Page 6 of Takedown

And working both walls like he held dual citizenship, one golden retriever of a human being at 149. Boat shoes. In the field house. Laugh you could hear through concrete.

"New guy!" He crossed the room like we were old friends who'd been tragically separated at birth. "Miles Bellamy. One-forty-nine, undisputed best hair on the team, do not listen to anything Kirby says about the incident with the van." He pumped my hand twice. "Kovac, right? Pennsylvania? We heard about you. Petrov watched your state final like eleven times."

"It's called scouting," said the hollow-eyed kid at 133, not looking up from his drill.

"It's called a crush on somebody's double leg, Aleks, but sure." Miles turned back to me, delighted with himself, with the room, with oxygen generally. "That's Aleks. That's Sam — " the chemistry reader lifted two fingers without losing his page — "we call him Doc, because he's going to be one, and because he once reset Turner's finger at an away meet with a pencil and total emotional detachment. Reyes is the quiet one by the wall, he transferred in from JC and he's better than all of us and hasn't figured out he's allowed to say so yet."

Reyes, by the wall, almost smiled. Filed that.

I disliked Miles Bellamy instantly and completely, on principle, on class grounds, on the goddamn boat shoes alone. I want it on the record that I was wrong about him in every way it is possible to be wrong about a person. But that's a later chapter, and honestly, it's somebody else's book.

Whitfield stood with the inheritance wall. Of course he did. Freshly taped — long fingers working the wrap around his wrist, tearing it with his teeth — and talking to nobody. Which I filed under too good for it, because I was eighteen, and filing things fast and wrong was my main indoor hobby.

* * *

Halloran didn't give a speech. He walked to the middle of the mat, stood under the lights until forty guys went quiet on their own, and pointed one thick finger at the leather book on its stand by the door.

"Some of you got names on buildings," he said. "That book doesn't know it."

That was the whole speech. I could've run through the wall.

Then the pairings, working down the weights, and my own name in that gravel voice for the first time:

"Kovac."

I was already stepping out when he finished it.

"Whitfield. Same weight, same size, nobody else in this room worth a damn to either of you. You drill together. Every practice. All season." He looked at the two of us with eyes like rivets, and there was something in his face I couldn't read yet. Thirty years running this room. I'd wonder later — I'd wonder for years — how much of everything that happened was that old man playing God with a pairing sheet. "Iron and iron," he said. "Go."

Somewhere behind me, quietly, Miles said, "Oh, this is gonna be good," and somebody shushed him.

* * *

We shook hands, because that's the sport. It is absolutely full of ceremony for touching people you hate.

We took our stance. And for the first time in my life, I put my hands on Grayson Whitfield.

Collar tie. His neck under my right hand, his grip closing on my wrist, forehead to forehead, close enough to hear him breathe. And in the first six seconds I learned three things that rearranged my whole filing system.

One: the technique wasn't bought. You feel the difference through your hands — bought technique performs the move; his believed it. Somebody had drilled these positions ten thousand times in some private argument with himself, and every angle arrived with conviction behind it. He hand-fought like it mattered. I'd wanted a soft prince. I'd been handed a problem.

Two: he was strong. Tendon strong, not mirror strong. He snapped my head down with honest disrespect in it, the room tilted a degree, and something lit up wall-to-wall in my chest with exactly one setting and no name on the box.

I called it hate. Hate was legal. Hate I could take home to Brandt Hollow and show my father.

Three: he was holding something back. Not effort — effort he spent like it was nothing, like everything else he owned. Something behind the effort. A door in the wrestling that stayed shut. Couldn't have told you how I knew, except that I'd spent eighteen years keeping a door of my own shut, and you learn to hear the draft under other people's.

Forty minutes of takedowns. He hit his beautiful, believed shot — dropped under my hands, took my leg out of the world — and I sprawled late and hated it. I hit my ugly Pennsylvania double, the one with no poetry in it whatsoever, and put him down harder than drilling strictly requires.

That's the part nobody warns you about with drilling. It's the most intimate thing the sport has and it's filed under work. Forty minutes of a man's hands on your neck, his breath in the air you're breathing, your weight learning his weight the way you learn a stair in the dark — and you call it a rep. You call it conditioning. Back home I'd had a whole relationship filed under nothing, conducted in the dark with the meter always running; the sport just does the same thing in daylight and hands everybody a mouthguard so the deniability comes standard. You can grip a man's collar tie for an hour and it's practice. You can breathe him. Still practice.

His forearm came across my jaw on the next exchange — legal, hard, a down payment on the whole season — and I ate it and came forward anyway, because forward was the only sentence I knew how to finish, and somewhere in the grinding heat of it a thought arrived with the flat clarity you only get when your lungs are already on fire: well, shit. This is a problem. And it is not the one Coach thinks he assigned me.

He got up with his face perfectly Whitfield and his eyes not Whitfield at all.

"Again," he said.

Current went through me like off a bad wire.