Chapter 23: The Card

The black SUV belonged to a freelance photographer for a local news site.

Gina walked across Larimer Street the next morning in her gym shorts and tapped on his window.

He lowered it, looking nervous.

"I'm doing a piece on the youth night," he said. "Somebody sent me a tip."

"Who?"

"A woman named Sasha. She said it was a good human interest story. The coach, the free program, a secret donor."

Gina came back across the street with her hands on her hips and stared at me for a long moment.

"Sasha," she said.

"She's trying to help."

"She's trying to put me in a newspaper."

"It's a news site."

"It is a newspaper in a different outfit."

I laughed so hard that I had to sit on the bottom stair.

Gina scowled for another minute, and then the scowl cracked, and she laughed with me.

"Fine," she said. "He can take pictures of the kids. Not me."

"Not me either."

"You're the one in the ring on Saturday."

"I know," I said, and my stomach dropped. "I'm the one in the ring on Saturday."

Nothing in my life had frightened me as much as the twelve days of training that followed.

I had spent two months learning to hit a bag, and Gina taught me to hit a person.

She taught me to keep my chin down and my guard up, and to breathe out on every punch.

She taught me to slip left, and to slip right, and to stay in the pocket long enough to finish a combination.

She did not go easy.

"Again," she'd say.

"I'm tired."

"Again."

"My arms are falling off."

"Then your legs are working. Again."

I hit pads until the leather scorched my wraps.

At night I fell onto the quilt with Gina rubbing my shoulders.

In the morning she wrapped my hands, always, slowly, with the same silence.

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