Hallie makes it back to the bench just as the stony-faced judges reveal her score: a flat 12.850. That means she’s officially slipped down to ninth place. I feel sick. As long as she doesn’t completely bomb floor, she should qualify to compete at Olympic Trials. (The top fourteen competitors will go to Trials.) But there’s no guarantee of that—anything could happen at a competition, especially with her confidence at an all-time low right now—and ninth place is a brutal, embarrassing spot to be in, even out of seventeen total spots. Ideally, she’d be in the top five or six, if not fully in the top three for medal contention. I hate to imagine Jasmine’s commentary right now. It can’t be good.

Ryan spots Hallie’s empty water bottle and goes to refill it.

“I’ll be back in a minute,” he promises.

Hallie scowls and slumps down further in her seat. There’s a beat of silence between us.

“I’m completely failing,” she says morosely. “I’m messing up over and over again on live TV, looking like a total idiot.”

“Hey, scoot,” I say, moving to sit next to her. “You’re not an idiot. At all. I promise.”

She slides over a few inches but doesn’t look at me. She’s staring at the big screen, transfixed as Emma sticks a powerful double-double on floor and makes it look easy.

“I’m in ninth place,” she spits out. “Ninth place. That’s for idiots.”

“You have to stop calling yourself an idiot,” I say.

She gives me a look full of skeptical contempt that reminds me she is still a surly teenager. She might have traded in the typical trappings of a teen girl’s life for the discipline, demands, and pressures of a fully grown adult athlete’s, but this is one thing she can’t change. She’s a sixteen-year-old girl, behaving the way any sixteen-year-old would.

She scrunches up her face. “I didn’t work this hard to be all the way down the scoreboard.”

“I know,” I say carefully. I try to figure out what to say to lift her spirits. “But maybe there’s more to it than that. What if you can just appreciate the fact that you’ve worked so hard to be here? I know you get so much joy out of performing. Just go out there and have fun showing off what you can do, you know?”

She tilts her head and stares at me.

“You’re nuts,” she says. “You’ve lost it.”

“I’m just trying to show you the silver lining,” I insist. “Because there is one.”

“If you kind of squint,” she adds.

“Squint really carefully, yeah,” I say. “You’re here. You deserve to be here.”

She takes a long sip of her water and shakes her head slowly.

“You sound extremely yoga right now,” she says.