After practice ends that night, I get ready to leave the gym. But the prospect of heading home is unbelievably depressing—I love my parents, but moving back into what is essentially a shrine to my failed childhood dream is unbearable. They hover. They ask too many questions about my plans for the future. I’m grateful that they let me stay with them (rent-free, even), but I’d be fine spending as little time there as possible. So, halfway through crossing the gym’s lobby, I turn around and head back onto the floor. It’s late, and the gym is empty; this is a golden opportunity to start choreographing Hallie’s new routine without gymnasts and other coaches gawking.

I choreographed all the girls’ routines back in LA, but this is a different beast. With Hallie, there are no physical limits; anything I can dream up, she can do. That doesn’t mean I have entirely free rein, though. The sport’s scoring system is laughably complex. It used to be simple: a perfect performance earned a perfect ten. But now, according to rules instituted in the 2000s by the Worldwide Organization of Gymnastics, a routine’s total score is made up of a difficulty score and an execution score. On floor, only the top five hardest tumbling skills and top three most challenging dance skills are allowed to count toward the difficulty score, though additional points can be earned by connecting multiple elements. Points are docked if you miss out on certain skills. I take Ryan’s binder from the shelf under the stereo and flip through it until I find the section of the Code of Points that details the requirements: I’ll need to include a leap or jump series, a front flip, a back flip, a flip with a full twist or more, a double flip, and a final tumbling pass with a difficulty value of at least a “D” (skills are ranked alphabetically, with the easiest ones labeled as “A”). In other words, choreographing a winning floor routine isn’t just an art—it’s a science, too.