Turns out she has two of them: as I run across the grass toward our makeshift end zone, Parker just a few steps behind me, Ruby appears. “Park!” she yells, lifting her t-shirt, her lacy push-up bra enough distraction that I make the touchdown safely. I spike the ball on the grass and drop to my knees as I throw my hands into the air, victorious. The girls run over and dogpile on top of me, and we all scream our heads off like we’ve just won the Super Bowl.
“Okay, okay,” says Jackson once we’re on our feet again. “You don’t have to rub it in.”
“Actually, we do,” Shelby says. “We’re number one,” she chants, clapping on each syllable and Avery, Ruby, and I join in, marching across the field to the cooler for celebratory and much-deserved beers.
In the afternoon, the guys grill burgers and we eat lunch as Cash tells us about his latest love interest, a backup singer he met at Altitude Friday night. “Her vocal range is unbelievable,” he says.
“She performed for you?” Avery says.
“More like I performed on her,” he says to an equal mix of groans and laughs.
It’s hot and humid, sticky as a thief’s thumb, my dad used to say on a day like today, so Ryder and I get in our suits and decide to go for a swim. We dog paddle out to a rock that butts up against the lakeshore, away from the group, away from anyone. Climbing up to the smooth, rounded top we sit side by side, the sun soaking into us, but the warmth feels good now having cooled off in the water a little.
I tell Ryder about my parents, my dad’s death, my mom’s moving to Florida. He tells me about his first fight, standing up in eighth grade for a kid name Marvin Lutwak. “He was short and fat and annoying. A whiny kid, cried a lot. He’d cry when he didn’t get picked for a team in P.E. and then the next day he’d cry because he didn’t like that the P.E. teacher was making a team pick him first to make up for the day before.”
I laugh. “Not to be mean, but I can kind of understand why people didn’t like him.”
Ryder smiles. “No, me, too. And we weren’t friends or anything. But I never thought just being an insufferable human being was enough reason to be picked on or made fun of or beat up,” he says. “I’d also seen Marvin walking around the neighborhood, pushing his grandmother in her wheelchair, and he had a nerdy sister two years younger. She went to our school, too, and she and her friends worshipped him.”
“So he meant something to some people,” I say.
“Right,” Ryder says. “So, one day, after school, in a side yard where the teachers never went, Patrick Mason, who was the most popular guy in school, has Marvin backed up against the chain-link fence, demanding Marvin give him five dollars or he’s going to beat the shit out of him. My friends, who were also Patrick’s friends, are running over to see what’s going to happen. Make fun of the cry-baby for probably the twentieth time that day. I go with them.” Ryder squints his eyes, looks up at the blue, cloudless sky. “The look on Marvin’s face. He was so scared. And I remember thinking how he must be scared every single day at school. Just because he wasn’t a cool guy or tough or strong. He didn’t stand out, except as a punching bag.”
I pull my knees to my chin. “So what happened?” I say. I can tell from the way his voice has softened that this is a difficult memory for him. I can relate to those.
“Marvin’s telling Patrick, ‘I don’t have any money, I don’t have anything.’ He’s pulling his pockets inside out, tears streaming down his cheeks. Patrick starts slapping him in the face, calling him a wuss, a mama’s boy, telling him he’s going to have to fuck his little sister and her friends because no other girl will ever do him. And no one’s doing anything, so I finally tell Patrick to knock it off. Let him go. He doesn’t have any money anyway.” Ryder swipes his hand through his hair, already dry from the sun. “So then Patrick turns on me, tells me to mind my own business, he’s not asking for my opinion, and I tell him, Well, that’s probably good, because my opinion is that he’s a coward who can’t pick on someone his own size. So he takes a swing at me, misses, and I punch him in the side of the head and he falls to the ground. Ice cold.”
I cover my mouth with my hands. “Oh my God,” I say. “So your first fight was a one-hit knock out?”
Ryder nods. “Patrick Mason never messed with Marvin Lutwak again. No one did, actually. And I started taking boxing classes that year.” Ryder lies back on the rock, stretching long his beautifully rippled torso. “When I had brawls in middle school, high school, I never really pictured doing it as an adult. But there can be a lot of money in it.”
“If you’re good,” I say.
“If you’re good,” he says. “And I am. Was.”
“Do you miss fighting?” I say. I lie next to him on my side, running my hand across his abdomen.
“Not enough,” he says. “The money I’ve made and the reputation I’ve earned have turned into better things than clocking some dude every night. I opened one bar while I was still fighting, and I used to think maybe that’s part of why it was popular.”