Chapter 34
Étienne
"The whole concept of failure gets weaponized," I said finally. "Used to shut down people's autonomy. You're allowed to make mistakes, to learn by doing things imperfectly. Your coach shouldn't be treating you like some machine that's supposed to deliver flawless results every single time."
I saw her absorbing this.
"Your technical ability is way above average. What you're struggling with is staying consistent under pressure—that's psychological, not technical. And you're trying to pull that off while training on a bad ankle, managing your mother's expectations, adapting to a completely new environment. Training injured while maintaining artistic presentation? That's hell mode."
Her eyes met mine, and I saw something shift—recognition, or relief at being seen.
"Everyone's got injuries..." Her French had gone hesitant. "Gymnastics is hell mode. We trade our bodies for scores. By the time we retire, our bodies are basically..." She trailed off, searching for the word, then switched to Bulgarian in frustration. "Razvalen."
Scrapped. Destroyed. Broken beyond repair. The word hit like a physical blow.
"Don't talk about yourself like that." The command came out almost desperate. "Your body's not some disposable resource. You're not something to be used up and thrown away when you're no longer useful."
She looked at me with those amber eyes that seemed to see too much, and I wondered if she could read the anger in my expression—not at her, but at the system that had taught her to view her own physicality as expendable.
"Tell me about Anna," I said, needing to redirect before I did something I couldn't take back. "Your friend from the Bulgarian team."
Elena's expression shifted, latching onto the change of subject with something like relief.
"Anna was incredibly talented. She could do rope elements most seniors wouldn't even attempt. The coaches kept saying she'd be at World Championships by sixteen, Olympics by eighteen."
I heard the admiration in her tone, but also something darker—recognition of what had been lost.
"Then she hit fourteen. Her height went from 158 centimeters to 168 in under a year. Weight went up, hips widened. Everything that used to be effortless suddenly took twice the work for half the result. Her body just stopped being the tool she'd trained it to be."
She wrapped her arms around herself, reliving not just Anna's experience but her own parallel journey.
"One day at training, she kept missing the same sequence. Over and over—wrong landing, dropped rope, broken rhythm. Finally she just collapsed on the mat and started crying. She said, 'My body's become a stranger. It won't listen to me anymore.'"
"They cut her three months later. Last I heard, she's teaching kids' gymnastics in Sofia. She's nineteen now. Career over before most people's even starts."
The story settled between us with the weight of a cautionary tale, and I understood what Elena was really asking—whether she'd managed to navigate that same treacherous passage, whether her body had betrayed her the way Anna's had.
"How did you get through it?" I asked. "The developmental transition."
Her laugh was bitter, completely devoid of humor.
"They monitored everything. Height, muscle mass, bone age, hormone levels. The coaching team tracked my development like some kind of experiment. They had charts predicting my final height based on my parents' genetics, calculations for optimal body composition at every stage."
She paused, debating how much to reveal.
"They told me to sleep less. Because growth hormone peaks during deep sleep. Too much sleep meant growing too tall. So I'd set alarms, wake myself up every few hours. Middle of the night, I'd be up watching anime. I was exhausted all the time, but exhausted was better than too tall to compete."
My fingers had gone white on the railing. I felt cold rage building in my chest.
"They told me not to think too hard about schoolwork. Because thinking makes you hungry, hungry makes you eat, eating makes you grow. So I'd do the bare minimum for classes and spend everything else training or resting, trying not to use my brain too much."
She stopped, swallowing hard.
"I developed an eating disorder that lasted almost two years. Not the aesthetic kind—the kind where your body's been trained to see food as a threat. I'd look at a meal and feel sick. Weight dropped to 38 kilograms. Period stopped for six months."
My hands had started shaking with the effort of remaining still.
"Eventually my body adjusted. Period came back. I learned to eat just enough to function without triggering growth. The monitoring went on until I was seventeen—that's when bone age testing showed my growth plates had closed, that I wasn't getting any taller. The relief I felt when they told me that—" She stopped, shook her head. "I was relieved my body had stopped betraying me. That's not how a seventeen-year-old should feel about puberty ending."
The silence that followed was suffocating.
"You still have disordered patterns with food," I said quietly. "I've watched how you eat since you moved in. The way you calculate every portion down to the gram, the anxiety if meal timing gets disrupted, the guilt after any deviation from your plan."
She looked away, defensive posture settling into her shoulders.
"It's better now. I eat enough to train. My weight's stable. My period's regular. That's recovery, right?"
"Recovery would be eating without guilt. Recovery would be seeing food as fuel and nourishment, not a threat. Recovery would be having a relationship with your body that isn't fundamentally hostile."
Her eyes met mine, tears gathering.
"What did your mother say?" I asked, though part of me already knew. "When you were struggling. When your weight dropped to dangerous levels. What was her response?"
Elena's voice had gone very quiet.
"She said if I wanted to be an elite athlete, this was the price. That she went through the same thing. That it's just what elite gymnastics requires. Sacrifice. Discipline."
"No." The word came out harder than I'd intended. I forced myself to moderate. "That's not discipline. That's systematic abuse dressed up as training methodology. What you're describing—sleep deprivation, starvation, psychological manipulation around natural development—that's destroying a child's relationship with her own body to serve adult ambitions."
I could see her processing this, trying to reconcile my assessment with the framework her mother had constructed.