Chapter Six The Weigh-In
She went to the weigh-in three weeks later, alone, in a coat that felt too plain for the room full of cameras and gold chains and women in outfits that cost more than her rent. She almost turned around at the door.
Then a woman with box braids down to her waist and a clipboard under her arm spotted her hovering and marched straight over. “You Mika?”
“How’d you—”
“Amir described you. Said, and I quote, ‘she’s gonna look like she wants to leave the second she gets there.’” The woman stuck out her hand. “I’m Nina. His cousin. I run his page, I run his schedule, and unofficially I run him, don’t tell him I said that.”
Mika laughed, surprised by how easy it came. “Mika.”
“I know, I just said that.” Nina looped an arm through hers before Mika could protest and steered her toward a cluster of folding chairs near the front, where a stocky older man in a Sixers jacket and a tall, easy-smiling guy in a Temple hoodie were arguing about a football score. “Pop, Tre — this is Mika. Be normal.”
“We’re always normal,” Tre said, standing to shake her hand properly, which nobody in Mika’s whole life had ever done. “Amir’s told us about you.”
“Good things, I hope.”
“Only good things,” Pop said, studying her with a kind of frank, grandfatherly assessment that should have felt invasive and instead felt like being checked on. “You go to school?”
“Law school. One more year.”
Pop’s eyebrows went up, impressed. “Huh. Boy finally picked a smart one.”
“Pop,” Tre said, laughing.
“What? I’m allowed to say it. Half these girls he used to run with couldn’t spell his last name.” Pop turned back to Mika, entirely unbothered by his own bluntness. “You want a water? Sit down. You’re standing there like you’re about to run.”
She sat, and let herself look around properly for the first time since walking in — the ropes of gold chains, the promotional banners, a row of photographers adjusting long lenses like it was the most normal thing in the world to point a camera at a man weighing himself in his underwear.
She’d worn her one good sweater and it still felt wrong here, too plain, too quiet, a library book somebody had accidentally shelved in a nightclub.
Nina must have clocked the thought crossing her face, because she leaned over without being asked.
“The first one of these is always the strangest,” Nina said. “You get used to it. Or you don’t, and you just get better at ignoring the parts that don’t matter.” She nodded toward the stage. “The parts that matter are usually smaller than they look.”
Mika didn’t fully understand what she meant until Amir came out for the weigh-in, stripped down and serious and staring across the stage at his opponent with an intensity that made her chest go tight, he found her face in the crowd before he found the cameras, and something in his shoulders eased.
Afterward, Nina leaned over and said, “He never looks for anybody in a crowd. Not once, not the whole time I’ve known him.” She said it like a fact she wanted Mika to have.
Mika held onto it the whole ride home.