Gravity

by Sarah Deming

  She set the ice on the apron but Tiffany gave it back to her, saying, “Take that with you, and keep it on the eye as much as you can.”

  “Okay.”

  “And ice your rib, too.”

  “Okay. Thanks, Tiff.”

  Gravity waited for Rick to give her some parting words, but he was busy fiddling with his phone.

  “What time do you want to train tomorrow?” she asked.

  “Oh, I can’t do tomorrow,” he said vaguely. “I’m traveling.”

  “When will you be back? When do you want to look over the video of me and Jenna sparring?”

  “Oh, that!” He laughed. “That was just for my records.”

  Her phone chimed.

  “And I’ll be gone until June.”

  Gravity felt her heartbeat accelerate. It was hard to figure Rick out. Why did he set up sparring for her and record it if he didn’t want to use it to discuss her mistakes? And why had he acted like he wanted to be her new coach if he knew he would be traveling?

  Her phone chimed again.

  Tiffany said, “Listen, come train with us if you want. We start every day at four.”

  Gravity thanked her. As she picked up her gym bag, her phone made more sounds. Texts had come in from Lefty, Svetlana, and Melsy.

  Her heart leapt when she saw Lefty’s name, and she felt a rush of need and longing so intense the pain in her rib disappeared. But it came back doubled when she read his message.

  Heyyy G! thanx 4 the pic;) your sweet but I think we r just not compatible:(

  She stared at the phone in shock.

  Was he breaking up with her? Over text?

  The message from Svetlana said:

  Left just posted pics on IG with Caroline from hempstead PAL,,,I was trying to tell you the other day,,he’s been posting kiss faces and wet emojis on her pics for weeks,,FUCK HIM,,how’s smileys?

  Melsy’s said:

  Cousin. Demetrius told me he saw your boy making out w this skank from long island last night. Fuck him. Moms making coconut rice and we got you a futon to sleep on and a special neck pillow, come home.

  Gravity’s heart began to pound. She went to Instagram and saw it. Lefty, with his goofy postsex grin, draped over the shoulder of a big-boobed blonde. Gravity knew that girl. She fought at light welterweight and was terrible. Her dad owned a big car dealership on Long Island. She went to Lefty’s Facebook page, furious, and saw that he had changed his status to “Married” and his cover picture to a cheesy montage of Caroline’s shitty selfies.

  Gravity texted Lefty, WTF?

  She texted Svetlana, Good looking out. Smiley’s kinda sucks tbh.

  She texted Melsy a string of crying faces, then erased them and put a string of angry faces, then erased them and wrote, I love you cuz.

  Lefty texted her back two question marks.

  Svetlana texted back, Whos coaching you now?

  Melsy texted back, did you luv him?

  Gravity texted Svetlana, I thought Rick Ross but he’s traveling so maybe Tiffany Clarke

  She texted Melsy, I don’t know.

  She set the phone down and made her way to the shower in a daze. Smiley’s had good water pressure; she winced when the jets hit her bruised face and left side.

  How had everything gotten so fucked up? Everyone seemed to be working against her: Coach, Mom, Rick Ross and Jenna Petrone, and now Lefty!

  She had thought she was in control of her life, that everything was going the way she wanted on a straight road to Rio. And now it was like she had taken one wrong turn and suddenly had no idea where she was.

  She looked around numbly at the gleaming tiles of the shower stall, wishing she could be magically teleported to the claustrophobic girls’ room at Cops ’n Kids with the busted mirror patched with duct tape; Tray’s old locker covered with stickers; Svetlana scrubbing herself with wet wipes. It wasn’t the number of rings or heavy bags that made a boxing gym. It was the people and the way they cared. She put a hand to her rib.

  Coach never would have let anyone hurt her.

  If only she could call him.

  No, she thought, her longing giving way to resentment. She could not stand to hear him gloat.

  Coach would hear that she and Lefty had split. Everyone would. They would all know that Lefty had dumped her for that other girl. She thought of D-Minus and Boo Boo and the rest of the boys, of what they must think of her now. Then she remembered the naked selfie.

  Oh, God.

  She got down on her knees and prayed: Dear God, please don’t let him show that to anybody, please please please.

  She watched the water run off her body and down the grate to wherever water went when it was dirty. She hadn’t felt like a slut before, not when she thought Lefty loved her. But now that he had poured her down the drain, Coach’s judgment no longer seemed unfair. She had been whoring around at the gym. And it had ruined everything.

  She turned off the water and stood dripping until she began to shiver. It wasn’t fair. Lefty could still go back to the gym anytime he wanted and swagger in like he owned the place. People would respect him more because he had slept with her.

  She was the champion and the more loving one, and she had lost all her status. And she could never go back there now, not ever. She toweled herself off, hard, until her skin hurt. She wished she could scrub the entire layer of skin off her body.

  She picked up her phone.

  Melsy had texted: Are you crying?

  She texted back, No.

  Svetlana had texted: Tiff is cool but Be careful about that guy Rick,,,heard he gives people steroids

  She texted Svetlana back, Thanks. It’s hard training without you, and added some emojis of muscles and hearts and a girl with two blond pigtails and a boxing glove and a Ukrainian flag.

  Lefty hadn’t texted.

  She stared in despair at the two question marks that were the last text from him. The curved shapes reminded her of their bodies when they spooned. She thought again with regret of how judgmental she had been their last time together, how he had wanted her to lie back down with him but she had hurried off. Maybe he didn’t know how much she cared. Maybe that was what the question marks meant.

  Her heart pounded as she texted, Lefty I’m so sorry if the last time we were together I came off as bitchy or something. Can we please talk about this in person? It’s so hard over texts. I miss you. Please don’t do this. I just wish I could touch you and look in your eyes.

  She hit Send before she could lose her nerve, then pulled on her leggings and Team Boo Boo hoodie.

  Svetlana texted back a funny GIF of a cat on a treadmill.

  Melsy texted back, If you aren’t crying, you didn’t love him.

  Lefty texted back, I had fun w u but I’m in luv w Somebody else

  Gravity collapsed onto the bench. Coach always said that the punch that really hurt was the one you didn’t see coming. He was in love with that girl? How could it be love? It had only been a few days.

  It must have been going on a lot longer, then. But he had called Gravity his girlfriend. How could he have done that if he was with someone else?

  She blinked, willing her eyes to produce tears, but they wouldn’t. She just felt kind of dead inside. Was Melsy right? Was the fact that she couldn’t cry proof that she didn’t love Lefty? Then again, Gravity never cried. She could not remember the last time she had cried, not counting hard punches to the tip of her nose.

  She reread Lefty’s text. He had had fun with her. Fun. Like playing a video game or petting a dog. That was all it was to him.

  She went back to Instagram and looked at the photo of the two of them again, hating Caroline with a thick, hot hatred. Caroline outweighed her by fifteen pounds, but she fucking sucked. They matched her lightly at her father’s club shows because he
always sponsored everything.

  Gravity imagined taking the train to Hempstead, barging into the PAL, and challenging Caroline to spar in front of all her bougie Long Island girlfriends. She would only ask for one round. Nobody could say no to one round. That was all Gravity would need to knock her the fuck out.

  When Gravity walked through their front door, Auntie Rosa said, “Finally!” and handed her three coconuts. “You’re the best at breaking things.”

  “Ooh! Ooh!” cried Tyler, jumping up and down. “Can we do it the fun way?”

  Gravity nodded. “Do you wanna pitch or catch?”

  “Catch!”

  Tyler dashed off into the elevator, and Melsy came and held Gravity in her arms, squeezing her tight and stroking her back.

  “Aw, cuz,” Melsy murmured. “You okay?”

  “I guess.”

  “Let’s do your hair!” Melsy said, taking one of Gravity’s frizzy curls between her fingers. “I got some gold extensions that will look hot. We can try it out, and if you like it, I’ll redo it for China.”

  “Okay.”

  Gravity tried to smile, but her face felt numb.

  “Forget that boricua!” yelled Rosa from the kitchen. “He does not deserve you.”

  “Thanks, Auntie.”

  Gravity walked across the living room as though in a dream. She moved aside the enormous jade plant on the windowsill. Its shiny blue raku pot was one of the many pieces of her auntie’s pottery that Gravity had broken as a child. She traced a finger down one of the lines of golden lacquer that shot through the blue, holding together the pieces. Somehow Rosa had repaired it so it looked even more beautiful for having been broken.

  Gravity pulled the window up and raised the screen. Tyler was down there already, waiting patiently.

  When he saw her at the window, he grinned and waved his arms.

  “All clear down below!” he yelled.

  Gravity let go of the first coconut. It hurtled downward, at some speed that Ms. Laventhol had taught them but she forgot—she had been half asleep—and hit the sidewalk with a satisfying crack. Tyler looked back up at her, his huge grin white in the night.

  “That was a good one!” he yelled.

  “That was a good one!” she yelled back, but she did not feel good. She did not feel much of anything.

  She watched Tyler gather the pieces of coconut together and put them in the big pot Auntie Rosa had given him. He craned his neck to look up at her. It made her own neck hurt to see it. It was nice of Melsy and Rosa to get her a special pillow, but it would not help. Gravity would be seventeen in just a couple months, but she had the neck of an old lady.

  “All clear down below!” he yelled.

  Gravity let go of the second coconut and watched it fall.

  It felt like her soul was not inside her body but somewhere impossibly far away, operating all the functions from a distance. She could smell the smells and see the sights, but she could not feel the feelings.

  The coconut hit the pavement. Tyler inspected it.

  “It broke a little bit,” he yelled up. “That was an okay one.”

  She let go of the third coconut.

  A moment after it left her hands, a little kid came from out of nowhere on a scooter.

  Tyler screamed, “Watch out!”

  But it was too late. Gravity could do nothing but watch in horror as the coconut hurtled five stories down, accelerating at 9.8 meters per second squared—a useless fact she suddenly recalled, her mind operating best in high-impact situations—on a collision course with the little boy’s frohawk. His mother should have made him wear a helmet.

  If Gravity had not already had faith in God, what happened next would have made her believe. At the last possible moment, a rat shot out from Auntie Rosa’s garbage cans, making for the bodega across the street.

  The little boy shrieked and veered off course.

  The rat disappeared into the night.

  The coconut broke against the concrete.

  Gravity felt her soul land back in her body.

  And nobody got arrested for manslaughter.

  “That was a great one!” Tyler yelled, jumping up and down.

  “That was a great one!” she said, giddy with aftershock.

  As she closed the window and turned back toward her family, she could not stop laughing.

  “What happened?” Melsy asked.

  “A New York miracle,” Gravity said.

  Tyler came back with the pieces of broken shell, and they set to the hard work of grating. You could do it in a Cuisinart, but the Delgados had cooked and chomped many a pot of coconut rice, and the consensus was that hand-grating was superior. Melsy, Ty, and Rosa did it in shifts, on the special graters Rosa had brought back from the DR, while Gravity went to wash her hair.

  She looked at herself in the bathroom mirror while she blew it out, studying her face: her squinty, dark eyes, the swelling around the left one already almost gone; the broad nose that was good for boxing; the annoying zits where her headgear rubbed her jaw; the thick, soft lips that Lefty had said were made to be kissed.

  Nothing had changed. Nothing was broken.

  One of Tiffany’s white-collar clients was a physical therapist. He had said the rib was just bruised and would take three or four weeks to heal. China was in four weeks. Gravity would work hard and get better.

  Fuck Lefty. Rosa was right. He didn’t deserve her. It wasn’t how many times you fell down, it was how many times you got back up.

  “I am going to win an Olympic gold medal,” she told herself, and she still believed it.

  When she came out of the bathroom, Rosa was squeezing the coconut meat in cheesecloth. Tyler was playing Hell Slayer 3. Melsy was arranging the bundles of hair, rubber bands, and combs with the precision of a trainer preparing to wrap a champion’s hands.

  Gravity felt gratitude fill her to the brim. Mom could steal her money and her trophies, but she could not take their love away from her. She sat on the floor at Melsy’s feet, let her eyes close, and surrendered to the wonderful feeling of her cousin’s deft fingers. Melsy hummed as she worked, painlessly combing out the tangles and sectioning the hair into pieces. She made it just a bit too tight so the braids would last, and it always gave Gravity a headache, a different kind than the ones from the ring.

  Pretty hurts. Gravity thought of the photos of the ring card girls Monster had shown her: the leather shoe strap cutting into the soft white flesh.

  “What was it like for you?” she asked her cousin. “Being in the boxing ring.”

  She could feel Melsy smile behind her. “It was so bright.”

  “Yeah!”

  “It was like a whole different world in there. The canvas was bluer than blue. Like my quinceañera dress. I could barely see the people in the crowd because the lights were in my eyes.”

  “You looked so beautiful,” Gravity told her, inhaling the delicious fragrance emanating from the kitchen. Rosa was boiling down the coconut milk now until it caramelized like dulce de leche.

  Melsy began braiding in the gold extensions. “At first I was trying not to fall in those heels. Then I got the hang of it, and I started listening.” Her voice filled with wonder. “It’s amazing what those coaches say. It’s like a whole telenovela!”

  “It is!” Gravity said.

  “The ropes got kind of sweaty later on in the night. That was gross.”

  Gravity laughed. “I guess they do. I’m always so sweaty I don’t notice!”

  Next to them, Tyler let out a triumphant whoop. Gravity looked up at the screen. His little Paladin was dancing around the bloated corpse of a one-eyed giant.

  “No way!” she said.

  “Way!” Tyler was beaming.

  “He beat the Bubonic Cyclops!” she told Melsy. “You don’t eve
n understand how hard that is!”

  “I’m a bad man,” Tyler said.

  Auntie Rosa emerged from the kitchen, looking proud. “Okay, bad man, time for dinner.”

  She had fried up some red snapper and tostones and made black beans, but the coconut rice was the main event. It was past midnight now, because a good main event always takes time, and Tyler and Auntie Rosa started nodding off midmeal. Gravity finished her rice, then started in on Tyler’s, savoring the coconut’s nutty sweetness.

  “It came out real good,” she said.

  Melsy nodded. “Mmm-hmm. Now come let me finish before we fall asleep with your hair half done.”

  Gravity sat back down at her feet and gave herself up to Melsy’s soft hands. After a while, she worked up the nerve to ask what she was wondering.

  She tried to make her voice sound casual. “How’s it going with you and D?”

  Melsy snorted. “He’s too little for me. Never date a man under six feet tall unless he makes six figures.”

  Gravity laughed. Melsy was probably five foot four if she was wearing her tallest heels.

  “He might be little,” Gravity said. “But he’s big in the ring. He’s got such long arms and good rhythm and distancing that he can outbox guys much taller. Like, remember Kimani? The really big one who was taking photographs the night you worked the fights?”

  “Monster?”

  “Yeah.” Gravity tried to think of how to express it to her cousin, but it was hard. “It’s like, Monster’s a superheavyweight, right? But inside he’s kind of insecure. You could psych him out if you knew what you were doing. But D…D’s got, like, infinite potential. If there’s any way to win, he’ll find it.”

  She thought about D’s loss to Tiger. “I’m not saying that he can’t be beat, because he can. He’s lazy and stubborn. You can beat him on conditioning alone.” She laughed, thinking about the crap he ate. “He’s like a fancy sports car running on cheap gas. But you can’t outslick him or take his heart. Even if he loses, he’ll go down punching.”

  “Oh. My. God,” said Melsy, her hands freezing midbraid. “I am so sorry, Gravity.”

  “What?” Gravity asked.

  She turned back to look at Melsy. Her cousin had tears in her eyes.