He Fixed My Fight, So the Champion Vanished novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Round Seven
Minutes before her title defense, Rae overhears Vince and her cornerman sell the fight, dumps the bottle and walks out past the walkout camera. She ends the night reading a flyer for a gym.
The whole arena was chanting my name, and I was standing in a cinderblock hallway with my gloves already laced.
Lou held out my water bottle, the same as he had before every fight since I was thirteen.
"Drink up, kid. Big night."
"Thanks, Lou."
I took it.
Then I did what I always do, which is carry it to the sink in the dressing room and pour it out.
Lou laughed.
"Superstition," he said. "Twenty-two and oh, and she still won't drink what I hand her."
"I haven't drunk from anyone's bottle but my own since I was twenty-one," I said. "You know that."
I broke the seal on the bottle from my own bag and drank from that.
The water from Lou's bottle went down the drain slowly.
It left a gray film on the steel, and the film smelled sweet.
I was still looking at it when Lou went to find my mouthpiece.
The office next door had its door open a hand's width.
Vince was in there.
My fiancé has a warm voice, and he uses it on everyone. Cab drivers, commissioners, the old woman who sells programs at the door.
"Round seven," he said, as friendly as he was with the program lady. "A body shot, left side. She goes down on one knee and stays there."
A second voice answered, a man I had never heard before.
"And she's okay with that?"
"She doesn't know. Lou gave her the bottle. By round five she'll be slow and by seven she'll be easy to hit. She won't feel a thing."
"Eleven to one on the challenger tonight."
"Two hundred thousand of mine is on it," Vince said, and he laughed softly. "Rae gets a rematch next spring and a bigger purse. She'll thank me."
I stood in the dressing room with my hand on the sink.
Twenty-two wins.
Every one of them had been mine, and I had never once asked how Vince got me a title shot so young.
Now I knew what the sweet film on the steel meant.
So I took off my robe, hung it on the hook, and walked out.
The champion's belt was lying on the bench where the commission man had left it for the walkout.
I left it there.
At the end of the hallway a camera crew was waiting to film me coming out for the ring.
The cameraman lifted his lens.
"Ms. Keller? You're on in two minutes."
"I know," I said.
I walked straight past him, down the hall toward the loading dock, in my ring shorts and my gloves.
The red light stayed on me the whole way.
"Rae!"
Vince had come out of the office behind me.
He was smiling for the camera. He is always smiling for the camera.
"Baby, what's wrong? Talk to me. Whatever it is, we'll fix it."
"Rae, kid," Lou said from the doorway, with my mouthpiece in his hand and no color in his face.
I did not turn around.
At the dock door a security guard stood up and looked at my gloves.
"Is everything all right?"
"No," I said. "I need you to cut these off."
He cut the laces with a box knife.
I pulled the gloves off, dropped them on the concrete and put my hoodie on over my wraps.
My gym bag had my wallet, my tape scissors and three hundred dollars in it.
My phone I threw into the dumpster behind the arena.
Then I walked a mile in the rain to the bus station.
There was a bus to Scranton at 11:40.
It was the only place I could think of where nobody would be looking for a champion.
I had grown up there. Nobody in Scranton had seen me since I turned pro.
In the station restroom I cut my hair off at the chin with my tape scissors, then shorter, until the sink was full of brown hair.
The girl in the mirror had a mole under her left eye and nothing else I recognized.
At six the next morning the bus pulled into the Scranton station.
The television over the ticket window was tuned to the sports channel.
Vince was on it, in the same charcoal coat, with his eyes wet.
"Our champion has disappeared," he said. "We found her phone, and a note. I won't say what it said. Please, if you see Rae, call me. There's a fifty-thousand-dollar reward."
I had not left a note.
A flyer was stapled to the corkboard under the television, between a lost cat and a room for rent.
FRONT DESK HELP WANTED. CASH. HOLLENBECK'S GYM, PENN AVE, 2ND FLOOR.
I tore it off the board and walked out into the cold.
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