I’ve just finished checking in Mrs. Patel for her silver sneakers water aerobics class, and happily returned to my sketching, when my best friend, James, comes up behind me. He rests his chin on my shoulder, his mop of blond hair flopping into his icy blue eyes, and leans the bulk of his six-foot-something personal-trainer body onto the old, faded black office chair I’m sitting in. The chair squeaks and groans in protest. I try to elbow him off.
“No, not there.” He snatches the pencil from my hand and hastily erases the words “cardio machines,” moving them over closer to the windows of the giant square I’ve drawn. “Put them over here near the parking lot so they can at least people watch while they destroy their gains.”
Meet James Manderlay, head of personal training at The Fitness Place. Twenty-eight, avidly anti-cardio—as evidenced by the “cardi-no” tank he’s currently sporting—shockingly handsome per half our guests (which is how we refer to the people who slog here in their sweats to work out), and owner of well-defined abs, exactly one dimple, and a bank account full of family money, thanks to his parents and their sketchy business practices.
He’s been my best friend since I moved to this godforsaken town five years ago, nineteen and already desperate for a fresh start. I’d wandered into his parents’ gym looking for a job, and found him on the ground behind the desk. When I asked him if he was okay, he explained he had just been dumped and was waiting for the universe to swallow him up. I nudged his leg and asked him for an application. (I don’t have time for sentimentality. Not when a paycheck is on the line.) James had laughed and dragged himself up long enough to scrounge one up.
He said he appreciated my tough love.
I didn’t bother asking what other kinds there were.
The Fitness Place didn’t really need another employee, but James convinced his parents to bring me on and I worked hard to make sure they never regretted it. It took about a year for them to upgrade me from floater—which meant I did everything from stock towels in the locker room to reposition floor heaters on wet or snowy days to cut locks off jammed lockers—to gym attendant, which largely consisted of sitting in the workout areas and assisting people who don’t know how to use the machines (awkward, because the number of people who think they are using a machine correctly when they are not even in the REALM of correctly is staggeringly high).
I’d rather pick gum from the gym locks, thank you very much.
Still, it was my job to make sure that nobody went viral for trying to use leg machines to work out their necks or for getting thrown off a treadmill because they mistook the speed for the incline setting and hit it up to warp.
By then the gym chain had really taken off—five locations and counting—and when the front desk manager left a couple years ago to run one of the new buildings, I got their job. The pay’s decent—maybe most people wouldn’t say so, but it’s the most I’ve ever made—and bonus, it comes with a free gym membership instead of the lousy 15 percent discount they give to other employees.
The “manager” title is more for bragging rights than any sort of actual authority though. My duties include sitting behind the desk, sca
nning people’s tiny key cards with my giant green scanner, and answering the phone fifty times a day for people asking to sign up for various personal training lessons with “dreamy James,” as most of our senior population call him.
It might not be that glamorous, but I love it. The smell of the mats, the sound of weights clinking, the feeling of crushing your reps or knowing you’re helping someone else crush theirs? There’s nothing better. Nothing. It’s the one place on earth I can actually make a difference, for myself and others. Right now, I have to do that within the existing framework of The Fitness Place. But someday, if everything goes right, I’ll have my own gym and develop my own programming. Imagine how awesome you could make a place if you designed it specifically to be welcoming and accessible to all from the ground up.
In fact, I spend almost every spare moment I have sketching out my hypothetical future gym, which is what I was doing before James came up and forced his opinions about cardio on me. I know the odds of someone like me actually being able to own a gym fall somewhere on the scale between “never going to happen” and “uncontrollably laughing in my face,” but still. It’s all I’ve wanted to do since I was old enough to know what a gym was.
“Hey, I gotta ask you something.” James flicks my wrist and then pulls the paper to the side. He scribbles “Lizzie’s Killer Gym” on the top, and then draws a stick figure in the center, careful to add large biceps to it after he’s done. A little arrow points to it, labeled “James.”
“Wait, why are you in the center of my gym?” I snort and pull the pencil from his hand.
“You wound me,” he says. He falls backward to the ground and mimes being stabbed. “I got you a job and you won’t return the favor? I guess I’ll just lay here and DIE THEN.”
I see we’ve come full circle.
He’s still sprawled out behind me—refusing to tell me what he really wants unless I promise him a senior role at my imaginary gym—when Henry Meyers comes up, his beard trimmed and waxed within an inch of its life. He fixes me with a strained yet polite smile, one that says anyone without a mid-six-figure income is beneath him. He drops his keys on the desk, even though I’m already holding the scanner, and waits. Okay, then. I rummage through them to his gym card and lift it to the scanner, his BMW key tag nearly blinding me u
nder the bright gym lights.
“Oh, Jamie!” he says, his smile going wide and genuine at the sight of my dumbass best friend still playing dead behind me. “I didn’t see you there.”
“Henry,” James says, hopping up in one lithe motion. He flashes Henry his best chemically whitened smile and is it just me or is he flexing? I fight the urge to roll my eyes as I slide the keys back to the man in front of me.
“All set!” I say cheerfully, but they both ignore me.
Henry leans forward on the counter, positioning his arms to maximize his muscles under his too tight Nike Pro shirt. I glance between them, suddenly feeling like I’m stuck in an episode of National Geographic: The Mating Rituals of the Hot and Wealthy.
I snicker when James shows off his plumage, which in this case means stretching just enough that his “cardi-no” shirt rides up, exposing the very bottom of his six-pack, or eight-pack, or shit, I don’t know, it could be a twelve-pack by now. I stopped keeping track of his gains somewhere around year three of our friendship, when his mom made him get formally certified instead of just hanging out here all the time and he started teaching bored stay-at-home spouses all day. This was more of a last-ditch effort by his parents to make him seem respectable than any real support of his interests—and even though he did exactly what she asked, she still seems disappointed.
His parents, especially his mom, Stella, intimidate me even on their best days. And I am usually not a part of their best days. Best days don’t usually require the owners to be on the premises of their lowest volume gym, after all. When we cross paths it’s usually because something major is wrong—like the time the sewers backed up into our locker rooms or the time an entire busload of seniors coming in from the retirement home got rashes from over-chlorinated pool water.
I somehow managed to get blamed for both. Who knew front desk managers were in charge of human waste engineering and properly administering pool chemicals?
No matter how much I tell James his mother hates me, he still insists I’m “reading too much into things.”
I’m not. I know I’m not.
Just like I’m not reading too much into the way Stella puts “just a” in front of “personal trainer” whenever she’s introducing James to her “classy” friends.
But even so, James gets enough attention and swoons from his clients. He doesn’t need me taking attendance every time a new muscle or vein appears on his body. Let the clients fawn; I’m just here for the late-night pizza-and-beer binges when one of them inevitably breaks James’s heart by being like, ya know, married.
“I love your ring, Henry, is that new?” I ask, fake gushing over the platinum and gold band around his finger. It’s not and I know it, and it earns me a kick to my chair from James, who is decidedly not preening anymore.
“Same old, same old,” Henry says, jerking his hand back.
Goodbye, pec cleavage, hello, reminder of holy matrimony.
“And how is the senator these days?”
Henry Meyers is married to Juliana Christiansen, a state senator at least twenty years his senior. I know this because she’s friends with James’s mom, Stella. And Stella loves to bring up that friendship in nearly every conversation—“The senator told me at brunch the other day . . .” and the like. Henry and the (state) senator have complimentary memberships to our club. James’s mom thinks it’s some sort of prestige to have her here sweating all over the equipment—which, by the way, she never wipes down after she’s done.
“Oh, she’s fine. You know, busy,” he says, clearing his throat and shoving his keys into his gym bag. “Well, I have to go get ready for HIIT but it was great to see you, James.”
“Always a pleasure,” I say, even though he didn’t mention it being great to see me. A scowl flashes over Henry’s face so quick I almost think I’ve imagined it before he rushes off to the locker room.
“What was that?” James frowns at me when he’s gone.
“What was what?” I ask, blinking my eyes quickly to express peak innocence.
“You cockblocked me!”
“I think technically his wife, the senator, did that long before I could.” I snort.
“Hey, if I don’t crush your nonsense dreams,” James says, gesturing toward my gym sketch, “you don’t crush mine.”
“Okay, right, except mine is not a nonsense dream.”
James leans down close to my ear and whispers, “It is if you don’t get off your ass, McCarthy.”
And okay, I get his point, sometimes you gotta shoot your shot, I guess. Whether that means flirting with the senator’s very hot husband or, like, actually doing something to achieve your dream job. Maybe he’s kind of right; on some level, it is a nonsense dream. But I want it so bad I can taste it.
“I am off my ass,” I say, and he raises an eyebrow at my very large, cushioned office chair. “Well, okay, maybe not right now I’m not, but in general. I’m thinking about putting in for that gym manager job at the new club.”
James seems to consider this for a second. “You are the only worker who actually wants to be here,” he says. Wow. His confidence in me is truly astounding.
The new gym is about forty-five minutes away—a bit of a commute, yes, but not bad, and with the raise that comes with it, I could afford a more reliable car. James’s parents have been building it for the last six months or so and are finally talking staffing.
Sure, it’s not quite owning my own gym, but it’s close. If I got brought on as t
he general manager, I’d be the big boss. Everything would be up to me. Well, everything that isn’t dictated by Stella and George, the actual owners, but still. They can’t keep me here scanning key cards forever. At least, I hope not.
“You applying today?” he asks.
“No, but soon . . . ish.”
“Uh-huh.”
I fling a pencil at him and spin back around to check in the next client. “What did you want anyway?” I ask him. “You said you had to ask me something when you came over, ya know, before the temper tantrum, and the flirting with married men, and—”
“Right,” he says, cutting me off. “I need a favor. A big one. I . . .”
I turn back to face him, confused why he trailed off, and am met with his infamous narrow-eyed smirk.
“Immediately no,” I say.
“You don’t even know what I’m about to ask!”
“I know nothing good ever comes out of your face doing that whole . . . thing.” I wave my hand.
“Not true.” James leans forward, his lips widening into a full-on grin. “In fact, I just realized that the favor I need from you would also be a favor for you.”
I scrunch up my face. “You’re making no sense right now. You know that, right?”
He holds up a finger. “What if I told you that I have an opportunity for us to spend time with my parents and turn you into a front-runner for that gym manager job in a way that a shitty résumé never would.”
“I would be extremely suspicious. Your parents barely tolerate you, let alone me. Put us together and we’re the Voltron of their disappointment and regrets.”
“O ye of little faith,” he huffs and pretends to walk away. “Fine, if you don’t want to know . . .”
“Just tell me.” I sigh. Even when I try to avoid his scheming, I usually get roped in anyway. If I ask now, at least I’ll know what I’m up against.
James spins my chair around so fast it makes me dizzy. “You know how my sister’s getting married next weekend?”
“How could I forget? Stella’s had me wrapping wedding favors for weeks since I’m ‘on the clock anyway.’” I roll my eyes.
“Okay, well, two birds one stone, then,” James says.
“What?”
“Come to Cara’s wedding with me; that’s what I was coming to ask you anyway. Except now you wouldn’t just be helping me. You can also use that time to dazzle my parents so they move your application to the top of the pile and, bonus, you ge
t to enjoy the fruits of your labor.” He leans in conspiratorially. “Those Jordan almonds aren’t gonna eat themselves, you know.”
“Nope, no way.” If there is anything I want to do less than spend a weekend watching James’s golden-child sister prance around at her Barbie dream wedding, I certainly can’t think of it. It’s bad enough my fingers are rubbed raw from all that tulle; she does not get my one weekend off this month too.
“Come on, please, please, please.” James falls to his knees begging, as the next client reaches my desk. “This could be so good for both of us!”
“Will you get up?” I grit through my teeth.
“Lizzie, please! I—”
“Don’t you have a class to teach, James?” Roger asks as he walks up, swinging his keys on a lanyard. He’s the general manager of this gym, number 105 (because Stella insisted on calling the first gym 101, like she’d opened a hundred before it). While I’m used to people yelling at me, Roger is quite possibly the only person here—besides me, of course—brave enough to take that tone with James.
“Not for ten minutes, boss,” James says, with a mock salute. Roger frowns.
“I don’t like you hanging around the desk distracting Lizzie. What if someone complains?”
To his mother? I fight the urge to say. Fat chance.
“Wouldn’t dream of causing any problems, Roger,” James says, standing up. “And Lizzie, think about it, okay?” He starts to leave and then turns back to press his hands together and mouth the word “please” to me.
Shit, he is not going to let this one go.
It’s my day off.
I should be spending it working on my résumé, but instead I woke up to three texts from James begging me to go to the wedding with him and, even worse, a dozen texts from my mom. She’s complaining that her cable was turned off and her electric is overdue, which means it is now My Problem to Solve for HerTM. Mom’s problems have a habit of becoming mine, and I learned long ago it’s easier to cut them off at the pass then hope they’ll go away or, god forbid, assume she’ll fix them herself.
She will not. It’s never been her style.
Mom and I were broke, like broke-broke, when I was growing up. We lived in a half-abandoned town that didn’t have much to show for it except for an empty Kmart, a Burger King, and a crumbling gym that boasted a $9.99 a month membership fee. Mom made friends with the woman who managed it, who was all too happy to look the other way when mom left me at the gym day care all day instead of just the one-hour limit.
While other kids were learning the alphabet, I was learning how to disinfect gym mats. We are not the same.
And it wasn’t any better at home either. Mom’s life has just been one long string of addictions, evictions, and choices that couldn’t have been worse if she tried. And I’ve always been the one who has to pick up the pieces—whether that means sending half my paycheck for her bills or spending my only childhood scraping her off bar floors.
When you have a mother like Pattie, you figure out real quick that the only one you can depend on is yourself—and unfortunately, the only one she can depend on is you.
That kind of responsibility grinds itself into your DNA and becomes a part of you even if you don’t want it to. Even my “fresh start” at nineteen only brought me twenty minutes down the highway. I couldn’t really leave my mom—even though everything in me was telling me that I should—but I could get myself a little breathing room, at least.
Which is why I linger at my apartment for a while, instead of rushing right over. I even stop at the gym to get in a quick workout to steel my spine, like every weight I lift will make me stronger inside and out. No day can truly be shitty if you’re crushing your PR or at least trying to, right?
I get cut off twice trying to parallel park near my mom’s building, but I can’t tell if I even really mind. I just circle the block aimlessly, waiting for someone to leave. It’s totally fine.
But then my phone buzzes as I finally pull into a spot.
Shit. All caps. She’s pissed. She must have been tracking me on Find My Friends.
When I bought her new phone—on my plan, no less—the man at the store “helpfully” set it up for us. I think he thought he was doing me a favor: now I could easily keep track of my mom or whatever. I didn’t have the heart to tell him she’s way younger than she looks—a life of booze and god knows what else will do that to you—or that the only one liable to get tracked now was me.
LIZZIE
Thanks so much, Apple Store dude!
“Hey, Ma!” I say cheerfully as I walk in her door. “Smells good in here.”
It doesn’t. It smells like stale cigarette smoke and burned food, but she lit the sugar cookie candle I gave her for Christmas last year, so I decide to play along.
“Such a charmer,” she grunts out around the cigarette dangling from her lip. “Took you long enough.”
“I couldn’t find a spot.”
“Oh, ’s that why you went to the gym?” she slurs.
Awesome! She’s drunk before noon. Love this for me. I wonder if it would be weird if I just grabbed her bills and ran, like some kind of reverse home invasion—we don’t steal things, we hook you up with 257 cable channels and counting!—but decide that it probably would be.
“I had to pick up my paycheck,” I lie, because there’s no sense arguing with her when she’s like this.
My excuse seems to settle her, and she falls back against her oversize chair. “I’m missing my stories,” she says and gestures to the black screen of the TV. “HDMI2” blinks lazily in the corner, waiting for input that will never come.
Well, until I pay the bill.
“What happened, Mom? I just gave you money a couple weeks ago.”
She leans forward. “I don’t go asking you how you spend your money. Now, take your coat off, stay awhile.”
I do as I’m told, not bothering to point out that if I’m the one supplying the money then maybe, just maybe, I do have the right to ask.
Definitely not worth the argument though.
Things with me and my mom are . . . complicated. When things are good, she’s actually kinda fun to be around. I can at least see where I get my sarcasm from, our visits turning into mini improv sets slash bitch sessions. But when they’re not good—and things haven’t been good for years now—she can strip you down to the bone with one withering look. You never know what version you’re going to get until it’s too late.
It’s why I left in the first place, even if I didn’t make it that far.
“How’s work?” she asks, and a part of me knows she’s just asking to make sure my hours are steady so that I can keep passing part of my check on to her. But I let myself imagine, just a little, that she’s asking because she cares.
I’m halfway through telling her about this new training program I’m working on with James that I’m wildly excited about when she gets up and starts rustling through the papers on her kitchen table. She selects a couple and drops them into my lap.
Right. The bills.
“I called and if you pay before five, they’ll turn my TV back on tonight,” Mom says, with a look that makes me wonder if she thinks she’s the one doing me a favor. “You can pay right at the grocery store. I asked.”
I’m sure she did.
I sigh and pull open the first bill. It’s her cable company and it’s three months behind. Next comes electric. That number hurts to look at. I can cover it, but it’s gonna just about wipe me out.
“Mom,” I say, but she waves me off. She heads back into the kitchen and pulls a sandwich out of the fridge. Peanut butter and fluff, cut in triangles with the crusts cut off. My favorite from as far back as I can remember.
“I made you this, baby girl,” she says, setting the plate on her coffee table in front of me. “Thought you might be hungry.”
Is it manipulative? Yes.
Do I love that she made it for me anyway? Also yes.
I shove the bills into my bag and the sandwich into my face. It feels like old times, like good times if you squint.
Until she breaks this happy silence with an offer to text me the address of the closest grocery store. She pinned it on Apple Maps apparently, right after getting off the phone with the cable company.
“Just trying to be helpful and all,” she says.
Right. Yeah.
At least this gives me an exit.
“I better head out, then,” I say, giving her a quick kiss on the cheek before carrying my dish over to the sink. “The sooner I get there, the sooner you’re turned back on.”
She beams, and I know I said just the right thing. I hurry to pull on my coat and get out the door before she changes her mind.
Short and sweet.
Well, short and sweet and expensive, but still. I’ve made it out relatively unscathed, I realize, and relief floods me as I dart down the stairs in front of her building and onto the sidewalk. But just as quickly as the relief comes, it goes, leaving behind an aching loneliness that only seems to hit in situations like this.
When I was younger, I used to let myself wallow in it, just drown right in all the what-ifs. What if Mom took care of me? What if Mom decided to get sober? What if Mom wasn’t such a goddamned narcissist?
It’s pointless, though. I’ve learned the answers to those questions inside and out. She doesn’t, she won’t, and she always will be.
James texts me again as I’m getting into my car—a quick reminder that it’s Bachelor night, and he’ll be over to watch as soon as he finishes up with his last client later this evening . ...
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