The steering wheel had been sitting in the sun since seven that morning, and when Venus took hold of it at a quarter past four, it bit her.
She said a word her mother had banned from the house and shook her hands out. The air in the car was thick enough to lean on and smelled of hot vinyl and old french fries, and her blond ponytail lay against the back of her neck as heavy as a hand. The car was secondhand. Its last owner had repainted it before selling, so every dent had been smoothed over and nobody could tell her what it had been through.
Through the windshield she could see her little sister in the front yard. Terra had the garden hose and was swinging it in high arcs so the neighbor kids could run shrieking through the rainbows. Their mother sat on the porch steps with her phone up, filming.
Venus had been the brightest thing on the street for sixteen years. Nobody had ever filmed that.
Practice started at four-thirty, and the beam was the one place Terra had never followed her. Venus dug the sunshade out from behind the passenger seat, a silver accordion of foil, and wedged it against the windshield between herself and the sun. Then she cranked the air conditioning to max and stood outside the open door while the vents roared.
It took what felt like four hundred years.
The vents blew hot, then warm, then merely unpleasant. The neighbor kids ran through Terra’s rainbows and back again. Venus checked the seatbelt buckle every minute or so, and every time it was still too hot to touch, long after the air around it had given up. When the cabin was finally cold enough to sit in, she folded her long legs under the wheel, and something crunched beneath her sneaker.
The floor mats were covered in beads. They must have started as droplets, wrung out of the cooling air and rolling into the low places, and somewhere along the way they had frozen. Now they lay white on the carpet and smoked faintly, like the dry ice her mother floated in the punch bowl every Halloween. Venus pinched one and dropped it. It stung her fingers with cold. The ones nearest the vents were already shrinking, turning back into the air she had spent four centuries cooling.
She popped the trunk and found the snow brush from an old ski trip, the long telescoping kind with a metal rail for a handle. It looked suspiciously like a mass driver. She laid it along the floorboard, drew it back, and swept. The frozen beads shot down the rail and out the door in a fast white line, over the driveway, over the hose and the rainbows, and kept climbing. Venus waited for them to come down. They never did.
“Do it again!” Terra yelled, and their mother swung the phone around to catch whatever she was yelling about.
By the second stoplight her mouth had gone dry as chalk. She felt under the seat and came up with an empty water bottle, nothing in it but a white ring at the bottom where water used to be.
At home Terra had the hose and the whole front yard. Venus could turn around, and her sister would spray her down for free in front of everyone, and their mother would film that too. She put on her blinker and pulled into the convenience store at the corner.
The only case left in the cooler was a twelve-pack of some expensive brand with a glacier on the label. The fine print said it had been bottled from ice at the far edge of the world. It cost more than water should. She paid anyway. She had one bottle open before she reached the door and empty before she reached the car, so cold it hurt her teeth.
She dropped the rest into the trunk. It landed with a thump that rocked the whole car on its springs, and when she got back behind the wheel the temperature needle had crept up a hair. She decided she could live with a hair.
She was late. The coach looked at the clock, then at her, and said nothing.
The lights over the beam were the big industrial kind, hung in a row from the rafters, and once she mounted they were all she could see. She looked down instead. Her shadow lay in a small dark pool around her feet. Coach’s rule: keep the shadow still and the rest of you will follow.
Split leap. The shadow stayed. Full turn, the slowest on the team and the only one that went clockwise. The shadow stayed.
Coming out of her switch leap it slid left. She pulled it back. It slid right. She pulled it back. Wobble, correct. Wobble, correct. Each correction was too small for anyone watching to see, and if she stopped making them for a single breath, the shadow would slide off the side of the beam and take her with it.
She walked to the end of the beam, raised her arms into the glare, and threw her dismount. She landed with both feet planted on the mat and kept them there.
The lights were still printed across her eyes when the others reached her, the girls from floor and the girls from bars, crossing the mats with their hands up. Someone was yelling her name. The girl from bars got there first and held out her phone, screen first.
“I got the whole thing.”