“Hey, hey, we have a camp starting in a month. You can’t just walk off the mat because you got taken down. You’re getting soft.” Chloe turned around, her gym bag already slung over her shoulder. She looked at Greg. She looked at his cauliflower ears and his taped fingers. She loved Greg, but right now he looked entirely clueless. “Soft,” she repeated. The word tasted ridiculous. “Greg, what do we do here?” Greg blinked, caught off guard by the question. “We train. We fight.” “No,” Chloe said quietly. “We play by a rulebook.
We wear padded gloves so we don’t break our hands. We fight on a padded floor. If someone gets hurt, a man in a black shirt steps in and stops it. If we get tired, we tap out and we get to go home and eat dinner.” “Yeah, it’s a sport. What’s your point?” “My point is that we’re pretending,” she said, her voice dropping to a whisper. “We’re all just pretending.” She didn’t wait for him to respond. She pushed through the heavy glass doors of the gym and stepped out into the biting November air. She walked around to the alleyway.
The rusted Honda Civic was gone. In its place was a beat-up Ford Ranger. The hood was propped open. Arthur was there. He was leaning over the engine block, a socket wrench in his hand, coughing a dry, rattling cough that sounded like it hurt. The cold air was unforgiving, and he wasn’t wearing a jacket, just his standard grease-stained coveralls over a thermal shirt. Chloe watched him for a long time. She walked down the street to a corner bodega, bought two large black coffees in cheap Styrofoam cups, and walked back. The paper bag burned pleasantly against her cold hands.
She stepped into the garage. It was dimly lit, smelling intensely of WD-40, old rubber, and stale coffee. There were calendars from auto parts stores from five years ago pinned to the cinder block walls, peeling at the corners. It was a chaotic, dirty place, but it felt remarkably safe. It felt real. “You shouldn’t leave the bay doors open,” Chloe said, her voice echoing slightly off the concrete floor. “It’s freezing.” Arthur didn’t jump. He just slowly turned his head, assessing her presence before turning back to the engine block. “Heater’s broken,” he grunted, twisting the wrench with a sharp jerk. “Fumes got to go somewhere.”
