Page 23 of Ellie Hayes and the Himbos
She waggles her finely etched brows. “What did you think of the room for rent sign? Wasn’t thatsnazzy?”
I laugh. “I take it you were responsible?” I ask, needlessly. If Grant is the embodiment of the body spray that hinted at what lay within the house, then Babs is glitter and hot pink in human form.
“They didn’t tell you? It’s my rental property. One of them, anyway. I’m your landlady,” she says, loftily. “The amount of money Ian’s flushed away by not insisting those boys find a fourth for that house is criminal. I’ve been getting on him for months, but he wouldn’t hear a word of it! I put up that sign last weekend.” She huffs a long-suffering sigh, then grins. “Was it the glitter? Did the sparkle reel you in?”
“It was certainly a factor,” I say, bursting with curiosity. “So, Ian’s been covering the rent on that room since he moved out?”
Diego jogs up then, clapping his hands for everyone’s attention as he welcomes us to class, and Babs and I are prevented from further discussion.
She winks. “You get settled in. Then we’ll talk.”
“I hate Kelly,” I say from where I lay sprawled on the floor.
As Diego explained, today’s workout, Kelly, is one of many benchmarks revisited throughout the year. Athletes keep track of their performance on each and try to improve their respective scores. Kelly, the hateful bitch, is done for time.
The fourteen-pound ball I’d used for wall balls—squatting in front of the rig, then standing “explosively!” as per Diego, and launching the ball up to a target, then catching the ball and repeating the motion another twenty-nine goddamn timesper round—rolled to a stop by my head after I finished/collapsed. I nudge it aside, letting it disappear into my blind spot, currently cloudy from the pressure my elevated body heat puts on the optic nerve. I just threw and caught that thing 150 times. I never want to see it again.
Babs laughs; she’s right next to me, but her breathing is already more regular than mine. “You think this is bad, wait until you meet my namesake. Barbarasucks.”
Ian peers down at me from where he’s perched on the box I used for the third and, arguably, worst portion of the exercise: box jumps. Even at twenty inches, they were as harrowing as I’d suspected. Diego advised that I focus on form over speed, which chafed my more competitive impulses, but after my compromiseddepth perception led to some close calls with the edge of the box, I was happy to take it slow.
“You did well for day one,” Ian says, casually tossing a lacrosse ball up in the air and catching it. “How are you feeling?”
“Oh,great,” I pant. “You know it’s brutal when a quarter-mile run is the least offensive element of an activity.”
“Even with the breaks between each round?”
“Those werenotbreaks.” The three-minute windows between each set went from being a relief to a period of anticipatory stress, me huffing and puffing as I watched the clock tick down to the next run with an increasing sense of dread.
“And why are wall balls so terrible?” I rail. “It’s just half sitting and throwing.”
“It’s a compound, high-intensity movement,” Ian says. “A large number of muscles in your body are putting in maximum effort. You’re squatting, and that’s all the powerful muscles in your lower body, and the muscles in your upper body contract to execute the push-pull phase as you throw the ball.”
“To atarget,” I add, ignoring the faint tug of attraction at his knowledgeable breakdown of the movement. I think of Heather’s comment yesterday: competence boner, indeed.
Ian turns to glance at the targets dotting the top bars of the rig, black discs about a foot or so in diameter. “They probably spiked your heart rate, too. And after the box jumps…” He frowns, then lets out a little laugh. “I hadn’t thought about the individual components. If you aren’t used to this kind of workout, your legs are probably jelly. Kellysucks.”
“Kellysucks,” I say, the sentiment echoed by several others on the floor around me.
Ian watches me, brows raised expectantly, that half smile tugging at his mouth as he gives the ball another toss and catch, toss and catch.
I scowl, conceding. “And I loved it.”
I really did.
Since Saturday, I’ve done a stellar job of not dwelling on any of my life’s unpleasantries. The guys have kept me busy; when there’s a chance your roommates might mace themselves with household cleaners, you have to stay on point. It’s the downtime when the intrusive thoughts creep in, calling to me from the crowded doorway. Lying in my borrowed sleeping bag last night and finding no thrill in being on a mattress Ianhadn’tused, it was all too easy to indulge in some self-pity. If not for the sudden burst of digital machine gun fire that had me shrieking from the room to remind Diego, my now wall-neighbor, to use his headset when playingCall of Duty, I might have fallen down a hole of despair.
But for the past hour, I have been in survival mode. My focus was on dialing in the rhythm of my squats and ball tosses and not letting my impaired vision earn me fourteen pounds of pleather sphere to the face. Every one of the 150 box jumps required my full concentration, lest I mistime it and shred my shin. The run was the only portion when I could have slipped up, but by the second round, I was so focused on psyching myself up for what would follow that I couldn’t spare a thought for anything but keeping myself moving.
Nothing but blessed silence from my worries.
Ian laughs, extending his free hand to offer a fist bump. I feebly bump back; I earned it. “You were grinning the whole time.”
“Was I?” I ask, as surprised by the news as I am interested in the fact that he had been watching me closely enough to notice.
“Or gritting your teeth really aggressively.All right! Finish strong!” he booms and claps, his attention on someone past me. I turn to the rig, where the final two athletes, Russ, a tall, heavyset guy with a thick dark beard and blindingly white tube socks, and Maggie, who’d been doing the box jumps on Saturday, grind out their final set. Maggie had scaled up, positioning her box to the twenty-four-inch side and using a twenty-pound ball; no wonder it’s taking her longer.
Other athletes clap, too, and I contribute a whistle. The two finish at the same time, Maggie walking it off, striding past Ian for a fist bump and continuing down the length of the gym floor, while Russ takes a seat on his box, whooping loudly and announcing, between gasped breaths, “Let’s do it again!”
