by Sarah Deming
She said something she had never said out loud before: “I want to be a champion.”
She waited for him to laugh at her, but he didn’t.
He just nodded and said, “I feel you, shorty.”
Then he reached out and softly took her hand. Humming along to James Brown, he moved it through a complicated sequence of choreography. The Cops ’n Kids secret handshake was always evolving. At that moment, it was a double pound, backhand, fist bump, finger wiggle, and pop-and-lock dance move that made Gravity feel kind of silly. She executed it to his satisfaction on the fourth try.
D-Minus smiled, and Gravity felt a little dizzy.
In boxing, one punch can change a whole fight. D-Minus had a smile like that. It was like the sun coming out from behind the clouds.
He motioned for her to follow him up the stairs and into the smaller of the two rings, which had a faded yellow canvas and blue ropes with white stripes that said “NYPD.” He asked her which hand she wrote with, and when she said her right, he told her she was “orthodox.” That meant she had to stand with her left foot forward.
He showed her how to keep her guard up: elbows in tight to catch body punches and hands against her cheeks to block head shots. Coach Jefferson H. Thomas III sat next to the ring and served up commentary in a booming voice that carried over the music and the bell.
The jab was a straight punch thrown with the lead hand. D-Minus moved her left arm to its fullest extension, keeping her elbow in tight and turning over her knuckles at the end. The hardest part was remembering to bring the hand back to her face immediately, instead of leaving it there like they did in karate.
D made her jab in a line going forward and backward. Then he had her add the right cross after the jab, in a combination he called the one-two. Coach Thomas kept blowing his whistle and pointing at her feet, and she would realize with dismay that they were way too close together, or too far apart, or just plain wrong.
The round timer divided everything into slices of work and rest. For three minutes, the light atop the clock was green and you had to keep punching. A warning bell rang when ten seconds were left. Then the light turned red and you could rest for one minute and talk to people.
And the gym was filling up with the coolest people. As they passed her, everybody reached their hands in between the ring ropes to shake hers. Even Boca was friendly. Gravity was not sure what she had been expecting, but certainly not this short, bald coach with a scar running down one tan cheek and a goofy smile. He walked in with a pack of Latino boxers in red tracksuits that said “BOCACREW” on the front and “#NoNewFriends” on the back, including Lefty (aka $outhpaw), who looked like a sexy vampire and dressed like a rap star. Lefty had thin braids that zigzagged across his head like lightning bolts and tattoos of guns across the backs of his hands.
When she told him her name, he threw back his head and sang, “Gravity…is working against me! And Gravity wants to bring me down!”
She laughed. He had a really good voice.
“I’m surprised you know that song,” she said.
“I’m full of surprises,” he told her, smoothly vaulting onto the apron to adjust her elbows.
He leaned in close as he did it, and she could feel the warmth of his body and smell his cologne. It wasn’t sleazy, but it wasn’t not sleazy either. She glanced across the gym at D-Minus. All these cute boys paying attention to her made Gravity feel pleasantly nervous. Like she wasn’t just some skinny tomboy in her cousin Melsy’s hand-me-downs. Like she was somebody who deserved attention, somebody who belonged.
Coach Thomas set a pair of tiny dumbbells on the apron and told her to repeat the drills with the weights in her hands.
“They’re too light,” she objected.
He laughed one of those old-people laughs that turn into a cough at the end. Then he rolled across to the larger ring on the far side of the gym, which had red, white, and blue ropes and a blue canvas with a PLASMAFuel decal in the middle, spattered with bloodstains.
D-Minus was inside that ring now. He had changed into a spectacular pair of leopard-print trunks with gold fringe and was shirtless, his trim abs gleaming. He grinned as his combinations snapped out, sometimes right on the beat of the James Brown and sometimes in obedience to an inner rhythm of his own. Gravity could have watched him all day long. Somehow, she just knew that he would do it: he would be a champion one day. That made her believe that she could too.
Next to D-Minus were several of the boxers from the Bocacrew, including Lefty, throwing furious combinations as Boca yelled out commands. Gravity was a little scared of the fighter called Monster. He was the biggest, darkest man in the room, with arms that were thicker than Gravity’s legs. Oddly, though, he wore pink satin trunks and a Powerpuff Girls T-shirt. He seemed to be Coach Thomas’s fighter, but when Boca gave his boxers water, he gave some to Monster, too, while Coach Thomas watched, glaring.
The tiny dumbbells didn’t feel so heavy at the beginning, but by the time she had done four rounds, it was hard to keep them to her cheeks. By the time Coach Thomas finally let her put them down, her shoulders ached and sweat dripped down the handles of the weights.
He said, “You don’t complain. That’s good.”
She felt a rush of pride that he had praised her. “Thank you, Mr. Thomas.”
“Call me Coach.”
Just then, the door swung open and a pack of tall white men trooped in, speaking a strange language. They wore blue-and-yellow tracksuits that said “UKRAINE.” In the middle of the group were two kids: a big boy whose face was hidden behind a fringe of blond hair and, trailing behind him—
“A girl!” Gravity exclaimed. “Look, Coach, it’s another girl! Can I fight her?”
The men stopped and shook Coach’s hand. The tallest among them, who looked like a shaggy bear, pointed at Gravity and said, “How much she weigh?”
Coach chuckled. “It’s her first day, Kostya.”
“I want to fight her,” Gravity said quietly.
“You’re not ready,” said Coach.
The girl looked at her and smiled, but it was a funny kind of smile, like she knew something Gravity didn’t know. She had two stubby blond braids and wide blue eyes and creamy skin with pink patches over the cheeks. The sleeves of her tracksuit came past her hands, making her look like a little kid.
“I’m a hundred and six pounds,” Gravity announced. “How much do you weigh?”
The girl laughed and said, in a loud voice, “I fight at ninety-five. But I ate a big breakfast.”
Gravity could tell Coach was annoyed, but he would be happy when he saw how good she could fight. She said to Kostya, “I won’t hurt her. Since she’s so much smaller than me.”
All the men laughed.
Kostya said, “We just do four rounds. Sveta work with her nice and easy.”
“She doesn’t even have a mouthpiece,” Coach said.
“I do too!” Gravity cried. “I still have one from karate!” She had bought it for the kumite they were supposed to have for their black belt, but then her mother said they couldn’t afford the testing fee, so she never got to fight.
“Please?” she whispered to Coach. “She doesn’t look so tough. I fought way bigger girls before. In third grade, I beat up a fifth grader!”
“Svetlana’s been boxing since she could walk,” he said.
“Please?”
Coach frowned, but he looked at Kostya and said, “Three rounds.”
Gravity was so happy she wanted to jump up and down, but Coach told her to shut up, sit down, and give him her hand. He produced a long strip of soft yellow cloth and, just like in the video, looped it over her thumb and between each of her fingers. His hands moved rhythmically, making a pad over her knuckles and weaving X’s across the back of her hand.
Gravity’s mind got quiet. The wraps felt snug bu
t not too tight, like her favorite pair of jeans. It made her feel safe, and it reminded her of something. Cousin Melsy called it déjà vu when you felt like you’d done something before. She said it had to do with ghosts. Gravity shivered.
“Be still,” Coach said.
Be still. That was it. Her dad used to say that when he brushed her hair in the morning.
He would sit on their old burgundy couch, and Gravity would sit at his feet and lean back against him, and he would hold her hair by the roots so it didn’t hurt when he brushed out the tangles. He said Gravity had curly hair like a Dominican girl and that her mom didn’t know what to do with it. She had forgotten all about that.
He would fix it with colored rubber bands he produced from the pockets of his jacket, where he kept the butterscotch candies she loved. He did Gravity’s hair like that every single morning for seven weeks. The seven beautiful weeks she remembered her father, between his sudden appearance at her eighth birthday party and his equally unexplained departure. Gravity shivered again.
“I said, be still,” scolded Coach.
She blinked and searched the old man’s face: the permanent frown, the smushed-up nose of an ex-boxer, the tiny scar at the corner of one eye. No, he didn’t look a thing like her dad. Maybe it wasn’t déjà vu. Maybe it was the opposite.
Time is strange. Three minutes can seem like three hours if you’re shadowboxing with hand weights, or three seconds if you’re talking to a cute boy. And even though round one always comes before round two, sometimes you get a feeling from the beginning for how things will end. When Coach Thomas wrapped her hands that very first time, Gravity somehow knew that he would do it again and again. She would get her hands wrapped—and, later, wrap them herself—so often that she would come to feel a little naked without it.
Coach yelled across to Boca, who coached Svetlana, “Sixteens?”
Boca nodded.
Coach held a sixteen-ounce sparring glove open for her, and Gravity pressed her hand into the opening. Her palm sank into the warm lining, torn in places from the kids who had worn it before. He steadied her elbow against the arm of his wheelchair and tightened the laces, then wrapped them around her wrist and swiftly tied them off. He held out the other glove. She pushed in.
“You go at the next bell,” he said. “Three things: Keep your hands up. Move your head. And jab.”
D-Minus appeared and said, “Who Svetlana sparring?”
Coach inclined his head toward Gravity. D’s eyes widened in shock.
“I’m a good fighter!” Gravity said, exasperated. “I can beat that girl.”
D-Minus laughed so hard he fell down on the floor. That made Coach laugh too. It even made Gravity smile a little, although she knew they were laughing at her.
D-Minus got back up, readjusted his Steelers cap, and spoke to Gravity in the kind of voice she used when her little brother put metal in the microwave: “Shorty. Listen. Homegirl is a regional champion. And in Russia they fight bears and shit. If she had caught the flu, broke up with her boyfriend, and got hit by a bus on the way to the gym, your ass would still lose.”
That made Gravity angry, but she didn’t say anything.
He shook his head and said, “Just don’t make her mad.”
“Hush,” said Coach. “Get that girls’ cup. It’s on the top shelf behind the toilet paper.”
D trotted off to the large locker bank against the back wall, which had been spray-painted with a mural of Jefferson “The Truth” Thomas as a young boxer, underneath a plaque that read “Happy Eightieth Birthday, Coach!” All around the mural were clippings of the champions the old man had trained, since way back in the day. Gravity wanted her photo up there too.
“Here,” D said, handing her a big red thing that she didn’t know what it was.
“It’s a female abdominal protector,” said Coach. “Put it on like shorts.”
D-Minus helped her find the place to put her legs and steadied her as she pulled it over her sweatpants. Coach rolled behind her to adjust the Velcro, and D-Minus pulled a headgear over her head. She felt like a NASCAR in the pit.
“Can you see?” D asked.
She said, “Yeah,” even though the forehead hung low over her eyes, but D-Minus noticed this and tightened the top laces.
Coach rinsed her mouthpiece over a bucket and slipped it in her mouth. She climbed into the big blue ring. Word had gotten out about the sparring, and all the fighters and trainers and dads in the gym had gathered around to watch. Svetlana, bouncing in her boxing boots in the opposite corner, looked meaner than she had before, her upper lip stretched by the mouthpiece. Gravity looked down at her worn-out trainers, wishing she could afford boxing boots. When her mother’s voice sprang up, saying she always ruined nice things, she silenced it by murmuring, through her mouthpiece, Coach’s three commands: “Keep your hands up, move your head, and jab.”
The bell rang, and Svetlana skipped into center ring, holding out her gloves. Gravity touched them. That was like shaking hands.
Gravity had missed with three shots before she realized there was something different about the way the other girl was standing. It felt like she was looking at a mirror image of herself. Svetlana stood the way Lefty did; she was a southpaw.
“Jab!” yelled Coach.
Gravity tried, but Svetlana parried and slapped her with a short right hook. It hit her temple, dizzying her. Kostya yelled something in Ukrainian.
“Sorry,” said Svetlana.
Gravity shook her head. Why was she apologizing? She ran at Svetlana, trying to hit her hard, but the other girl just spun off to the side. Gravity chased, throwing a one-two, but Svetlana blocked the jab with her elbow, slipped the right, then hit Gravity in the stomach. Gravity froze for a moment, unable to breathe.
“Good one!” yelled Boca.
Before she could recover, Svetlana swooped in and landed four more light taps. Gravity came back with a hard right hand to the place where she thought Svetlana’s head was, but Svetlana’s head wasn’t there anymore.
Gravity dropped her hands, panting, just as Kostya called time. It had only been sixty seconds—kids fought shorter rounds than adults—but she could not remember ever having felt so exhausted.
D-Minus beckoned her over to where he stood on the apron. He squeezed water in her mouth and said, “Keep your left foot outside her lead foot. Aim at her body.”
Svetlana got even faster in the second round. Gravity spent the first thirty seconds just chasing her, at one point tripping over her sneakers and dropping to her knees.
D-Minus yelled, “One! Two! Three!” like he was counting a knockdown.
She got up, cheeks burning. When she looked over at Svetlana, she thought she saw a slight smile cross the other girl’s lips.
“Hands up!” barked Coach.
Before she could obey, Svetlana dashed to her and peppered six shots into the padded part of her headgear. All the Ukrainians cheered.
Just then, she heard a deep voice in her ear: “Come on! Don’t let her do that.”
It was Monster, bending over the top rope. He was so tall that he didn’t even need to stand on the ring apron to talk to her.
“Go on.” He put an enormous hand on her back. “Hard right hand to the body. Sneak it in.”
Gravity decided she was going to land one shot, just one. She pretended to throw the right hand at Svetlana’s head. When Svetlana lifted her hands to block, Gravity got low, putting everything she had into one right hand to the open place between the elbows. When it landed, Svetlana let out a tiny “oof” of pain that made the whole thing worthwhile.
Kostya called time.
Gravity looked down at Coach, who smiled and raised a fist, but when D-Minus gave her water, he said, “That was stupid.”
“What do you mean?” she asked him.
He just shr
ugged. “You’ll see.”
When Kostya called time in and the real beatdown started, Gravity remembered what D-Minus had said before about not making Svetlana mad. The first punch that hit her with full force felt like a hard roundhouse kick, and she almost went down.
At first the gym rats oohed and aahed but then they got quiet. Somewhere in the middle of it, Svetlana landed a looping left to the tip of her nose that made her eyes tear. Red droplets spattered to the canvas.
“Easy!” thundered Coach.
Svetlana froze and said, “Sorry. You okay?”
This time, it didn’t make Gravity mad. She nodded, and when Svetlana extended her gloves, she touched her own to them. For the last thirty seconds or so, Svetlana barely threw any shots.
When Kostya called time, Svetlana hugged her and then sat in between the ropes to make space for Gravity to climb out. Gravity looked back and saw her blood spattered on the PLASMAFuel decal, a shade lighter than the older stains. Svetlana’s brother, Genya, helped her down the stairs, and Boca appeared with a damp towel and cleaned her face of blood.
Coach didn’t say “I told you so,” just unlaced her gloves. Even D-Minus seemed disinclined to crack jokes. The vibe in the gym was calmer, as though someone had taken a lid off a boiling pot and let off the steam. As Gravity made her way across the gym floor, many of the fighters softly touched her glove. Despite her miserable performance, the sparring seemed to have made them accept her more.
The boys changed in a large, foul-smelling locker room behind the shadowboxing mirror. Gravity glanced in as she passed and saw a half dozen boys slap boxing amid piles of stinking handwraps and moldering plastic suits. The girls changed in a tiny closet with a piece of paper taped to the door that read “Any Man Caught In The Girl’s Room Will Be Kicked Out From The Gym Period Point Blank End Of Story No Questions Asked.”
It smelled nice inside, like pine trees. A mirror, broken and fixed with duct tape, leaned against one wall. The opposite wall was covered with cool fight posters of female boxers, mixed with pictures of nearly naked male athletes from Sports Illustrated and beefcake shots of a young Mike Tyson. Svetlana was already in there, in front of the sole locker in the room. When Gravity walked in, she nodded, turned her back, and started spinning the dial of her little combination lock. She had unbraided her hair, and it spread across her back in golden waves.