"I know, Grandma."
"And you drive slow. It's wet out there. The radio said there's been three accidents on the interstate already this morning."
"I'll drive slow."
"And you call me when you get to Coach Ray's. And when you get to the hotel tonight. And—"
"Grandma." Dara put down her fork. "I've been driving for six years. I'll be fine."
Odessa sat down across the table from her with her own cup of coffee and looked at her over the rim of her reading glasses, which she had not bothered to put on. It was the look. The one that had silenced four thousand seventh graders.
"I know you'll be fine," she said. "You're always fine. That's what worries me."
Dara did not ask what she meant. She ate her eggs.
The plan for the day was simple. In the morning, at nine, she had a photo shoot downtown for the sponsor that was paying for most of her trip to the trials, a small, stylish athletic apparel company based in the city that had signed her the year before, when her world university bronze had made the local news. Their marketing director, an energetic woman named Priscilla Ng who talked very fast and wore enormous glasses with tortoiseshell frames, had decided that what the company needed for its next campaign was not Dara Whitfield in a white dobok kicking a pad in a gym, which everyone had seen a hundred times, but Dara Whitfield as a person. Street style, Priscilla had said, waving her hands. Edge. Attitude. Who is the woman behind the black belt? So they had hired a stylist, and the stylist had dressed her, and Dara had spent two hours the previous afternoon standing in a studio with her arms out like a scarecrow while the stylist pinned and tucked and stood back with her head tilted and said things like, yes, yes, oh, that's so you.
It was not so her. But she had to admit, looking at herself in the mirror at the end of it, that it was something.
The jacket was the centerpiece. A cropped leather biker jacket, cut short at the waist, in two tones, a rich dark brown across the shoulders and down the arms and a deep glossy black across the body, with heavy silver zippers and a wide collar that stood up around her neck like armor. Under it went a pair of high-waisted shorts in the same leather, black at the front and tan at the back, cut short, close-fitting. Then sheer black tights, and a pair of black high-top sneakers on thick platform soles that added three inches to her height, which was already five foot ten. The stylist had stepped back and looked at her and said, oh my God, you look like you could kick a car in half, and Dara, who in fact could probably have done some serious damage to a car door with the right kick, had not said anything, but had privately thought that this was not quite the message Coach Imura would have wanted her to send.
The hair had taken three hours. Her cousin Tasha had done it, the night before, sitting on the floor of Tasha's apartment with Dara on the couch above her and a movie on the television that neither of them watched. Tasha, who was a hairdresser now, and who had never forgotten who had climbed up the slide after Kevin Marsh fifteen years ago, had braided Dara's hair into thick, intricate cornrows that swept back from her forehead in clean curving lines, each one crisp and even as the furrow of a field, and gathered them at the crown into a long heavy braided ponytail that hung down past her shoulder blades. She had wrapped it at intervals with thin bands of gold thread, so that it caught the light when Dara moved her head. And then she had spent twenty minutes with a soft toothbrush and a pot of edge control, laying Dara's baby hairs along her hairline in sleek, delicate, swooping curves, her tongue between her teeth in concentration, until they lay flat and glossy against her forehead like brushstrokes.
"There," Tasha had said, sitting back. "Now you look like a champion."
"I am a champion."
"Now you look like one." Tasha had grinned at her in the mirror. "Go win, cousin. And don't kick anybody."
"I never kick anybody."
"I know. That's what scares me about you."
It was the second time in twelve hours that someone in her family had said something like that, and Dara did not know what to make of it.