Peak Normal

The drill was called a suicide and Coach Mathieson had never once acknowledged the irony.

I hit the first line, touched it, turned. Hit the second, touched it, turned. My court shoes squeaked against the gym floor in that particular pitch that meant I was pushing hard enough, the kind of sound that used to feel like proof of something. My lungs were fine. My arms were fine. My legs were the problem, and I was not going to think about my legs.

Hit the third line. Turn.

Around me the rest of the team was moving through the same drill, the same squeak and pivot, Courtney’s ponytail whipping past on the left, Danielle breathing too loud the way she always did when she was trying not to quit. I kept my eyes on the far baseline and told myself what I always told myself: first one done sets the tone.

I finished four seconds behind Courtney.

I straightened up, hands on hips, breathing through my nose so it looked controlled. Nobody would notice four seconds. Four seconds was nothing. I had not slept well and it was the first week of August and we had been at this since six forty-five and four seconds was nothing.

Coach Mathieson blew his whistle from the sideline and scribbled something on his clipboard. He had the particular coaching expression that gave away everything by giving away nothing, a flat mouth and focused eyes that moved across his players the way a scanner moved across a document. He did not look at me longer than anyone else.

I told myself that meant something good.

“Water,” he said. “Two minutes.”

I grabbed my bottle from the bleachers and drank. The gym smelled like it always smelled, rubber and floor polish and the particular stale cool of a space that had been air-conditioned since June. I loved this smell. I had loved it since I was eleven years old and my dads drove me to my first club practice and I walked through the gymnasium doors and thought: yes. This. Whatever this is.

I had been right. Five years of being right.

Courtney dropped onto the bleacher next to me, close enough that our shoulders touched. She was breathing hard, which meant the drill had actually gotten to her, which she would never admit. “Mathieson’s been watching you all morning.”

I kept my eyes on the water bottle in my hands. “He watches everyone.”

“Sure.” She said it in the tone that meant she was done talking about it but had not actually dropped it.

I rotated my left ankle once, slow, keeping it casual, and did not think about how my legs had felt on that last turn, that particular heaviness that was not burn exactly, more like resistance, like running in water instead of air. I had felt it Friday too. I had gone home and stretched for twenty minutes and told myself it was nothing and it had been fine Saturday and fine Sunday and this morning it was back.

I drank more water and watched Coach Mathieson mark something else on his clipboard. He said something to Danielle that made her nod and reset her stance, some quiet correction that didn’t carry across the gym. That was the thing about Mathieson. He noticed everything and said most of it quietly enough that only the person who needed to hear it did. I had always respected that about him. I had also always been slightly afraid of it.

Two minutes ended. We ran again.

By the third rotation I had found something close to my rhythm, not quite there but close, and I was good enough at managing my body to make close look like comfortable. Outside hitters lived and died by their ability to read timing, to be in the right place before the play developed, and five years of that had made me good at managing all kinds of things. I adjusted my stride. I compensated on the turns. I smiled at Danielle during the water break and said good push and meant it and did not once let Coach Mathieson catch me doing anything other than working hard and making it look easy.

This was the job. I was good at the job.

The last set was serve receive and I ran it on autopilot, reading the ball off the pass, moving to the right spot, doing what my body had been trained to do without consulting the part of my brain that was quietly, persistently aware of the dull pull in my left leg. Platform up. Eyes on the setter. Trust the footwork.

First one done sets the tone.

At eight fifteen he let us go. “Good work,” Mathieson said, which from him meant something. He didn’t hand out good work the way some coaches did, reflexively, like participation trophies. When he said it he meant it and everyone in that gym knew it.

I meant to feel good about that on the walk out. I almost did.

The team spilled into the parking lot in that loose post-practice way, bags and conversations already splitting off in different directions. I came through the double doors behind Courtney and let the August heat land on me all at once, that particular thick warmth that felt almost physical after two hours of air conditioning. The sky was that specific Colorado blue that happened in early morning before the haze built up, sharp and clean, the kind of day that looked like a poster for somewhere people wanted to be.

My navy spandex shorts and cut-sleeve Sierra Vista tee were already doing the work they were designed for, which was to say they were damp and clinging and I had stopped noticing them two hours ago. The Mizuno's were white when the season started. They were not white anymore.

I saw Chandler before I was ready to.

He was leaning against the passenger door of Stetson’s car with his arms crossed and his ankles loose, like he had been there long enough to get comfortable. The black Lexus was Stetson’s pride and the rest of the family’s ongoing complaint about parking space, but right now I wasn’t thinking about the car. Chandler’s hair was still damp from his own workout, the strawberry blonde darker at the temples, and his cerulean eyes found me across the parking lot with that particular directness he had, the kind that didn’t announce itself but landed anyway.

He had no other way home. Same car, same schedule, same arrangement it had always been. That was the reason he was here.

I kept telling myself that was the reason.

He spotted me at the same moment I spotted him, which was unfortunate, because it meant I did not get the extra two seconds to arrange my face into something neutral.

“Hey.” He said it easy, the way he said most things.

“You’re on the wrong side of the car.”

He looked down at his position against the passenger door like he was genuinely considering this. “Huh.”

“That’s my door.”

“I was here first.”

“It’s my door because it’s not your car.”

“It’s not your car either.”

“It’s my brother’s car, which makes it functionally my car, which makes that functionally my door, which makes you,” I pulled on the handle and he straightened up just in time, “in my way.”

He stepped aside with that unhurried quality he had, the one I had decided was either extremely annoying or extremely something else, and I had been declining to figure out which for the better part of a year.

“You look tired,” he said.

“Thank you. Super helpful.”

“I’m a helpful person.”

“Keep telling yourself that.”

He pulled open the back door. “You’re welcome for moving.”

“I didn’t say thank you.”

“No, but you thought it.”

I got in before I could say anything to that, which was probably the right call.

My legs felt shaky on the step up and I grabbed the door frame without making it obvious and settled into the seat. The car smelled like the vanilla air freshener Stetson had been buying since he got his license, some cheap clip-on thing he replaced every three weeks with aggressive consistency. I had made fun of it for eight months. At this point it just smelled like the car, which was to say it smelled like home.

Stetson appeared thirty seconds later, yanked open the driver’s door, and threw his soccer bag into the back. “I am absolutely starving,” he announced to no one in particular. “Like, embarrassingly starving. I could eat the air freshener.” He cranked the music before he had fully closed his door, some country-pop thing with a hook designed to live in your brain rent-free, and sang the first line immediately, off-key and completely unbothered.

Chandler slid in behind me. In my peripheral vision I caught him tapping his fingers against his thigh in rhythm with the chorus. Not singing. Just tapping.

“Can we not,” I said.

“You love this song,” Stetson said.

“I have never loved this song.”

“You hummed it in the shower Saturday.”

“I was processing it involuntarily. That’s different.”

He turned it up.

I put my head back and let him, because this was the arrangement and the arrangement worked. Stetson drove and played music I pretended to hate and Chandler sat behind me and said things that were technically nothing and I said things back that were also technically nothing and this was just a morning in August and everything was fine.

Stetson pulled out of the parking lot and I shifted in my seat, trying to find a position where my left leg wasn’t pressing at that wrong angle, and I almost had it, almost found the spot where it stopped pulling, when the seat behind me moved slightly. Chandler leaning forward, his knee bumping the back of my seat.

“You good?”

I looked straight ahead. “Fine.”

A little too quick. I knew it the second it came out.

In my peripheral vision his reflection caught in the window, just enough to see his eyes narrow, a small consideration, like he was deciding whether to say something else. He didn’t. He sat back. The seat shifted again and then settled and the space behind me felt like it had before, ordinary, nothing, just Chandler sitting in the backseat the same way he always did.

The tapping resumed against his thigh, easy and steady.

Stetson sang the bridge completely wrong and the vanilla air freshener swung with a turn and I stared out the window at Sierra Vista going past and pretended my leg wasn’t pulsing.

Pretended my stomach wasn’t twisting underneath my ribs in a way that had nothing to do with conditioning.

I knew my body. Five years of practice had made me fluent in it, every variation of sore and tired and pushed-too-hard and needs a rest day. I knew what two-hour conditioning felt like the morning after bad sleep. I knew what a cramp felt like, what a pulled muscle felt like, what dehydration felt like at the end of a long week.

This wasn’t any of those things.

I pressed my palm against my thigh, slow and flat, and the ache spread underneath my hand, low and deliberate. Not sharp. Not sudden. Patient, almost. Like something that had been there for a while and had simply decided to stop waiting.

Outside the window August was golden and familiar. Stetson hit the last chorus. Chandler’s fingers kept their rhythm.

I kept my hand on my leg and my eyes on the road and didn’t say anything.

I told myself I was tired. I told myself it was early. I told myself I knew the difference between something and nothing and this was nothing and I would feel fine by noon.

The problem, the part I couldn’t quite get around, was that I did know the difference.

That was exactly the problem.