We walked to the office, all three of us, and I sat down at Deja’s desk and copied the relevant pages by hand into a notebook of my own. I didn’t trust a phone with any of it. Sasha stood at the door with her back to the wall and her eyes on the hallway, and Marcus read the room over my shoulder, and for eleven minutes the only sounds in the building were the pen and the compressor and the far-off thud of Tyler’s footwork on the mat in the back.
When I finished, I stood up and went to find Deja.
She was in the equipment room, coiling jump ropes around her forearm. She didn’t look up.
“You’re leaving,” she said.
“Tonight.”
“For how long?”
I didn’t answer.
Deja hung the rope on its hook, took a breath, and turned around. Her face was doing the thing it did in competition — flat, level, refusing to give anything away.
“I’ve run this gym for sixteen years,” she said.
“I’ve had kids come in here with broken homes and broken ribs and I’ve never once asked a parent a question I didn’t already know the answer to. I know what a person looks like when they’re about to do something that might not work.”
“You do.”
“So tell me what you need from me.”
I thought about it. I thought about Tyler in the back, drilling a movement that would still be hard for him in six months. I thought about the cubbies with names taped to them, and the trophy case, and the smell of chalk that had gotten into the walls of this place so deep no cleaning would ever take it out.
“If anyone comes asking for me,” I said, “you’ve never met me. I came in one Thursday in October and never came back. That’s the whole story.”
“That’s a bad story.”
“It’s the only one that keeps you out of it.”
Deja crossed her arms. “And Tyler?”
“Tyler thinks I quit.” I paused. “Let him keep thinking that.”
“He’ll be angry with you.”
“Good. Angry is faster than sad. He’ll train better.”
She looked at me for a long moment. Then she took something off the shelf behind her — a roll of athletic tape, half used, with somebody’s initials written on the cardboard core in marker.
“Take it,” she said. “Not because you need it. Because it’s from here.”
I put it in my pocket. I didn’t say thank you, because my voice wouldn’t have carried it.
Outside, the parking lot was nearly empty. Marcus’s car was a gray sedan with tinted windows and nothing personal in it. Sasha’s was a dented hatchback with a bike rack she clearly never used.
I walked back to my own car to get the duffel bag I’d dropped in the doorway. On the way, I stopped at the bleachers.
Tyler was sitting alone in the dark, halfway up, hands folded between his knees. He’d come out the back door and around the building. He must have heard the sedan start and decided the hallway wasn’t far enough.
“You told me to go in the back,” he said. “I went in the back. Then I came out the front.”
“That’s fair.”
“Are you coming back Thursday?”
I sat down two rows in front of him, facing the mat instead of him, because it was easier.
“No,” I said.
He nodded slowly, like he’d already known and had just wanted it said out loud.
“Whatever’s going on,” he said, “you could tell me.”
“I could. I’m not going to.”
“Why not?”
“Because the last person who knew everything about me spent six years protecting me from it, and he died without ever telling me he’d done it,” I said. “I’m not putting that on a nineteen-year-old with a knee injury.”
Tyler was quiet for a while. Then he said something that landed harder than anything else that night.
“So that’s what this is. You’re not running from something. You’re running *for* somebody.”
I turned and looked at him.
“Who told you that?”
“Nobody.” He shrugged. “It’s just what it looks like when somebody fights. My dad used to fight like that. He’d get quiet, and then he’d get up, and whatever it was he was mad about, it wasn’t in the room with us.”
I stood up. I put my hand on his shoulder for exactly one second, then took it off, because one second is all you get before a thing turns into a promise.
“Keep working the left,” I said.
“It’s the fastest thing you have and the only thing you’ve never trusted.”
“Coach.”
“Tyler.”
“Was any of it real? The stuff you taught me?”
“All of it,” I said.
“Every second.”
I walked away before he could answer, and I didn’t look back, and I heard him exhale once, hard, the way athletes do when they’ve decided something.
Marcus was holding the passenger door. Sasha was already in her car with the engine running, and the little hatchback’s taillights doubled in the wet asphalt.
I got in. Marcus closed the door and walked around and started the sedan and pulled out of the lot without any headlights until we hit the access road.
“North?” he asked.
“North.”
“Four hours.”
“Then four hours.”
We drove. The highway unspooled under us, and the last town thinned out behind us into fields, and the fields into dark, and the radio played nothing because neither of us turned it on.
I held the spiral notebook on my lap with both hands like it was a living thing. Twenty years of a life I’d agreed to forget was in there, in ballpoint ink, in a stranger’s careful columns.
