Sometimes, they wonder if they grew up too fast.
She sets the table that evening, just like any other evening. It's routine, and even though she's only five, she thrives on routine, thrives on everything occurring thedesignated time day after day, thrives on the way everything has its time and place. She finds piece in her routines which never change even as things, like whether or not her parents can pay the bills, whether or not they'll fight when her father gets home, remain highly unpredictable.
Her dad gets the red plate which is one of her favorites because of the vivid red hue that always makes her feel warmer inside even when the heat is off becauseher dad didn't make enough money to pay the heating bill. Her mom gets the purple plate, because Emily knows it's her mother's favorite color. For the same reason, Brian gets the blue plate. Her plate is white with her own yellow hand prints decorating the surface. She places the silverware — it's really plastic since they can't afford really silver ware — on top of the white cloth napkins that her mother washes every week — Brian's gets washed every night because he's a mess.
Everything sits in its place and she's content, and therefore, everything should be alright only her dad never comes home that night.
Her mom comes home from work and makes dinner, rice and chicken, leaving both on their respective serving plates at they wait for Dad to come home, only he never will. They don't know that he won't come back for a while so Chloe Kmetko simply serves her kids their dinner deciding not to wait for her children's father, because she doesn't want their food to get cold. She assumes he's running late — she doesn't know she's wrong.
The next morning, her father doesn't wake her up. He doesn't walk into her room and kiss her forehead lightly before tickling her until she stops pretending to sleep. Her mother wakes her up. Her mother gently shakes his shoulder and turns on the lights before leaving to prepare breakfast, and she doesn't realize that it's only the first of many mornings on which her mother will wake her up, but eventually, because she's rather intelligent for a five-year-old, she realizes that he isn't coming back, that from now on, it's going to be just her and Mom and Brian, and it hurts, but she grows up and eventually, she doesn't need her daddy anymore.
Lauren Tanner absentmindedly tosses the bottle of sleeping pills up and down, watching as the bottle twists and turns in the air, the fine black letters blurring so she can't read them. They are prescribed to her, her name emblazoned on the label in tiny, precise black print. She reads the date on the bottle. The pills expired a long time ago, yet the bottle is still full, the cap still sealed, never opened, because she never swallowed even one.
She shakes the bottle, listening as the pills rattle against their plastic confines before standing up on her tiptoes to place the pills back on the top shelf of the mirrored medicine cabinet, almost out of reach. She hasn't taken one and never will for a multitude of reasons, the least of which is the fact that the pills expired long ago and would no longer have the desired effect.
A couple years back, in a rare moment of awareness for someone other than himself, her father had noticed she wasn't sleeping well and taken her to the doctor. The doctor who owned a private practice and charged his wealthy clientele ridiculous amounts of money had prescribed the sleeping pills without a second thought. He didn't care. He just wanted his money, just wanted to be done with the petite blonde girl and her worried father so he could head off for his next tee-time.
She remembers the trip to the pharmacy, seeing the rows and rows of medications lined up along the shelves behind the counter, each in its proper place. She wondered how many had been thoughtlessly prescribed by doctors who didn't care about their clients. She remembers how her father handed her the white paper bag holding the container of pills and how even now, the white tightly-sealed lid intended to keep children from opening the bottle and accidentally ingesting the pills, remains unopened.
Her demons still haunt her, not every night but often enough to bother her. She still staunchly refuses to take even one of those pills. She feels like she would be giving something up by taking those pills. Maybe, she feels like taking those pills would constitute ceding control of her own body to chemicals carefully balanced and mixed by some white-clad researchers in some medical facility.
Sometimes, she remembers sitting in the glass-walled solarium coloring and reading with her mother as the sun poured in through the glass warming the wood floors. Sometimes, she remembers her fifth birthday when her mother had come home with an sparkling orange leotard for her daughter and how her mother had bought a matching one for herself, because at heart, Leslie Tanner never grew up. Sometimes, she remembers seeing the proud grin plastered across her mother's face every time she watched her daughter learn a new skill. Sometimes, she remembers the warm and cozy kitchen on a winter day and revels in the memory of the scent of chocolate chip cookies baking in the oven, but then, she inevitably remembers when her mother's smiles became less frequent, when her mother stopped laughing and started snapping and yelling, when Lauren would find herself sitting at the top of the stairs hiding behind the banister listening as her parents yelled and screamed, their voices mixing and jumbling together as they screamed over each other, their distinct voices indiscernible.
And then, only on her worst days, she remembers white tile floors set against walls just as white. She remembers the sound of her own screams piercing the silence, remembers cold panic. She remembers how she didn't even bat an eye, how she didn't wake up. She remembers calling 911 like her parents had always told her to in case of an emergency, like she'd always thought she'd never have to because they'd always be there to take care of her. She remembers the sound of sirens piercing a quiet evening, red and blue lights reflecting in the rain drops that tumbled and poured out of the sky. She remembers watching the vehicle race away with her mother, leaving her alone in the cold rain, watching as the vehicle became nothing more than a pinprick in the distance.
Then, she'll remember how her mother never came back, how she never saw her again, because she left, because she didn't care.
Her eyes flicker back to the mirror, and she's staring at her own image and recalls why she hates standing in front of the mirror: it's a lot harder to deny the truth as it stares right back at you, and the truth was that she looked more like Leslie Tanner than she cared to.
Same hair, same face, same eyes. It was all the same, and she didn't want it to be.
She didn't want her ending to be like her mother's. She had dreams, dreams of glory and love and happiness.
She keeps her eyes focused on the mirror as she pulls her hair into braids and then into a ponytail, tightly secured at the back of her head, not a hair out of place. Her eyes flicker closed and she can't see her reflection but her hand stays steady as she runs eyeliner across her eyelids.
She stares at her reflection, sees her mother's eyes looking back at her, and turns away. She won't be her mother, not today at least.
Kelly Parker loses her NCAA eligibility shortly after her ninth birthday.
She doesn't care then, because she's a bright-eyed nine-year-old who thinks she's going to be a star, and somehow, when you've got all that promise, all those dreams filling the sky, twinkling and burning like the stars, you don't think about practical things like college and back-up plans in the event that things don't turn out quite how you want them to.
Her face first appears in a print ad for some leotard company that appears in some gymnastics magazine. They put her in a sparkling pink leotard (which she hates, because she hates pink) and pull her hair up into braided buns at the side of her head, and at her mother's insistence, the hairstyle becomes "her thing," her trademark look. She agrees because her favorite movie has always beenStar Wars, and though she never says it out loud, she's always wanted to be Princess Leia because she's strong and she's a fighter, and she's just pretty damn awesome.
She thinks it's fun. She thinks she's special. And she's right, because no one can do the things she does in her sleep, and she unlike all the other girls her age, is the primary bread winner. She brings home the money that puts food on the table.
Kaylie Cruz enters a cavernous house filled with silence. The first thing she sees as she crosses the threshold into the house, escaping from the cool bite of the Colorado wind, is her parents' wedding picture, sitting in its place on a little end table in the foyer. It's the first thing she always sees, and usually, it makes her smile, seeing her parents wrapped up in each other's arms, happy.
Today, it makes her want to scream, but she's Kaylie Cruz. She's perfect. She doesn't scream. So she does the next best thing. She grabs the picture and hurls it onto the stone floor, almost wincing as the sound of shattering glass breaks the silence.
She spends another second looking at the mess of glass and frame and paper laying strewn across the floor but does nothing about it. There's nothing she can do so she walks away.
The next afternoon, the morning newspaper lays across the top of the end table. The stone floors are cleared of the glass and mess that littered them just yesterday. The mess has been quietly cleaned up and swept away as if it were never there.
No one who walked in would know that yesterday a picture of a couple in love stood on that end table. No one who walked in would know that just a few weeks ago, the cavernous house was filled not with silence but with laughter and joy.
She does know.
She remembers running up and down the stairs with Leo as their dad chased them through the house. She remembers baking cookies and hot apple cider with her mom on cold winter days. She remembers a night just weeks ago when the four of them sat around the wooden table laughing and eating together.
She remembers and knows things won't ever be the same.
Payson Keeler breaks her neck, but somehow, the constant, aching pain in her neck isn't what hurts her most.
There's a tightness in her chest that bothers her every second of the day, keeps her from sleeping soundly.
She asks her specialist about it. He gives her a wry smile and tells her that there's nothing he can do about it. He performed surgery on her. He's one of the best doctors in the world, but even he can't heal a broken heart.
She spends more time at the Rock than is probably considered healthy, but she doesn't know what else to do. She's struck by the realization that she has nothing, nothing outside of gymnastics so she spends her time in a gym that is no longer hers watching her friends shine.
She breaks.