"And I don't know yet. That's the hell of it, Vic. Nineteen years old, my whole life goes in the trash in one scrimmage, and I rebuilt it into this—" he slapped his own chest, not gently "—and she's the first person ever to look at it and say, fine, that's the beginning, what's the verb? My daddy looked at me my whole life and only ever saw the noun."
Vic drank his coffee. "Fathers," he said, "are just coaches whose contracts can't be terminated." He considered Marcus over the rim of the cup. "You want the Whitfield contract. Brooks wants it. One slot, Dana said. You know you two are fighting each other for it in every drill she runs, even the dancing."
"I know it."
"And yet I watched you yesterday," Vic said, "hold the line drill steady so Brooks could run his reps at full speed without eating the floor. That's not how men compete for one slot, Marcus."
Marcus was quiet. The gym was filling with the evening crowd now, and through the wall of sound he could hear Tyler's laugh, unmistakable, at something Carla Nguyen had said by the front desk.
"Maybe there's more than the one way to be chosen," Marcus said at last, and sounded surprised by himself, and went to get his bag.
Tyler Brooks had three older brothers, and the Brooks family of Beaumont, Texas, had a saying that was only half a joke: the boys came down the stairs in order of size and out the door in order of speed. Wrestling was the family trade the way other families have plumbing or the ministry. His father had wrestled. His uncles had wrestled. His brothers — Darnell, Marcus's near-namesake and no relation, big Maurice, and clever Antoine — had filled a wall of the family home with medals arranged, though nobody admitted it, in descending order of shine, and Tyler, the fourth son, the baby, the afterthought with the fast feet, had grown up underneath that wall the way a plant grows under a shelf, reaching sideways for the light.
He was, from the age of eight, the quickest Brooks. He was never, at any age, the chosen one. The chosen one was whoever was winning the most that season; the household's warmth was a trophy that got handed around, and Tyler's hands were always a half-second late for it, which was the family's private tragedy and its private joke: the fastest one, last to be picked. He had won a state title at seventeen and come home to find it celebrated, sincerely, for almost a whole dinner, before the conversation found its way back to Maurice's college prospects. He had laughed. He always laughed. Laughter was the Brooks family art form, and Tyler was its master, and it had taken him until he was twenty-five and three fights into a professional career to understand that a man can laugh as a form of hiding and that hiding, like retreating, can become the only direction he knows.
Carla Nguyen heard most of this the way everyone heard everything about Tyler, sideways, at the juice bar after training, in the middle of three other stories he was telling at once. Carla was thirty-four, the club's events coordinator, the person who actually made Dana Whitfield's galas happen — the bookings, the insurance, the thousand small promises that had to be kept in the same order — and she had the administrator's gift of hearing the sentence inside the anecdote.
"So the contract," Carla said. "For you it's not the money."
"There's money?" Tyler said. "Carla. There's money?"
"Don't do the laugh. Why do you want it?"
Tyler spun his cup on the counter, once, twice. "Dana Whitfield puts one name on that poster," he said. "One name, top of the card, the developmental slot, the whole machine behind it. Marcus wants it because his daddy reads posters. I want it because—" the cup stopped. "Because I have been the fastest thing in every room I ever stood in, and it has never once been the thing the room was choosing. I want to walk into one room, one time, and be the name they say first. Not the quick one. Not the little brother. The chosen one. Is that a stupid reason?"
"No," Carla said. "It's the reason under all the reasons. Everybody in this building is fighting about a wall of medals in some house somewhere. You're just the only one who'll say it at a juice bar."