by Sarah Deming
So that’s how it’s going to be, Gravity thought, tying the girl up and staring over her shoulder at Rick Ross, who was sitting, smug and orange, on the arena floor. She wanted to climb out of the ring and scratch out his eyes.
“Lead right, left hook,” Sacred cried, and it was good advice, but by the end of the first round, Gravity was hurting so badly that all she could do was hold.
Shorty acted like he was sleepwalking through the round break. Maybe he thought all she needed was water and the stool, but she needed confidence and energy. She longed for Fatso to smack her across the face and ask her what her problem was!
Wake up, she told herself as she rose from the stool and gazed at Li’s stocky form and burning eyes. You are in the ring. Wake up. Fight.
But it was like her mind was awake and her body was asleep. The second round was a blur. She tried to keep Li on the outside, but she could not muster the power to get the girl’s respect. The body shots were cumulative. She felt a burning pain in that bad rib, and she found it hard to make herself jab. Her body wanted to keep the left arm pinned to her side, like the wing of a hurt bird.
At one point, she even switched southpaw to get the rib farther from Li, but she was a terrible southpaw and never trained that way and immediately got drilled with a left. She wobbled in the unfamiliar stance and felt something she had never felt before in the ring: fear.
Sacred cried, “Don’t do that!”
She switched back to orthodox. Li rushed her then, dark eyes burning, and Gravity held on so hard the ref warned her again, more sternly this time.
Shorty yelled at her after that round, and she wanted to yell back at him. She wanted to yell at him for not being Fatso, for not being Coach, for not having some kind of magic answer. She sat there in despair, and when the bell rang for round three, it was the first time in her life that she did not want to be in the boxing ring.
She felt betrayed, disgusted. What was the point in trying your hardest if the people around you did not fight fair?
The first standing eight was from a body shot that dropped her to her knees. It was very hard to rise, but she made herself do it.
The second standing eight was a left cross to the head, and by now, Gravity was not trying to win anymore. She was just trying to go the distance. That was a small, bitter victory, but it was something: they could beat her but not stop her.
At the end, when they failed to raise her hand and she lost all hope of Rio, she turned away in disgust and walked out of the ring, without bothering to embrace the Chinese girl.
Fuck Du Li.
Rick Ross had softened Gravity up and recorded secret videos. It was cheap and dishonorable, and Du Li did not deserve Gravity’s respect. Gravity would rather lose all the marbles than win like that.
Gravity paced the dormitory courtyard beneath the gray Qinhuangdao sunset, muttering to herself and reading Sacred’s Bible. She had the urge to Skype Coach, but what would she say? That she missed him terribly? That she was sorry she had let him down?
She was staring at her phone in despair when Kaylee came to drag her to Pizza Hut.
“I don’t feel like it,” Gravity told her.
“Arr! Captain’s orders.”
“I’m not hungry.”
Kaylee stepped to Gravity and stared up into her eyes. Gravity stared back, willing the full force of her anger to drive her away, but the smaller woman held her gaze, unblinking. They had never sparred before. Gravity was surprised at the strength of her game face.
Many communications passed silently between them. Kaylee’s eyes, gray-blue in the dusk and red around the edges, testified to her own anger and grief. Gravity remembered how Kaylee had come out with them after her loss, bravely showing her face at the table. And Kaylee was out of Rio for good, and her knee would take months to rehab, whereas Gravity had heard rumors that she might still be in the running, and her rib was only bruised. She felt ashamed of herself then. She looked down at the concrete and hugged the Bible to her chest.
“Okay. I’ll go.”
Kaylee put her arm around her. “Pizza’s on me, matey.”
The conversation at the Hut that night centered on Aisha and Aaliyah’s engagement. Aisha held her hand out so everyone could see the ring: apricot gold, with two boxing gloves meeting in the center at a sapphire crown. She pulled it off and passed it around so everyone could read the inscription: “Empress of my heart.”
Kaylee offered to officiate the ceremony aboard a pirate ship, but Aaliyah said they were going to do it in Seattle next spring, inside a boxing ring, and everyone was invited.
“Even you, Paloma,” she said.
Paloma snorted and went back to her cell phone.
“You too, Carmen! Come to my wedding!” Aaliyah yelled across the restaurant, beckoning to Carmen Cruz, who stood near the hostess stand with some shady men from the amateur boxing commission of Uzbekistan.
Carmen waved at them, looking very serious and journalistic with her pantsuit and press credentials but still sporting stiletto heels. Gravity watched as she sashayed across the restaurant to their table.
“Ladies!” she said. “How are you all this evening?”
Everyone said, “Great,” except Gravity, who studied the photographs of sausage pizza on the laminated place mats. She could not wait to get home and eat meat again. To her annoyance, Carmen slid into the banquette directly next to her. It was such a tight squeeze that Carmen’s dark, glossy hair fell across Gravity’s shoulder. It smelled like roses.
“I am sorry for your loss,” Carmen told her.
“Thank you,” Gravity said, gazing across the restaurant. She had not spoken to Carmen since her coverage of the tournament in Cornwall. What she had written about Ariana Leite having deserved the win still hurt.
“You were magnificent defeating Azerbaijan,” Carmen said. “I thought you would pull out the win today. Du Li is not half the fighter you are.”
Gravity turned to glare at her. Why was she saying these things? To torture her? To gloat? But to her surprise, Carmen was studying her with a pained expression. Her dark eyes brimmed with tears.
“Excuse me,” Carmen said. “It’s just…sometimes I feel things so deeply when I watch you girls box.” She pulled a lace handkerchief from the pocket of her jacket and dabbed at her eyes and nose. “When you got in the ring today, I had the funniest feeling. Like someone had hurt you very badly before the fight even started. I wondered if you had heard some bad news from home. You fought like you had lost your faith.”
The pizza arrived. Sacred Jones and Marisol Bonilla bent their heads in prayer. Gravity watched the grease sizzling around the edges of her crust.
Carmen said, “Forgive me, Gravity. Sometimes I make up stupid stories.” She let out a little, bitter laugh and twisted the emerald on her finger.
Carmen’s hands were long-fingered and elegant, but she had a prominent callus from writing, and there were ink smudges on her thumbs. Gravity thought of the photos Monster had shown her of the hands and feet of ring card girls, of how he had said they all fought their own battles.
“It’s not stupid,” Gravity told her. “You’re the only one who writes what really happens.” Something clicked inside her, and she accepted Carmen’s judgment of her bout against Ariana. It would have been nice to rematch Ariana. She sighed. Now she wouldn’t have the chance.
“Do you want some?” Gravity said, pointing to her Veggie Lover’s.
Carmen smiled. “Never pet a dog while it’s eating, and never take a boxer’s food. You might get hurt.”
Gravity laughed. It was true that she was starving. She slid a piece of pizza out of the pan and into her mouth.
“You do understand that you may still go to Rio, don’t you?” Carmen asked.
Gravity blinked at her, chewing. She had heard rumors but had not understood t
hem. There was always so much misinformation in boxing. She could not allow herself false hopes.
“How can I go to Rio if I lost in the prelims? They’re only taking twelve lightweights. I didn’t even make the top sixteen.”
Carmen pulled out her notebook excitedly. “Mira, Gravity! It is not simply the top twelve. The Olympics use continental quotas to ensure geographical diversity.” She showed Gravity a table she had printed off the AIBA website and pasted into her notebook.
“The top four lightweights from Europe will advance, plus the top three from Asia, the top African, the top Australian or New Zealander, and one Tripartite Committee selection that nobody understands—that’s what I was trying to interview those gentlemen about.” She gestured to the shady-looking men from Uzbekistan, who had taken a table in the corner and were eating calamari.
“And from our American region, they take the top two, and all of you lost today.” She showed Gravity her bracket sheet, which she had been filling in by hand. “Your Ariana Leite lost to the great Jean Sullivan of Ireland. Annie Bervin fell to Russia. Puerto Rico lost to the UK, Mexico to South Korea, Argentina to Gabon.”
She tapped a fingernail against the last fight. “That was a very exciting upset. It’s a travesty, the conditions in which most of the African fighters train. The Gabonese fighter told me she goes without food after training so her son can eat. You would think AIBA would put money into development instead of spending it on bullshit like the World Series of Boxing.”
She shook her head. “Anyway. All of the Americas’ champions lost! That means your final rankings will be determined by the rankings of the women who beat you. You can still go to Rio if Du Li does well enough, and her draw, I must say, is auspicious. You need to start rooting for China.”
Gravity looked at Carmen in shock. “I’m not rooting for that—” She stopped herself before saying the word “bitch.” “I’m not rooting for Du Li.” She cupped another veggie slice in her hand and started chewing it fiercely.
Carmen raised an eyebrow. “What happened in that ring today, Gravity?”
Gravity finished her pizza, slurped down the rest of her Diet Coke, and sat back in the booth. She reached for a napkin and wiped the grease off her hands.
Then she told Carmen the story. All of it. About Lefty, about leaving Coach, about how she had thought Rick wanted to help her when he was just setting her up to get hurt, about him recording her and taking the tape back to show Du Li. It felt good to get it off her chest. But then she saw that Carmen had started to take notes, and she felt panicked.
“You won’t write about that, will you? I mean, I hate Rick Ross, and I hate Du Li. But it’s over. What’s done is done.” She did not want to be like Paloma, giving Carmen bitter quotes about it afterward. That was not the behavior of a champion.
“I won’t write about it if you don’t want me to,” Carmen said, putting away her notebook. “But in the future, you must always tell a writer beforehand if something is off the record.”
“Okay.”
“Du Li is a beautiful person. You can be sure she had nothing to do with it. This was all Rick. So many sharks in boxing, sniffing for blood.”
That made Gravity think of Andre Vázquez and the gross thing he had said to her outside the Barclays Center.
“I want to tell you something else off the record,” she said.
Carmen looked at Gravity expectantly.
“Are you and Andre Vázquez…you know…dating?”
It was weird to ask a lady Carmen’s age about her love life, but Gravity had seen the way Carmen had taken his arm that night at the Barclays Center in her sexy red dress. Hearing his name now, Carmen flinched. It was like a boxer hearing the name of someone who had defeated them.
She said, “We…were never dating. And whatever it was that we were doing, we are not doing it anymore.”
“Because he’s one of the sharks,” Gravity said. She told Carmen about Monster, how kind he was and how talented as an artist and how she was worried that Andre was just using him to make a quick buck. Then she lowered her voice and repeated what he had said to her that night: “My cock is heavy too, but I don’t take it out and pass it around.”
She told Carmen how Andre had acted like nothing had happened and how it had made her feel, just for a second, so ashamed. And then she had to see him at the gym all the time, rolling in like he owned the place.
Telling all of this to Carmen made her feel the shame afresh, but afterward she felt better. It was like taking out the spoiled milk she had shoved to the back of the fridge and finally pouring it down the drain and throwing out the carton.
“Oh, mi niña,” said Carmen. “Let me hug you.”
Carmen held her in her arms for a while, and Gravity inhaled the roses of her perfume. It made her miss Melsy. As she thought of Melsy, Gravity let out a little sob. She would have to tell Melsy that she had lost. She would have to tell Tyler and Auntie Rosa and Ms. Laventhol and Keeshawn, who always hit her up on Instagram and told her to stay undefeated. She wasn’t undefeated anymore, and soon everyone would know. Everybody back at Cops ’n Kids. Coach would be so disappointed.
Carmen pulled back and laid her hand on top of Gravity’s head. “Do not despair. If you despair, that means Rick Ross and Lefty and Andre Vázquez won, and you don’t want them to win, do you?”
Gravity sniffed. “No.”
“I won’t publish what you told me about Andre,” she said. “But I won’t forget it, either. I used to be a pretty good investigative reporter. A man who talks like that to a sixteen-year-old girl does other things, too.”
She rose from the table, taking out her notebook and smoothing down her hair. “Okay, Gravity, keep your head up. I have to go interview those Uzbek thugs.”
Gravity was sitting in the cafeteria alone, staring at the half-moons of honeydew on her plate, when Marisol Bonilla slid into her booth and said, “Hey, G!”
The little boxer was round-cheeked and rosy. She looked like an entirely different person than the twitchy, ravenous 106-pounder she had been upon arrival in Qinhuangdao. The contrast shook Gravity out of her gloom.
“Holy shit, Marisol! How much do you weigh now?”
Marisol beamed. “One twenty!”
They both laughed.
“Nice one,” Gravity said.
“I know, right? My dad’s gonna freak, but whatever.”
“How’d you manage that on fruit and rice?”
“No, no, I started eating the meat, ’cause I’m not going to the Olympics or anything. The chicken’s really good! It’s so salty!”
Gravity looked across to the hot-food line. God, that sounded good. All the fruit and rice had made her stomach sick of sweetness. She wanted to eat greasy meat and gnaw the bones. Then she wanted to lie down in bed and pull the covers up over her head where nobody could find her.
She had not told anyone about her loss, and people kept emailing her to wish her luck or ask how she was doing. Du Li had won again last night. Tonight she fought South Korea in the quarters. Carmen had said Du Li’s draw was “auspicious,” and Gravity had looked that word up and it meant “lucky.” It was true that Du Li’s part of the bracket was the least dangerous. She would not have to run into the strongest girls—the Russian or “Irish” Jean Sullivan—until the finals.
“Wanna train?” Marisol asked. She was so cute, with her pug nose and fishtail braid and bangs that hung down into her eyes.
Somewhere deep inside herself, Gravity fought an internal battle. Part of her wanted to get up and get happy. Part of her wanted to stay sad, to punish herself for losing.
She said, “Yeah. Okay.”
They met Shorty down in the big warehouse gym, where he was setting up round-robin sparring for Nakima, Aisha, and Aaliyah, who had lost the previous night. The gym was buzzing, sparring going on in both rings
as well as in taped-off squares on the floor. Gravity saw girls from the UK, Sweden, India, Canada, and France, and lots of Chinese women, not just the women in the tournament but other local boxers who had come in to get good work. It was like a big meat market, with trainers running back and forth between the girls to match them up. Gravity felt her heart start to pound.
When Shorty saw her, he said, “That’s what I’m talking about!”
She started doing her stretches, and when she was wrapped up and warm, she looked across the gym and saw Ariana Leite, surrounded by the Brazilian coaches, her Mohawk standing straight up like a cock’s feathers. She and Gravity locked eyes, and Gravity could not see anyone else.
She felt that same giddy rush of happiness and excitement that she had felt five long years ago when, in the middle of all the boys and men, little Svetlana had walked in the gym.
Someone for me, she thought.
She tugged on the sleeve of Shorty’s tracksuit.
“I want to fight her,” she told him, pointing at Ariana.
He looked across the gym at the Brazilian champion, who smiled like she knew something Gravity didn’t, but Ariana didn’t know shit. Gravity would show her a thing or two.
Shorty said something in Spanish and then started to translate, but Gravity knew that word by now.
“Claro,” she said, “estoy lista.”
You had to snatch your opening when you saw it. Who knew if she would get the chance to fight Ariana again? One of them might not qualify for Rio. Or they might qualify but lose before they faced each other.
When Shorty nodded and said, “Bueno,” she was so happy she wanted to jump up and down.
She watched as he walked over to talk to Claudio, the enormous Brazilian coach. Claudio nodded. Shorty came back and helped her into her gloves.
“You go in there in three,” he said, pointing to the ring in which a French girl was roughing up a Swede.
But Gravity could not wait, and so she skipped across to mess with Ariana. The fight started the moment you knew who your opponent was. Their conditioning coach, Igor, spoke English, so she grabbed him by the arm and dragged him over to translate.