Chapter Two The Gym on Hells Kitchen
This was the big leagues.
“You hear ’em?” his trainer, Marcus — everybody called him Pop — said, nodding toward the gym’s cracked front window, where two kids from the neighborhood had their faces pressed to the glass. “Six months ago weren’t nobody watching you but me and them blasted pigeons.”
“Six months ago I wasn’t nobody’s business,” Amir said, wrapping his hands with the automatic, meditative care of a man who’d done this ten thousand times.
Pop had pulled Amir off that corner when he was just nineteen, half by threat and half by love, and told him the truth nobody else had bothered to: you got hands, but you got a head too, and if you don’t use both you gon’ end up just like your cousin.
His cousin Rasheed was doing a dime upstate.
Amir thought about that every single morning at five a.m. when the alarm went off and his whole body begged him to stay in bed.
His crew hadn’t changed much since those corner days — that was the part nobody understood about him.
Tre, his best friend since third grade, still lived two blocks from where they grew up and worked at the rec centre coaching eight-year-olds in the same gym Amir trained in now.
His cousin Nina ran his social media between nursing shifts and cussed him out if he ever, even once, thought about ghosting a fan who’d waited two hours for a photo.
They weren’t hangers-on. They were the reason he hadn’t lost himself the three times fame had tried to buy him.
“You still thinking about that girl?” Pop asked, not looking up from the mitts.
Amir huffed a laugh, embarrassed. “What girl?”
“The one at the front desk two doors down. You walked past that building four times this week. I counted.”
“I got meetings over there.”
“Uh huh. Four meetings.” Pop smacked his mitts together. “Quit lying to an old man and hit something.”
Amir hit something. But Pop wasn’t wrong.
There was a girl behind the glass at Prescott & Nash who never looked up when he passed, who kept her eyes on her books like the world outside the window wasn’t worth the distraction, and something about that — something about a woman in this city who wasn’t watching him — had gotten under his skin in a way three years of local fame hadn’t managed.
The two kids at the window were still there when he finished his round on the bag, faces pressed flat to the glass, and he waved them in the way he always did, let them take turns hitting the heavy bag while he held it steady, told them both their jabs were better than his had been at their age, which wasn’t even a lie.
His mother used to bring him to a gym like this one when he was that small, before she got sick, before the streets got louder than anything a gym could teach him.
He didn’t talk about her much. Pop knew the shape of it without needing details, he had been there the year everything came apart, he had been the one steady hand, in a house that otherwise had none.
“You good?” Pop asked, catching something in his face.
“I’m good.” Amir wiped his neck with a towel, watching the smaller of the two kids land a clean right hand and grin about it like he’d won a title. “Just thinking. I do a lot of thinking in this gym.”
“Most of it about that girl, probably.”
“Pop.”
“I’m just saying.” Pop smacked him on the shoulder, already walking off toward the office. “Men who think that much about a woman ought to go say something to her instead of standing here shadowboxing his own nerves.”
He finally decided that Friday he’d stop being a coward and actually walk through the door and introduce himself…