes, people use their eyes to look at other people, I yelled at myself silently. My voice came pushing out of me, a syllable, Ha! or La! but it was too late—Allison, the Level 4 coach, was shouting Larisa’s name, calling her to the mats, and she was already leaping off the vault and across the gym into the beginning pose of her floor routine, her back arched impossibly, one leg pointing straight upwards, unwavering. Top Gun swelled out of the boom box, and I watched, riveted, as she began again.

summer arrived, which meant that school ended but gymnastics continued. At home, I practiced my centre splits while drilling math under the watchful presence of my mother. The Olympics had just begun in Atlanta, and I was allowed to watch the Women’s Gymnastics if I finished my Kumon, my piano practice, plus my extra homework that my mother invented for me in the summers because she didn’t trust the Toronto Public School Board with my education. Lazy teachers, she would say disapprovingly. Teaching you things a baby could learn! Better to know it all first, before they try to tell you what’s what.

My mother had taken no interest in the Olympic goings-on, as she called them, until that night when, peering over my shoulder, she noticed Amy Chow. Amy was a reckoning force on vault and uneven bars, but among Team USA’s Magnificent Seven, she wasn’t the brightest star—I noticed that the announcers paid her less attention than Shannon Miller and Kerri Strug, the two blondes.

Chow! my mother exclaimed. Same family name as ours, see? Probably from Hong Kong too.

When the announcer mentioned that Amy had won awards for piano and was doing a biology degree at Stanford, my mother beamed in a way that made me embarrassed but jealous—she never smiled like that at me.

It’s not the same as our name, I argued. "We’re C-h-a-u, she’s C-h-o-w. They’re different names."

No no no, she said. Same name. Different spelling, but same character. It’s the same.

I glowered for a moment, wanting to be right, but also confused by what she had just said. I decided same character meant that Amy Chow and I had the same personality, and thus, possibly, the same fate. She was eighteen, eight whole years older than me. It seemed like a very long time, eight years, in which untold things could happen. Eight was my lucky number, I had decided some time ago. This was a Good Omen. Maybe I could excel at gymnastics, after all, or at least make it to Level 4 by then.

For those Olympic weeks, my mother, in a rare permissive mood, let me do my drills in front of our ancient television, watching the Women’s Gymnastics obsessively: Team, All-Around, Individuals. There was no Canadian team, but luckily CBC, the only channel we had, covered the US team extensively. Next to Amy, I liked Dominique Moceanu, the youngest and tiniest member of the team, whose parents were Romanian. Her charisma was undeniable and oftcommented on, especially when she did her floor routine to The Devil Went Down to Georgia. The way the American fans screamed for Dominique in the stands made our TV protest with shrill static. Amy, on the other hand, didn’t participate in the All-Around competition, because she hadn’t qualified with a floor routine. Chow’s stoicism and introspection have kept her from excelling in the floor exercise, said the announcer. I tried to puzzle this out: introspection was thinking inwardly, which I could relate to, a need to be inside yourself and not talk all the time, like some people wanted you to. Why would this make Amy less able to do a floor routine?

I barely crossed paths with Larisa during that period. She seemed preoccupied. I often glimpsed her sneaking smokes in the parking lot before practice with her crew. Nothing I did, not even landing my first cartwheel combo on beam, got her attention. A hollowness grew in me, an echoing chamber in my chest. At the same time, a new recklessness surged, my fear of falling swept aside in the face of this larger void. Within a couple of weeks, I’d nailed my round-off back handspring and was drilling back tucks. My longing for Larisa’s gaze drove me up into the air, tightened my rotations, and plunged my feet into the crash mat.

At the end of one Tuesday-night practice, some of the girls were on mat-rolling duty. Our practice mats were long and narrow: four of them had to be rolled out to make the required competition square. When we were finished, we rolled them back up into fat cylinders and stowed them in the dusty storage closet. I was on my way to change when a hand grabbed me from the hole in the centre of a newly forming cylinder. Get in, Larisa said to me, her face glowing with a strange energy, and what could I do but catch my breath and wiggle into the panting mat with her, the mat that had been absorbing our sweat and our falls for who knows how long, which was now embracing the two of us, tangled together, and rolling over and over, faster and faster, so that we screamed in fear and exhilaration, our teammates thrusting us forward for what felt like forever but must have only been a few seconds. The momentum stopped as abruptly as it had begun, and Larisa was laughing beside my face, flashing those teeth of hers. I could feel her whole body vibrating, and I wanted to laugh, too, but I couldn’t.

We were teetering on the edge of something—the words that would bring us to that something were on the tip of my tongue, but refused to sound. The others had moved on to the locker room. Practice was over. Time to go, lazybones, Larisa said, and she slithered out of the mat’s tight hold, her leotard making a shiny noise against mine. I caught a flash of her moving away from me, through the circular opening. Panic hit me. I was stuck in the mat, I had expanded the second she had gotten out, I wouldn’t be able to free myself, no one would remember I was there, they would lock the storage closet and then the gym, and I would lie there in the dark, slowly suffocating to death. I gasped and sweated.

Coach Allison’s head appeared in the opening. Hannah! What are you still doing in there? Go get changed. The authority in her voice was like a floodlight. Blinking, I wriggled out into the world. All the other girls were surging out the locker-room doors when I got there, Larisa among them, her hair bright amid the wave of bodies. I tried to catch her eye and thought I saw her wink at me. I held that like a talisman while I changed by myself in the silent wake of everyone.

My mother was late to pick me up, so I waited in the parking lot, practicing my illusion turn. The grit made my foot pivot wobbly, and I kept stepping out awkwardly and blushing, imagining Larisa watching me—maybe even spotting me, manipulating my hips in a fluid motion. You’re such a natural, I could hear her saying. None of the other girls catch on this fast. When my mother finally drove up, her lab coat still on despite the muggy night air, she immediately commented on my red face and dishevelled appearance.

What have you been doing out here? She was looking around in that sharp way of hers, as