When we weren’t playing basketball, we were talking. We talked about everything. We endlessly analyzed what it would take to transform ourselves from the geeks we knew we were to the cool juniors and seniors who somehow managed to actually date girls and not merely wonder what happened on dates. We found we were both only children and speculated what it would be like to have a brother or a sister or both. We learned we both hated our fathers: I hated mine for abandoning my mother and me before I was born, and he hated his for not leaving, for staying to smack him and his mother around whenever the guy had a bad day. We confessed our big, ill-formed dreams; Jim loved science and wanted to win the Nobel Prize in something, while I wanted to somehow change the world, to make a big difference.
We were brothers.
We began the new summer with two goals: To play our way onto the wood floor before school started again, and to put some muscle on our skinny frames. To reach our goals, we created a ritual of work and swore we’d make each other keep to it until the summer ended.
We started each morning by hitting the center right when it opened so we could get a jump on the weight benches. We worked out most of each morning, until we were too sore to continue. Then we’d eat an early lunch, stretch a bit, and hit the courts. We’d play until dinner, go to one or the other of our houses to eat, then head back to the courts and more games until the outside lights cut off at ten. By the time we got home it was all we could do to collapse into bed until the next morning.
The gym was where we discovered just how hard we could push one another, and where I found for the first time a constructive way to express the anger that was always roiling inside me.
We were at the end of our Thursday leg workout, a particularly brutal routine in which we did twenty-rep leg sets with heavy weights: first extensions, then squats, and finally leg presses. I was on the incline leg-press machine, in my third and final set of twenty heavy reps, fighting a weight I had been stuck on for a month. Each time I had tried this weight, I had grunted out the first two sets, but I had failed to make the third. I couldn’t even come close. I’d never made it past fifteen reps on that set, and the exercise now loomed as a demon in the gym, a dragon that always slayed me.
Jim had gone first and pounded out his third set, setting a personal best. He was sitting on the bench next to the machine as I strapped myself in. “You can do this, Matt,” he said.
“I know I can,” I lied. I didn’t know it all. Sure, my head knew it was possible, but in my heart I could already feel the incredible pain that hit around the tenth rep, already see the image of myself getting up from the machine having failed yet again.
“No,” he said. “You don’t know it, you don’t believe it, but you’re wrong. You can do it, but have to believe it and you have to pay the price.”
I nodded, took a couple of deep breaths, and started the set.
The first nine reps were good and relatively painless, my body a machine, my legs pistons the weight could not stop. The tenth was everything I had feared, as much a blast of pain as the previous nine had been routine. I paused after it, legs extended, sucking air.
“Push it,” I heard Jim say.
I pounded out two more reps without pause and then had to rest for air. I looked at my legs and was surprised to find they were shaking. I shook my head no.
“Bull,” Jim said. “Don’t you give up.”
I nodded yes and ground out the thirteenth and fourteenth repetitions, then stopped again for air. It was over. My legs knew it. My head knew it. My heart knew it. I might get the fifteenth, though even that was doubtful, but I surely wouldn’t get another. It was over.