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Julissa Gomez was a teammate and friend of Christy Henrich.

Also see article "Hurt friend never far from her thoughts"

Ryan, J. (1995, June). Little girl lost: The tragedy of a teenage gymnast [Except from the book Little girls in pretty boxes]. Redbook, 185, pp. 66(8).

It was 2 A.M. when the phone rang in Otilia Gomez's Houston apartment. She wasn't alarmed. Her 15-year-old daughter, Julissa, was in Japan competing in a gymnastics meet and, ignoring the time difference, had been calling her mother in the middle of the night for a week. Otilia didn't mind. She loved talking to Julissa. Otilia was close to both her daughters, but she and Julissa shared a special bond. Her younger daughter, 13-year old Kristy, was, like most teenagers, bullheaded in her quest for independence. But Julissa never tired of her mother's hugs and kisses, never went a day without saying, "I love you."

Physically and socially, Julissa was Kool-Aid and finger paint, as tiny and shy as a fifth grader. She stood four feet ten inches tall and weighed 72 pounds. Yet like most elite gymnasts, Julissa grew up too slowly and too quickly at once. She put in more hours at the gym than many adults spend at their full-time jobs. During the week she moved from the gym to school to the gym, 13 hours a day. She rarely saw a movie or walked to the mall or sat in an ice-cream parlor with friends. She had no time, and she had to watch every calorie.

Julissa wanted to excel in gymnastics for herself, but she also knew how much money and hope her parents had invested. The children of migrant farmers, Otilia and Ramiro had grown up working in the fields alongside their parents in the summer. In school from fall to spring, they spoke English only to their teachers, their sole contacts with the non-Latino world. Otilia dreamed of becoming a teacher. After high school she worked her way through Texas Women's University and married Ramiro. He delivered eggs, hauled produce, worked the fields, then, during a two-year stint in the army, learned welding. By the time Otilia finished college, Ramiro had earned his welder's license, and the couple found jobs in San Antonio, where their daughters were born.

Julissa knew what her gymnastics meant to her parents. Nothing pleased Otilia more than watching her gifted daughter soar with the daughters of lawyers and oilmen. And nothing meant more to Julissa than pleasing her mother. She wanted to repay her mother's love with ribbons and trophies and, if she worked hard, harder than any other gymnast, an Olympic medal.

At age 10 Julissa had outgrown the gymnastics programs in San Antonio, and the family moved to Houston, America's hotbed of gymnastics. For them, it was unthinkable to send Julissa to Houston alone and let some other family raise her. They had promised themselves they wouldn't let gymnastics break up their family. Ramiro lost his welding job the first month in Houston and considered moving the family back to San Antonio, but Julissa was blossoming at the gym of world-famous coach Bela Karolyi. So Ramiro found work as a cook. But after five years in Houston, Julissa could no longer tolerate Karolyi's harsh tactics. Ranked thirteenth in the country and with the 1988 U.S. Olympic Trials six months away, Julissa needed to find a new coach quickly. She settled on Al Fong in Blue Springs, Missouri. This time Otilia and Ramiro saw no other alternative than to break up the family, at least for a few months.

Ramiro moved to Blue Springs with Julissa, transferring to a TGI Friday' s restaurant in nearby Kansas City. Otilia and Kristy would move when school let out. Kristy was upset that her life would be uprooted because of her sister. "I didn't want to move either," Otilia recalls. "But we had invested so much money and it was what Julissa wanted. We just couldn't say no."

When the phone rang in Otilia Gomez's apartment on the night of May 5, boxes bound with packing tape stood against the walls. In two weeks Otilia and Kristy planned to load the car and drive to Missouri. The family, Otilia thought, would soon be together again.

"Hello!" she answered cheerfully, eager to hear how Julissa had fared in competition that day.

"Mrs. Gomez?"

It was Al Fong. To this day Otilia can't remember what Fong told her. But she knows his words registered because she turned on all the lights, got dressed, called Ramiro in Missouri, packed her bags, and headed for the airport to board a plane to Japan.

FOR MANY YOUNG GYMNASTS, THE ROAD to the Olympics winds through a steamy gym in suburban North Houston. It's the home of famed coach Bela Karolyi, who trained Olympic gold medalists Nadia Comaneci and Mary Lou Retton. When 10-year-old Julissa Gomez first visited Karolyi, she had just finished second in a state meet. Karolyi wanted her. He wanted every promising gymnast. He ran what came to be known as The Factory, gathering to his gym as many flexible girls as he could find, then winnowing out the weak, the rebellious, and the unappealing.

Though Julissa didn't fit Karolyi's idea of a star - she was timid and frail-looking - she was talented, worked hard, and never complained. Even if she wasn't going to be another Mary Lou, she could be valuable in pushing the star gymnasts to greater heights, plus her parents were willing to pay. Karolyi placed her on the "hopes" team, talented youngsters who were groomed as candidates for Karolyi's special elite team: six girls handpicked to train for the Olympic tryouts. These six were queens of the gym. They paid for their status with a grueling schedule: 46 hours a week. Their parents paid hundreds of dollars to Karolyi every month often sacrificing piano lessons or a new bike for their other children. They learned to keep their mouths shut when Karolyi called their daughters bloody imbeciles or fat cows or kicked them out of the gym for crying in pain.

"As a parent, you become so involved that you just can't see the whole picture. You're seeing only what you want to see," Otilia Gomez reflects, talking in a flat voice, as if the words were sea pebbles worn down by pain and anger. "You really think they can be verbally abused and it's not going to affect them, because you've built them up so much. Now, looking back at what Julissa went through, I know it took its toll."

The competition in Karolyi's gym was intense. "These girls are like little scorpions," Karolyi once said. "You put them all in a bottle, and one scorpion will come out alive. That scorpion will be champion." If a girl didn't perform a routine to his liking, he often made one of her teammates do extra work, building a climate of resentment.

Julissa worked hard, eventually moving up to the elite team. But along the way she closed down something inside her, as if her hardening muscles had become a fortress around her soul. She barely smiled anymore. And she was always in pain. Karolyi picked on her. testing her survival instincts: Either she would grow stronger from his abuse or she would quit.

"Bela was mean to her. He would call her names or say mean things, " says Carrol Stack, mother of 1988 Olympian Chelle Stack. "She had a lot of talent. But she was quiet and shy. Didn't have much personality. You've got to have personality with him."

No matter what ugly words were thrown at her, Julissa didn't fight back. Few do. An elite gymnast learns to stand still - mouth closed, eyes blank - and weather her coach's storms. Even when she's in pain, even when she's scared, she says nothing. "Chickening out" is an unforgivable sin.

Elena Moukina could have told Julissa how dangerous this code of silence can be. The Soviet gymnast won the World Gymnastics Championships in 1978. At age 20, on the eve of the 1980 Olympics. she attempted a complicated tumbling trick. Plagued by injuries, she knew she wasn't prepared but never questioned whether she should do it. She crashed to the mat. That fall broke her neck and left her a paraplegic.

"I was let down by my own inability to say no," Moukina said in an interview with International Gymnast magazine. The coaches' demand for complete subservience, she said, is one reason they prefer their gymnasts young. "It is far easier to work with small, mute creatures who look at a coach as an idol."

Julissa never voiced her fears. She was flexible and graceful, making her a beautiful performer on the beam, but her frail body lacked the power for the explosive moves demanded in the vault. Still, Julissa's coaches had her doing the most technically difficult vault at the time, the Yurchenko. This vault was introduced by the Soviet Union' s Natalia Yurchenko in 1983, when she used it to win the World Championships. In the individual finals a day later, however, she cracked both ankles. Yurchenko had trained for years to perfect the vault, but young American girls had to learn it almost overnight to keep pace.

In the Yurchenko the gymnast sprints down the runway and does a round- off onto a springboard, landing with her back to the horse. She then leaps, back arched, as if she were doing a backward dive. Her hands land on the horse for a split second. She pushes off, twists in the air, and lands on her feet.

The vault scared many gymnasts because they couldn't see where their feet were landing on the springboard. And because they leapt off the springboard backward, blindly, they could miss the horse altogether.

Julissa's teammates at Karolyi's knew she never felt confident with the vault. It required a consistency Julissa could never find. A gymnast' s feet should land on the springboard in the same place every time, but Julissa was all over the place. Gymnasts remember Karolyi warning Julissa she was going to miss the springboard someday. "You could tell it was not safe for her," says Chelle Stack, who watched Julissa every day in practice. "Someone along the way should have stopped her."

But no one did. Some said that. despite the risks, the Yurchenko was safer for someone like Julissa because she didn't have the strength to propel herself safely through the more traditional vaults. And Julissa performed well enough in competitions to drive her vault scores from the low 9s to the mid to high 9s (on a scale of 10). That was what she needed if she was going to reach the Olympics. And for Julissa, as for most elite gymnasts, the Olympics loomed like some dreamy, magical place that would make all the sacrifices worthwhile.

About a year before the Olympics, Karolyi added a midday practice to the morning and evening workouts. When Julissa asked about school. Karolyi shrugged. Julissa dropped out of ninth grade and signed up for correspondence courses, as her five teammates had already done.

A short time later, Julissa sprained her knee. Though her doctor told her to stay off it for a month, she went to the gym every day - fevers, chicken pox, broken bones, and sprains were unacceptable excuses for missing practice. She worked only on the uneven bars, where she would put no strain on the ankle (she didn't dismount). Karolyi alternately ignored and harangued her. In his mind, perhaps, he was trying to motivate Julissa to rise above the injuries. Like a boot camp sergeant producing hardened soldiers through humiliation, extraordinary work, and blind obedience, Karolyi had turned a handful of gymnasts into champions. But because 12-year-old girls aren't soldiers, most of Karolyi's gymnasts didn't become champions. They were more likely to end up as entries on hospital logs.

One day Karolyi blasted Julissa. He was tired of her babying her sprained knee: She could either work out like the rest of the girls or leave. Otilia, who had just arrived from work to pick up her daughter, saw Karolyi yell at Julissa but couldn't hear what he was saying.

"What happened out there?" Otilia asked in the car.

"Nothing."

Otilia persisted. "What was that all about?"

Julissa started to cry. "I hate him. I don't want to go back."

The Gomezes had just paid Karolyi $1,000 for a month of basic tuition, plus private lessons on the uneven bars. "It was getting completely out of hand," recalls Otilia, who taught in a year-round school to earn two months' extra pay.

Julissa signed on with the only other coach in Houston who trained elites. but seven months later she knew she was getting nowhere, and the Olympic Trials were fast approaching. During her last month in Houston, she had a disturbing and prophetic dream - that the reigning world champion from the Soviet Union had died. When she told the dream to her mother the next morning, she was still upset. "It seemed to me like part of her wanted to say, `I don't want to do this anymore, '" Otilia says. "I knew she didn't like to compete, but she loved everything that went with it: going on trips, signing autographs, going to good restaurants, staying in hotels. That was exciting for her. We kept asking if she wanted to quit, and she kept saying no. I think she sort of felt the same way we did. that she had come this far...."

One thing was clear: Julissa needed a new coach. Otilia called Al Fong in Blue Springs, Missouri, where world-class gymnast Christy Henrich trained. Julissa had befriended Christy at an international meet, and they had become pen pals.

Fong was delighted to coach Julissa. He considered it a coup.

AL FONG TALKED BIG. WHEN HE'D opened the Great American Gymnastics Express in Blue Springs, he told reporters, "I think I'll have kids on the national team in two years." It took him seven. He had also predicted having "the top gym in the United States by the year 2000" - and drove his gymnasts hard. A coach becomes a star only by producing stars, and Fong's best shot at stardom in the winter of 1988 was 15- year-old Christy Henrich. Then Julissa came on board and bingo! - Fong doubled his Olympic chances. And right behind Henrich and Gomez waited rising star Karen Tierney.

The three gymnasts formed the foundation Fong needed to create his dynasty. Fong told reporters that, unlike other coaches, he'd create world champions in a family setting, letting his "girls be girls" and eat pizza and go out on dates. "Check me in ten years," he challenged in 1983, "and see if it works."

Unbeknownst to Fong. Karen Tierney's aspirations had died at the U.S. Olympic Festival in the summer of 1987. She was badly injured performing a Yurchenko vault. After I hurt my neck, I gave up my dream," she says. "The Olympics no longer seemed important." But she continued at Fong's gym for a time and says she cringed when she watched Julissa do the Yurchenko in practice. "She was always real close to the end of the board. And she had a weird approach. I remember once or twice. she missed the end of the board."

Fong saw Julissa's flaws too, later testifying that he had noticed her poor technique at competitions when she was still with Karolyi. She wasn't landing within the safety zone of the springboard. So Fong tinkered with her approach and her round-off and felt so confident of her progress he accepted an invitation for her to compete at the World Sports Fair in Japan just three months after she arrived in Missouri. But first there was a meet in South Dakota the, weekend before she was to leave for Tokyo. Julissa begged her mother to come.

"I'm going to be seeing you in two weeks," Otilia told her. "By the time you get back from Japan, I'll be in Missouri."

"But I want you to come," Julissa pleaded.

At such a late date Otilia couldn't get a decent airfare, but she caved in. She flew to Kansas City, then she and Ramiro drove eight hours to South Dakota. Julissa did well, especially in the vault. She scored a 9.7 on her Yurchenko.

That night Julissa stayed in her parents' hotel room. As she often did at home, she got into bed with her mother, leaving her father to sleep alone. Otilia and Julissa flipped through magazines, looking at clothes and hairstyles, laughing and talking. The family spent part of the next day together, then Otilia and Ramiro took their daughter back to the team's hotel. Julissa said good-bye to her parents four times.

On the drive back, Otilia smiled. "I feel so good having seen her," she said to Ramiro.

OF THE 200,OR SO GYMNASTS WHO COMpete on the elite level every year, only 20 make the national team. Only 6 of those compete in the Olympics. A gymnast's elite career usually lasts for five or six years, generally from age 12 to age 18. Some go on to college gymnastics, a more forgiving environment. Others walk out of the gym and never return. How many leave because of injuries or eating disorders? No one keeps a tally.

Because the athletes' careers are so short, an elite gym moves to a single beat: the ticking clock. To rest an injury is to kill precious time. The girls know all too well that when their bodies give out, there's someone ready to take their place. So they hide their sprained ankles, deny their broken toes, downplay their pulled muscles.

"You never come into the gym and not have something wrong with you," says Brandy Johnson, a 1988 Olympian who once competed with a broken foot. Everyone takes painkillers. Kathy Johnson, an Olympian turned sportscaster, says she took aspirin daily with a Maalox chaser. Erica Stokes, who trained with Karolyi, took five to seven Advils every day - never mind that such a high daily dosage can cause bleeding in the lining of the stomach and can lead to kidney disease. Elizabeth Traylor, another Karolyi gymnast, took six to eight Advils daily and sprayed her knees with anesthetic to further dull the pain. She was 11 years old.

IF BELA KAROLYI IS THE HIGH PRIEST OF insensitivity, he's not alone at the altar. The adults around elite gymnasts become so accustomed to the braces and splints and cries of pain that they're dulled to the damage the sport can inflict. Kathy Kelly, the director of women' s gymnastics for USA Gymnastics (formerly the USGF). had just returned from the funeral of an anorexic gymnast when asked about the sport' s dangers. She answered cheerfully, talking about the federation's new health programs, about how she had recently hired a female sports psychologist and had installed a hot line for the athletes and coaches. She mentioned the safety certification program and voluntary training courses for coaches. "We have a healthier group of kids out here now," she said.

But the federation has no teeth. It can dispense the best advice in the world to the coaches and athletes, but it can't make them follow it. A coach can't be banned unless he's been charged with a crime. Repeated injuries to his gymnasts. abusive language. ignorance of eating disorders - none of these are grounds for expulsion.

So where is the safety net? "There is none:" concedes education and safety director Steve Whitlock.

In fact. the federation's mandate, which is to field the best national teams it can and to develop the sport's popularity. sometimes means pushing sore, injured athletes to compete.

During the 1992 Olympics, Shannon Miller had a screw in her elbow to hold down a bone chip. Betty Okina competed with two fractured vertebrae in her lower back. Kim Zmeskal had a stress fracture above her ankle and a bad wrist. Michelle Campi, with a fractured hip, couldn't compete at all. Dominique Dawes hurt her back during pre-Olympic training in Europe and had to sit out for two days. And Wendy Bruce tore her thumb muscle away from the bone shortly before the Olympics and had it shot up with cortisone.

"We are commodities," former Olympian Kelly Garrison says. "We make the federation's living, really."

GYMNASTS GET HURT SO OFTEN BECAUSE the sport demands ever-increasing training hours and ever-diminishing bodies. Dr. Lyle Micheli, a pediatric orthopedist at Harvard Medical School and former president of the American College of Sports Medicine, says gymnasts who train more than 16 hours a week are at high risk for repetitive stress fractures. Most elite gymnasts train between 30 and 45 hours a week. and nearly all complain of back pain' A 1990 study of Swedish male gymnasts found they had as many degenerated disks in their spines as the average 65-year-old man.

These findings are more dire when applied to female gymnasts. Unlike their male counterparts, most female gymnasts reach their peak when they are still children. Hips and breasts are an impediment to their performance - they have to be tiny to soar through the air. But the pounding on their still-forming skeletal structures can have long- term consequences. Some permanently damage their joints and backs. Some don't grow to full height. Strenuous exercise coupled with poor eating habits (gymnasts diet constantly to keep their weight down) delays the onset of puberty. If a girl isn't menstruating, she isn't producing estrogen. and her bones cannot develop properly. This accounts, at least in part, for the high rate of injury.

And the sport grows riskier each year. When Olga Korbut performed a backflip on the balance beam at the 1972 Olympics, the move was revolutionary. Today gymnasts perform three backflips in a row. Audiences can't get enough of it. We love these risky moves not just for their beauty but for the terrible thrill of a death-defying spectacle.

THE TOKYO MEET WAS IMPORTANT TO Julissa: She wanted to prove she was as good as Christy Henrich. Sunya Knapp, a teammate, noticed during practice that Julissa was struggling with her Yurchenko vault. But Fong wasn't alarmed. It wasn't unusual for a gymnast to take time adjusting to a new environment. And on the first day of competition, Fong's instincts proved right. Julissa finished higher in the vault than any other American and qualified for the individual finals the next day.

She called her mother about midnight Houston time with the good news. She said she would call again the following day.

That night Julissa couldn't get Elena Moukina out of her head. She had begun thinking about her when someone had pointed across the floor of the Tokyo arena to the Soviet coach. "Do you know who that is? Elena Moukina's old coach." Elegant and powerful, Moukina had been world champion when Julissa started in gymnastics and immediately became her favorite gymnast. Julissa mentioned Elena at dinner later that night, then again at the hotel, where she and Sunya stayed up talking. "I can't believe that was her coach," Julissa said. At ten-thirty Julissa went to her room but soon caged Sunya. "Can I sleep in your room tonight?" Julissa asked. I don't want to be by myself." As Julissa slid in next to Sunya, she mentioned Elena yet again. "It's such a shame what happened to her."

The next morning Julissa lined up at the vault. When it was her turn, she stood straight and still. Her face darkened with concentration. her chin tilted forward. The muscles in her legs looked like ropes. Across the chest of her red leotard, she wore the three letters she hoped to wear in the Olympics four months later: USA. Her gaze traveled 82 feet down the long strip of green carpeting, past the springboard. to the vaulting horse. Was she beating back thoughts of Elena Moukina? Did she have doubts? Despite Julissa's chronic troubles, Fong watched her from yards away rather than right next to the horse, where he might have been able to catch her if anything went wrong.

With a deep breath Julissa took off. She ran, legs and arms pumping. She whipped into a round-off in front of the springboard. When she popped upright out of her round-off, she was slightly out of control, so slightly that the untrained eye wouldn't have noticed. Her left foot landed on the springboard, but her right foot slipped off the back and plunged to the floor. Her body jerked as if she had stepped off a curb unexpectedly.

Every instinct told her not to pull out of the trick. Keep going, her coaches always told her, because she could hurt herself worse by balking. So she arched her back as if doing a backward dive, with her neck stretched and her head upside down. But she had no lift. Her head didn't clear the top of the horse. She crashed full speed, forehead first, into the side of the horse. Her neck snapped. The force of the vault carried her body over the horse. She flopped to the mat like a shot bird.

People began shouting and running as Fong stood rooted, stunned. A trainer performed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Julissa slipped in and out of consciousness on the way to the hospital. She didn't feel pain until doctors snaked a tube down her throat for the respirator. She couldn't talk. She couldn't understand what people were saying around her. She couldn't remember what had brought her to this white bed, her body laid out as if in a coffin, her head in a steel grip.

When the Gomezes arrived in Japan, Julissa was conscious. The first thing Otilia did was devise a way for her daughter to communicate with a letter-board. When Julissa wanted to say something, Otilia pointed to each letter until Julissa blinked "yes." Julissa would spell out every word this way. She never brought up the accident, though Otilia suspected she knew what they knew: A Houston doctor who had flown to Tokyo said he was 99 percent certain the paralysis was permanent.

A week passed as the Gomezes waited for word from the Japanese doctor that Julissa was stable enough to be flown home. She had had a tracheotomy, and every day she was breathing more on her own. Upon receiving the doctor's approval late the second week, the Gomezes went to arrange the final details. When they arrived at the hospital in the early afternoon, their spirits were high. Finally they could give Julissa some good news: They were going home. Their translator brought Julissa a going-away gift: a pearl choker to hide the tracheotomy scar. The three waited to be called into intensive care.

They waited. And waited. Finally the receptionist summoned Otilia and Ramiro. The doctor wanted to see them.

The doctor spoke in Japanese, but Otilia and Ramiro knew what he was saying. They saw him mimic the motion of the tracheal tube coming out. During the night Julissa had become disconnected from her oxygen supply. She was in a coma.

When Otilia and Ramiro went in to see her, Julissa's eyelids were fluttering and her mouth was twitching. She had wires taped to her skull. The two Houston doctors who had flown to Tokyo to accompany Julissa home examined her and delivered grim news: Julissa had brain damage. She was having seizures, and each seizure was killing more brain cells. Even if she came out of the coma, she would spend the rest of her life in a vegetative state.

The Gomezes flew home that night on a military plane, their daughter strapped to a stretcher behind them, tubes and wires forming a grotesque web around her.

Otilia never returned to her old apartment. She had all her furniture put into storage. While Julissa was in intensive care at Methodist Hospital in downtown Houston, the family stayed with Otilia's sister, then in a Ronald McDonald House, then in a rented house near the hospital. Otilia didn't accept calls. She refused to let people visit.

"I think I was trying to take myself to a place that wasn't real," Otilia recalls. "In Japan it wasn't real because it was a place we had never been. A language we didn't understand. It was like living a nightmare. Coming home, if I had gone back to the apartment and to the people I knew, then it would have to be real."

In September, four months after the accident, doctors told the Gomezes there was nothing more they could do. They said Julissa could live 5 years or 50 years and recommended placing her in a long-term care facility. The Gomezes decided to care for her at home and spent three months at the Institute for Rehabilitation and Research learning how to work the ventilator, suction fluids from the trachea, inject Julissa' s food from a large syringe into her feeding tube, use the catheter. and change her diapers. Kristy eventually learned how to wash the tubing, sterilize the syringes, and monitor the machines, though she would sometimes go weeks without stepping inside her sister's room. She told few friends at her new school about Julissa and rarely invited them to her house.

Julissa was no longer in a coma and so would open her eyes, wince as if in pain, and even cry at times. But she usually slept or stared into space. She doubled her weight to 140 pounds, making her virtually unrecognizable.

In August 1991, three years after going home, Julissa contracted an infection and had to be rushed to the hospital. A doctor encouraged the Gomezes to let the illness take its course; they insisted he treat her. But as her condition worsened and she needed to be hooked up to yet another machine to clear her lungs, Otilia and Ramiro decided to let Julissa go. She had been through enough. For three days they stayed at her bedside. When the doctor told them it was time, Otilia took Julissa in her arms, something she hadn't done in three years because of the ventilator tubes. She felt her daughter's last faint breath on her cheek.

The gymnastics federation barely mentioned Julissa's accident or death in its official magazine. There was no tribute at any gymnastics meet. But the accident sent shivers through every gym in America. No young gymnast could say she didn't think about Julissa as she stood at the end of the runway facing the vault. Some spent months tortured by fear. For some, Julissa's accident would change forever the way they looked at gymnastics. But for most, the fear eventually disappeared, muscled out by ambition and the powerful drive to please.

Inside a bedroom in Independence, Missouri, a thousand miles from Julissa's grave, Christy Henrich hung a picture of her good friend. Like Julissa, she was willing to endure any pain to fulfill her dream. In a quest to reshape herself into the wispy ballerina the coaches and judges favored, Christy starved herself. Her body cannibalized her muscles. bones. and organs for fuel to keep functioning. Finally there was nothing left. Christy died last summer at age 21. She weighed 50 pounds.

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