Just then my father walked through the door. His face was rigid, brows crinkled together. He dropped into the nearest chair and began working his dirt-covered boots off, pushing down on the heel of one with the toe of the other. He sighed, said, “Work is really fuckin’ up my world.” It was his line.

“Most of my friends are playing basketball—”

“You’re not playing basketball,” he interrupted.

We both looked at him.

“I know,” I agreed, but he felt inclined to give his reasons why, anyway.

“Basketball is for pussies and you’re too short. You’re tough enough to wrestle.”

My mother shrugged. “He’s right.”

He got his boots off and tossed them on the mat beside the door. His days in a factory were behind him and he now worked construction. It was as good a setup as he could hope for, seven months of work through summer and fall followed by five months of unemployment during winter.

“Of course I’m right. You’re an ass kicker, just like your old man. Discussion closed,” he said, stood, retired to the bathroom to shower.

I smiled at her. “I was going to wrestle, anyway.”

“I know, Bubby,” she said with a wink.

2

Jason Daniels, my best friend, was slightly bigger than me. He had sandy blond hair and pale skin and wore glasses so thick that when he took them off, his eyes appeared small and beady, drawing laughs from whoever was around to witness it. At the age of twelve, he knew more about sports than any other person I knew. When we had a question, he almost always fired back with the right answer. We called him, creatively enough, “The Answer” because of it. We had played baseball together for years and, as he was no taller than me, there was little doubt he would wrestle as well, just as his older brother had before him.

They weighed us all in on the first day of practice, writing our names and weights on a chart that hung on the wall beside the scale. They kept track of our weight before and after every practice. The lightest weight class was eighty pounds, which meant I’d be outweighed by six pounds every match I wrestled. Six pounds is nothing to a heavyweight, but it’s a lot to a lightweight.

We were all nervous that first day; few knew what to expect. You could tell the ones who did know because they were already wearing wrestling shoes—usually because they had an older brother, such as Jason, who had wrestled before—while most of us wore tennis shoes. Those completely in the dark wore to practice what they’d worn to school.