Gravity

by Sarah Deming

  She knew what they would do: They would laugh. They would joke about the Russian villain from Rocky IV. It didn’t matter that Katarina was not Russian. None of them knew where Azerbaijan was.

  Fatso would say, “Shit! You gonna let that Drago bitch do you that way?”

  And Coach would scowl and say, “I thought we had rhythm. I thought we worked off the jab.”

  She opened her eyes. You could win a fight with nothing but the jab. You could win a fight with rhythm. Something came over Gravity then, and she understood that her mistake had been in allowing Katarina to set the style, to make it an awkward in-and-out affair, like one of her mother’s old LPs that was warped from the sun.

  Gravity whipped out the jab and stepped left, marking the edge of one of many circles. There was a new kind of authority in it that Katarina felt at once, taking a tiny step backward and tightening her guard. Gravity switched directions swiftly, circling right now and mixing up levels: up, down, stutter step, then a double to the face, then a feint and a big right hand.

  Katarina might have been her equal in height, but she did not have such long arms. This was why she was so skilled at moving in and out, stopping and starting. Gravity did not need to work like that. She could keep it in a very narrow groove, a range at which she could touch Katarina but Katarina could not touch her. It was all a question of keeping her own beat going, even in the silence between the punches, filling the space between them and making it her own.

  Just before the bell, she tried something Boo Boo had taught her, suckering Katarina in with a slow walk to her right, her left hand low around her knees, a shiny lure that promised a false opening. It was a risk, but this was no place to play it safe.

  Because of the angle, Katarina could not see the right arm, locked and loaded. At the right moment, Gravity spun, turning her foot, turning her hip, pouring all the weight from her right leg into her left and beyond, into her shoulder and arm and glove. Had she missed, she might have fallen, but she did not miss. She clenched her fist tight within its little gauze shell, and her first two knuckles met bone.

  Red blossomed beautifully from Katarina’s nose. The follow-through threw their two bodies together, chest to chest, headgear to headgear. When Gravity pulled free, her tank was stained with Katarina’s blood. The bell made its triple chime. She danced back to the stool.

  “Good round,” Shorty said, pulling out her mouthpiece.

  Gravity sank down gratefully. She had thrown a lot of punches the second round and felt exhausted. Shorty knelt at her feet and squeezed water into her mouth.

  “Hey, Gravity!” Kaylee yelled from the stands. “Look!”

  When Gravity looked over at them, all her teammates did the wave. She laughed.

  “Beautiful right hand!” Sacred yelled.

  “Do it again!” Kaylee added.

  I will, she promised them, and even though she was tired, she could not wait for the bell to sound again so she could go back out there and keep fighting.

  Shorty reached into the waistband of her trunks and pulled her abdominal protector away from her belly, giving her room to breathe. Bonnie held ice against her chest and neck. Gravity felt her heart rate drop.

  It was a long round break. Shorty pulled the towel out of his pocket and mopped at the blood on her chest. Because he had his back to center ring, it was Bonnie who noticed it first. She let go of the stool and raised her arms in the air, whooping. The referee appeared at Shorty’s side and said, “Congratulations.”

  “Wait!” Gravity said. “Why?”

  She looked past him to the red corner, but she couldn’t see Katarina, just the backs of her coaches and the ring doctor, bending in over her.

  “Her nose is broken. She doesn’t want to continue.”

  Gravity felt a sinking inside her. She wanted to keep fighting. This was supposed to have been a hard fight. She had just been hitting her groove. She felt like grabbing Katarina and shaking her to make her keep going.

  “Congratulations, champ,” Shorty said in his scratchy voice. “You fight a beautiful fight.”

  Bonnie hugged her to her enormous bosom.

  Gravity peered anxiously at Katarina, who was sitting on her stool, clutching a bag of ice to her face. The doctor was moving a penlight in front of her eyes.

  “Is she going to be okay?” she asked.

  Shorty made a dismissive gesture. “She be fine. Girls are tougher than boys.”

  That night, she sat in the stands next to Sacred and screamed for Kaylee as she took the ring to box the Indian champion.

  Laishram Memi was a legend. She had survived poverty and violence to win five world championships, one of them just months after giving birth to twins. Her best weight was probably 100 pounds, maybe 106, and when the referee brought her and Kaylee face to face in center ring, the size differential was enormous.

  “Kaylee looks like a giant!” Gravity said.

  “Yeah,” Sacred agreed. “But she don’t look right.”

  Gravity knew what she meant. Kaylee had been nervous ever since the draw and had not made any dumb pirate jokes all day. Although Memi only came up to her shoulders, the tiny Indian champion radiated dominance, and her intensity filled the ring.

  “She’ll shake herself out of it,” Gravity said.

  Memi came out fast. She was a southpaw like Kaylee but with a more awkward style. A bit like Gravity’s opponent that morning, she liked to get in, get off, and get out. Kaylee spent the entire first round chasing Memi, who zipped around like a hummingbird.

  In the second round, Memi began putting combinations together. She kept her hands too low and looped her punches wide, but she did everything with such fire that the technical flaws were immaterial.

  A cheer of “India! India!” rose from the opposite stands.

  “That’s all right!” Gravity yelled as Memi scored a looping left that they could hear from the bleachers. “Let’s get that back!”

  “Work, Kay!” Sacred yelled. “Work!”

  Gravity and Sacred watched the third round in tense silence. The Turkish woman referee was letting them fight through the clinches unchecked, and Memi was rough in there. She tied Kaylee up and continued to club away with whatever was free, and sometimes what landed was an elbow or a hit to the back of the head. It wasn’t intentionally dirty, but it wasn’t Kaylee’s style. They say that southpaws confuse everyone, even fellow southpaws, and sometimes that made for ugly matches.

  “She’s so aggressive,” Gravity murmured.

  Sacred said grimly, “She wants it more.”

  Gravity did not see how that was possible. She thought of Kaylee in their makeshift sauna in Cornwall, of all the sacrifices she had made to overcome her OCD. How could anyone want it more?

  “She let Shorty and them get into her head,” Sacred said quietly. “They good coaches and all, but Kaylee was peaking. She had finally beat Aisha after six losses. Bad time to make changes.”

  Sacred’s words confirmed Gravity’s own vague sense of Shorty’s limitations. Kaylee had been training full-time at the Olympic Training Center since Cornwall. She said the altitude had done wonders for her conditioning, but her boxing looked more tentative.

  “You think they tried to change too much about her?” Gravity asked Sacred.

  Sacred spread her hands. “You gotta remember where you came from and what got you here.”

  Gravity nodded. She never would have been able to beat Azerbaijan if she hadn’t channeled Coach and Fatso. It was still hard to believe Sacred was her friend, that they were sitting there, talking shop. She wanted to ask her a million questions.

  “So, what do you do when Shorty gives you advice?” Gravity whispered. “I mean, he’s such a nice guy….”

  Sacred scoffed. “Nice don’t pay my rent. Look, you gotta pretend to listen. Maybe sometimes you even do listen
, if it’s something worth hearing. But when that bell rings, you do you. Shorty ain’t the one in there taking punches.”

  Gravity winced as Memi wrestled Kaylee down to the canvas, falling on top of her. When Kaylee got up, she was limping. She bent and straightened her left leg repeatedly.

  “Fuck,” Gravity said. “She blew out her knee.”

  “She’s gonna quit,” Paloma said loudly.

  Gravity shot a dirty look in Paloma’s direction and cupped her hands to her mouth. She yelled, “Let’s go, Kaylee! Dig deep!”

  When the ref called time in, Memi flew at Kaylee as though launched by a slingshot. Kaylee’s weight was all on her front leg, and as Memi connected with a left cross, she crumpled backward into the ropes and lay there in evident agony.

  “Must’ve torn her ACL,” Paloma announced. “Or maybe the meniscus. That’s gonna take a while to heal.” She sounded almost happy at the prospect.

  They stopped the fight and gave it to Memi. Kaylee could barely stand up for the decision.

  She wasn’t going to Rio. It had all happened so quickly that it was hard to believe.

  The team headed back to the dorms, but Gravity stayed in the venue to wait for Kaylee. On the floor by the ring, two pretty young women with a camera were talking excitedly.

  “Memi looked amazing,” one of them was saying. “Oh, I’m so happy for her!”

  “Let’s get Carmen Cruz to do voice-over on the knockdown.”

  “Do you think Kaylee Miller would give us an interview?”

  “Ugh, I doubt it.”

  “There’s no way she’ll qualify now, right?”

  “No. She’s out.”

  One of them looked over and met Gravity’s eyes. “Hey, you’re Gravity Delgado!” She smiled. “Great fight today.”

  Gravity nodded, unable to smile back. She had been on a high since beating Azerbaijan, but now she felt incapable of celebrating. The two women seemed to take in her mood and understand it.

  “We’re sorry for Kaylee,” one of them said.

  “She can fight better than that,” Gravity said. “Today just wasn’t her day. Your girl deserved it. She’s tiny but she punches above her class.” That reminded her of D-Minus. He was fighting in a few hours. If he won two more, he would make it to Rio.

  “Hey!” The one with the camera hoisted it onto her shoulder. “Could you say that again for the camera? But first just say your name and who you are.”

  That made Gravity laugh. She wanted to say, “I ain’t no snitch,” but they wouldn’t get the joke, so she just said, “Kaylee’s my friend. I’m not gonna be in some other girl’s movie.”

  By then, Kaylee had come limping out of the dressing rooms. Bonnie had her arm around her, and Shorty was trailing sadly behind, carrying his trainer’s bag. Kaylee’s face was red and blotchy, and she wore tape around her knee. Gravity could tell she was trying very hard not to start crying again, so she did not say anything, just reached out for her friend’s hand and squeezed it. Kaylee nodded, her nostrils flaring. Bonnie rubbed her back and made soothing noises as they rode the bus back to the dorms.

  After a while, Kaylee said, “I fought like shit.”

  “That’s not true,” Gravity said.

  “I just…I dunno. I just didn’t feel it.”

  “Yeah.”

  The hazy light coming through the bus window lit up Kaylee’s teary blue eyes. Gravity wished she could say something to make her feel better.

  “It would have been better to get outclassed,” Kaylee said. “But when you know you could have done better, it really hurts. I should have stuck to the jab and the one-two.”

  Even though Kaylee was sad, she agreed to go to Pizza Hut. Sacred was the one who had discovered the Qinhuangdao Pizza Hut, tucked away in the large shopping mall where they had gone the first day to buy cheap electronics. The team spread out across two booths, and the friendly server came and took selfies with everyone and brought them about a million Veggie Lover’s pan pizzas.

  The team had been warned not to eat Chinese meat, because hormones in it could cause false positives on the antidoping tests. After five days of nothing but fruit, soy sauce, eggs, and rice, the pan pizzas were just about the best thing Gravity had ever eaten.

  Kiki had won her fight against the Hungarian champion, and everyone toasted to her and Gravity’s wins. Kaylee kept saying she wished she could do it all over again, and everyone consoled her, except Paloma, who said, “Laishram Memi is a legend. When you fight a girl like that, you gotta leave it all in the ring.”

  Gravity hoped Paloma lost soon. She was the kind of person who could not stand to see others win. It was like she thought happiness was a personal pan pizza, and whenever anybody else took a slice, that was one less in her pan.

  That wasn’t the way happiness worked. Happiness was more like an all-you-can-eat buffet: the best strategy was to stuff yourself to capacity and steal what you could for your friends.

  BOXINGFORGIRLS.COM

  AN EXQUISITE EYE AT RINGSIDE

  Carmen Cruz, Independent Journalist

  May 21, 2016

  World Amateur Championships, Day Two: Boxing Love

  QINHUANGDAO, CHINA—The second day of competition here at the Olympic Sports Center saw the bantam, feather, light welter, welter, and middleweights battling it out in preliminary round action in two simultaneous rings. But the real action was in the stands.

  Bantamweight Aisha Johnson, whose incredible life journey has taken her from the mean streets of Baltimore to the bright lights of the London Olympic ring, dropped a hard-fought unanimous decision to Stoyka Asenova of Bulgaria. As Johnson emerged from the dressing room, her girlfriend, Aaliyah Williams, dropped to one knee and proposed.

  The US women lifted the happy couple up in the air and carried them around the stadium.

  “I was going to wait for a more romantic moment,” said Williams, “but I figured, Why waste time? I’ve had the ring in my pocket for weeks.”

  London medalist Paloma Gonzales of Sacramento, now campaigning at featherweight, enters as the third seed in her weight and advanced on a bye. Pronouncing the competition “disappointing so far,” she said: “The only ones I’m worried about are Italy and Kazakhstan.” Gonzales faces Ukraine tomorrow.

  In the evening session, light welterweight Aaliyah Williams celebrated her new engagement with a triumphant third-round stoppage of Alina Hajiyeva of Azerbaijan.

  “This one’s for you, boo,” Aaliyah yelled to her fiancée as the referee raised her hand.

  It’s been a tough tournament thus far for the Azeri team, what with Gravity Delgado’s dismantling of their lightweight champion yesterday. Delgado looked outstanding. Let’s hope she can keep it up for tomorrow’s outing versus China.

  In welterweight action, Nakima Fanning of Newark met her match in Germany’s Vera Weber.

  “I’ve learned so much, just from being here,” said Fanning.

  Sacred Jones, entering as the top seed in her class, also enjoyed a first-round bye. She sat in the stands cheering on her teammates and watching the other middleweights with interest.

  “I hope some of them can push me a little,” she said. “I want to give the crowd a good show.”

  Gravity was feeling great until she stepped through the ropes to fight Du Li. Then she looked across the ring and saw him, orange biceps bulging in his Team China T-shirt.

  She turned to Shorty in a panic. “What is Rick Ross doing here?”

  “He coaches China,” Shorty said. “They pay good money, better than the US.”

  Rick flashed his bleached teeth at her, and she felt all the strength go out of her legs. Seeing him there across the ring, buckling on Du Li’s headgear, was like learning that someone had gone through her underwear drawer and read every page of her diary.

  Now she unde
rstood why Rick Ross had recorded the sparring that day at Smiley’s. He must have brought the footage back to China so they could pore over all her weaknesses. Shit, he had probably set the whole thing up on purpose to get her hurt!

  Of course he had. The knowledge made her sick to her stomach. Nobody in their right mind would make a fighter they cared about spar someone so much bigger so close to an important tournament. Her rib began to ache at the memory of Jenna Petrone’s punishing body shot.

  “He coached me for a second,” she told Shorty.

  “So?” Shorty grabbed Gravity’s headgear and shook it lightly. “Come on, now. Get your head in the game.”

  She nodded and took a deep breath, trying to push down the self-hatred that swirled inside her. What an idiot she had been! Rick must have felt like he won the lottery when she walked through that gym door.

  Numbly, Gravity turned to face the corner post and knelt in prayer, but her mind swirled with such anxiety that she could barely get through the Shema. She was tempted to ask for victory, for the first time in her life, but she stopped herself. Long ago she had vowed never to ask for that. She rose to her feet, feeling more agitated than when she had knelt down.

  When she met Li in center ring, the shorter woman stared up at her with intense, burning eyes, looking like an angry child.

  Right off the opening bell, Li went at her injured rib with ferocity, but Gravity had anticipated this and caught her with a crisp check hook coming in. Li was tough and sucked it up.

  The Chinese champion was that dangerous thing: a southpaw with an educated right hand. She began stabbing the right jab to the body and head, then hooking off it, up and down. She had fast feet, and whenever she scored with the hook downstairs, she dug in, right where she knew Gravity was vulnerable.