Boot Camp, page 9
“Maybe it exists only because you know what it’s like to not have had it.” I stay silent for a few moments, and he notices my downturned lips and heavy eyes. “Look, I don’t know your reason for hating high school—because trust me, we all have one—but you’re still young, and you can only keep improving from here.
School matters way less than you think it does right now.”
“That sounds like advice the former captain of the varsity football team would give me.”
“I was more of a wannabe Eminem than the next Tom Brady growing up, if that helps paint a picture.”
For the duration of our winding jog back to the center of the camp, I grill him on his former rapper dreams, forced to stop every few moments to contain my laughter. All I could picture were oversized light denim jeans and a bag of burned CDs on hand, with a few Eminem posters on a bedroom wall as the cherry on top. That was enough for me to thank my lucky stars that I never had that idea myself, knowing that I did not possess any musical ability to counteract my missing athletic gene.
“Feeling better now?” he asks when I start wheezing between laughs. “Very glad to be your entertainment for the day.”
“Y-yes, I-I think s-so.” I bend over and cough my lungs out, questioning whether an asthma diagnosis is in my future. When I straighten up again, I do everything in my power to wipe the smile off my face, even physically dragging my hand across it.
“Sorry. I needed that laugh today.”
“I’ll let it slide this time, Whitney.” His voice drops a notch when he dips his head down and says, “Only because I like you better when you’re happy.”
I smile even harder.
—
Most nights at camp, I’ve had the communal bathroom to myself as I get ready for bed, at some sweet spot between eleven p.m. and midnight. This time, as I brush my teeth with drooping eyelids, Willow steps out of a stall and ducks her head down as she walks to the sink.
I work my toothbrush over my molars with a little more vigor, watching her wash her hands in my peripheral vision. She lets water run over the soapy foam for at least a minute, arms frozen in place, and curiosity starts to eat at my brain.
“Willow . . . why are you really here?”
She pulls her hands away from the sink. The sensors detect the lack of movement and shut the water off at last, and from miles away, my environmentalist sister cheers. “Like I told everyone during that icebreaker, I had no choice.” She scoffs. “Does it look like I needed to go to a fitness camp, Whitney?”
“Does it look like I needed to go to one?”
“That’s not what I’m saying,” she snaps and rips off a paper towel from the dispenser. “All I’m saying is you’re not being held hostage in this place. So, I don’t know—maybe try to have some more fun while you’re here instead of frowning all the time and giving yourself premature wrinkles?”
“And how can I do that when you’re here with me?”
For the first time in my life, I’ve managed to say something that hurts her, and I watch her suck in her cheeks and wipe at her hands like she’s trying to peel off a layer of skin. Instinctually, I cringe and wait for the blow: the remark, the insult, the promise of humiliation to come.
Instead, she puffs up her shoulders and scrunches her face into her signature scowl, crumpling the paper towel in her hands into a ball. “I guess you’ll have to take that one up with my mother.”
She aims for the trash can from afar, and when she misses, I refrain from commenting, even though I want to.
I want to be just as fucking mean as she was to me.
“But to answer your question, Whitney, I don’t think you needed to go to a fitness camp. And definitely not this hellhole.”
She’s gone before I can say anything, and I curse softly, dropping my hands to the counter. My fingers curling into the granite, I stare at myself in the mirror, watching the lines in my forehead and cheeks flatten and my anger fade to confusion. I always thought if I had the chance to crawl into her head, I’d find only air, but it turns out her mind is a complex web.
I hate that I understand nothing in there.
I pick up her crumpled paper towel and chuck it into the trash before marching back to my room. When I push open the door, I almost trip over Martina, who’s set up camp between our two beds. She hunches over with her headphones on, blasting something by The Killers, and saws away her thumbnail with a nail file. Registering my presence, she drops her headphones to her neck and cracks a smile.
“What’s gotten into you?” she asks, noticing the scowl on my face.
“Ran into Willow in the bathroom,” I answer, throwing myself face down onto my bed.
“Oh, wait, never mind. That explains everything.”
I sit up on my elbows. “She basically all but implied her mother is holding her hostage here. Honestly, did Adriana ever mention why Cindy made Willow come here in the first place?
It sure as hell wasn’t to get fit.”
She shrugs. “Not sure if she even told Adriana the truth, but from what I heard, it had something to do with not wanting her to dance this summer. I don’t think Cindy’s ever been very supportive of her dancing.”
I figured Cindy would love anything that involved movement and grace, especially since that art form may be the only thing Willow has a natural aptitude for besides ruining lives.
Every other photo on her Instagram is her holding a medal after winning yet another competition.
“You know, what is your deal with her?” Martina asks after a moment. “Look, I don’t like any of the airheads Adriana is friends with either, but I’m gathering you and Willow go way back, and not in a good way.”
I rise to a sitting position and lean back on my hands, staring off at the opposite wall. “I wish it was just one thing that happened, not years of continuous hell. But do you wanna know the funniest thing?” Martina nods. “When I first started high school, we were friends. We used to spend our lonely lunches or free periods together and bond over dumb stuff, like indie bands or our hatred of world history class. And then second semester, she returned to school with an expensive wardrobe, a colorful vocabulary, and a brand-new set of friends. It was all downhill from there, especially after her dad died that summer.”
Martina sits down next to me on my bed. “Sounds like you became the victim of her sudden popularity.”
“Yeah. In an instant, she’d transformed me from neutral outsider to a complete social pariah. There was always something to make fun of: my boring clothes, my dedication to school, my nonexistent boyfriends . . . and her favorite, how bad I was at sports. I’m thankful I always had my friend Ava by my side, but there was only so much she could do to defend me.”
Martina ignores everything but the last point. “Wait—you’re friends with Ava?”
“You know her?”
“Hell yeah, I do. We used to bond over our desire to jump off a cliff whenever we’d be dragged to those brunches Willow’s mom would host.”
Groaning, I fall back to my mattress, hands fanned out on opposite sides of my head. At this point, it seems like all roads in my life lead to Willow, and with my luck, she’s probably also Axel’s secret ex-girlfriend and my second cousin once removed.
Martina follows my lead, and we both lie the wrong way across my bed, taking in a different corner of the ceiling.
“You know just a couple more weeks and you’ll be free of her, right?” she says, turning to look at me. “I won’t be, for the record.”
I chuckle softly with her, not telling her I also thought that before I graduated, and yet here we are. At this point, it seems easier to accept Willow as some semipermanent fixture in my life than a parasite I keep trying and failing to kill.
“Sure,” I mumble in return, closing my eyes as sleep consumes me, “only a couple more weeks.”
Chapter Ten
With each day full of intense workouts, exercise starts to have an opposite, almost invigorating effect on me.
Instead of napping after dinner, I somehow want to move even more, so I shove my hands into the pockets of my blue hoodie and stroll down the sidewalk overlooking the athletic fields. As my sneakers crunch against gravel, I look up at the angry gray color of the accumulating clouds above me. A droplet of rain plops onto my nose, then one on my cheek.
When I make it back up the hill, I search for an open seat to rest my sore legs, but the two stone benches behind the dorm are occupied by Adriana, Willow, Joanna, and Noelle. Noelle lays her hands daintily on top of her pink shorts, laughing with a little too much amusement at whatever Willow says. Her mascara-framed eyes fall on me as I walk by, and she whispers something to the group. Adriana’s pointed glare intimidates Noelle enough to shyly look away.
I wonder if Martina threatened her into being nice to me, but she hasn’t seemed that bad this whole time. Weirdly competitive and a little vain, yes, but nowhere near as terrible as Willow is—well, I guess was.
Feeling another droplet paint my face, I turn around and spot Axel standing outside the trainer dorm. When he catches my gaze, he beckons to me and mouths something unintelligible. My brow furrowing, I point my thumb towards my chest, and he nods.
The words on his lips grow clear.
Come here.
I force myself to casually stroll to him, even though my heart is fluttering like a lovestruck idiot at the fact he’s giving me attention, not any of the four girls behind me I’d have surely lost to in high school. I stop in front of his waiting form, propped up against the back entrance. He’s traded in his typical T-shirt for a gray hoodie and smells like a fresh shower.
“What’s up?”
“It’s gonna start pouring any second now,” he says, stating the obvious. He glances up at the clouds then back at me and drops his mouth to my ear. “Get a head start on those airheads over there and go back inside.”
The sky responds no more than five seconds later, sending the first wave of heavy rain. Moments later, a standard summer storm morphs into a biblical deluge, rumbling thunder and all.
“Oh crap, oh shit, oh crap.” I duck down and safeguard my hair with my hands as I try to figure out the quickest route back to my room that won’t destroy my crisp white sneakers.
I begin to sprint away, but for once, Axel doesn’t care about how fast I can run. He grabs my arm and pulls me through the rear entrance of the building, pushing me into the dry indoors with the kind of strength I almost forgot he possessed.
“I should check the weather more often,” I say, watching him peel off his damp hoodie. His T-shirt underneath lifts and offers me a glimpse of the V of his hard abdomen. I avert my eyes to the lining of glass on the door, blurred by droplets of rain. “I’ll just wait out here until the storm calms down a bit.
Thanks.”
“You’ll probably be here for two hours.” He checks his phone to be sure. “But if that’s okay with you, I’ll get going.” He pulls out what looks like a key card and heads to the door about five feet down the hall.
I stay in place, wondering if he’s going to go in. Sure enough, he unlocks the door and holds it open with his elbow, turning his head to the left to observe my expression.
“This isn’t an invitation to your room, is it?” I keep my voice down in case anyone is listening.
He smirks and leans against the wooden door. Rocking from one leg to another, I try to evade his curious gaze trailing from my wide eyes to my folded hands. At this point, it’d probably be easier to whip out a sign reading inexperienced loser than explain myself.
“I’ll leave my door open.”
He disappears into his room, leaving me even more conflicted. Sighing, I slide down to the floor and pull my phone out of my back pocket, hoping to find a few notifications, but my empty home screen mocks me. I rest the back of my head on the hard wall, staring at the spotlights on the ceiling. After two minutes of thinking about nothing, I fight the urge to fall asleep, somehow soothed by the intermittent cracks of thunder. When my heavy eyelids finally start to give in, I shoot up to my feet, terrified of someone—Bob, to be specific—finding me here.
I creep down the hall, wincing at the squeak of my sneakers on the polished linoleum. I peek into Axel’s doorway and find an organized room with a mostly dark-blue interior, aside from the white walls. He’s crouching by his side table, thumbing through a stack of papers.
“Hi.”
He rises to his feet at the sound of my voice, a small smile tugging on the edges of his lips. “Giving in already?”
“I’m kind of terrified of someone finding me. Isn’t this—you know—against the rules?”
“Sheltering you from a violent thunderstorm?” He cocks his head to the side, clucking his tongue. “Nah, I don’t think even Bob would be mad about that.”
“You could’ve told me to stay out there.”
“And you could’ve done that,” he says, walking towards me and leaning forward so that I feel just shy of trapped. “Yet you’re here, Whitney. Door’s still open, by the way.”
Once again, his teasing muddles my thinking, but I don’t want to concede just yet. I duck into the foot of space between his desk and the wall to conceal myself from any passersby.
“Your room is . . .” I trail my eyes from the wrinkle-free double bed to the aligned notebooks on his desk. “. . . neat. I like it.”
“Thanks,” Axel says, crumpling a piece of paper into a ball.
“Bob assigns twenty push-ups for each unmade bed found on random room checks, so there’s no messing around.”
“Wait, really? That’s wild.”
“God no. He never even enters this building.” He chucks the ball of paper into the small recycling bin and takes a seat on the edge of his bed. “The true story is my roommate my first semester of college was an absolute fucking pig and put me off dirty laundry and trash that’s not in a can for good.”
“That makes much more sense,” I laugh. “Is Bob as intimidating as we all think he is? Or was that persona on the first day just an act?”
“It’s hard to say. Once he gets to know you better, he lightens up, but some part of him thrives on destroying the enthusiasm of the new campers, so the introductory speech is probably never going to change. But he is a lot more lenient on the female trainers than he is on us guys.”
“Because he thinks they’re less competent?”
He gives me a half-assed answer, and I end the conversation.
To pass the time, I glance at the mementos on his desk, hoping to find the answers to the questions I still can’t find the time and place to ask, about his family, his upbringing, about Isla . . .
Decorating the corner of the wooden surface are two picture frames and a couple of plaques that appear to be awards from college or high school. I’m interested only in the photos, one of which is of him in a cap and gown standing next to a woman with his same eyes. His mother? Probably. The other picture is much older, slightly wrinkled in the frame, featuring a baby-faced version of him with a younger boy who I’m guessing is his brother, and a kind-eyed man wrapping his arms around them both. Maybe his father? They sit on a bench in a public park, in front of buildings that remind me more of those in Boston than the skyscrapers of New York.
“Is that the Common?” I ask, trying to subtly introduce my interest in this photo.
“It is,” he says, standing up. He places his hands on his hips and eyes the photo from a distance, something he looks like he’s done a hundred times before. “Kid on the left is my brother, Jake. The man in between us is my dad. He . . .” Axel pauses and squints, like he’s restraining some emotion, which becomes clearer when he finishes the sentence. “He passed away when I was twelve.”
His words sink in for a moment. “I’m so sorry,” I whisper and bring my hand to his forearm. It’s a soft, almost instinctual touch I use whenever I comfort someone, but I forgot this someone is my personal trainer, and he’s looking at where we’re connected with parted lips and a slightly furrowed brow.
I yank my hand away, cheeks warming. “That, uh, that must have been difficult to go through at that age. Not that losing your parent is easy at any age, of course, but it would’ve been especially hard in middle school. I can’t say I speak from experience, but I do know a couple of people who lost their parents, and it’s something—”
“Whitney,” he says, taking a step forward, “it’s okay.” He ducks his head down, and at the sudden proximity, my breath gets stuck in my throat, which would have been great ten seconds ago when I was rambling like an idiot. “That’s definitely a more creative response than I’m used to. Refreshing, almost.”
“Most people who know me would probably use the word awkward.”
He laughs. “You must have some very boring people in your life then.”
When he takes another step towards me, I fall back into the wall, flattening my hand across the cold surface to keep myself upright. The rain pounds outside, pelleting against the windows, and thumps almost as strongly as my heart with him this close to me. Between flashes of lightning, I don’t know if I tilt my head up first or he lowers his, but in my fantasies, this would be the part where we kiss and then roll onto his bed and cuddle until the storm ends.
The next crack of thunder seems to knock him to his senses, and he pulls back right as the room plunges into darkness. Every few seconds, we can make each other out with the help of the intermittent flashes outside, doing the job of the now-useless ceiling lights.
“Can you stay here for a couple of minutes?” Axel asks. He grabs his phone and room key, grumbling, “I’m gonna go see what to do about the power.”
“Sure,” I say, slowly sinking down into his desk chair in the dark.
When he leaves and shuts the door behind him, I remind myself that at end of the day, this is his job and I’m just a part of it—the only way it should be.
Chapter Eleven
