Chapter 25 #2
Whenever he has a spare second—which isn’t often, since he has about a dozen children he’s trying to keep an eye on—he finds himself glancing over at the parallel bars.
You can tell a lot about someone by their coaching style, and Sasha’s fits him to a tee: quiet and efficient, letting the kids do their work with the occasional adjustment or correction, following up afterwards with a suggestion for next time.
He has the boys on their best behavior, although that’s probably because they’re still scoping him out, like they would with any new coach or teacher at school.
Danny’s pretty sure they google him during a water break, because a group gathers around someone’s phone, whoa-ing and glancing at Sasha, until Coach Garrett calls them out and they scurry back to their stations.
Sasha seems oblivious to it all, his brow furrowed in concentration as he spots the students or listens to Coach Garrett’s instructions, and Danny’s kind of obsessed with how careful he is, how good he is, switching between English, hand gestures, and demonstrations to get his point across, the students’ faces lighting up in understanding.
By the end of the rotation, several of them have better form on their giants, and Coach Garrett is talking less and less, letting Sasha do his own thing.
At ten-thirty, it’s time for a break, which means ice pops, goldfish, and crayons, the campers crowding around a long table in the team room.
The older kids take one end of the table, playing YouTube videos on their phones—“Hey, guys, keep it PG,” Danny reminds them—while the younger ones glom onto the coloring books, duking it out over who gets the superheroes or the princesses.
“Sash, come here,” Danny says, once the arguments are settled and everyone’s busy coloring. Sasha’s still hanging back, leaning awkwardly against the wall like he’s not sure what he’s supposed to be doing. “Jake, buddy, can you move over?”
The second Sasha sits down on the bench, Nicole picks up her coloring book, walks around from the other side of the table, and slides right in next to him, wiggling until Jake has no choice but to let her in, too. “Can you draw me a shark?” she asks.
Sasha blinks at her, and Danny laughs when he looks around, as if hoping someone might save him. “Dude, come on, you gotta draw her a shark.”
To Sasha’s credit, he doesn’t glower across the table at Danny like he clearly wants to, and when he exhales, it’s not enough of a sigh for Nicole to notice. “Shark?” he echoes, turning back to her.
“Yes, please.” Nicole drops a crayon in front of him. “I want a hammerhead. And a megamouth.”
Sasha glances at Danny, a promise of payback flashing in his eyes before he bends over Nicole’s coloring book to start drawing… something. Danny doesn’t understand art, like, at all, but he can tell that whatever Sasha’s doing is pretty bad, even by stick-figure standards.
Nicole wrinkles her nose. “You don’t draw a lot, do you,” she says, and Danny’s trying so hard not to laugh, but Sasha’s expression is fucking killing him. “It’s okay, you can try again. Practice makes perfect.”
“That’s great advice, Nicole.” Danny grins at Sasha, imagining how beautiful it would have been if he could have recorded that moment on his phone. “For drawing and gymnastics.”
“I’m not talking to you,” Nicole replies.
It’s Sasha’s turn to laugh now, and maybe Danny should be offended, but honestly, he’s too distracted by how Sasha looks with his face lit up like that.
He’s seen it before, usually when he says something Sasha isn’t expecting, and those sudden, startled smiles always make him feel like he’s a kid again, finding sand dollars on the beach.
Still chuckling, Sasha offers the crayon back to Nicole. “How do you draw shark?” he asks her. “Maybe better if you show me.”
Nicole supervises him through a hammerhead, a megamouth, and a great white, her small fingers pointing wherever she wants him to go (“The mouth needs to be bigger and he has eight fins and—no, not there, there!”).
Sasha listens patiently, his head bent towards hers as he draws and redraws until she claps her hands in satisfaction, and holy shit, Danny’s so in love with him it hurts.
If there weren’t thirty other campers in the room, he would have kept sitting there, watching Sasha and Nicole with the dumbest smile on his face.
Before long, though, the younger kids get restless and start requesting their favorite gymnastics videos, so he grabs the old laptop that’s hooked up to the even older TV.
“All right, who do you guys want to see today? Simone?”
“YEAH!”
“And Julia!”
“And Matt Miller!”
There’s a Rio playlist already queued up—Chelsea put it together a while ago, tired of searching for the same videos over and over again—so all Danny has to do is hit play.
By now, the sight of that enormous green arena is like an ache from an old injury, something he can mostly ignore even though the damage is still there; it’s easy enough to focus on the campers instead of the TV, laughing at their commentary and quizzing them on the names of the skills.
But when Matt’s high bar routine comes up, Danny’s stomach clenches, and he has to fight the urge to bolt out of the room.
It doesn’t even matter that he’s not looking at the screen, because he can still hear everything the announcers are saying—and the worst part is, they spend most of Matt’s performance talking about him, how much higher he scored than Matt in qualifying, how “hungry” he is for a medal after the “disappointing” all-around and floor finals.
“GOLD!” Angelo shouts when Matt sticks the landing, throwing his hands—and his crayons—into the air.
“Hey, buddy, we talked about not doing that, remember?”
“Oh, yeah.” With a sheepish grin, Angelo slides off the bench, squatting on the floor to collect the crayons. Peering up at Danny, he asks, “Can we watch your high bar routine?”
It’s not the first time Danny’s gotten this question, and it’s not the first time he’s forced a smile, buying himself an extra second or two to come up with an excuse.
He’s been avoiding that video for almost a year now, and he knows it’s stupid, knows he should just sit down and watch it once and for all… but he fucking can’t.
He’d tried a few months ago, loading it up on YouTube and taking a deep breath before pressing play—but as he watched himself walk onto the mat, his heart started racing, a rapid thump-thump-thump in a ribcage that suddenly felt like a vise grip around his lungs.
“This could be the routine of a lifetime,” the announcer said, and the next thing Danny knew, he was slamming the screen down so hard he almost broke his laptop.
Since Angelo’s still waiting for a response, and now Sasha’s looking up from Nicole’s coloring book, Danny opts for his most tried-and-true method: distraction.
“Oh, that wasn’t a good one,” he tells Angelo with a laugh and a grin, feeling the strain on his cheeks.
“But hey”—he raises his voice to get the other campers’ attention—“who wants to see a really cool video?”
“ME!”
“All right, I’m gonna show you guys one of the best vaults I’ve ever seen in my entire life,” Danny says, disconnecting the laptop from the screen so he can search for sasha zakaryan vault 2015 world championships without anyone noticing. “And I want to see who here can recognize the gymnast.”
“Matt Miller!” Angelo yells.
“No, it’s not Matt, but I’ll give you guys a hint: you’ve all met him before…”
The kids start brainstorming; Sasha glances suspiciously at Danny; and Danny winks at him, his heartbeat finally back to normal.