"Cast Of Shadows" - читать интересную книгу автора (Guilfoile Kevin)

– 6 -

The Beast was a device invented by Anna Kat’s coach, Miss Hannity, from parts of old Nautilus equipment and an even older Universal weight machine. It was designed to increase stamina and also to work muscle groups in the order that a volleyball player would use them. There was a spike exercise and a dig exercise and a serve exercise, and each consisted of a combination of repetitions involving the legs and then the arms. Always the legs and then the arms. Miss Hannity had begun the process to have the Beast patented (she had a lawyer and everything), and once, after a game, she had even asked Anna Kat’s father if he would give a medical endorsement of the workout. For marketing purposes. Davis looked it over and said he was impressed but he gave Miss Hannity the names of an orthopedist and a physical therapist. My word won’t carry much authority, he told her. And anyway, with some buyers, it would probably be better if you were not associated with me at all.

AK rode her bike up to a gazebo-like structure behind the school gym. She turned at the last minute and backed up with her sneakers paddling against the pavement, walking it into a narrow stall. She readjusted the bag over her shoulder and jogged to the locker room door.

The fall semester wouldn’t begin for another month, but there was sporadic activity at the school throughout July and August. Changing into long, baggy basketball shorts and a size-too-small T-shirt over a black sports bra, she heard other voices and lockers slamming shut, but the showers were mostly empty, which raised her hopes. When she opened the door to the weight room she saw a handful of football players around the bench press, but none of her teammates were working out this afternoon. The Beast was all hers.

She slid into the device on her back and raised her legs in a recumbent bicycle position, with her feet resting on a pair of levers positioned on either side of a tall weight stack. She inserted her arms underneath a padded bar behind her head. One of Miss Hannity’s innovations allowed the user to change the resistance without leaving the chair. AK set the weights at a warm-up level and began her workout.

In her headphones was an unfamiliar song, part of a mix given to her by a friend. The singer sounded British. Or maybe Scottish. Definitely rakish. He sang:

Last night on earth

Don’t pick up that pen

We’re so ill-equipped to deal with all

The pressure, risk, and stress

They can’t hurt you now

It doesn’t matter what they say

You can still feel anger across the grave

But it was fun anyway

As she marked the repetitions with exhales, the weights behind the bench press stopped chiming on the other side of the room. Through the forest of machines, the boys would be able to make out only parts of her body – her calves, her hips, her shoulders maybe – and AK smiled to herself as she pushed her legs against the weight and extended her arms. They thought they were being so quiet, but their stealth was giving them away.

Only in the last two years had Anna Kat begun to think of herself as pretty. In junior high she had been skinny and bookish and so self-conscious about her height she wore sexless flats and carried herself bent forward, as if her shoulders were made of concrete. Oddly, the girls in her class noticed her potential before the boys did. Pretty girls – popular girls – began inviting her to Starbucks, to the mall after school, to parties. She developed an interest in clothes. Her skin cleared. Volleyball straightened her posture. Her freakishly high hips were now the delta of tanned and toned legs that stretched endlessly to her new black pumps.

She felt desired in amounts equal to her desire.

When her workout was finished (three sets each, serves, spikes, and digs), AK grabbed a towel from the shelf and walked out, pretending cool indifference to the warm, admiring stares on the backs of her legs as the frosted Plexiglas door slid shut behind her.

Between the weight room and the girls’ shower, three pairs of glass doors looked out to the practice fields behind the school. Two of them opened with a sucking sound and AK felt the thick heat balloon in the hallway before the cool, forced air of the school pushed it back. Two runners in tank tops and billowing weightless nylon shorts walked past to the boys’ locker room. A third, whom she knew from chemistry, mumbled a bashful “Hey, ’K” and hurried on. A fourth, trailing the others, paused and smiled at her. She waited for the locker room door to shut behind the last of the other runners before saying hello, but she couldn’t get the greeting out of her throat before the boy ducked into the wrestling room.

Anna Kat followed.

In announcements and on bulletin boards the wrestling room was called the auxiliary gym, but aside from certain PE classes, hardly anyone other than wrestlers used it for practice. It was a small room relative to the main gym – maybe forty feet square – and thick green-and-yellow mats were rolled against the walls. The boy sat on one of these with his palms next to his hips, grinning.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” she said.

AK sat beside him. The windowless room smelled like hot vinegar from fifteen years of adolescent sweat and poor ventilation. No place Anna Kat knew smelled just like it. It smelled like the worst of boys in close quarters. Like prison, she imagined. The odor depressed her.

“What’s going on?” she said.

“Nothing,” he said. “I got another disc for you in my locker. Some classic stuff. The Clash. Dire Straits. The Mekons.”

She said, “I’ve been listening to that Mekons disc you gave me last month.”

“And?”

“It’s growing on me.” She stared at the blank wall on the other side of the room.

He said, “Are you okay?”

AK didn’t want to talk about her dad. Well, she did, but not with him. She tried to dispose of the matter quickly. “I was at the clinic this afternoon. It’s just sometimes I think I’m competing with all those little embryos in test tubes. Other people’s kids. I know he cares about me, but he spends more time with them than he does with me. This will really be my last year at home. It’s frustrating, that’s all.”

The round of mat beneath her felt spongy and sticky to Anna Kat’s nervous hands, but she remembered how much like concrete it had seemed against her back during a karate elective her freshman year. When the mats were up like this, the wrestling room was floored with thin, sandpapery carpet, and AK removed her right shoe and scratched her toes against it through her sock. It wasn’t meant as an advance, necessarily, but in a few seconds the boy had kicked off his left Nike and pinned her shin against the curve of the mat with his calf.

He leaned over and kissed her and she kissed him back, draping an arm over his shoulder and touching the wet fade of his sweaty crew cut. In an instant, he had a hand on her breast.

“Sam,” she said, pulling away.

“Hmmph,” he said, reattaching his lips to hers.

“Sam,” she said, disengaging again. “Let’s see a movie tomorrow.”

“Like a date.” It was a clarification more than a question.

“No,” she said. “Just… just something.”

Sam slid his hand up the inside of her thigh and snapped the elastic of her panties with his thumb. “This isn’t something?”

She pushed his arm away and laughed. “It is. It’s just weird.”

“Dating is complicated, AK,” Sam said. “This is un.”

“Un?”

“Complicated.” He looked for a smile and didn’t get one. “Look, you go to the movies or even Starbucks together and people are talking. You’re seeing Daniel-”

“Sort of.”

“You’re sort of seeing Daniel. I’m seeing Chrissy-”

“And Tanya. And Sue.”

“You know about them?”

“What’s the matter? More complicated than you thought?”

“Nah.” He looked at his feet. “Is that what this is about? I mess around with other girls?”

“No.” She shook her head. That wasn’t it. The problem she didn’t want to admit to was guilt. She felt a bit used. She felt a bit like a user. No one was forcing her to meet Sam, of course. She liked being with him. They did things together that seemed grown-up. They did things together that frightened her. Things that excited her. That was the problem. She liked the way he could thrill her, the dangerous feeling she had when they were together. When she thought about it, though, she didn’t much like him. Although he was intelligent, Sam could be cruel to people he didn’t like, and he treated his friends only marginally better. To get laughs he said mean things to people’s faces (instead of following the widely accepted high school policy that called for saying mean things behind people’s backs). He was indifferent and selfish and cynical, and while these things made him cool and even a kind of popular, that didn’t mean that anybody really liked him. If they were dating, she would have to defend him, and Anna Kat didn’t know how she would do that.

Sam’s hand was inside her shirt and flat against her bare back, pushing her toward him. They were sweaty and gritty and aroused. Sam’s teeth closed around her right earring and pulled just the right amount too hard. “Did you lock the door?” he whispered.

“No…,” she said, as if an apology were coming.

“Good,” Sam said, and he pulled her down on top of him in the narrow space between the rolled-up mat and the wall.

In her locker, several walls and halls away, Anna Kat’s cell phone was ringing.