by Naomi Niles
“He’s talking shit about my mom!” I exclaimed, taking a step back but keeping my eyes trained on Nick who was nursing a cut lip.
“I don’t care!” said Bruce. “If this had been an actual fight, you would have been disqualified automatically, without a second’s thought. You never, never knee an opponent in the groin or try to hit them in the back of the head. You know better than this. What gives?”
“I’m gonna need a break,” said Nick, turning and beginning to stalk away. “See you.”
“Coward!” I called after him. He threw up his middle finger and kept walking. I followed him with my eyes until he rounded the corner and disappeared from view.
Bruce continued to glare at me, still visibly troubled.
“Braxton, I thought you were better than this. You’ve made so much progress in the last year—staying out of fights, staying out of jail, cleaning your act up. And then you start beating the shit out of your best friend.”
“Bruce, you’re going to be horrified when you find out what MMA is.”
“I’m not talking about that! Of course, you’re allowed to fight, but not like that. You could have really hurt him. I know you have a big fight coming up, but there are better ways to practice. I think for right now you should be focusing on getting hold of your temper. If your opponent figures out how easy it is to get under your skin, you’re screwed.”
It was a dangerous thing to try to argue with me when I was this mad. A red haze clouded my vision, and I wanted badly to punch something, anything. I was tired of being talked down to by inferior fighters, tired of being told what I should and shouldn’t do.
As I walked past the pool to the locker room, a warm spray of mist seeped out of the showers and rolled over the tiles. Nick was probably showering or with Coach; he’d be a fool to hang out in the locker room unprotected when I was still this upset.
Once I had calmed down a little, I would probably feel awful for the way I had treated him. But for now, it was best if he hung back.
My locker had gotten stuck, and it took me a few minutes to pry it open, at which point I was more furious than ever. I pulled a granola bar heatedly from my pants pocket and ate it in two bites. I threw the wrapper in the direction of the waste bin, but it only made it about halfway before it fell to the ground.
When I checked my phone, I was surprised to find that I had a new message from Bruce.
Hey, sorry I had to be so harsh out there. I’m just worried about you. I know the pressure of training for a big fight can be a lot to deal with. I’m here if you need to talk. But also, if you’re looking for a growth hormone that will give you an automatic edge over the competition, I know where you can get one that won’t be detected. Just let me know, and please keep this on the DL.
I had to read this last part several times over to make sure I hadn’t dreamed it. Was that how Bruce had overcome Bones on Saturday night? If he had really been taking growth hormones, then maybe I hadn’t helped him as much as I had thought.
I had half a mind to march into Coach’s office and report him right then. It was awfully presumptuous of him to lecture me about respecting the rules of MMA when he had been breaking them the whole time.
Not knowing what else to say, but figuring he was awaiting my response, I told him I’d think about it.
Thanks, he wrote back. And let Nick know, too, if you would.
I will when he apologizes for badmouthing my mom, I replied. But I had a feeling I would end up apologizing long before that.
I tore off my shorts and stepped into the shower, still puzzling over Bruce’s strange message. No way would I ever take growth hormones to beat an opponent; I was too proud for that. Either I would win on my own merits, or I wouldn’t win at all. By taking drugs, Bruce was essentially admitting that he wasn’t good enough to win fights on his own. Maybe I really was the best player Coach had.
Nick must have been in the next shower, but he was waiting for me to leave before he climbed out. Eventually, I heard the water turn off, and he slipped quietly out of the stall and out of the locker room. But I hung back for a while, letting the warm water wash over my body and wondering when life had gotten so complicated and so hard.
When I got out, I checked my phone again. This time I had a message from Coach.
Whenever you have a minute, I need you to meet me in my office.
I stood paralyzed, wondering what he could have wanted to talk to me about, sensing that it couldn’t be anything good. Was he going to reprimand me for unloading on Nick? Or had he seen the last text I had sent Bruce and taken it at face value? I was going to have a hard time explaining that I meant anything other than what I had said. If he really thought we were taking growth hormones, this could be the end of our career in the octagon.
And I hadn’t even made it to the next fight yet.
With a feeling of palpable unease, I walked out of the locker room, past the pool and into his office.
I found him seated at his desk watching a spring marathon live on ESPN.
“You wanted to see me?” I asked, hesitant.
“Yeah, have a seat.”
I sat down in a folding chair at the front of the desk. I was having a hard time hiding my anxiety. “What’s up?”
“I understand you’re trying to get yourself ready for the big fight coming up.”
“Yeah? What about it?”
“Well, I’ve just gotten off the phone with Carruthers, and apparently this is going to be some big thing, bigger than we could have expected. Bruce’s performance in Vegas this weekend went viral on social media, and he’s already been booked on the major morning shows next week.”
“That’s fantastic!” Though I couldn’t help feeling a twinge of jealousy even as I said it.
“Yeah, totally. But it’s bringing a spotlight down on our whole troupe. They want to know about us, and about you in particular. They’re going to start digging, and I’m afraid they’re going to have some questions about some of your questionable behavior in the past.”
That made sense. If the media was really interested in me, it wouldn’t take them long to find out that I had been in and out of jail in the past year. My stomach lurched miserably as I thought about the shame I was likely to bring on our team.
“Yeah, I’m sorry…” I said slowly.
“There’s no need to apologize, not yet. We want to get out in front of the story, so I’m calling a press conference for this upcoming Saturday. You’ll go out there and answer a few questions and generally deliver what we used to call a ‘charm offensive.’ Do you know what that is?”
“I think I get the idea.”
“Good.” Coach smiled a smile of satisfaction. “It’s a tough business, MMA. What nobody tells you is that it’s as much about image management as it is how you conduct yourself in the octagon.”
“Was that all you wanted to talk to me about?”
Coach hesitated for a moment. “One more thing. I need you to be straight with me. These journalists are going to come out here and dig up whatever dirt they can find. I don’t want to be getting any surprises come the middle of next week. Is there anything, anything at all that could damage your rep, that I don’t already know about?”
I stood silently for a moment, thinking. Should I tell him about Bruce’s offer of drugs and risk ruining the career of his best player? Should I explain that I had agreed to think about it, but only so he would leave me alone? If the police came and searched through our phones, it would raise more questions than answers.
“Savery?” asked Coach after a long pause. “Anything?”
“No, Coach.” I shook my head firmly. “You already know everything.”
Chapter Twenty
Jaimie
When I knew I couldn’t put it off any longer, I decided to come clean to Randy.
On Friday afternoon, we went out for lunch at a seafood pub downtown, where I ordered beer-battered cod served with waffle fries. While we were waiting for our orders, I ga
ve him the final report on Saturday night.
“We ended up making quite a bit less than we had projected.”
“How much less?” asked Randy, his brow furrowed.
“Well, about three thousand dollars less.” I took a sip of my ice water to moisten my dry throat. “Now given how many people showed up to the fight, we ought to break even after Aardman takes his cut. But I know you were expecting more than that, and I’m sorry.”
Randy stared down into his basket of hush puppies, looking momentarily puzzled. “I mean, it’s not your fault we didn’t make as much as we wanted. I really thought this fight was going to put us back on the map.”
“So did I, and I wish it had. I know we’ve both put in a lot of work over the past two weeks to make this event a success. But with the increased media exposure we’ve been getting since the night of the fight, our next melee ought to get massively more attention.”
Randy nodded sagely. “A lot’s riding on Braxton and how he handles himself in this next match. If he breaks out—if they both break out—then we could eventually place them in the octagon against each other. Promote it as a ‘battle of the century’ kind of thing.”
“Depending on how well he does.” I hated the fact that the future of our business might depend on that asshole as much as I hated the fact that I couldn’t stop thinking about him.
I sat silently, taking in the tranquil atmosphere of the pub with its wood-paneled walls and paintings of old sailing vessels. A smell of vinegar and salt wafted from the kitchen. It was an overcast day, and a dusky gray light filtered in through the windows above our booth.
“A lot’s riding on how he handles this press conference tomorrow,” said Randy. “I don’t know if you’ve been following the papers, but there have been some questions raised in the press about his criminal history.”
“How bad is it?” I couldn’t resist asking. Had I really hooked up with a convicted criminal?
“He hasn’t committed any felonies that I’m aware of. He was taken in last Christmas for ‘menacing’ a homeless man, and then a few weeks later was charged with assaulting a high-schooler in a city park.”
“A high-schooler?” I could feel my stomach dropping, disappointment coursing through every inch of my body. “Seriously?”
“That’s what the reports say. Fortunately for him, the defendant eventually caved and agreed to drop the charges, but even if it had gone to court, he wouldn’t have been guilty of anything worse than a misdemeanor.”
“Still. Assaulting a high-schooler is not a good look.”
“Well, no. But you have to remember that he’s only nineteen. He was in high school himself just a couple years ago.”
It was hard to say whether Randy was defending Braxton because he liked him or because he knew how much was at stake. I understood the temptation, though: I wanted to believe the best of him, too. He had a way of making you overlook what would have been unforgivable in anyone else.
Ever since our trip to the mall on Monday, I had been thinking over my conversation with Ren. Somehow remembering my horrible experience at summer camp had helped to put the weekend in perspective. It made sense that I would be embarrassed by how our tryst had ended—it was icky and selfish and one-sided. But old wounds were seeping into the encounter and making it worse than it really was.
Randy took a sip of his lemonade-and-vodka. “Are you coming with me to the press conference tomorrow?”
“Excuse me?”
“It’s a simple question.”
I hadn’t even thought about going. Ren and I had already made plans to visit the aquarium downtown and then maybe go out for dinner. She had just finished writing what she hoped would be the final draft of her book and she wanted to go out and celebrate. How hurt would she be if I canceled at the last minute?
“So what do you think?” asked Randy as the waiter appeared with our orders. “Are you in?”
I didn’t answer for a moment. Lately, it felt like he had been pressuring me to go everywhere with him, and once again I was on the brink of canceling my plans because I didn’t know how to say no.
“I’m sorry,” I said finally, feeling sure he was going to hate me. “I already made plans for tomorrow.”
Randy raised his brows in surprise, but if he was offended, he didn’t allow it to show on his face. “That’s okay. I’m sure I’ll be texting you my thoughts as it happens.”
“Oh, fantastic.” I made a mental note to turn my phone off.
“I’m really curious to see how he handles this,” Randy added as he cut into his tilapia. “If he can successfully spin his prior criminal history as a non-issue, then he may really have what it takes to succeed in this business. It’s just so rare that you see someone with a gift for both fighting and PR. This guy is the full package.”
“Well, I guess we’ll see…” I said uncertainly.
“Yeah. Or I’ll be seeing, anyway.” Randy laughed at his own joke.
But when I met up with Ren that night at the tattoo parlor, she was adamant that I cancel our plans.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said, as she sprayed the shop in a cloud of incense. “Of course you have to go to this thing.”
“Why, though?”
Ren paused and looked me in the eyes. “Can you tell me in all honesty you don’t still like this guy? Even after your drunken tryst?”
“My own feelings don’t come into it,” I replied, dodging the question. “I seem to remember you saying he was icky and not the sort of person I should be pinning my hopes on.”
She shrugged, as though to say she wouldn’t deny it. “Well, if nothing else, this is a chance to confront him in person and try to force an apology out of him. If he apologizes, then maybe you were vindicated in liking him before. If he doesn’t, then he’s not worth your time, and you can move on.”
It was hard to argue with her logic. “So do you like this guy or no?”
“I think he’s a heel, personally,” said Ren as she lit a scented candle. “But you seem fixated on him, and this would be a good chance to tell him how you really feel.”
“But I’m not even sure how I really feel!” I exclaimed. “Sometimes I wish I had the strength of a fellow fighter. Then I could punch him in the face. But then I’ll see his picture in the paper or see him being interviewed on TV and I want to go up to him and kiss him and never stop kissing him.”
“Well, there you go. The lance has to boil sometime.”
I shook my head. “You and your metaphors,” I muttered.
Ren shrugged, though she looked faintly pleased with herself.
“Anyway, enough about me.” I sat down in the papasan chair, swathing myself in a blue blanket. “How does it feel to finally have your book finished?”
“I don’t know if I’d call it finished,” Ren said with a sigh. “The thing about being a novelist is that your books are never really finished. Now my agent will have to look over it, and if she likes it, she’ll start shopping it around to a publisher. And then if it gets picked up, they’ll want to make corrections, and I’ll have to go through a whole ‘nother round of edits. So in a sense, finishing the novel is really just the beginning.”
“I’m not looking forward to going through that hell,” I said. “I wish I could just do the writing and pay someone else to take care of all that.”
“Well, that’s what an agent is for. You can’t expect one person to be brilliant at everything.”
“And do you like the book?”
Ren nodded eagerly. “I’m not saying it will be the next Fault in Our Stars, but I’m pretty proud of it. It only took me about six weeks to finish this one, and I think it has a better chance of being picked up than any of my other books.”
“Here’s hoping,” I said, fingers crossed.
“Yeah. When are you going to finish yours?”
The old question again. “As soon as Randy stops inviting me everywhere. As soon as life slows down a bit.”
Ren stared dow
n into the glass candle bowl as though transfixed by its flame. In the darkened room the light shone eerily on her face. “You know, Jaimie, at some point, you have to stop blaming others for your lack of success.”
“What do you mean by that?” I asked in a defensive tone.
“Just that if you really wanted to write, you would find the time. You’d write during your breaks. You’d write for ten minutes at night while you were falling asleep. I read an interview with—I can’t remember if it was Neil Gaiman or Stephen King, one of those guys—but he read somewhere that if you write just one page a day, three hundred words every day for a year, in a year you’ll have written a whole novel. There’s no excuse.”
So we had reached the “lecturing Jaimie” portion of the visit. For some reason, I never looked forward to this. “I understand all that, and I get it, but I don’t think it’s as easy as everyone says.”
“I mean, if I can write a book in six weeks, surely you can write one in a year.”
There was no arguing with Ren when she got like this. I was overjoyed that she had finished her book, but I wasn’t going to pretend we were the same. Some things were harder for me, and there was no shame in that.
I picked up my keys off the desk and began heading toward the door.
“Hey, where are you going?” Ren called after me.
“Going home.” I paused in the doorway and turned toward her. “And I think I will go to that conference tomorrow. Maybe see you some other day.”
“Good night, Jaimie.”
“See you.” I closed the door behind me, leaving her alone in the empty room.
Chapter Twenty-One
Braxton
A couple hours before the press conference on Saturday, I met up with Nick at Arby’s. I ordered a roast beef sandwich and sat down at a two-person table by the window in a chair that was hardly big enough to fit me, watching the cars pass in the drive-thru while I waited for him to finish his order.
“You sure you don’t want a drink?” he asked me as he walked over to the soda fountain with a cup in hand.
