Hit Count

by Chris Lynch

  It’s a trade. I need to make the trade. I will endure a bit of humiliation for Ma, and the thought already makes me feel better.

  “Come on up then,” the guy says, and I drop my backpack and hop on up. The kid gives over his mitts, and I pull them on. I am in school clothes, but that means little as my school and reality clothes are pretty similar. Loose fitting, always ready for movement. Good, grippy shoes.

  “Just really want to test out the space helmet a bit,” I say. The guy nods, and we begin our little dance.

  Bob-­weave-­jab. Bob weave jab. The guy moves very well. Very athletic. It suits me. I’d be good. Maybe better than I am at straight-­up boxing.

  Bob-­weave-­jab. Bob-­weave-­jab. I’m sticking him pretty good. I’m feeling other stuff now. Feeling like I have something to show, something to prove, something to achieve.

  “How’s the hat?” he asks, bouncing a couple of quick ones off my forehead for emphasis.

  “Doin’ the job,” I say, instantly kind of thrilled to have something bounce off my head for a change without the echo bouncing around inside a dozen times. I lean into him, and show him some speed as I back away again with a snapping right-­hand parting gift.

  “What’s your name, kid?”

  “Arlo.”

  “Simon. I give lessons here for Jamie, ‘cause he doesn’t know squat about this.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Simon. Actually, been wanting to meet you.”

  We conduct this over the soothing rhythm of the pop-­pop-­pop of leather thwacking leather.

  Thwack. I thwack Simon a nice one flush on the left side of his face.

  “You move well,” he says. “Ever thought about kickboxing?”

  “Just started thinking about it.”

  “Good. Good to hear.”

  We dance a bit more, trade punches a bit more, test the various contact points of the silly important headgear, and the headgear responds well enough that getting punched has the perverse effect of making me more confident, more excited, more aggressive.

  “Don’t hold back, Simon,” I say, feeling it now, “you can kick. I want to see how it goes.”

  He nods, continues to box me. Then I lean over and launch a right-­foot kick that he blocks pretty easily.

  “Good balance,” he says. Then he sends an easy kick toward my ribs. I block with my elbow, return kick. He blocks. Then he kicks at my ribs again. I block again, kick at his head.

  He doesn’t even bother blocking that one. He just moves to his right, and blur-­quick his right foot is smacking me sideways, landing—Bam!—at my temple.

  Simon smiles, and I return same. The headgear is my friend.

  “Taking me to school,” I say happily.

  “That’s precisely what we’re here for, young man,” he says, waving his hands in such a way that I know he is lining me up with that foot again. I am certain and I am ready. . . .

  For precisely the wrong thing. As I foolishly look for that foot, old Simon rocks a straight right hand that would shame any of the straight-­up guys in the other ring discipline. It catches the point of my chin and does me a whiplash thing that must make it look like the back of my head and my chin are doing a dog-­tail chase after one another.

  It reverberates in my brain like a small fighter is continuing to kick from inside my skull.

  Someone whoops like a nut job, or there’s a fire engine in the house.

  I backpedal until I lean way back into the ropes. I sink into them, then come out covering up.

  “Kickboxing,” Simon says, wrapping me up in a fatherly hug as I come off the ropes, the way a referee does to save some battered loser from more battering. “Never forget the two words in the title. Soon as you get infatuated with the one, the other’ll lay you out.”

  “I’ll remember,” I say into his neck.

  “That lesson’s for free. We’ll talk about next steps whenever you’re ready,” he says.

  Scenes are flashing for me now. Like a song that’s skipping, I go from Simon’s neck to the kid unsmilingly taking the gloves off me without any connecting vision.

  This could be a lot of things. Could be my future, or a vision of it, in which I’m the champion and Jamie is my grizzled dog-­eared loyal cornerman up in the ring to greet me after the greatest championship fight of my life. The lights are here for me anyway, snapping and popping everywhere, and Jamie sure gives great grizzled. Could be a Rocky scene. Maybe they stole it from us. Maybe I’m in the scene, in the middle of it right now. Maybe I was there all along.

  Consequences Are Consequences

  I’m sitting on a thick, splintered oak bench as I wait for the birds to stop tweeting in my head. It’s usually just a few minutes, then I’m good to go. Good to go. Good to go.

  “When you’re ready, come see me in the office!” Jamie yells to me from his doorway.

  I don’t like the sound of this. I see my brother walk out of the office behind him and hurry out of the gym. Now I really don’t like this.

  When I feel settled enough, I get off the bench and start walking across the concrete floor to the door of the gym. I concentrate on walking straight. I see in front of the boxing ring the fathead helmet that I guess I must have tossed there. I look back at the office. Shouldn’t have done that. It’s like the door jumps out at my face. Jamie’s on the phone, but he’s mouthing, “Wait, wait, Arlo, don’t go,” and I’m mouthing “Homework,” and I’m gone.

  It’s nothing at all like a concussion. It’s not even a real thing. It’s sub­concussive. If there is one good that’s come out of Ma’s nagging file of the big book of head injuries, it’s that I know what I’m talking about when I talk about what I know I do not have.

  Subconcussive. Why even bother with such a thing? It’s like saying you have a brokenish hand, or a torn-­like hamstring. They made up a name because these days it seems like it’s all gotta be named to make it all simple and countable for people who probably just need insurance ass-­cover and who do not know shit.

  Getting your bell rung is what it is, what it always was, and what is to be expected. If you are not prepared to get your bell rung sometimes, then you should stay in your damn bed.

  Because all the padded helmets in the world aren’t gonna be able to save you.

  Balance

  I walk out of McAlpine’s and right into Sandy. Guilt runs hot and bloody right up under the surface of my skin all over.

  “You’ve been avoiding me,” she says.

  “I haven’t,” I say. I have. When did I get so good at lying?

  “What happened to your lip?”

  “Slipped in the shower.”

  “Uh-­huh.” She is looking at me in that way, tilting her head left and right, as if to see honesty lurking somewhere way up in my nostrils. I wonder how she knew where to find me. I am glad she did. Like the criminal on the run who would never turn himself in but is happy to be caught.

  I put out my hand, desperate for her to take it, to balance me, to remind me, to make me better in all the ways that can mean.

  She does. God, she does. And she does and she does and she does.

  She takes my hand. “Go for a run with me, then,” she says as we make our way down the street.

  “Don’t think I’m up to it today, Sandy.”

  “I’m just talking about a few circuits of the track. Three miles max? Then we can walk home together? Sit on my porch for a while?”

  This is the most beautiful offer I have ever had. I’m disgusted to find myself . . . For the love of . . . I’m welling up. Like a jackass, like I never used to do and now I do, and I’m more humiliated by the loss of control or sanity or whatever. I pray that the nausea takes over first.

  “Honey,” I say, shaking my clammy hand out of hers with some force and rushing away. “I just can’t . . . feeling really sick.”

  “Arlo!” she calls. I turn and give her a half wave as she stands there, looking at her hand and the slick of whatever I left on it.

&nb
sp; I almost hope she understands. I pray she doesn’t.

  I hit Centre Street and I feel strong enough to run, but away from Sandy rather than back to her. I start running. It’s a pug run because I even run like a pug now, like a fighter runs. Right away my whole body is into it, just like boxers on TV showing off their training regimen. My shoulders get into it, juking this way and that, my fists get into it, pop-­pop-­popping jabs to the rhythm of my footfalls. It’s a whole different breed of run and it isn’t something I have to apply. It is me. The real me. I might just need to get away from Jamie, and Lloyd, and everybody else who has a preformed opinion about me, and start fresh at a new gym. Do it right and find out for real what I can give to the fight thing. Maybe that’s all I need.

  Several sweaty miles after I leave, I come back to a quiet house and the space to appreciate the feeling of calm and of privacy. Feeling better after feeling scarily not better is a whole kind of joy itself.

  In the bathroom I break the wrapper on a new bar of Palmolive Gold, and life is behaving itself so well at this instant it deserves some kind of prize.

  The shower alone brings a smile to my face as I hold the mediciney bar of gold to my nose for the longest time, eyes closed, everything else wide open to the heat, the vapor, the wash.

  After many minutes with my eyes closed, I open them up to find the strange and unhappy sense that they are still closed. I panic, putting one hand on the glass shower panel in front of me and the other on the tiled wall to my left. The bar of soap bumbles to the shower floor, slithers, and stops, and I blink over and over until the olive eyelid blackness becomes something more like camera flash and lightning, sheet lightning showing me nothing else, then bolt lightning, slashing across visions of tiles, of my hands, my feet, and pebbly, rain-­dropped glass.

  Sight is worse still, worse than the sight that hid from me. Rocket shots of pain and horror light slash my head inside out and I drop to my knees, crouching forward, brow to glass, hands clasped around my head, trying to hold my skull fragment continents in their places.

  Of course I know what this is. Dammit. Damn it to hell.

  How many times have I read the damn thing. The unfortunate fools from the NHL, NFL, pro boxing who sat in their rooms for hours and months in petrified paralyzed hell. Sometimes it seems like the Bruins have a whole extra training room full of these guys.

  Thanks, File. Thanks for the info. It was always good to know what they all had that I did not have. Thanks, articles. Thanks, Ma.

  Withering sensitivity to light. Nausea tides. Screaming, throbbing come-­and-­go headaches. Balance totally screwed, then not. Then cured. Then not. Go to hell, mercurial mood swings and volcanic rage and hide-­and-­seek memory and volcanic rage. Thanks for everything because it’s not ever been me. Probably just the articles and the individual letters themselves forming the wicked words and the sentences that torture the inside of my eyelids that’re making me so bad and mad now—and it will just go away like it usually does if I just calm the hell down.

  Thanks, postconcussion syndrome. Maybe it’s post-subconcussion syndrome. The junior varsity of head injury.

  I stay like this, squeezing my eyes tight shut, bringing back every letter of every page of every brain-­trauma article I ever read for the express purpose of convincing myself that I do not have this awful thing, heh-­heh-­heh, chumps. The hot rain pat-­pattering my back, until I can do something else, will work fine.

  As soon as I can get out of the cubicle, I switch off the light. Light is frying me. It is as if there is a direct laser line from my corneas to the upper front of my brain, and it causes me agony every time I lift the lids a fraction. I walk gingerly from the bathroom to my bedroom, using mostly wall and memory to navigate. Once there I pull the shade right down, sit on the edge of my bed in the duskiness. The dark calms me and I can finally just sit, completely empty.

  My phone goes off and it has to be Sandy. When I don’t answer, she calls again. Then texts. She wants to know how I am. She loves me. She rings again, texts again. I cannot pick it up, cannot even look at it, but I know it’s her. When she finally gives up, I get so sad. I get so sad. Please, Sandy.

  And then I sit, and sit. There is a huge hollow empty dark quiet in the space Sandy left just there, and it terrifies me for about a minute.

  Then my senses are back to ridiculous. My sight, my smell, they are pulling in signals at eleven hundred and seventy times the normal rate. My nerve endings are slithering like microscopic eels throughout my body, through the skin, the fingertips, the eyebrows, the groin, slipping out, snaking out, out of me and into the atmosphere, and feeling the holy hell out of everything everywhere.

  I cannot sit still enough. The fibers of my muscles are churning no matter how much I concentrate on shushing them. They are swinging and banging and crashing into one another, making hellacious loud, awful tormenting noises.

  Stillness is my only goal now. I sit on my bed with my hands folded in the dark, and I simply try to stop feeling, sensing, anything at all.

  I am aware of my father coming home. I am aware a little while later when my mother comes home. Somewhere out on the horizon of my consciousness I am aware of their nice, normal evening with dinner and low conversation and human interaction and eventually their fading off to their bedroom and their peaceful sleep.

  Through it all I sit, still and safe, but the realization comes to me that my life in this room has become, to them, no different from the unpleasant, unapproachable, alien existence that Lloyd’s other life once was just down the hall. I skulk and I hide and I sneak, and I’m sure just one more big hit will solve everything for me.

  Except it won’t. Not anymore.

  It’s done. It’s really over.

  Dawn

  Sleep? I suppose, but it doesn’t much matter.

  I am upright when the sun comes hissing in under the window shade. I take as much physical inventory as I can before moving one fiber of one muscle. I decide there’s enough there to get dressed. After getting dressed, I decide there’s enough for more.

  “What are you doing there?” I say when I find Lloyd sitting at a kitchen chair that isn’t in the kitchen. It’s backed up to the back door.

  “Didn’t want to miss you,” he says groggily.

  “That’s sweet,” I say. “Now that you haven’t missed me, could you slide out of the way?”

  He slowly rises, moves the chair a couple of feet sideways, then stands up right in my face.

  “You get in that ring again, and it’ll be with me,” he says with just enough of his old menace to be both a joke and scary to me.

  “I have to tell you, big brother, you are not the force you were anymore.”

  He stands his ground. “Neither are you, little brother.”

  I lean even closer to him, hold us both there for several long seconds. Then I cup my right hand behind his skull, and kiss his cheek, finishing it off with a great smacking sound. He reaches around and thumps me on the back. I hold that gnarly nuts head of his for a few more seconds before I step around him and out.

  Porch

  I’ve nodded off by the time Sandy’s front door slams behind me. I lift my chin off my fist but do not turn around.

  “I’m sorry, Sandy,” I say.

  She is on my back, arms around my shoulders, warming me like a little human cape.

  “You going to tell me what you’re sorry for?”

  “I’m going to try not to. You going to allow it?”

  She sighs some deep-­thought breathing right in my ear.

  “For now, I suppose,” she says.

  “I need a tutor,” I say.

  “You have a tutor,” she says.

  “I need a better one. I need a really, really patient and understanding one. I want to learn, and I want to graduate. And I want a tutor that I want to be with all the time, all the time.”

  She does the extended think-­breathing again.

  “Wow,” she says, “you really do mean patien
t.”

  I laugh, which makes my head hurt fantastically but everything else fantastically not.

  “Yup,” I say. “Know anybody?”

  I hear her soft breathing. I could listen forever to Sandy’s soft breathing, and she knows it.

  “Um . . . Sandy?”

  “Shhhhh,” she says into the deepest part of my ear, making me tingle from there, down my spine, and all the way back up again to where her lips stay pressed to me.

  HIT COUNT

  BY

  CHRIS LYNCH

  Questions for Discussion

  Questions for Discussion

  1. On page 16 while looking through The File, Arlo says, “You had to be a certain type of athlete to wind up in that state, a certain type of person.” How do Arlo’’s assumptions about “types of athletes” and “playing smart” affect his growth as a player? Do you think they affect how he sees himself by the end of Hit Count?

  2. At several points in the story, Arlo is reminded by his teammates or coach that “football is a team sport.” Why do you think Arlo has such a hard time with that fact?

  3. On page 44, in reference to Sandy’s joking comparison of Arlo’s boyfriend skills to Dinos’s, Arlo thinks to himself, “Everything is a competition. How else do you know how you’re doing?” How does Arlo internalize this belief and apply it to the rest of his life as the book continues? What are some examples of Arlo turning innocent situations into competitions? What kind of response does he get from the other people in his life?

  4. Arlo watches his brother, Lloyd, go through several stages of addiction and recovery throughout the book. What is the connection between how Lloyd feels about drugs and alcohol and how Arlo feels about exercise? Once Arlo begins exercising to the point of injury and illness, why is his excessive behavior not criticized as Lloyd’s is?