by Ruby Ryan
"Damn Roland, I was just--"
"I need a fight," I said. "Tonight."
"Really? After just getting back?"
"I need to blow off steam. What do you have for me?"
I heard the rustling of papers. "Actually, yeah. There's a big guy here who's been hanging around this week, looking for a match. But he's at least 60 pounds outside your weight..."
"Don't care, I'll take him."
The silence sounded like hesitation, so I said, "Give me the fucken fight, Boris."
"Alright, alright. Get here in the next hour and we'll set it up. But--"
I hung up.
*
The thing was in my head. My fucken head.
You know how some electronics will emit a high-pitched ringing noise, just on the edge of your hearing? It was like that, but not audible. A grain of sand inside my brain, rubbing a hole in my nerve endings. Slowly driving me insane.
And even though the larger pressure in my head continued dimming as I neared home, that goddamn grain of sand remained.
I took the steps two at a time and then strode through my apartment. The gryphon was just where I'd left it, snug and safe. Once it was in my hands everything felt calmer. More normal. At least, relatively speaking. I still felt irritable and off.
What I needed was to put my fist through some flesh.
I practically jogged out to Boris's bar in the night. It was early yet, only half full and no fights currently taking place in the corner. I jerked my head up in a greeting to Boris behind the bar--who gave me a curious look--and then headed to the back, where a tiny supply closet functioned as a makeshift locker room, with a stack of actual lockers fastened with padlocks.
I flinched when I realized that I'd forgotten to get a change of clothes. I'd gone all the way home and didn't even get what I needed! This gryphon was doing things to my psyche. Twisting me apart.
Thankfully I knew the combination to my roommate's locker, and he had a fresh pair of shorts and fighter's tape inside. I had to tie the draw strings extra tight since his waist was about six inches wider than mine, but it would do.
I paused with my bundle of clothes in my hands.
The gryphon. What was I supposed to do with it while I fought? I had no pockets. And even if I did, I could hardly fight with a bulging stone sticking out one side.
I extended my arm to place the clothes into the locker slowly. The moment my hand let go the pressure returned, like falling to the bottom of the deep end of the pool. I groaned and rotated my jaw to make it stop but it was no use.
Stuck there, I considered just going home. Taking my stuff and leaving, lying down in bed and not moving. I didn't have to deal with this. I could pretend I was sick--which I very well may have been--and slept it off.
But the desire to hit something overruled those thoughts. I needed to blow off steam. One fight was all I'd need, then I could go home. And maybe call Harriet to apologize.
Right. Harriet. I still had that to deal with. But the pain in my head left no room for guilt, so I strode back out to the bar floor.
Boris was there waiting for me. "You sure you want to do this?"
"The fuck's that supposed to mean?" I demanded. He looked like he wanted to argue more, then shrugged, then led me to the ring.
My opponent was already waiting.
His boxing shorts were the color of blood, a deep red that shined from the lights overhead. He was big, with muscles that were large and bulky rather than lean, a tank of a man rather than a sports car. A Chinese serpent tattoo covered his entire left arm. His hair was shaved down to a low fuzz, and his nose was swollen and crooked from too many breaks. The fat on his cheeks hung like slabs of lazy meat.
I ducked under the rope and made a point to stare at the guy, and almost flinched now that I was closer. His right eye was completely filled with blood, with almost no white to speak of. He returned my gaze with curiosity, looking me up and down.
"Are you my guy?" he asked in a thick Boston accent.
"Sure," I said, stretching my muscles out. "Don't let the lack of weight fool ya."
Boris made his introductions, first calling out my name to a chorus of halfhearted cheers. Normally I'd strut around the ring and be as boisterous and entertaining as possible, but tonight I didn't have it in me. Being in the ring helped a little bit, some comforting familiarity, but the gryphon still pained me even here, just 20 feet away. I shook my head to try to dispel the sensation.
I didn't catch most of Boris's introduction of my opponent, except that his name was The Dragon.
"This ain't no Mexican luchador circuit," I sneered, annoyed and angry and still writhing in discomfort. "We don't use nicknames."
"Not a nickname," he said, still examining me like I was a steak that wasn't cooked to his specifications. A fly buzzed around his head, and he swatted at it with annoyance. "Goddamn bugs."
"Fucken weirdo," I said, hopping from one foot to the other. Getting the blood flowing to my joints.
"Fighters?" Boris said, gesturing. We approached one another, each extending a fist to bump. Then we stepped back, and Boris exited the ring.
A bell rang, and the fight began.
My strategy slid into my brain. Against an opponent so far outside my weight class, I would need to rely on my speed. Keeping him at distance, dancing around him and away from his larger attacks, darting in and out where I could to do some damage. Wear him down.
Dragon boy stepped forward steadily, carefully, and I orbited him to gauge his balance and grace. He moved like any other lumbering idiot, only enough to put himself in a position where he could rely on devastating blows to win the fight. I let him get close enough to try a jab, then moved back away from it easily.
Okay, now I knew what I was up against. I could handle this dude easily.
"Are you my guy?" he repeated again.
"We're fucken fighting, aren't we?"
"You mistake my meaning, friend." He slid forward with a little more speed, jabbing twice with his left before throwing a wide punch with his right. The latter caught me off guard, but I was able to avoid it and take only a glancing blow across the shoulder.
I quickly twisted and countered with a jab at his head, which he blocked with a swipe of his fist. He grinned at me, showing teeth that were yellow and foul.
"I've been looking for my man all over Boston," he drawled in that Southie accent, fists raised and head hunched. "Days of it. I can almost smell him, if only I could take a big enough whiff." He sniffed the air. "So. Are you him? Are you my guy?"
"I'm not your fucken nobody." I added an exclamation point to my statement by bulling forward, hoping to catch him off guard with a feint to his head before battering his ribs with body blows. But the man didn't fall for the feint, and he reacted smoothly by lowering his forearms to block my body blows, left and right and left again, none of them connecting with his ribs. I wanted to keep at him, the frustration and anger of the day urging me on, but the fighter inside me screamed louder and I jumped backwards before the larger man could counterattack.
For a moment he looked surprised, but then something else fell across his meaty face.
Disappointment.
"No," he said sadly. "You're not him."
And then he was moving toward me steadily, and he anticipated my slide to the right and cut me off, sending a quick jab at my face that struck my cheek and made me see stars. Flashes of white light danced across my vision as I tried to recover, moving backwards blindly, but onward the man came. The dragon tattoo on his arm rippled as he alternated punches, forcing me backwards while my balance was lost. He moved me around the ring methodically, and the meager crowd began to cheer louder like dogs that had caught the smell of blood.
I ducked under a roundhouse punch and jogged across the ring to give me a few seconds. I was starting to feel winded. I needed to recuperate. To gather myself.
But with the pressure in my ears, and the gryphon practically pulsing in the other room like a
second heartbeat, I couldn't keep my full attention on my foe.
The dragon stepped toward me with the same slow gait... and then he moved faster than I ever could have predicted, closing the distance in one long stride and delivering a vicious one-two punch to my gut. It doubled me over against my will, and then a flash of light caught me underneath the jaw, blinding me again for a moment and clicking my teeth together hard.
It was all over then, though I was still on my feet.
He moved impossibly fast then, so much so that he had to have been faking his lumbering gait prior to now. Blow after blow struck my body, ribs and gut and jaw. They came so rapid-fire it made me think the man had four arms instead of two, and my pitiful arms couldn't possibly defend from so many, but I couldn't surrender because that wasn't who I was, so I took each punch and tried to defend my face and listened to the sound of the crowd screaming for the kill.
There was a brief moment where the punches stopped, and through swollen eyes I saw the man pulling back.
The killing blow was a sledgehammer of a punch to the left side of my face, delivered with his entire twisting body. For a heartbeat I was weightless, and then the ground rushed up and struck me in the side of the face, and everything was horizontal: the ground, the dragon's bare calf muscles covered in reddish hair, and the clothed feet and legs of the crowd all around. I tried to put a hand underneath me to get up, because I didn't have the stomach for surrender, was too angry and pained to lose tonight, but somehow my hand couldn't find the floor.
Boris was in the ring then, and I heard his distant voice announcing something, but couldn't understand the words.
"Nope. Not him," I heard the dragon say, disgust and disappointment in his voice.
The last thing I heard was the fighter's chuckles as he left the ring, and then the crowd noise drowned him out.
11
HARRIET
I must have looked like a mess as I ran home in the cold night.
It was a bad date. A guy who'd been an asshole. I'd had those dates before. Every woman did, and had to learn to shield herself from them. To not let them poison her soul.
But this felt different.
Tears streamed down my face as I reached my apartment and closed the door, locking the deadbolt and chain for some subconscious feeling of protection. I leaned against the door and caught my breath, alone in the darkness.
And then, safe in the cocoon of my home, I let myself cry.
Not just the stray tears from the immediate afterwards, but a deeper cry. The kind that shakes your entire body and threatens to knock you to your knees. I cried for getting my hopes up about this boy, who'd turned out to be nothing like what I expected. I cried for the embarrassment of the restaurant, wondering how many people saw me run off like a child. I cried for allowing myself to have a one-night stand in the first place, which was completely out of character for an introvert like me.
And then I was crying for my thesis. My precious, wonderful thesis which had been like a child in my womb, ready to be nurtured and raised and then birthed to the world. It was only a thesis topic, just the glimmer of an idea that I hadn't even begun any work on, but loss felt monumental to me.
I cried, and sniveled, and gasped, and wiped snot away from my disgusting nose.
Eventually I reached that point where I couldn't weep anymore. I'd gotten it all out and then some; the tank was empty, I'd been running on fumes, and now there was nothing left. Just the hollow ache in my chest and the smeared mascara on my face.
I filled the remaining emptiness with reheated pasta leftovers and chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream, while rewatching Planet Earth on Netflix.
Only then did I feel a little bit more like myself. Still aching with the pain of regret, but normal enough to start processing things.
And then I got angry.
Fuck this guy! It was one thing to have a one-night stand with a girl, but it could have ended that morning in his apartment. I might have never seen him again if he hadn't texted me when he was at the airport. I re-read those text messages, and they only made me angrier. Why had he led me along if he didn't really want to see me again?
If he'd been blunt with me, I wouldn't have spent all week daydreaming about his return. I would have been over him by now. And then I would have been able to turn my attention and energy toward what really mattered in my life.
I spent an hour comprising a long text message, pacing back and forth in my apartment while I struggled to find the words. I wrote, and deleted, and edited, and re-wrote, until finally I had a manifesto to my frustration ready to send, a masterpiece of feminine anger. While deliberating about whether or not to send it, I changed Roland's name in my contact list to something mean. Then I put down my phone, went to take a long hot bath to relax, and returned to it with fresh eyes.
Deciding that it was still perfect, I hit send.
It flew away at the speed of light. I fantasized about Roland's response when he received it; in his apartment, or at the bar, or with some other slut who didn't know what he really was. I imagined it dealing a physical blow to his psyche, an emotional punch to his asshole brain.
And then I paced my apartment while I waited for the response.
It took an hour before I got the "Message Delivered" notification underneath the text that proved he'd read it. Immediately the three dots appeared to indicate that he was typing a response. I sat down on the couch and stared at the screen, transfixed by the pixels, waiting to see what he had to say for himself.
ASSHOLE ROLAND: I'm sorry
I blinked. That was it? That was all he had to say? I poured all of my anger into a beautiful treatise, and he responded with eight friggin characters?
It should have been the conclusion I needed. Confirmation that he was nothing more than a cocky jerk, too self-involved to even tell a girl he wasn't interested. But instead it only made me mad.
Because life was never simple. Of course it would take time for my pain to fade.
I just wished it didn't have to take so long.
*
"Fuck him."
Jon had been nice enough to offer to escort me to my meeting with my Department Head, and I eagerly took him up on it. The MIT campus was dead on a Sunday morning, and it felt good not to be alone. If I were by myself, this probably would have felt like walking to the electric chair. And dressed the way I was, with black slacks and a blouse underneath my coat, I felt like I was going to a funeral.
"No," I said with a halfhearted smile, "the idea is to not do that."
"Girl, you know what I mean." He held my phone ahead of him as he re-read my text message, and Roland's reply. "There's nothing wrong with a random hookup. But flirting with you by text message, and agreeing to meet you for drinks? That boy led you on."
"Yep."
He held the phone back to me, pinching it between two fingers like a disgusting tissue. "You're lucky I wasn't there. I'd have called him and given that boy a piece of my mind."
"I bet you would have."
"I don't care how fine he is. Nobody's pretty enough to act like that."
I smiled to myself. Having Jon with me definitely improved my mood. At least for now.
"And honey," he turned to me while we walked, "I'm so sorry."
"For what?"
"We shouldn't have taken you there. That place was not your scene. None of this would have happened..."
"Oh come on," I protested. "I'm a grown woman. I can take care of myself. One mistake isn't the end of the world." I sighed. "Unlike my thesis topic, which is the end of my world.."
I still didn't have a backup topic prepared, and I was terrified the Department Head would ask for one on the spot. I still wasn't sure what I would do in the meeting. Maybe get on my knees and beg to keep my thesis topic.
"Don't think about it," Jon said, but then snorted. "Okay. That was really stupid advice."
"Yeah, it was."
"I still don't understand why she would want you to change
your thesis. I mean, I'm just a lowly computer engineer, but bee hives and elephants seem like a great combination."
I laughed at his surface understanding of my topic. "Yeah, I don't know either."
"You know what?" he said, a sparkle of cattiness in his eyes. "I bet the topic is so great she wants to steal it for herself. Selfish hussy..."
That was so unlikely it might as well have been impossible, but I said, "Yeah, maybe so."
"You ought to defend yourself in there. Stride right into her office like Beyonce and demand that you keep your thesis. You're Harriet Reckmeyer, damnit, the smartest animal conservationist I know!"
"I bet I'm the only one you know."
"That's beside the point! She can't treat you like this. It's probably illegal. You should sue her. Destruction of character! Theft of intellectual property!"
But as much as I enjoyed hearing Jon's enthusiastic defense of me, the Department Head obviously could treat me like that. It was the entire purpose of submitting thesis topics for approval before doing the work.
And it was time to face that harsh reality.
We reached the Earth Sciences building, with its wide facade of marble columns and the round dome on top. We trudged up the stone stairs and into the lobby, our footsteps echoing on the tile in such an enormous room, with the dome at least a hundred feet above.
I knew the way to the Department Head's office, not because I'd ever been there before but because I'd looked up the building map online and memorized it prior to this meeting. It gave me a tiny feeling of preparedness. One of the few things I could control about what was going to happen.
We reached the door with Dr. Allen on the nameplate. Jon turned me around, looked me up and down, and then embraced me.
"I'll be right out here waiting," he said, then sat on a bench in the hall.
The door led into a secretary's office which was empty, and then curved to the left into the larger office. I went to that doorway and stuck my head in. One woman sat hunched over her huge desk, focused on something she was reading.
