Stories

At Friday night's pasta party, we're eating dinner and taking a break from stalking Caroline's ex-boyfriend on Facebook when someone asks, "Diana, what's your major?"

"Professional Writing and Spanish," I say.

"Yeah? What do you want to do with that?"

"Be a writer."

"Ooh, can you write about me?" Caroline asks, biting into a forkful of pasta.

"Or me?" Steph offers.

"I wrote a story once," Mindy chimes in.

There were many stories that evening -- stories of skills, sex, "being bombed," cheating and reuniting. We laughed until about a quarter to 11, when we realized, "Hey, we've got a meet tomorrow."

We are not the ones who are supposed to have stories written about us. We are the club team of an overlooked sport and if you're club, well, of course you can't be worth watching. A joke, really, of the sport as 18-to-22-year-old girls pretend to do what they did ten years ago, rejects from the "real team," older girls pulling on leotards and wobbling as someone applauds politely.

If that's what you think, I am glad you were not there yesterday.

Three o'clock on Saturday afternoon. Too late to be asleep from the night before, but you could be napping. You could be doing work, making out, staring at the clock, doing your nails. Much better uses of your time, of course.

Otherwise you would have been dismayed by a Penn State girl's front-front-half on vault, Cornell's girl swinging full-twisting front giants, Jess throwing a flight skill from every family on beam and winning the event. You would not have appreciated Mindy's roundoff back tuck on floor that she taught herself, Nicole's face-planted but valiant Tsuk, Steph's full, Cassandra's first front handspring on vault, Beth's graceful beam routine after yet another ticket, Em's newly-learned Arabian that landed on her feet.

And you would narrow your eyes at this girl, yes, not good enough for varsity, the one who fractured her rib exactly six weeks before -- she should have been out of the sport when she blew out her knee, her and that Emeline with the dislocated elbow --

How dare she look so joyous and beat nearly every other gymnast's harder tumbling with a 9.4?

Sometimes we try to tell ourselves that it's a joke, too. We laugh when Mindy does the robot on beam and know that no matter how many times we fall, no coach will yell at us or pull us from the lineup, no extra routines will be our punishment.

But if you think we're joking, you should watch our faces just before we salute the judge.

Yes, our crowd is fans for other teams, some of our parents, some of our significant others and dear friends (and Angela Calvano). And they clap as loudly as we did for you. And we do not want them to see us falter.

If you were a gymnast once and your body still has strength and will to flip, how can you sit quietly now?

We will not have lengthy online write-ups and a possible newspaper article. Only a few of our friends who weren't there will remember to ask, "Hey, how'd the meet go?"

We will have far too many photographs. We will laugh loudly and share pretzels. We will be at practice tonight because we choose to be there.

And we will have the stories that a few will read. The stories that we will all understand.