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  • Fight Week
  • Laura van den Berg (bio)
Keywords

fight, boxing, coach, gas station, robbery, gun, hospital, stranger, mother, mortality, death, friend, violence


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[End Page 146]

On fight week, Kayla feels every muscle in her body harden. Electrical currents race around in her bloodstream; each movement is animated by a force that feels uncontrollable, uncontainable. Her coach keeps telling her to rest, to sleep, but how is she supposed to sleep? Her life has tapered to one fine and brilliant point. In bed at night she imagines each punch landing like a sledgehammer ripping through concrete.

This will be Kayla's third fight. She lost her first, won her second. In the first, she felt caught in a herd of stampeding horses: overwhelmed, overpowered. In her second, the herd stilled and parted and her objective emerged from the dust with stunning clarity. She pressed forward, hurled the combinations she had spent countless hours honing. She pinned the other girl to the ropes and did not relent until the bell.

After that second fight, the adrenaline high soared for days. Insults bounced off her, at school and at home. She walked around feeling like nothing in this world could ever hurt her again.

Not long after that second fight, however, something irrevocable happened. Her best friend abandoned their coach for a rival gym. No conversation, no advance warning. Most afternoons, they met up in an empty field to do sprints and one day she simply was not there. When confronted over text, she said she wanted to win nationals this year and she didn't see that happening with Coach, whom she called a washed-up old fuck. Kayla understands that this is a thing that happens in their world, that fighters come and go; she just did not think it would ever happen to them. They have not spoken since, though they still follow each other on social media. Every week they post photos: scowling in headgear on sparring days, flexing in dirty mirrors after lifting weights. Kayla feels like they are in silent competition with one another and maybe that has always been the case, even when they were still best friends. Same age. Same weight class. Only two white girls on the fight team. They both even have a dead parent knocking around in their pasts. Her former best friend's father was killed in a car accident three years ago. Kayla's own mother has been dead for a decade, after a blood vessel burst like a pipe in her brain. She collapsed in the grocery store, right by the citrus display. Life support for twenty-four hours and then gone.

The thing Kayla resents most is how her former best friend has managed to shake her confidence in her gym, which is to say her home. Just a little. Just enough. She feels like she's seeing her family through the eyes of an outsider for the first time. All the small things she never paid much attention to before—now they're all she notices. Coach's habit of running late; the haphazard equipment (good luck finding two dumbbells that match); his mercurial moods. One day he waves his fighters off, sends them away to work the heavy bags on their own. Sometimes you have to do for yourselves, he tells them, like they're a bunch of needy children. Another he spends an hour breaking down the jab in glorious detail. One day she can't tie her shoes right; another she's the greatest thing this gym has ever seen. On fight dates, Coach is like one of those performers who practically has to be carried to the venue only to transform into an entirely different person the moment he steps onstage. She is certain that the talks he delivered before her bouts did nothing less than alter the substance of her soul. The way he left her feeling so understood, so believed-in.

Two days before the fight, Kayla drives over to the gym to shadowbox in front of the mirrors, work her head movement with the slip bag. Then she sits ringside and watches...

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