At Risk Read Online Free Page B

to be treated like a champion.
    The locker room smells musty and lockers are clanging. Here the gymnasts look more like the little girls they are. One, when she sees Polly, quickly covers her bare, undeveloped chest. Polly walks along the aisles, looking for Amanda. Instead, she sees Evelyn Crowley.
    “You had some great routines,” she tells Evelyn.
    Evelyn smiles, but Polly can see her disappointment.
    “I didn’t practice enough,” Evelyn says.
    “Have you seen Amanda?” Polly asks.
    Evelyn shrugs. Amanda is probably the last person she wants to see right now.
    “Maybe she’s in the showers,” Evelyn says.
    Polly walks toward the rear of the locker room. She sees Amanda’s unzipped gym bag hanging in an open locker. Inside there are barrettes and a hairbrush and a necklace made out of tiny plastic beads that look like seed pearls, which Amanda sometimes wears before a meet for good luck.
    The showers are all turned on and Polly can hear the voices of the little girls, a murmur that can just as easily explode into giggles or a contemptuous rating of someone’s routine. Polly has decided, they will definitely have fried clams tonight. When they go home they’ll sit out on the porch to watch for the last few lightning bugs. They’ll hear a chorus of frogs, both from the marshy inlets that surround Morrow and from the aquarium inside the house where Charlie is temporarily keeping a bull-frog, which he swears is the last of the specimens he’ll bring home, just as he swears it’s a matter of life and death for him to record the number of croaks per hour during various weather conditions. Maybe Polly can persuade Amanda to give up one day’s practice and go to the beach with her tomorrow, just the two of them. When they were little, it was hard for Polly to divide her time equally between the children. Charlie and Amanda wanted such different things that one of them always had to be put on hold, and either way Polly felt torn between them. No matter what she did, she always had the nagging sense she was disappointing someone. But now things have changed; the children prefer to be with their friends and Polly has to wheedle hours for herself. Polly often thinks about this when her mother calls from New York, but it never stops her from cutting the conversation short, from always being the first to hang up.
    The closer Polly gets to the showers, the stronger the smell of ammonia. They use some awful heavyduty cleaner and the result is dizzying.
    “Hi, Polly,” a high voice says, and Polly turns and hugs Amanda’s best friend, Jessie Eagan, who is also the daughter of the coach. Jessie is a good gymnast, but she’s not passionate the way Amanda is, and maybe that’s why she can cheer for Amanda and feel no jealousy. It’s too bad Jessie’s not serious, because she has a perfect gymnast’s body, she’s only four feet six and amazingly light. She has brown hair, cut short, and golden eyes. Both she and Amanda are in love with some singer in a rock group, whom they refer to by his first name, Brian, as though they were on intimate terms with him.
    “Amanda was fantastic,” Jessie says. “Even my dad says so.”
    Clearly, the coach is not one to hand out compliments.
    “Come out to dinner with us tonight,” Polly says.
    “I can’t,” Jessie says mournfully. “Don’t tell me if you’re going to go out for clams because I’ll be trapped at my aunt’s having something gross.”
    Polly hugs Jessie again and walks on toward the showers. She forces herself not to laugh when she sees one of the girls showering with her bra on, and in fact she’s a little shocked that an eleven-or twelve-year-old would even wear a bra. The sound of the showers makes it seem as though the room were under water. The tiles are green, and there are no windows back here. Polly sees a hand from inside one of the showers holding onto the outside wall. Without thinking, she begins to run.
    Amanda is doubled over; her blond hair