We walk another block in silence, and then I see it up ahead: an old brick building wedged between a bodega and what looks like a closed-down dry cleaner, the kind of place that time forgot while the rest of the neighborhood gentrified around it.
The windows are dark and a faded sign hangs above the door, the letters barely legible these days. KOWALSKI’S GYM. The building looks abandoned, but the bones of it are exactly the way I remember.
“This is it,” I say, stopping in front of the entrance.
Brooke looks up at the building, taking in the cracked windows and the peeling paint and the general air of neglect. “What happened to it?”
“The owner died years ago. Heart attack, I think. Nobody took it over, so it’s just... sat here.” I try the door, but it doesn’t budge, the lock rusted shut. I step back and scan the facade, and that’s when I notice the window on the side, the glass broken out and the frame hanging loose.
I glance at Brooke, then back at the window.
“Oh no,” she says, following my gaze. “Absolutely not.”
“Come on.” I’m already moving toward the side of the building. “Don’t act like you’ve never broken into somewhere before.”
“I haven’t, so I don’t know where you’re getting that idea,” she says, following me despite her protests.
“Really?” I glance back at her. “You’ve never broken into anywhere? Not even once?”
She looks at me blankly for a moment, and then I watch her expression go from confused to annoyed to murderous in the span of about two seconds. The hardware store on Fifth Street, the summer before senior year, the two of us sneaking in through the back entrance at midnight.
“We agreed toneverspeak of that,” she says.
“Did we?” I lean against the side of the building and cross my arms. “I must have been distracted by something at the time.”
“I’m agreeing now, retroactively, on behalf of both of us.” She crosses her arms. “And if I recall correctly, back then I was in jeans and tennis shoes, not a dress and Louboutin heels.”
I hoist myself up onto the windowsill and swing my legs through, dropping down into the darkness on the other side. The floor is solid beneath my feet, dusty but stable. I turn back and extend my hand through the window. “Come on, Bennett. Where’s your sense of adventure?”
She looks at my hand, then down at her heels, then back at my hand. “If I ruin these shoes, you’re buying me new ones.”
“Deal. I’ll add it to the tab along with the bra.”
She mutters something under her breath that sounds distinctly like “fuck you, Midnight,” but she takes my hand anyway, letting me steady her as she climbs through the window frame. Her dress rides up as she swings her legs over and I keep my eyes firmly on her face as she drops down beside me.
We stand there for a moment, letting our eyes adjust to the darkness. The streetlights outside provide just enough glow through the broken windows to make out the shape of the space: a boxing ring in the center with sagging ropes, heavy bags hanging from the ceiling like ghosts waiting for someone to wakethem up. Old posters on the walls, too faded to read from here. A speed bag in the corner, still attached to its platform.
I walk through it slowly, running my hand along the ropes of the ring. The canvas is dusty but intact, and when I press down on it I can feel the give that means the padding underneath is still good. Whoever closed this place down didn’t even bother to gut it. They just locked the door and walked away.
“It’s like a time capsule,” Brooke says quietly from somewhere behind me. She’s looking at the photos on the wall, old black-and-white shots of fighters in their primes, poses that were probably cutting-edge decades ago and now look almost quaint.
“My dad’s up there somewhere.” I join her at the wall and scan the faces until I find him, looking young and hungry, maybe twenty-two or twenty-three, his fists raised and his jaw set with determination. “There, the third from the left.”
She finds him and studies the photo for a long moment. “He looks intense.”
“He was.” I touch the edge of the frame, feeling the dust coat my fingertips. “He was the most stubborn man I’ve ever known. It drove me crazy when I was a kid, but I get it now.”
We’re quiet for a while, just standing there in the dark looking at ghosts. I can almost hear the sounds this place must have held once: gloves hitting leather, trainers shouting instructions, the shuffle of feet on canvas and the grunts of effort. All of it silent now, waiting.
“I want to open a gym here,” I say, and the words surprise me almost as much as they seem to surprise her. “Not now, probably not for years. But someday. A second Midnight Boxing, in New York. I never thought I would, but I’m developing a love for this city.”
Brooke turns back to look at the posters, her face half in shadow. “Here? In this building?”
“My dad always talked about coming back.” I shove my hands in my pockets and look around the space, seeing it not as it is but as it could be. New equipment, fresh paint, the ring restored to its former glory. Young fighters learning the same fundamentals my dad learned sixty years ago, in the same place he learned them. “Opening a gym in the city where it all started. He never got the chance.”
“So you’d do it for him,” she says, looking at me with an unreadable expression.
“I’d do it for both of us.” I meet her eyes. “It’s a stupid dream, probably. The real estate alone would be?—“
