Andi Taylor is pumping her hands together, hitting her own flat stomach, thinking not of her mother sitting at home with her little brother, not of her car, which barely got her here, not of her summer job, her lifeguarding at the overcrowded community pool, not of the four-year-old she watched die, the four-year-old she practically killed, and his blue cheeks. They shouldn’t give teenagers the job of saving children. It doesn’t matter how many CPR classes you’ve taken. She killed the boy with her wandering eyes. His swimsuit had small red trucks on it. He looked like he was made out of plastic. The feel of his thigh when she pulled him from the bottom of the pool, already dead, and the way it was so easy to grip, because it was so small, she’s not thinking about it. She’s looking at the skylight and the light it’s letting in on this shithole gym and she’s thinking about the things she always does wrong when she fights, her lazy left guard, the way her left hand slips away and doesn’t protect her face if she’s not thinking about it. She is also thinking about the way Artemis Victor will get her. If Andi Taylor doesn’t think about this, this fight will be over in a matter of seconds. Andi Taylor needs to think about her spacing and her stomach. Andi Taylor needs to think about her stance.
They’re still sitting and looking at each other meanly. They know each other but have never fought before. When you join the women’s youth boxing league this facade of a sports association makes you pay two hundred dollars and then you get a “free” subscription to their magazine, which profiles its members, young girl boxers, one by one, so you see who’s out there, even if they are across the country, and you get a good sense of who you’re up against, and you know who they’ve fought and who they are going to fight and what their favorite hobby is because god only knows what kind of a journalist writes this excuse for a magazine, but whoever it is seems to think it is valuable information and that it should be included in every athlete profile, because in every issue there it is: name, hometown, favorite color, hobby, wins and losses, photo of the girl in gloves. The photo is a wild card because some girls choose to take it in their gym clothes, while others choose to take it in halter tops, their hair down, their heads tilted, and their gloves resting on their hips.
Andi Taylor would know Artemis Victor anywhere because Artemis Victor is the youngest of the three Victor sisters, a family of boxers whose parents come to every single one of Artemis’s matches with shirts that say “Victor,” which is, of course, ridiculous, their proclamation of their daughters’ winning records on their chests.
Everyone knows the Victor sisters and what they’ve won and what they’ve lost and the judges treat Artemis’s family like old friends, which, in boxing, is especially infuriating because the gray area of a call is often so present, and if you know a judge has a special relationship with the participants, you can’t help thinking, I’m being slighted, this is the end of me, if only I had parents willing to befriend my coaches, if only I had parents who could get off work, who didn’t work, who could come see me win.
Mr. and Mrs. Victor sit in folding chairs next to the ring. There are barely over two dozen other onlookers: judges, other girl fighters, a journalist from the local paper, a journalist from the Women’s Youth Boxing Association magazine, parents, a grandmother, coaches, and Bob, the owner of this gym.
Bob is also a coach, but, as a rule, doesn’t coach women. He has no particular fighter he’d like to see win. His gym was just the right location for the tournament to take place. All the coaches are men and all the coaches own gyms, and all the coaches collect fees from the girls to, in part, pay the Women’s Youth Boxing Association, who, in turn, pays the coaches for hosting regionals at their gyms. Some of the coaches were amateur boxers, but many of them have never competed at the level that these girls are fighting in. The girls’ coaches travel to the tournament to get their checks from the association. In between rounds, Artemis’s and Andi’s coaches do speak to them, but the coaches speak only in clichés and useless information. Everything the coaches have taught the girls is in the past. The language of the coaches inside Bob’s Boxing Palace is like the sound of the loud overhead fan. Artemis and Andi wish they could fight with less sound pollution. Every sound other than the smack of a hit is only a distraction.•
From Headshot, by Rita Bullwinkel, published on March 12, 2024, by Viking Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2024 by Rita Bullwinkel.
Join us on March 20 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Bullwinkel will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and special guest Lucy Corin to discuss Headshot. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
