—GO!
As we started lunging, I looked over at the floor-to-ceiling windows that formed the back wall of the weight room and saw every coach on staff watching us from the hallway, including Coach Hightower’s scowling self. The feeling of Hightower’s eyes on my body seemed every bit as heavy as the two fifty-pound weights I was lugging forward. Knee-floor, up, knee-floor, up.
The dumbbell handles scraped back and forth against the thick calluses on my palms, creating blisters around the edges of the calluses. Sweat trailed down my fingers, making the handles slippery and forcing me to continuously re-grip—creating a second set of blisters on the insides of my thumbs’ knuckles. My hamstrings went the way of cottage cheese. My forearms glowed hot orange. Knee-floor, up, knee-floor, up.
Fifteen minutes into the game a groan was torn from the throat of J1, and what followed was the sound we’d all been waiting for, the thud and ping of two dropped dumbbells knocking against each other. An invisible cord was cut—you could release your weights without the shame of being first.
But while several players immediately quit, I continued lunging. I passed J1, who stepped out of line and sucked air between clenched teeth as he examined the electric pink fissures that ran down his thumbs. Knee-floor, up, knee-floor, up. I thought about how you can’t see wounds on black players as easily as you can on white players. Knee-floor, up, knee-floor, up. But when you did see them on black players, the wounds looked that much more horrible. Thud, thud, another player dropping out.
My blisters tore, sweat stinging the open wounds, and I soon lost track of who remained in the game, lost track of anything that fell outside my seared, aching body. I didn’t notice that Chase had come up right behind me, and was caught completely unaware when, just as I was touching my right knee to the floor, he stepped on the heel of my left shoe so that when I rose the shoe slid halfway off my foot. I stopped, looking down at the shoe.
—The fuck, McGerrin?! Devonté yelled.
—Fuck you! Chase grunted, lunging past me.
Heckles from players who’d dropped out, calls for me to be allowed to set down my weights so I could reaffix my shoe. But Chase knew what he was doing. If I set down the weights now, I’d lose the last of my momentum. The only choice I had was to keep going and hope my shoe remained mostly on my foot.
I resumed marching—slowly, precisely—and three minutes later I had the satisfaction of watching Chase kneel and fail to rise again, stuck in that position like an homage-paying knight. Knee-floor, up. Knee-floor, up. One by one, players continued to surrender, some with a bang of hastily dropped dumbbells, others with a whimper that got them mocked by players who’d already forgotten their own excruciations, until the only people remaining were me and Kendrick Slocum, our starting fullback and the odds-on favorite to win. Kendrick was a quiet, shuffling type from northern Louisiana, and his street outfit of choice was a pair of baggy jeans and a humongous white T-shirt, clothes he could disappear into. But beneath the loose wardrobe was a body that would have made Rodin proud: Kendrick’s traps rose a good six inches above his collarbone, and his thighs were as muscle-marbled as what you see on thoroughbreds, while his triceps and biceps appeared flexed even when there was no way they could be. He was not merely the pound-for-pound strongest player on the team, he was the strongest in the absolute sense. I have no idea whether this was true, but word was Kendrick made walking-around money by modeling naked for anatomy classes at the medical school.
He was carrying two seventy-pound dumbbells to my fifties, and yet his steps were even, his tread light.
Knee-floor, up, knee-floor, up.
The handlebar steel grated across my weeping blisters. My grunting had started out as a he-man sound, but by now the grunts had become unselfconscious, were just how I was breathing.
Knee-floor, up, knee-floor, up.
By the time I reached the next straightaway, my whole body started to tremble. I clamped my cramping hands harder around the handles, knee-floor, but when I rose from this latest lunge, I took a slightly bad angle on my badly shod foot and felt the loose shoe crumple beneath me. The slightly bad angle was exacerbated into a majorly bad one by the weight in my hand, dragging my body rightward. I didn’t want to let go of the weights. My left foot was slipping, my left foot would slide beneath my body and my shinbone would crack …
I dropped the weights and stumbled away. A cheer rose for Kendrick as he placidly set his dumbbells on the rubber floor. I stood looking at my fingers, which remained curled in the shape of the handles, my palms resembling haphazardly peeled fruit.
And yet I was elated. Players patted me on the back and congratulated me on finishing second despite Chase’s sabotage. When I looked over at the bank of windows, Coach Hightower nodded from behind the glass.
In no time Reshawn and Jamie became an if-then couple—if one was present, then you could be sure the other was somewhere close. They slept together, ate together, walked hand-in-hand from class to class. Reshawn was forever carrying one of the theory books Jamie had loaned him, while she could be relied on to idly wander over to the shelf next to his desk and slide out a novel of his own. The sex was constant, which I knew because I would return to our room to find a little checkmark in the lower right-hand corner of our door’s whiteboard, the signal Reshawn and I developed to stop me from walking in on them again.
Jamie’s acceptance letters to grad programs began
