14FARSHID
“One, four, five,” Coach Nico calls out.
Jab, right hook, left uppercut.
“Three, three, six.” Left hook, left hook, right uppercut.
“One, two, one, two.”
Jab, cross, jab, cross.
Sweat drips down your forehead into the corner of your eye, and you blink the salt burn away as you breathe and follow the combos. This is the best part of the workout, when you turn your brain off and punch as hard as you can, light on your feet one moment, driving from your hips the next. Butterfly. Bee.
You are strong and capable. You’re getting gains.
You’re not… that word.
You’re not.
Coach Nico keeps calling out combos, but he grabs the back of your bag to hold it in place, staring right at you as you hit, nodding encouragement. Coach Nico is nothing like your coaches at school. He’s young, for one, in his twenties, and used to do MMA, and now he works some sort of office job when he’s not coaching thirtysomething white ladies (and you) in a boxing class at five thirty in the morning. And maybe it’s the fact that the class is like 80 percent women, but he’s… kinder.
He still shouts out your combos in his sharp voice, he still corrects your form with a voice like a whip, but he does it because he knows you can do it, not because he thinks you can’t, and he’s always proud of you when you finally get it right.
He’s tall, over six feet, with tanned white skin and buzzed black hair and sparkling blue eyes and a scar that bisects his right eyebrow that he probably got in the ring. But even though heshouldbe kind of scary, when he smiles you can’t help but smile back.
It’s so different from the gym at school, where the guys act like every single thing is a competition that has to have winners and losers, except you’re never quite sure what the win condition actually is.
Brody came back to class last week. He hasn’t tried boxing you again, but he’s taken to scowling at you every time you get too close, like a dog guarding a favorite chew toy.
You’re still stuck with Dayton, but you don’t really talk to him except about the workout, and he doesn’t talk to you, either, and thankfully tomorrow’s the last day of weight lifting so you can finally be free of him.
You don’t picture his face on the bag as you hit it, but you do remember his voice screaming that word in the packed auditorium. Six letters. Six punches.
You pound the anger out of your chest, into the leather and sand.
“Time!” Coach Nico calls. A loud beep accompanies the end of the round, but you fire off your last combo one final time.
Coach Nico pats the bag as you step back. “Look at you go. You’re like the Energizer Bunny.”
“The what?”
He laughs at you and shakes his head. “Kids.”
“I’m not a kid.” You’re fourteen.
“Then how come you don’t know who the Energizer Bunny is?” he says. “All right, everybody, laps!”
You join the rest of the class, running laps around the edge of the ring, pushing yourself to go faster, savoring the burn in your legs, your shoulders, your lungs.
Faster, faster, faster, until you’re flying, until you’re outrunning everyone.
Everyone and everything.
You never knew community service was so much work.
“Ah, crap,” Nour mutters as she tugs her keffiyeh out from where its tassels got smooshed between two boxes.
You and Nour and Cooper have been packing bunches of nonperishable foods to donate to shelters all across Kansas City. You’ve been at it for over an hour, and you’re sweating in your shirt. It’s seventy degrees outside—another wild fall day in Missouri—but the school’s already turned on the heat after the temperature plunged below freezing last week, and once the heat’s on, it stays on until spring, when the air conditioner gets turned back on.
