Chapter 9 #2
The fourteen-pound ball I’d used for wall balls—squatting in front of the rig, then standing “explosively!” as per Diego, and launching the ball up to a target, then catching the ball and repeating the motion another twenty-nine goddamn times per round—rolled to a stop by my head after I finished/collapsed.
I nudge it aside, letting it disappear into my blind spot, currently cloudy from the pressure my elevated body heat puts on the optic nerve.
I just threw and caught that thing 150 times. I never want to see it again.
Babs laughs; she’s right next to me, but her breathing is already more regular than mine. “You think this is bad, wait until you meet my namesake. Barbara sucks.”
Ian peers down at me from where he’s perched on the box I used for the third and, arguably, worst portion of the exercise: box jumps.
Even at twenty inches, they were as harrowing as I’d suspected.
Diego advised that I focus on form over speed, which chafed my more competitive impulses, but after my compromised depth perception led to some close calls with the edge of the box, I was happy to take it slow.
“You did well for day one,” Ian says, casually tossing a lacrosse ball up in the air and catching it. “How are you feeling?”
“Oh, great,” I pant. “You know it’s brutal when a quarter-mile run is the least offensive element of an activity.”
“Even with the breaks between each round?”
“Those were not breaks.” The three-minute windows between each set went from being a relief to a period of anticipatory stress, me huffing and puffing as I watched the clock tick down to the next run with an increasing sense of dread.
“And why are wall balls so terrible?” I rail. “It’s just half sitting and throwing.”
“It’s a compound, high-intensity movement,” Ian says. “A large number of muscles in your body are putting in maximum effort. You’re squatting, and that’s all the powerful muscles in your lower body, and the muscles in your upper body contract to execute the push-pull phase as you throw the ball.”
“To a target,” I add, ignoring the faint tug of attraction at his knowledgeable breakdown of the movement. I think of Heather’s comment yesterday: competence boner, indeed.
Ian turns to glance at the targets dotting the top bars of the rig, black discs about a foot or so in diameter.
“They probably spiked your heart rate, too. And after the box jumps…” He frowns, then lets out a little laugh.
“I hadn’t thought about the individual components.
If you aren’t used to this kind of workout, your legs are probably jelly. Kelly sucks.”
“Kelly sucks,” I say, the sentiment echoed by several others on the floor around me.
Ian watches me, brows raised expectantly, that half smile tugging at his mouth as he gives the ball another toss and catch, toss and catch.
I scowl, conceding. “And I loved it.”
I really did.
Since Saturday, I’ve done a stellar job of not dwelling on any of my life’s unpleasantries.
The guys have kept me busy; when there’s a chance your roommates might mace themselves with household cleaners, you have to stay on point.
It’s the downtime when the intrusive thoughts creep in, calling to me from the crowded doorway.
Lying in my borrowed sleeping bag last night and finding no thrill in being on a mattress Ian hadn’t used, it was all too easy to indulge in some self-pity.
If not for the sudden burst of digital machine gun fire that had me shrieking from the room to remind Diego, my now wall-neighbor, to use his headset when playing Call of Duty, I might have fallen down a hole of despair.
But for the past hour, I have been in survival mode.
My focus was on dialing in the rhythm of my squats and ball tosses and not letting my impaired vision earn me fourteen pounds of pleather sphere to the face.
Every one of the 150 box jumps required my full concentration, lest I mistime it and shred my shin.
The run was the only portion when I could have slipped up, but by the second round, I was so focused on psyching myself up for what would follow that I couldn’t spare a thought for anything but keeping myself moving.
Nothing but blessed silence from my worries.
Ian laughs, extending his free hand to offer a fist bump. I feebly bump back; I earned it. “You were grinning the whole time.”
“Was I?” I ask, as surprised by the news as I am interested in the fact that he had been watching me closely enough to notice.
“Or gritting your teeth really aggressively. All right! Finish strong!” he booms and claps, his attention on someone past me.
I turn to the rig, where the final two athletes, Russ, a tall, heavyset guy with a thick dark beard and blindingly white tube socks, and Maggie, who’d been doing the box jumps on Saturday, grind out their final set.
Maggie had scaled up, positioning her box to the twenty-four-inch side and using a twenty-pound ball; no wonder it’s taking her longer.
Other athletes clap, too, and I contribute a whistle.
The two finish at the same time, Maggie walking it off, striding past Ian for a fist bump and continuing down the length of the gym floor, while Russ takes a seat on his box, whooping loudly and announcing, between gasped breaths, “Let’s do it again! ”
I turn back to Ian. “Is everyone always so supportive? Folks were cheering and giving high fives as we passed one another during the runs.” I figured that Saturday’s enthusiasm had been a critical mass thing. I hadn’t expected it in today’s much smaller group.
Ian nods. “There’s something to be said about shared suffering. It creates a bond.”
“A trauma bond,” says Babs.
“I’ll take box jumps over battlefields, I guess,” I say.
“You say that now, but wait until you eat shit on one of these things.” Ian taps the lacrosse ball against the side of the box he’s on.
“Everyone here has dinged their shin on a jump at some time or another. Fucking kills,” he says, then cocks his head, as if considering. “But also makes you feel alive?”
“Cheating death will do that,” Babs mutters.
“What has you here so late anyway?” Ian asks, leaning on his side on the box, closer to the older woman. “I don’t usually see you during daylight hours, other than Saturdays.”
“I volunteered to come later on the chance I’d get to gab with the new girl,” she says, smiling at me. “I’m supposed to report back to the five a.m. crew.”
I laugh, surprised to be a novelty. “Was that a warning, or should I be flattered?”
Babs shrugs, her skin making a sticky, sweaty sound with the movement. “Eh. Our lives are a little slow.”
Ian bounces the lacrosse ball. “And all of you gossip like old hens.”
“Hardly,” she counters. “The gym is a constant source of intrigue.”
“It isn’t,” Ian tells me, and levers himself up in a smooth movement. He hands me the ball. “You’re going to need this.” He nods to my pink-loving new pal. “Barbara.”
“Coach,” she says in parting, and Ian strides off.
I eye the ball he handed me. “I’m going to need this?”
“You’ll use it as we stretch. Find a sore muscle in your back or shoulder, then lie with the ball on that point. Hurts so good,” she says.
I’m not so sure, but I’m willing to go with it.
“Interesting that he handed that off to you,” she muses. “There’s not always enough to go around. That he didn’t give one to me, his respected elder…” Babs gives the ball a meaningful look. “I call that intrigue.”
My shift begins after I shower. I tidy the locker rooms. I clean all the windows in the facility.
I use the stick vacuum to get into every neglected nook and cranny of the place, unearthing balls of dust that could’ve eaten the ones the guys eradicated yesterday.
I do laundry. The clothing and towels among the lost and found items are no longer stiff.
I rearrange the dumbbells to correspond with the number of pounds written on the storage racks, and am intercepted by Grant, who takes advantage of my proximity to the weights to show me how to use them.
Rows and curls I knew about, but I’m introduced to tricep kickbacks, which are hateful, and am humbled by how hard a time I have with snatches, which he and Diego made look so effortless in the yard yesterday.
But by three, I’ve cleaned to my satisfaction, the guys are off to classes or, in Alistair’s case, a photo shoot, Ian is coaching, and I have nothing to do. The free time looms; I can practically hear my maladies closing in.
Ian stands in an open bay door, cheering on a group of runners in the two thirty class coming back in from a four hundred.
As the last member staggers past the threshold, Ian comes over.
The fleeting look of yearning he sends his abandoned Rice Krispies Treat does not escape my notice.
Mostly because I made a point of moving it to my good side so that any such look would not escape my notice. “You’ve been keeping busy,” he says.
“I have been. I don’t have a lot to do while the classes are going on,” I say with a glance at the group currently enduring Kelly. “And I’ve taken care of everything in my job description.”
“You’re quick. If you have other work to do?” He shrugs. “Or just enjoy the downtime.”
I grimace. “I don’t do downtime. And I’d work, but I’m waiting to hear back from a district about supporting materials for my Of Mice and Men unit.”
Ian cocks his head in a motion so like his brother, it makes me smile. “What do you do?”
“That is a conversation or another day. Right now…” I straighten and strum my nails over the legal pad I found while organizing the office supply drawer. “I’ve made a list!”
“A list?” Ian’s attention has shifted, keeping an eye on the progress of his class. I nod anyway.
My need to be useful borders on pathological.
I have to be engaged in an activity that contributes to something.
Cleaning is a solid outlet, but, as proven by the guys yesterday, anyone—provided they have the proper motivation and clearly established standards—can do that.
And with the humbling experience with Kelly still fresh and Alistair’s insistence that my snatches are, in his words, “slow as shit,” I needed to assert my competence.
“Little things I noticed around the gym.” I read aloud from the pad.
“Places for touch-up paint, and there’s a spot in the flooring that’s sticking up a bit,” I say, and peer over the edge of the legal pad to spot the circle of chalk I drew around the area as a warning to members.
“A hamper or something to replace the cardboard box you’re using for lost-and-found stuff.
A bold, new vision for the pro shop.” I’m excited about that; I can already feel the future orderliness radiating from the space.
It’s a touch more Regular Life Ellie and Her Desperate Need for Organization to Maintain an Illusion of Control than is in keeping with the spirit of the next few months, but Break from Reality Ellie wasn’t going to be completely free from that, anyway.
Not when Standard Me can clearly be put to good use.
I expect Ian to express appreciation for my initiative, but instead, his brow puckers. Confused, I glance at the gym floor, assuming that something there is what has him scowling.
“The pro shop is fine,” he says.
“It’s—what?”
“The pro shop does what I need it to. And this is a gym,” he continues, and faces me, his brows still low. “Stuff’s going to get dinged up, so the paint and all that doesn’t matter. And the lost and found doesn’t need to be anything but a box, anyway.”
“It doesn’t need to,” I agree, politely. “But it would look nice—”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“I’m not! I just thought, you know, fresh perspective—”
“Leave it.”
Ian’s voice has an edge that surprises me. It surprises us both, if the silence that follows is any indication. I watch, stunned at the sudden severity of his expression as he works to smooth it into something closer to his usual, friendly one.
“I appreciate the list,” he says, but his tone makes clear into which sunless crevice I might shove said list. “Save that energy for your roommates.” He starts moving toward the gym floor. “I don’t need to be a project, too.”
I stare after him, the sting of reproach heating my cheeks.
So much for intrigue.