Page 96 of My Family

Griff appears. He doesn't speak. He just hands me an ice pack, and I press it to my swelling cheekbone, and the cold makes my eyes water.

He sits beside me.

The tournament continues.

I stay very still.

Across the gym, I find Ethan. He's in the warm-up area, wrapping his hands, focused. He can't come to me. His match is two fights away, and he can't leave the area where the athletes are supposed to stay.

But his eyes lift and find mine across the distance, and in that single look, there's an entire conversation: are you okay, I'm sorry I wasn't closer, I love you, I'll be there as soon as I can.

I look away first.

I always look away first when he does that, because if I hold his gaze too long, the thing in my chest gets too big for my ribs, and I'll do something fucking embarrassing, like cry in a gymnasium full of offenders.

And I've already been eaten alive once today.

Griff sits beside me on the bench. He's been there for a while. He watches the current match. He doesn't say anything for a long time, but the silence is comfortable, not awkward.

My cheekbone is numb now, the cold having done its work, but I keep the pack there.

I haven't cried, which I count as the biggest win of the day.

"You know," Griff says, his voice low, "my first professional match, I got knocked out cold in the second round."

I turn my head slowly because fast movements make my vision swim.

He's not looking at me. His eyes are fixed on the mat, on the two fighters circling each other, but I can tell his attention is somewhere else entirely, somewhere years ago, in a different gym, in a different body.

"I was twenty-two," he continues. "Thought I was invincible. I'd won every amateur bout, beaten everyone in my gym, talked more shit than a man with my skill level had any right to talk. The guy they put me against was a southpaw from Philly. Built like a fire hydrant. I didn't respect him because he was shorter than me, which tells you everything you need to know about the idiot I was at twenty-two."

He pauses.

On the mat, one fighter catches the other with a clean jab. The crowd reacts.

Griff doesn't.

"He caught me with a left hook in the second round. I don't remember going down. I remember the ceiling. It had water stains, these big brown shapes that looked like maps. I woke up looking at those stains and thinking, Oh. So this is what it feels like."

The ice pack drips condensation down my wrist.

"You know what I did?" he asks.

I shake my head, then regret the movement.

Griff turns to me, and his green eyes are softer, the lines around them deeper, and he looks, for the first time since I've known him, like someone who was once young and afraid and knocked flat on his back.

"I left the ring," he says. "Found a corner behind the bleachers. Pulled up my hoodie." He holds my gaze. "And cried my eyes out."

I raise my eyebrows, surprised.

Chris Griff, who runs Aspire very much like a drill sergeant, who stands in front of fifty boys every morning without flinching, many of whom have actually stabbed someone—this man sat behind the bleachers in a hoodie and cried.

"Getting knocked down isn't failure," he says, still being too soft, and if he keeps going, I'm going to absolutely cry.

He must stop, NOW.

"Giving up is. And you"—he points at me with one calloused finger—"you didn't give up. You got hit, you went down, and you got back up."