Friendships and Backflips Read online

  At the end of training on Wednesday, Tara hung back and waited until Clare had finished talking to Jack.

  “What’s up, Tara?” the coach asked with a smile. It had been a great training session and she was in a good mood. That made Tara feel a little less nervous.

  “I was wondering…” She swallowed and took a deep breath. “Would it be okay if I miss training on Friday?” The words rushed out and she looked hopefully up at her coach.

  “Why?” Clare asked.

  “It’s…um, it’s my best friend’s birthday,” Tara said hesitantly. She thought that probably sounded really lame to Clare. She wished she could have thought of a way to say it that made it sound as important as it really was.

  Clare paused, considering it. “You’ve been working harder than anyone,” she said finally. “I don’t think missing one session will ruin that. You deserve a break. Just make sure you’re not too tired to train hard on Saturday!”

  “Thanks, Clare!” Tara grinned. She rose up on tiptoe in her excitement and gave her coach a quick hug. “I promise I’ll make up for it by being extra brilliant on Saturday!”

  The next morning, Tara’s maths class were working on questions from their textbooks. She tore a page from the back of her exercise book and wrote a note to Emily.

  Sorry I was stupid and said no to your birthday. Can I still come?

  xxx

  She folded the paper, wrote Emily’s name on the front, and asked the girl sitting behind her to pass it back towards her friends in the opposite corner of the room. She turned and watched the note travel from hand to hand.

  Emily read it. She looked up with a big smile and nodded enthusiastically. Then she scrunched the note up in her fist before Mr. Spencer could see it. Tara grinned back and settled down to work. She knew she’d made the right choice.

  The next day was Friday, and Emily’s twelfth birthday. A few people gave her birthday cards in the morning, and Tara and Kate both gave her presents. Mum had taken Tara shopping after school on Thursday so that she could buy something. Emily opened Kate’s first – a pair of pink and silver dangly earrings. Emily had had her ears pierced last month and she was dying to start wearing pretty earrings instead of plain silver studs.

  “Thanks, Kate. I’ll wear them this evening!” she said, and then spun around to face Tara. “You’re still coming, aren’t you?” Worry crossed her face until Tara nodded.

  “Of course!” She was going to say sorry again for being a bad friend at first, but Emily threw her arms around her before she could speak. The present from Tara, still wrapped in pale blue tissue paper, was forgotten in her hand. Tara laughed. “Aren’t you going to open your present?” she asked. Emily jumped back and began carefully opening the paper.

  “Tear it!” groaned Kate. “I want to see what it is.” Emily smiled and slowly peeled back the paper. Inside was a photo frame with silvery flowers around the edges. Behind the glass was a photo of Emily, Kate and Tara. Tara’s dad had taken it in Kate’s garden in the summer, when the three of them had performed a dance show for their parents. Their hair blew about their faces, blonde tangling with dark and dark with light brown. They had their arms draped around each other’s shoulders and were laughing at a joke none of them could remember any more.

  “Thank you,” Emily said softly. “I love it.”

  After school, the three girls and a few of their other friends went back to Emily’s house, where they ate pizza and then sang “Happy Birthday” before Emily blew out twelve candles on a beautiful cake. Mrs. Walter had made the cake herself. It was covered with white icing, and there were lilac coloured flowers in a circle around the top. In the middle, Happy Birthday, Emily was written in lilac icing. After they’d eaten a delicious slice each, Mrs. Walter took them all to the cinema. She bought their tickets and told them what time to meet her afterwards, and then they went into the film by themselves.

  They giggled and whispered through the funny parts, and Kate pretended to cry when the film was supposed to be sad. Later, they sang pop songs all the way back to Emily’s house. They gossiped about school and listened to music for a while, and soon it was time for the other girls to go home.

  Kate, Tara and Emily changed into pyjamas and laid the big cushions from the sofa on the floor of Emily’s room, with sleeping bags and blankets. They all sat on Emily’s bed, eating sweets and trying to keep their laughter quiet so that they didn’t wake Emily’s younger brothers. They talked until the early hours of the morning about everything they had missed chatting about while Tara was at gym. Tara noticed that Emily and Kate had a lot more to talk about than she did. Once she’d told them a bit about gymnastics, there wasn’t much else to say. Eventually, Tara and Kate moved to their sleeping bags on the floor, their eyes began to close, and after a while Tara heard Kate’s breathing turn into quiet snoring.

  “Tara?” Emily whispered, after it had been silent for a while.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m really glad you came.” Tara lay on her back, staring up at the ceiling of Emily’s bedroom where there were a few glow-in-the-dark stars. “I know you had to miss gym,” continued Emily, still whispering so she didn’t wake Kate. “And I understand why you didn’t want to. So thanks. It just wouldn’t have felt like my birthday without you.”

  “That’s okay,” Tara murmured. She heard Emily turn over in her bed to go to sleep. But Tara’s eyes were still wide open. “Em?” she whispered.

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m really glad I came, too.”

  Even though she couldn’t see her friend in the dark, Tara knew that Emily was smiling just as much as she was. She turned on her side and closed her eyes. Mum was picking her up early the next morning to go to Silverdale, and she knew she’d be exhausted. But it was absolutely, completely worth it.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The last week before Regionals passed quickly. Lindsay and Tara focused on getting everything as precise and beautiful as possible, but they had fun too. Working hard every minute of every day could make gymnastics feel like a chore, and that wasn’t what they wanted. They only had one lunchtime practice, and Emily and Kate came to watch. They were amazed by what their friend could do.

  “Can we come to the competition?” begged Kate.

  “Of course!” Tara smiled. “I’ve wanted to ask you for ages, but I thought you hated gymnastics.”

  “No way,” said Kate. “We just got annoyed that it was taking over your life.”

  “We’d love to come,” Emily added. “You’re our best friend and we want to cheer you on.”

  “And go wild when you win the gold medal,” Kate said, grinning.

  Tara laughed. She felt nervous whenever anyone mentioned winning. She and Lindsay had trained so hard, but what if it still wasn’t enough?

  At the end of lunchtime, Kate and Emily talked excitedly about the competition and the balances Tara and Lindsay could do all the way back to their form rooms. Tara was thrilled that they were coming to watch her compete, but every extra pair of eyes on her was an extra bit of pressure. Her friends, her parents, her sister…they really wanted to see her win, but they didn’t know how high the standard would be. Would she let them all down? And what about Clare? She had taken a risk letting Tara and Lindsay compete at Regionals, and Tara was desperate to make her coach proud.

  The competition was on a Saturday in the middle of November. Tara and the rest of the Silverdale squad had to be at the gym at eight o’clock in the morning for one last practice. Jittering in the cold changing room, they were all strung up on butterflies and hopeful excitement. On the familiar blue floor, they performed their routines better than they ever had before, and they all hoped that they could do just as well that afternoon.

  The competition was being held at Central Gym Club, which was in a nearby town and was the biggest club in the area. When they ar
rived, Tara looked around with wide eyes and gaping mouth. It was huge. There were three gyms, all with big open spaces and lots of equipment. Most of the others had been in club competitions there before, so they knew their way around. As Jasmine led the way to the changing rooms, Tara peeked through the door of the second gym they passed. She guessed that this gym wasn’t being used for the competition; there were small groups of gymnasts working on each piece of apparatus and it looked like just another training day. It wasn’t as noisy as Silverdale usually was on Saturdays. It might have been all the extra space to move in, but Tara thought it seemed somehow colder, too.

  She hurried after Jasmine and the others. It wasn’t hard to tell where the changing room was – it was the noisiest room in the whole building! When Sophie pushed the door open, they stepped into a bright room full of colour and chatter. They found a space and changed quickly into their leotards. Tara smiled when she put hers on – she loved it more than any other item of clothing she’d ever owned. Then she stood still while Jasmine pulled her hair back into a neat bun, which was encircled by a dark blue scrunchie. She was so busy taking everything in that she hardly even noticed how hard Jasmine was pulling.

  When she emerged from the white cloud of hairspray, she caught sight of herself in the mirror. She looked like a gymnast – and suddenly she felt the full excitement of competing. She was nervous, but she couldn’t wait to get out there and perform her routine. This was what she’d been waiting for ever since she’d first begun to practise wobbly handstands in the garden.

  “Put your tracksuit on, you need to keep warm,” Sam told her, for once speaking to Tara the same way she would talk to any of the more experienced gymnasts. The importance of the competition must be getting to her, Tara thought. She obediently covered up the beloved leotard with her new Silverdale tracksuit. There were gymnasts everywhere, in leotards and tracksuits of every colour and pattern imaginable. Everyone was chattering loudly; it sounded like the lunch hall at school.

  “Ready, everyone?” demanded Sam. “Let’s go out then, it’s chaos in here. I told the boys to meet us in the corridor.” They followed her out of the changing room, where the boys were waiting, and into the gym. It was already starting to fill up with people, even though there was still an hour until the competition started.

  Clare gathered them together and led them into the warm-up room, which was an extra gym usually used for working on floor routines. There was no other equipment, just a sprung floor and a wall of mirrors. Other teams were also trickling through and beginning to warm up. Tara looked at them all, trying to size up the competition.

  “Tara, are you listening?” demanded Clare. “Ignore everyone else. Focus on your routine. Only the routine.” She talked them through some reminders and picked up on a few things she’d noticed in their morning practice. “Sophie, you must make sure you point your toes, and Tara, keep your eyes up no matter how nervous you are!”

  They warmed up in a small group, facing each other so that they wouldn’t be distracted by the gymnasts all around them practising balances. In no time at all, Clare stopped them and told them it was competition time. Everyone was starting to go back into the main gym, and they tacked onto the end of the line leaving the warm-up room. They found their place on the benches reserved for the gymnasts, which ran all the way along two of the walls. Tara saw her parents and Anna in the crowd of spectators and waved. Then she saw Emily and Kate sitting next to them and waved even harder, as they waved excitedly back at her. Knowing that they were here to see her perform and cheer her on made the whole competition even more special.

  A man with a microphone walked into the middle of the floor.

  “Welcome to the Regional Acrobatic Gymnastics Competition!” he announced. “I’d like to invite the gymnasts to present themselves, and then we’ll get going.” Tara and the others got up and joined the long, colourful line walking round the floor. She was so excited that it was hard not to laugh. She’d seen Olympic gymnasts march round the gym at the beginning of competitions, and now she was doing it herself!

  The audience clapped and cheered while the competitors walked around the blue square where all the drama of the afternoon was about to happen. Then the gymnasts sat back down on the benches and settled themselves to watch their rivals. There were two floor areas. Luckily the girls’ pairs were competing on the same floor as the boys’ groups, while the boys’ pairs, mixed pairs and girls’ trios were on the other floor – Tara thought Clare must be relieved that all the Silverdale gymnasts would be in the same place.

  Sam and Jasmine’s competition was first. They were the third pair to compete, and they performed their routine brilliantly. Despite all the nasty comments Sam had made, Tara had to admit that the older gymnast was really, really good. Tara watched the other Level 4 pairs, dreaming of the day that she’d be able to do the things they did. There were flicks and somersaults, and lots of the tops did handstands on their partners’ hands. Tara imagined doing that on Lindsay’s hands and a shiver ran down her spine. A few months ago she’d have laughed and thought it was impossible, but now…well, who knew?

  No one was surprised when Jasmine and Sam scored the highest, winning the first gold medal for Silverdale.

  “You’re so lucky, going near the beginning,” grumbled Jack, when they joined the others again. “Now you can enjoy the rest of the competition.”

  The next round was Level 4 boys, but there were no Silverdale gymnasts competing in that category. Then it was Level 3 girls. Tara could see Megan and Sophie on the other side of the floor, waiting for their turn. Megan was lightly bouncing up and down on the balls of her feet and Sophie was swinging her arms around vigorously. Neither of them could keep still. Just watching them made Tara feel nervous.

  Some of the other pairs in Megan and Sophie’s level were very good, but lots of them were messy and made mistakes. Some had graceful classical music, others performed to fun, bouncy tunes, and a few matched their gymnastics to spiky electronic sounds that made Tara think of spaceships and robots. Watching them, Tara noticed all the things that Clare would have criticized; some were not quite in time with each other, some didn’t point their toes or stretch their arms enough. One girl looked down at the floor for the whole routine, and another didn’t finish any of her balances properly. She looked as if she was just doing a rough practice! Tara tucked all these things away in her mind so that she wouldn’t make the same mistakes.

  Megan and Sophie sailed through their routine with no problems. They even had the crowd clapping along to their rhythmic music while they bounced in and out of powerful handsprings and backflips. Clare had explained to Tara that their routines would be scored out of thirty – ten marks for the difficulty of the routine, ten marks for how well they performed the gymnastics skills, and ten marks for performance. Tara bet that Megan and Sophie had got themselves lots of points for being so wonderful to watch. There was a burst of loud applause when they performed their final balance; Sophie was in a bridge position on the floor, and Megan held a steady handstand on Sophie’s stomach. Tara had seen it go wrong lots of times in the gym, but when it mattered Megan and Sophie held the balance as if it was the simplest thing in the world. The audience loved them, and they walked off the floor to the sound of whooping and clapping. Tara was pleased for them, and thrilled to see another gold medal go to Silverdale, but she couldn’t help being a little bit envious. They made it seem so easy.

  The four boys from Silverdale were in the next round, but Tara and Lindsay didn’t get to see them perform. Their competition was afterwards, so they were lost in their own little world in the warm-up gym. Even if they had been allowed to watch, Tara was sure she’d never be able to concentrate on anything but the thought of her own routine at that moment. There was hardly any time left until she had to go out and prove to Sam and Clare and everyone else that she deserved to be here, wearing the Silverdale competition leotard…to prove
that she deserved to be in Clare’s squad.

  When they walked back into the gym, Tara glanced quickly at the Silverdale bench. The boys didn’t look very excited, and Jasmine’s face was full of sympathy. They were the first Silverdale gymnasts not to win gold, Tara guessed. Would she and Lindsay be the second? She started to feel sick.

  They were competing near the end of the round, so they had to watch most of the other Level 2 pairs first. There was one light, bouncy routine that she really enjoyed, and another which was full of graceful steps to gorgeous flowing music. They were serious competition. The graceful routine finished, and Tara and Lindsay exchanged nervous grins. They were next. They rubbed chalk on their hands and feet to stop themselves slipping in balances, just as the score for the pair before them went up: 28.3. It was the highest score so far.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Tara’s heart was beating faster than their jazzy music. She and Lindsay walked out onto the floor, and stepped forward with their arms stretched up to present themselves to the judges. Then they took up their starting positions and the familiar music began. It sounded much louder in the big gym, with everyone watching. They jumped and turned their way through Clare’s lovely routine, their handsprings and split leaps perfectly in time with the upbeat, cheerful music. Tara smiled and kept her chin up, directing her expressive arm movements out towards the audience. Her walkovers felt smooth and effortless. The springy floor helped her to bounce out of a round-off into a full turn jump, spinning through the air and landing neatly with her feet together, facing Lindsay.

  In a second Tara found herself at Lindsay’s side, preparing for their toughest challenge. Her palms were sweating but she took Lindsay’s hands and pulled herself up to stand on her shoulders, perfectly in time with the music. She made sure she was balancing securely, then she lifted one foot…held onto it…and stretched her leg up into the Y-balance. It felt wonderful!