Later, when Linh Dan went to wash the dishes, Vy picked up her phone. She had been avoiding it since leaving the academy, afraid of what she might find, but avoidance was beginning to feel worse than knowledge. She opened the academy group chat with a sense of dread, and what she found was exactly as fractured as she had feared.
Some messages defended Damian outright, calling the roll intense but normal, suggesting that Vy was new and might not understand seminar intensity, suggesting that champions trained differently and that softening training for everyone would ruin the academy. Some messages defended the rule itself, short and unequivocal: a tap is a tap, no matter who you are, no matter how famous, no matter how light the roll was supposed to be. Some messages tried to find a middle ground that was not really middle at all, saying both sides had misunderstood each other, as if a tap could be misunderstood when it had been given twice and accompanied by words.
And some messages blamed Vy in ways that were dressed up as advice. She rolled too hard, they said. She should have known better than to accept a roll with a champion. She was trying to show off when she reversed him, and champions did not like being shown up. Vy read those messages twice, feeling heat rise in her face, and then she set the phone face down on the couch cushion, hard enough that Linh Dan looked over from the sink.
“Do not read it all tonight,” Linh Dan said, drying her hands. “Those people were not on the mat with you. Their opinions are not evidence.”
Vy nodded, but the words stayed with her. She rolled too hard. She had heard that kind of sentence before, in other contexts, in other rooms, and she knew how easily it could become a story that followed a person. If she stayed silent, the story would be written by others. If she spoke, she would be accused of seeking attention. There seemed to be no version in which she simply got to be a student who had tapped and expected the roll to stop.
She thought about quitting. The thought arrived quietly, without drama, as she sat on her couch with a blanket around her shoulders and tea going cold on the table. Quitting would be simple. She could stop going to Bayview, find a different gym, or stop training altogether and focus only on her graduate work. No more group chats. No more whispers. No more having to explain herself to people who had already decided what they believed. Her life in Richmond was still new; she could reshape it without this academy in it, and no one outside that small world would ever know the difference.
But another thought followed close behind, equally quiet and far more stubborn. Training was not just a hobby she had picked up to fill evenings. It was a place where she had learned, over years of wrestling in high school and two years of no-gi, how to stay calm under pressure, how to breathe when someone else was trying to control her space, how to get up after being taken down and try again. It was one of the few places where she felt fully herself, not a student trying to impress professors, not a daughter trying to meet expectations, just a body and a mind working together. Giving that up because one man had broken a rule felt like letting him decide what her life in Richmond would look like, and she was not ready to hand him that power.
She did not resolve the question that night. She let it sit beside her, unresolved, the way some questions needed to sit before they could be answered honestly. She showered slowly, letting warm water run over her shoulders, and she changed into soft clothes, and she checked the marks on her neck in the bathroom mirror, not out of vanity but out of a need to see what was real. The redness was fading already, which somehow made her angrier, as if her body were erasing evidence before she had decided what to do with it.
Linh Dan stayed until late, until Vy’s eyelids grew heavy and the apartment grew quiet. She left a note on the kitchen counter, in her looping handwriting: Call me in the morning. No rush. I am here. Vy read it twice after Linh Dan had gone, and she folded it carefully and put it in her bag, as if it were something she might need to hold onto later.