Boot Camp, page 8
I tilt my head up. “What?”
“Show you how it’s done. Only if you’re comfortable, that is.”
A murmured yes leaves my mouth, and he draws closer, his fingers dangling in the air. I nod, and he connects one hand with my lower stomach, while the other rests on my back. He pushes upwards gently and fixes my curved form. He lets his fingers linger for a second or two longer than needed—or maybe I imagine that he does—and I burn holes into the sand with my eyes, trying not to let him notice I’m affected.
After another twenty seconds, my hair sticks to the back of my neck, and my face is hot enough to fry an egg. All the muscles in my lower and upper body struggle to keep me up, crying out to me to spare them. They give up on me not long after, ignoring my wish to make it to a full minute.
“Thirty-six seconds,” he says, his tone low and equivocal.
“What do you think?”
“I was aiming for a minute, but thirty-six seconds is pretty good. If you round it up by four seconds, I made it forty seconds.
And then if you round that number to the nearest minute, technically, I reached my goal.”
“That’s the spirit,” he chuckles and holds out his hand, as always.
He leads me through a series of upper-body exercises without weights, equipment I once thought was necessary for building arm strength. I breeze through most of them and send a small mental shoutout to all academic textbook publishers on the last set.
“Let’s try a plank again now.”
I groan at his usage of “let’s,” given it’s always me doing all these exercises. I crawl back onto the mat and get into position, remembering to straighten my back and keep my elbows parallel to my shoulders. I change my strategy this time, trying not to focus on time and instead on what it would feel like to kiss him.
Wait, what?
“Tired yet?” he teases.
His voice pulls me out of my reverie, and I shake my head, feeling my cheeks grow hotter than they already are from exhaustion. I can’t even guess how much time has passed when I finally crumple to the mat.
“Fifty-eight seconds.”
“Seriously?”
“Look for yourself, if you want to,” he says, showing me his phone. Sure enough, the number is what he said, and that boosts my nearly nonexistent ego.
I hand it back to him, beaming. “Now what?”
I should’ve already expected his answer: “Now we run.”
Halfway down the beach, I grow bored of the quiet, wondering how his thoughts keep him so entertained. I normally try to escape mine, diving into TV series or sappy novels about people with lives ten times more interesting than my own.
Maybe I’ve craved them less this week because my life finally is interesting.
“Axel,” I say, less breathless than usual, “are we ever gonna—you know—get to know each other a little? We can’t keep going on like this for four more weeks.”
He waits a beat before answering, “Whitney, the purpose of this experience isn’t to become friends.”
It’s to become lovers, I finish for him in my head, joking.
Okay, half joking.
“Okay, cool.” I shrug, looking down at the sand. “Forget I asked.”
“I’m just messing with you. What are you dying to know?”
I perk up and blurt the first thing that comes to my mind.
“You could start by confirming you’re not thirty. Your age is still a little muddy in my mind.”
“Subtract a decade from that,” he chuckles. “Just finished my sophomore year of college, actually.”
“Are you an exercise science major?” It has to be something similar, given that he willingly works at a fitness camp.
“Close, kinesiology. I plan to become a physical therapist and hopefully open my own gym.” We make it to the end of the beach, and for once, he doesn’t demand we run back right away.
“What about you? Any big life aspirations?”
“I want to be premed in college, but it feels so unoriginal.
Everybody’s parents at my school were either doctors, bankers, or lawyers, and it makes people think I’m into the career for the wrong reasons.”
“From someone who’s about two years ahead of you in life, I say if you’re passionate about medicine, fuck what people think.”
His blunt reply feels like some ice water to the face, refreshing and sobering at the same time. I wonder what it would be like to naturally think like him. “Where’s home for you?”
“Greenwich. Although I did spend the first six years of my life in Manhattan. I don’t have a ton of notable memories, but I do remember life being a lot more vibrant than the Connecticut suburbs.”
“I’m from Brooklyn,” he says. I suddenly feel odd for talking about the city like he doesn’t know it through and through. “Not sure if I enjoyed the place that much growing up. My mom worked a lot of the time, so I took on most of the responsibility for my younger brother.” A tight crease forms between his eyebrows. “Never betrayed the city for Hedge Fund Land, though, so I guess we can’t entirely relate.”
“I was just a kid,” I mumble, although I know he’s joking. I fail to mention my dad left New York to work at a hedge fund.
“Is your brother a lot younger than you?”
“Yeah, he’s a baby. Fifteen next month,” he says, and I laugh.
“Got any siblings yourself?”
“One sister, a couple years older than you. So, not a baby.”
We continue talking, sharing a few more details about our lives and ourselves, before beginning the run back down the beach. Each time he says something, I let him talk as much as he wants, realizing that no matter what he shares, I’m interested.
So damn interested.
—
After dinner, Cindy and a few other female trainers gather the sixteen of us in the yoga studio for a “relax and recharge” session, as if I will be doing any relaxing with Willow breathing the same air as me.
“Gather in a circle so we can begin today’s session.” Cindy summons us with a circular hand motion. Reluctantly, I head over to the middle of the room, finding a spot between Martina and Joanna, one step up from Willow. “We talk a lot about empowerment when it comes to working out, but we tend to forget about the word nestled in it: power. All of you, whether you realize it or not, hold a tremendous amount of power. But if you’re not careful, you can let other people, bad circumstances, or even your own lack of self-confidence take it away from you and keep you from reaching your highest potential.”
As Cindy speaks, the room stays silent. Some girls point their heads down towards the wooden floor while others seem a step away from whipping out a notebook and jotting down her every word. I lean back on my hands and blind myself with the spotlights on the ceiling, wondering where she’s going with all these buzzwords.
“I’ll have May continue this session for us.”
“Thanks, Cindy,” May says. She’s pretty in that cute way, with noticeable dimples in her cheeks and short black hair that flows like water with the movements of her head.
Martina leans into my ear. “That’s Ryan’s girlfriend—I think. Still holding out hope he’s single.”
I glance down at the rock on her left ring finger, visible as she wraps her hands around her knees. “Are you sure she’s just his girlfriend?”
“Oh, shit. You’re more observant than I am.”
“When I was in high school,” May begins with the classic dramatic phrase, “I was a lot bigger than I am now. It wasn’t that big a deal, and I wasn’t even that insecure about it, since I’d always looked that way. But there were a few girls in my grade who always made me feel otherwise.
“They invited me to go prom dress shopping with them senior year, and we hit up store after store, and at every one, I failed to find a dress that fit me. I still forced myself to smile and tell them how beautiful they looked in their dresses, but by the end of the day, instead of trying to find a store that would work for me, those same girls looked me in the eyes, and do you know what they said? ‘You know what, May, maybe if you lost some weight, you could shop like the rest of us do.’” A few girls suck in a breath, like someone had insulted them the same way. “I let that comment get to me so much, I skipped prom and missed out on that once-in-a-lifetime event. Now I realize I didn’t have to give them that kind of power over my own joy and self-worth.
They weren’t worth it.”
“Has anyone given someone else power they don’t deserve?”
Cindy asks, her eyes gliding over the room. I swear they rest a second longer on my downturned face before moving to her daughter. “Or has anyone ever used their power in a way they weren’t supposed to?”
Hands pop up in the air, and I kind of like that I can’t tell whether these girls are saying yes to the first or second question. It emboldens me enough to raise my own hand, and soon enough Martina’s and Aspen’s follow. Willow’s hand stays glued to the floor, along with her eyes.
“Does anyone want to share?” May asks. “This is a judgment-free zone.”
Thirty seconds pass, and no one has spoken up. I make sure to stare intently at my white sneakers in case May or Cindy start calling on people, but to my relief, a raspy voice behind me speaks up.
“I’ll go,” Kennedy says, and I shoot her a smile for sparing us all. “I’m dyslexic. It wasn’t something that was a big deal to people until my parents transferred me to a supercompetitive high school during my sophomore year. After everyone found out, there was this group of assholes that would always try to get me to read out loud in class so they could laugh at how it’d take me twice as long as everyone else to get through one damn paragraph. One day, I saw this guy I really liked leaving a note on my desk, and for a second, I thought maybe he was asking me out or complimenting me or something cute like that. But that note . . . I honestly don’t even want to repeat what he said out loud here, but none of you guys would want to find that on your desk first thing Monday morning.”
I grimace as she talks, unsure how her classmates derived any entertainment from something as common as dyslexia, until I remember exactly how the brain of a bully works.
Oh, wait—it doesn’t.
“When I picked it up and read it, I could hear that same guy from the back of the class telling his friends, ‘Don’t worry, guys, Kennedy can’t read that.’” A couple of girls gasp, but she shrugs and pushes her waist-length blond hair away from her blue eyes, clearly having grown thick enough skin. “Gosh, I just wanted to scream at that moment, ‘I’m dyslexic, not freakin’ illiterate, you morons,’ but what could I do? Maybe there was something I could’ve done, but instead, I made my parents transfer me from that school, and I missed out on what could’ve been a great education. Or gave away my academic power, to be metaphorical.”
A couple of girls follow Kennedy’s lead, displaying a kind of vulnerability that’s almost admirable as they share intimate stories from their lives. Moments from high school float through my head, all the years of ducking my head down and trying to slink down the hallways to avoid being the victim of another one of Willow’s schemes. My fingernails dig deeper into my palms as I think about what a shell of a person she made me, but I wonder if it was all her. I recall that moment at the restaurant yesterday, walking between Axel and Isla with no shame, and I wonder if that could’ve been me all along.
“Thank you, all, that was very brave of you to share,” Cindy says, sliding a box of tissues forward. While some girls dab at their eyes with theirs, I pluck a tissue to wipe away the tiny droplets of blood on my palm and then crush it into a ball in my fist. “Before this session ends, I want you all to realize that even if other people have taken your power from you, you can still reclaim it. You can grow stronger, you can forgive, and maybe if you’re lucky, you can even forget. And if you’ve taken someone else’s power from them, you can always redeem yourself. Try to make amends and start anew. Because it’s never too late.”
Willow and I look at each other for a fleeting moment when her mother finishes talking, and there’s some soft emotion creasing up her eyes on the sides, but it’s gone in a blink.
And we’re back to two enemies sitting on opposite sides of the yoga studio.
Business as usual.
Chapter Nine
Axel and I meet at the rope climbing fixture in the woods again, which somehow seems smaller now that I’ve spent a week away from it.
“Need a demonstration?” he asks, cracking his knuckles.
The muggy weather today is insect-bite heaven, and he’s sporting a sleeveless shirt. I don’t complain, admiring the veins bulging down the insides of his arms when he grasps the rope, practically a phlebotomist’s dream.
“Sure,” I say, snapping out of it, “why not?”
Like every other athletic feat, Axel performs it like it’s nothing, effortlessly gliding to the top of the unrelenting rope. He explains how I should approach each pull, and more excitement than apprehension fills my mind.
Deciding not to overthink it, I jump as high as I can into the air. My grip viselike, I pull myself up while fumbling with the end of the rope at my feet. Axel hovers below me, arms outstretched, ready to catch my struggling body. His presence motivates me to impress him for once, and with all my little might, I drag myself up the first third of the rope.
“Nice job, keep up that form,” Axel comments from below, moving out of the way. “You think you can keep going?”
The coarse rope bites my soft palms and my core aches from how hard I’m clenching it, but I still yell back a yes. As I walk my hands up about a foot, I draw my knees closer to my chest, squinting as the cloud-covered sun shines in my face. As I push my feet together and extend my body, the top is almost reach-able. But the pain in my hands is unbearable; I’m still unused to the strain climbing puts on them.
“If you can’t keep going, slowly walk yourself down,” he says, tilting his head up. I look down at his warm expression and feel less bad about myself. “Come on, Whit, you’ve got this.”
Whit? That nickname is forever associated with family members or close friends, too casual for everyday life. But I’ve always loved it, and I like it even more coming from his mouth.
In my distraction, I let my sweaty palms drag down the rest of the rope, sending me careening to the dirt ground. Axel’s hands lock onto either side of my hips to keep me on my feet.
A jolt of electricity hits my body when his rough fingers meet the skin peeking out of the hem of my shirt, and I stumble backwards, my back to his chest, my heavy breaths matching his.
“You good?” he asks, taking a step back. I nod, noticing the one hand still on my body. His fingers dance across my skin as he removes it, and I shiver. “You had the descent at first.”
“Sorry, I got a little distracted. Can I try again?”
As I give the rope climb another go, I filter any thoughts from my brain, laser focused on the top. As I complete pull after pull, I can only hope my grunts and groans aren’t nearly as loud as I think they are, exaggerated by my building aggravation.
“Almost there!” Axel calls right as my hand hits the fixture of the rope.
When I finally make it to the top, I may as well be at the peak of Mount Everest from all the endorphins rushing through my body. I look down at a smiling Axel as I catch my breath before making my way down with caution, ignoring the pain in my arms and focusing on the shock in my mind. By the time I’m standing on my own two feet, I almost can’t believe I was just at the top, because all I see is that moment two years ago, when I experienced the same shock —not over my success, but over the fact the rope had snapped in half just from me attempting to climb it.
—
“Come on, Whit!” Ava called from below, clapping her hands.
“You can do it!”
A couple of other girls cheered with her as I hauled my shaking body up another inch of the rope, blinded by the fluorescent ceiling lights of the gym. I’d volunteered to go last, mostly because I already knew it would take me nearly twice as long as every other girl to make it up a few feet. I caught sight of a fraying portion of the rope and lifted one wary hand to assess the material.
“Don’t worry, Whitney!” Willow said, and I squeezed my eyes shut as I prepared for the blow. “You’re not heavy enough to snap it—yet, at least.”
The cackles from below overpowered a failed attempt from Ava to defend me, and I opened my eyes. Seeing red, I clawed and fought my way up another few inches of the rope, ignoring all the warning signs flashing in my head when I latched onto the thinning material.
“Whitney, I think you need to—”
I blocked out my gym teacher’s voice and completed one more pull, adrenaline pumping with each inch closer to the top.
Right when I thought I might make it, a creak blended into the sound of my own yelp, and in seconds, I lay flat on my backside on the mat. Groaning in pain, I stared up through bright white lights at the sports banners lining the walls of the gym, wondering if I’d died and made it to athletic heaven.
Above my unmoving body—from embarrassment and not paralysis—frazzled voices blended into each other.
And none of them were St. Peter.
“Oh my god, Whit, are you okay?”
“You should totally sue the school for this, girl. My dad’s a personal injury lawyer, and he’d take your case in a second.”
“Hey, you guys, back off. She might have a concussion.
Whitney, can you see how many fingers I’m holding up?”
“I don’t think she hit her head when she landed. Do you think her tailbone’s broken, though? My sister broke hers giving birth, and she said it hurt like a bitch.”
But one voice was clear among the rest.
“Oh, this is going to make some great content for the newsletter this week.”
—
Axel halts my drifting thoughts by handing me a bottle of water.
“I don’t get it,” I breathe, cracking the cap open with extra force. “I spent the past four years of my life getting humiliated for my shitty athletic skills—among other things—and you’re telling me after less than two weeks here, I can do that? Where was this willpower during high school?”
