Page 51 of Takedown

I walked to my corner with my ears roaring like shift change. Miles had the water and a towel and his face was doing careful nothing, which from Miles is a scream.

"Talk to me," he said, low, crouched in front of me.

"He's reading everything. Every escape I own, he built the counter with me. I taught him my whole file, Miles. All season, six a.m., I taught him—"

"Okay. So?" Miles's careful nothing cracked into the general, the one from the walk to the Hearth Club, rule three in his eyes. "So he knows your file. You know something bigger."

"What."

"You know him." He pressed the water into my hand and stood, sunny again for the room's benefit, and said the last thing over his shoulder, deniable as weather: "Nobody's ever been readable in both directions, Kovac. Go read back."

Read back. Easy for the general to say. I sat in my corner with my ears roaring like shift change and my cheekbone already fattening where the crossface had lived, and I did the ugliest arithmetic of my life: one match gone, two to win, and the man I had to beat twice was the one man in the building who could hear my heartbeat change through a collar tie. I'd spent a whole season making myself legible to him — because being read by Grayson Whitfield had started, somewhere back around October, to feel like the only hour of my week I got seen at all. And now the seeing was going to cost me the fare home.

"Read back," I said, out loud, to nobody, testing the weight of it. It didn't mean anything yet. It would. But I didn't have it in the corner, and I want that in the record too: I did not have it yet. All I had in the corner was a fat cheekbone and a bad number and my father's voice coming from a long way off — you don't beat a man worth beating by wanting him worse off — and no earthly idea, sitting there bleeding, how a man like me was supposed to do the other thing.

Down the mat, the suits recalibrated comfortably — the formality, reasserting itself — and the topcoat in the third row sat with his hands folded, unreadable, watching his son's hand come down from the air.

Grayson wasn't celebrating. That's the detail I clocked even through the roar: he'd just ridden me into the mat for a full period, the best wrestling of his life, one match from keeping everything — and he came off the mat with his jaw set like a man in the middle of a job, not the end of one. He didn't look at the suits. He didn't look at his father.

He looked at me. One second. Something in it I couldn't read, and didn't have time to.

"Five minutes," Halloran's gravel announced. "Match two."

I took my towel to the tunnel. Alone — I felt Miles start after me and felt him stop, felt the room hold its distance, and I stood in the concrete dark with the towel over my head and the math laid out on the floor of me, plain as a letter:

One match from the bus. One more ride like that and it's June, and the duffel, and the depot, and eleven hours of Pennsylvania filling back in around me like water into a footprint.

And my father's voice, Thursday, flat as the valley: You don't beat a man worth beating by wanting him worse off. You beat him at his best.

His best. His best was the ride. And his best had a fingerprint on it — because I had taught him my file, all season, six a.m. after six a.m., which meant every counter he was reading me with was one we'd built together, which meant I knew the counters as well as he knew the escapes, which meant —

I stood very still in the tunnel.

Which meant I could stop wrestling my way out. And start wrestling his way in.

Patience. The one weapon Brandt Hollow never issues. I'd been watching him use it for four months — on the mat, at his family's table, in every firelit room he'd ever survived — and somewhere between the towel and the whistle, in a concrete tunnel with my season on the clock, I picked it up.

Well, said the shift-whistle voice, dry as ever. Took you long enough.

Chapter 24 — GRAYSON

One match from keeping everything. That's where I stood, at the edge of my family's mat, with my lungs burning and my father in the third row and the best period of top wrestling I had ever produced still humming in my forearms.

And I want the record to hold what it felt like, because no one will believe it: it felt like counterfeiting.

Not the wrestling — the wrestling was real, every second, I'd promised him nothing soft and there was nothing soft in that ride; I dug the crossface in like he was a stranger and read his escapes like film and gave him the full weight of everything my blood ever built, because that was the deal, that was rule one, the only one still breathing. The counterfeit was the scoreboard. One more match like that and the room's story wrote itself: order restored, the formality concluded, the help sent home — my father's joke, made flesh, by my own hands, with my season as the punchline's proof. I stood there at 1–0 understanding, with total clarity, that I was seven minutes of my best wrestling away from becoming the truest version of everything I'd told his study I refused to be.

The plan had always required losing honestly. The gym was about to find out whether he'd let me.

Losing honestly. I'd turned the phrase over all week like a stone with something written on the underside I couldn't quite make out. It sounds like a contradiction and it is not; it is the hardest thing the sport asks of anyone. Any coward can lose. Losing on purpose is easy and filthy and every man in the room can smell it — a thrown match has a stink that outlives the season — and I would sooner have signed the Ledger in another man's blood than let that stink touch what Danny and I were building in the dark. So the plan was never to lose. The plan was to win everything except the scoreboard: to wrestle so hard and so true that the only way on God's earth he could take the spot was to be, on the day, in front of all of them, genuinely better than the best I had in me — and then to want, with my whole treasonous heart, for him to be precisely that.

Nineteen years I had been told what to want. I had finally found a thing to want that no one had issued me — and the terrible, unrepeatable joke of my life was that the thing, wanted more than the singlet, more than the name, more than the approval folded into a topcoat in the third row, was this: to lose a wrestling match correctly to a boy from a burning town, and to have him understand, someday, when it was safe to, that the losing was the truest wrestling I would ever do.

Halloran passed behind my chair during the break. He does his real work in transit — the man has never once held a meeting; he administers an entire program in sentences delivered while walking somewhere else — and he paused behind me for exactly as long as it takes to check a clipboard he wasn't holding, and said, gravel, to the middle distance:

"Nice ride."

Two words. I've spent years on them. Because nice ride from Halloran, at 1–0, to the man who'd just produced the best period of top wrestling of his life, should have been praise, and it was not praise — the register was wrong, the register was the one he uses when a wrestler is doing the correct thing at the incorrect moment, and underneath the two words, in the oracle's frequency, the actual transmission came through with terrible clarity: I saw what that ride was for. I see what you're carrying. Wrestle the second one the same way and we'll all find out together what the third one's for.