Page 65 of Salto

Vanta pointed with his clipboard.

“Hale, beam with me.”

Of course.

“Higher,” Vanta commanded when I completed another layout step-out series. “Set more,” he said, and I gritted my teeth.

I was setting as high as I could.

“Try again. Do them until you get it right,” he said, moving on to Eva, who was also on beam with me. She did the skill, and I watched her do it perfectly. My jaw almost dropped.

Okay, so one week was apparently enough to make me incredibly far behind.

I rubbed my tight lower back muscles, looking up at the ceiling.

“Already hurting?”

I wasn’t expecting the voice that interrupted my brief pause.

I looked behind me, finding Sloane on the mat near my beam.

“I’m fine,” I said, my tone clipped.

She didn’t look convinced. “The first week is the worst. After that, it’s not so bad.” She looked me up and down before turning back to her work.

Was that supposed to be some sort of backhanded comment?

I couldn’t tell. But it was Sloane, so I was unsure of what anything meant anymore.

I ignored her the best I could the rest of beam. But some small part of me worried she’d come back to shoot more vague condescension darts my way. Thankfully, it wasn’t long before we were on to the next event.

When noon rolled around, we took a small break. I worked on my online classes and ate some lunch before the second half of practice began around three o’clock.

It was right back into it. We worked on dance with Hana, and she was the most nitpicky coach I’d ever met when it came to the dance stuff. My pointed toes weren’t pointed enough; there was another level of pointed in her rule of points. There was The Code, then there was Hana’s Code. My splits weren’t high enough or big enough; they were above one eighty, but she wanted a two-hundred-degree split. At this rate, my legs were going to snap if I pulled any harder.

By the time I was with Rove on bars, I was officially spent.

And of course, Rove wasn’t about to go easy on me.

We worked on Jaegers for the entire hour and a half. Apparently, when I thought I had my Jaeger, I was deluding myself. Rove was finding something wrong with almost every single one today.

“Again,” Rove said when I kipped back up to the high bar once more. He was on the spotting block; it was starting to become his throne of sorts.

Did he ever get down from there?

“Do you know any other words than that?” I asked. Maybe if I could keep him talking, I could stall and catch my breath.

The corner of his mouth lifted.

“A few.”

“Name one.”

“No.”

He wasn’t making it easy for me to get out of this, was he?

“Isn’t it creepy looking at your own face all over the walls constantly?”