by Fred Aceves
“Do you know what that means?” fake Superman asks me.
“Yeah. Not symmetrical.”
“Yep,” he says, crunching the final bite out of his apple. “Goofy as fuck.”
Tower hands his phone to me. It’s a bodybuilder, super swole, with deformed arms and shoulders. Blood oozing from a tiny hole in his left tricep.
I’m not the squeamish type but damn. That’s hard to look at.
“Gross. I’m not doing that. Forget it.”
“You won’t fuck this up,” Alpha says, and then turns to narrow his eyes at Tower. “Don’t show him pictures, bro.”
Tower swipes the screen: there’s another pic of Synthol gone wrong. A gash in a man’s bicep about an inch long, with puss and blood leaking out.
“Fucking hell,” I say, before Alpha snatches the phone from my hand.
“Those are idiots injecting too much and too often,” Alpha says.
He explains that pro bodybuilders use it only for lagging muscles. In Alpha’s case, he needs it for his biceps.
“I want the peaks to be higher for the Mr. Florida competition in a few months. If you mess up a little, my biceps will be back to normal in a few days. We’re just practicing.”
“Is this legal for competition?”
“Legal and common,” Jake says.
So you’re not only expected to take steroids, you’re also expected to puff some muscles up with oil? Pro bodybuilding is so damn weird.
“But it only works if it looks natural,” Tower points out. “Use too much and you get a balloon-look, can’t see muscle definition. Judges take away points for that.”
“Which is why we have to practice.” Alpha takes a seat and spreads his arms in front of him, straight across the desk, palms up. Fear is etched on his face, which scares me more.
“This is some wild shit,” Tower says quietly, as if to himself.
“Bro,” Alpha says in a stern voice. “Please do me a favor and shut the fuck up.” Then to me: “You got this, David.”
I so don’t got this. My stomach is churning. “Why doesn’t someone with experience injecting do it?”
The two guys respond at the same time.
Jake: “Shaky hands because of hyperactivity.”
Tower: “I don’t have my contacts in today.”
“It’s easy,” Alpha tells me. “Just slowly inject half a cc into each head of the biceps.”
“And I gotta inject the same spot,” I say.
“Right in the middle,” Alpha says, demonstrating with a stabbing motion. “And hold the needle in the same angle, straight down.”
My stomach churns even more, but fuck being scared. I’m a man, dammit. We don’t back down from anything. We come through for our friends. It’s not just Alpha in this room. I also gotta prove myself to the other two guys.
“Let’s do this,” I say, resolved to get it over with.
I stand over the desk. Run my fingers over the middle of his left bicep. There it is, the split in the two muscles. I leave my index finger pressed in there.
I take a deep breath and jab the one-inch needle straight into the middle of the inner bicep head. Alpha’s face squeezes extra tight. A bird chirp leaks out of his pressed lips.
As I slowly push the plunger to half a cc, I tell myself not to worry if I’m causing Alpha pain or fucking up. He insisted I do this after I said I couldn’t.
I inject the other head and then move to the right bicep, each poke causing Alpha to chirp louder. Probably because the needle gets duller with each stab.
After the last half cc is in his arm, I pull out the needle, cap it, and set the syringe on the desk. Then I step back real quick.
If I wasn’t accurate and Alpha ends up like those freaks in the photos, it’s totally on him. I never claimed to have the hand-eye coordination of a surgeon.
“Fuck yeah!” Alpha shouts.
“I could never do that, bro,” Tower tells me. “You got bigger balls than me.”
He gives me a fist bump.
“What the hell?” I say. “I thought you couldn’t do it because you’re not wearing contacts.”
“Oh yeah. That was a lie. I got twenty-twenty, baby. I just don’t wanna stab nobody in the arms. That’s some horrifying shit.”
I turn to Jake and just stare, in case he needs to come clean too.
He shrugs. “I don’t have a shaky hand, just a queasy stomach.”
“You two are pathetic,” I say, but the truth is it feels good to be higher on the guy scale for once. I’m manlier than them. For now anyway.
I expected Alpha to be flexing, testing the instant results. Instead he’s massaging his left bicep, squeezing and rubbing it.
“So my arms don’t get lumpy,” Alpha explains.
“Massage them good,” Jake says. “You don’t wanna look like this guy, am I right?”
He holds out his phone and laughs. It’s another shirtless guy, pale with dark purple upper arms. The doctor is draining one arm, the blood oozing out of the lumpiest part of his bicep.
“Rub those biceps,” I tell Alpha. “Rub them good.”
Alpha moves on to the other arm, rubbing and squeezing.
Then he walks over to the full-length mirror on the door. Even with the whole gym lined with mirrors, he needs one in here. We gather around. He does the front double biceps pose. Peaks! Beautiful peaks! Symmetrical peaks that look natural!
I don’t scream for joy and relief because it’s dead silent in here. Jake and Tower have their mouths hung open. I feel a rush of pride followed by worry—what if they want me to start injecting them with that stuff too?
13
Twenty-nine days until school begins
ANYBODY WOULD draw attention in a jacked Jeep Wrangler, fire red with the top down. You put the biggest bodybuilder in Florida in the driver’s seat, and his enormous Rottweiler in the back, you get a spectacle.
So naturally I’m trying to be incognito just like when I ride my bike—cap pulled low and hood blocking most of my face.
Alpha and I just came back from the gym. Iron Life closes at two p.m. on Sunday, but since he did brunch with Mindy he had to get his workout in later. How cool that he can open whenever he wants, and invite me along.
“Are you sure you don’t wanna grill something up at my place?” Alpha asks.
“I don’t have time.”
Dad and Gaby hang out with the Aquino family on Sundays, and will be back in a little over an hour. I used to go there too, to eat pozole and hang out with some kids my age—I always wore a T-shirt in the pool. But if one of them has seen the video—and it’s almost certain—they have all seen the video.
Alpha says, “Mindy and her friends are still out, Crockett, so it’s just me and you.”
I check out Crockett in the rearview mirror one more time. He’s pushing his head into the wind, the thick tongue out and trembling over Sligh Avenue. His neck and body are a bit leaner. I wasn’t 100 percent sure when I first saw him today, but now I’m positive.
“Crockett is smaller.”
“Mindy hasn’t had time to take him out for runs lately, and he’s not getting fed double like before.”
So I’d have to keep up with my routine and my diet after the summer, which is not a problem. My plan is to keep getting bigger anyway.
“Disgusting,” Alpha says, slowing for a red light. He’s looking at the three guys coming outta Chipotle. “I know I’m extreme, as a pro bodybuilder, but that right there?”
“Unacceptable,” I say, repeating one of Alpha’s favorite words.
These three goofy guys, maybe late twenties, think they’re hiding that fat with their tucked-in shirts. The polos and the checkered button-up sort of balloon up from the belt. We’re not fooled.
Then I notice their wives or girlfriends, who have clearly never set foot in a gym either.
Is that mean? Maybe, but I can’t help it. I body-watch constantly, zeroing in on the shape and muscle definition. It’s automatic, sort
of like how I used to be with nice cars.
I barely notice cars anymore.
The weirdest thing is that lately I’m checking out guys way more than the girls. Actually, sizing them up is a better way to put it. I compare myself to them, satisfied if they’re skinny or fat. If they’re built, and I’m smaller, I try to calculate how much time until I catch up.
Alpha says, “They probably have some bullshit excuse about not enough time, when even interval training can build muscle in twenty minutes a day.” He shakes his head. “Unacceptable.”
The man with the superskinny arms and paunch belly could be me in my twenties, if I’d never discovered weight training. Unacceptable.
“You’d think they would have figured stuff out by that age,” I say.
“Exactly, bro. Muscles make the man,” Alpha says. “A powerful body is what distinguishes us from girls.”
I guess that’s true. Women can do whatever males can. Play the same sports, be doctors or politicians or whatever. Everything except look like us.
Well, some of those women pro bodybuilders come damn close, but that’s because of all the testosterone they take.
Light breaks from the east. Clouds have opened to spill sunlight onto Tampa.
Alpha doesn’t notice. He’s looking down at his flexed biceps. I injected him once again yesterday and his arms have that fuller look. Now that we’re both assured of my technique and skill, we’re laying off until he actually needs Synthol injections—just before his competition.
“Check it out,” I tell him, pointing.
“Beautiful.” He squints up at the sky. Then he takes out his phone and snaps a few pictures for his 176,000 Instagram followers.
He posts mostly bro stuff like show-off poses, big meals, and videos of him going hardcore in the gym. But he also posts stuff like the sky and beautiful trees.
I’ve created my own new Instagram account, named Big D. But I only follow Natural Nathan and other bodybuilders and YouTubers who give me inspiration. I’m waiting to really become Big D before I post.
We cruise past a hot girl in yoga pants pumping gas at the Shell station. Right away there’s a tingling down there. Uh oh.
Did I mention I get hard-ons more often? Just what a horny teen needs more of in his life. Alpha never warned me about that and the forums don’t get into it too much.
It’s to the point where I’m jacking off up to four, five times a day. It’s almost become a chore. Either I jerk it often or sport a boner around the clock.
“Is there any way to avoid sudden boners?” I ask now.
“Ahhhh, yes,” Alpha says with mock nostalgia. “The relentless and unpredictable boners of adolescence. Made worse with gear.” He laughs. “You getting frequent broners?”
I laugh. It’s another term to add to my new vocabulary. My brocabulary.
“Is your lovestick getting more excited lately?” he adds, laughing more. “You going full salute often?”
“Forget it,” I say, feeling my cheeks get red. “I shouldn’t have asked.”
“Okay, okay,” he says, laying off. He swings a right onto a tree-lined block. “I got an industry secret for you. The best way to stop the boners is to think of something the opposite of sexy.”
“I know that trick. Everybody knows that trick.”
“Well, with extra-hard broners, you have to go extra awful and ugly. I’m talking as horrific as you can. Go deep down into your subconscious for things you’ve tried to forget. Imagine it even worse.”
“Interesting.” The stiffness is gone for now, but I’ll be testing that theory later.
Mom used to say God puts people in our lives for a reason. I’m not a churchgoer or even religious, but the day I met Alpha does seem too perfectly awesome to dismiss as luck.
Who would’ve thought that I would walk into the perfect gym, owned and run by the biggest guy in Florida? Or that I could’ve scored gear on my first try, from the same bro?
If this happened by luck, I’m the luckiest guy of all time.
Minus, of course, my first seventeen years of scrawny chumpiness. My luck began when I decided to fix my appearance. Ricky might have inspired that, sure, but I’m still going to fuck him up when school starts.
My phone vibrates in my pocket. It’s a text from Karina: where r u?
“Fuck! I forgot Karina was coming over.” I text back that I’m on my way. I’m not too crazy about seeing her. All I wanted was to go home, down my post-workout shake, eat a meal, and relax so my muscles can grow.
“A minute ago you were talking about excess horniness,” Alpha says, “and now you got a girl waiting for you at home.”
I explain that Karina isn’t down with hooking up at my house—she’s too worried about my family coming home.
“And at her house it’s impossible because her grandma came from Puerto Rico to visit for the summer.”
“Karina is Puerto Rican?” Alpha asks. “I thought you were Mexican.”
Years ago I accepted that I gotta hear dumb things from white people sometimes, and explain basic race and ethnic stuff to them. It doesn’t mean it’s not annoying though.
“You thought she was Mexican just because I’m Mexican?”
“No,” he says. “I mean, yeah, okay. I assumed she was Mexican because you are.”
“Karina could be a white girl from Sweden too, you know. Any girl can be named Karina.”
“Okay, you’ve made your point.”
“The law recently changed, and we Mexicans can now date non-Mexicans,” I say, my voice thick with sarcasm. “Tell your people to hide their girlfriends and daughters.”
He laughs. “Good one.”
We’re at the four-way stop sign, a few blocks from my house. Salsa music and the scent of grilled meat is coming from a backyard. “Is that Mexican or Puerto Rican music?”
His face shows genuine interest. He’s not being funny.
“Salsa music is a bunch of different sounds from a few Latin American countries,” I say. “So it’s sort of from everywhere, even though it was born in New York City.”
He chuckles and glances at me. “You’re fucking with me, right?”
I shake my head.
“That’s cool,” he says. After a pause he asks, “But all Latinos speak Mexican, right?”
“Speak Mexican?” I shoot him a look. “Are you fucking with me?”
“Yeah, take it easy,” he says, laughing. Then he adds, “Go, man.”
He’s talking to the driver to our left, because it’s his turn on the four-way stop sign.
Alpha gestures for the driver to go.
“This happens all the time,” Alpha says. “Some people are terrified of me and act extra nice.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like this morning when I went to pay for gas. The guy coming outta the store held the door open for me even though I was pretty far away. As if he let it close I’d beat him up or eat him or something.”
I laugh, but Alpha isn’t laughing.
He now drives past the stop sign himself. “They treat me like some kind of monster. Last week when I went to the DMV, the guy behind the desk said, ‘Please don’t hurt me!’ as a joke and put his hands up like he was afraid.”
I laugh hard at that.
“Yeah, okay,” Alpha says. “Not a bad joke, but it’s not funny when it happens all the time. It sucks when people treat you differently because of how you look.”
Now I feel bad. Because I sort of thought Alpha was goofy-looking before, and I’ve even made fun of bodybuilders. Not to their face or anything, but still. I guess it’s no different than making fun of people for being skinny or fat.
“It’s discrimination,” I say, realizing this out loud. “Even though you can stop being so muscular if you want to.”
“That’s right. It’s fucked up.”
Then, as if he’s ashamed for talking about how he feels, he changes the subject. “So if you aren’t hooking up with your girlfriend, why not brea
k it off? Soon you’ll have more girls than you’ll know what to do with.”
There aren’t enough hours in the day to explain why Karina is the greatest thing that has ever happened to me.
I remember the constant loneliness, all those crushes that led to nothing. I used to get so sad that I’d lie on my bed wondering if love was something that I wasn’t born to have.
Then I met a great girl who proved to be more amazing than I knew. She’s handled this whole video crisis so well. She keeps checking up on me, still has my back. Doesn’t care that I’m the joke of the school.
I snap out of my daze to say “Karina is a great girl” and realize we’re here, parked behind her mom’s white Tercel.
I turn to see . . . Karina is not on the porch. And my dad’s Pathfinder is in the driveway. Fuck! What’s going on? I was supposed to have an hour of chill time, at least, before Dad and Gaby came home.
I know how Dad’s mind works. If he sees me with Captain Steroids, I’ll be guilty by association. This one time at the supermarket I said hi to Malik from history class. Dad took one look at his nose piercing and asked me, “You actually think a nose piercing is cool?”
I unbuckle my seat belt. “Thanks, Alpha.”
He needs to get the hell outta here before Dad spots him.
I hop out and lightly close the Jeep door—not much noise at all.
“Your dad is big for a regular guy,” Alpha says.
A chill runs through me. Oh no.
“Does he train?”
I look at the house. There’s Dad in the window, his face showing no expression.
No sense in rushing inside now. Which would be suspicious.
“No,” I tell Alpha. “He’s just naturally big.”
“One of those guys,” Alpha says, smiling knowingly. “Um . . . your dad is still staring.”
Alpha waves. Dad, the weirdo, stares a few more seconds before waving back. Doesn’t even smile.
Gaby appears in the window. Her bottom lip drops at what she sees. A moment later Karina joins them and has enough tact to smile and wave.
“Is that Karina?” Alpha asks, waving back.
“Yep.”
