Two Good Girls

The getting up was the expensive part. The fall had been one clean motion, a door swinging shut on its own weight, but the getting up was a hundred small motions strung together, each a separate decision, and she took them one at a time in the empty room: roll onto her side, one arm under her, the mat's grit pressing into her palm; a knee, then the other; her head down a moment with her own breath loud in her ears and the collar warm where it had ridden against her windpipe all morning. The light through the high windows had gone white and hard. The building ticked around her — the boiler exhaling somewhere below, the wind working at a pane, a door settling in its frame down the hall — and every small sound arrived enormous in the quiet, as loud as the blood moving in her ears.

She stood, and the mat's pattern was printed across her back and the backs of her thighs, and she walked to the edge where her coat lay and dressed quickly, without looking down: the sweatpants over the Lycra, the coat over the compression bra, her hair still escaping its tie. The collar she had not touched. She stood at the center of the circle with it in her hands, the leather still warm from her skin, the brass ring holding the ghost of her thumb, and the voice at the back of her head — the one that had spent the whole year saying the same soft thing — spoke up clearly: you don't have to set it down. Nobody has to know. It isn't hurting anything. She let the voice say all of it, and then she set the collar in the exact center of the worn red paint where her shoulders had been, and walked out with her throat bare.

Amanda was in the lobby, on the bench by the trophy case, coat still buttoned, hands flat on her knees, staring at the glass and the small gold figures ranked inside it. She had been there long enough that the winter light through the doors had crossed the floor and left her. She looked up when Lisa's footsteps hit the tile, and her eyes went to Lisa's throat, and stayed there.

"You took it off." Her voice was scraped raw, the voice of a girl who had not spoken for an hour and had spent it screaming on the inside. "I did." "Good." The word came out wrong, too hard, like she was trying to make it true by saying it. "Don't put it back on." Lisa said nothing. "Don't tell me it's okay," Amanda said. "Don't tell me you've got this. I watched you. I watched all of it." Her voice broke on all of it and she stopped and pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes, hard, and when she lowered them her face had gone the color of the winter sky. "You knew," she said. "You told me she doesn't know what you know. You walked out there like you'd already won, and she ran Dad's cradle on you. On you. In front of your own class." "I know what she did. I was there." "No," Amanda said, and the word came out of her like something torn loose. "You were under her. There's a difference."

Lisa stood over her sister and let the difference sit. It was true. It had been true all year, and she had spent all year not looking at it straight on, and now it sat between them on the lobby tile, undeniable. "I had to see it," she said. "Everything she's been hiding. All fall I coached her and I never saw the whole of her, and you can't beat what you haven't watched. Now I've watched it. She doesn't have anything left I haven't seen." Amanda shook her head slowly, like a teacher watching a student miss the same problem for the tenth time. "That's not why you did it. You didn't need to see it. You needed to lose." The words landed in the quiet. Lisa opened her mouth and found nothing in it, and the nothing was an answer, and Amanda watched the answer arrive in pieces, each piece worse than the last. "You almost pinned her," Amanda said, and her voice cracked on almost. "I was watching. You had her. You had her and she—" "She bridged," Lisa said. "She's the only human being I've ever met who can bridge off her back like that. I didn't let go. I put everything I owned into that pin and she moved me anyway." "That's worse," Amanda said, and her voice had gone small. "You can't hate yourself for losing that one. You just have to live with her being better, and you knew it, and you went in there anyway." "I went in there because on a mat I know the rules," Lisa said. "Off a mat, she makes them up as she goes. That match was the only ground I could name, and I almost won it. I got closer than anyone has ever gotten." "And you think almost counts for something." "It counts for everything. Because now she knows it too. She told me after — nobody has ever almost had her. She told me I made her use everything she's got. Do you know what that does to a girl like her, hearing that? It makes her afraid. Afraid is the one thing she's never been."

Amanda said it flat and final, the voice she had used since she was twelve to end arguments: "Then we end her. Tonight. We go to the police, both of us, together. She has pictures of me too — I know she does, I was there, I'm in them. We walk in and we hand them everything and we take the hit together. She can't threaten us with what we've already chosen to show." The plan hung in the air, clean and possible and terrible. Lisa looked at her sister — the buttoned coat, the flat hands, the jaw set as it had been set since she was six and demanding to be taught the cradle — and loved her so completely that it hurt to draw a breath, and said: "No." "Why not?" "Because it would work," Lisa said. "And she knows it would work. And if I did it, she'd burn everything on the way down. The program. The season. Every girl on that roster. And I'd be the coach who destroyed her own team because she couldn't—" She stopped. The sentence had been about to end somewhere she could not let it end in front of her sister. Amanda finished it for her, as she had been finishing Lisa's sentences since she was old enough to talk: "Because you couldn't stop wanting it."

The lobby went very quiet. Behind the trophy case a clock ticked, one dry click after another. Lisa stood with her bare throat and her sister's words hanging in the air between them, and she could not deny them, and the not-denying was the loudest thing she had ever not said. Amanda stood. She was shorter than Lisa and had to tilt her head to meet her eyes, and she did it straight on, no angle, as she did everything. "I've been looking for the opening all year," she said. "In her matches. In her drills. In the way she sets her feet before she shoots. I watched her beat you twice and I kept telling myself it was in her somewhere — the one thing she hasn't got — and if I could find it, you'd be free." She picked up her bag from the bench. "You just showed me where it really lives. It's not in her, Lisa. It's in you." She walked to the doors and put her shoulder to the bar, and the cold came in across the tile, and she stopped with her hand on the glass. "I'm going to find that part of you and I'm going to cut it out. Even if you hate me for it." The door swung shut behind her. The cold stayed a moment and then the lobby swallowed it, and the clock ticked on, and Lisa stood alone by the dark glass of the doors, bare-throated, and her sister had just declared war on the only part of her that Jade had never had to take.

She drove home slowly with the window cracked, February coming in across her cheek, finding the strip of throat the collar had covered all morning, and she kept one hand on the wheel and the other in her lap and did not think about the leather lying in the center of the mat, and thought about it anyway, as the tongue finds a missing tooth, over and over, whether you want it to or not. The apartment was dark and smelled of the previous tenant's curry, a smell she had stopped noticing in September and that came back every time she had been away long enough to forget it. She showered as hot as she could stand, and the water found the marks the morning had left — the wide heat across her backside where the counting had run to forty, the deep ache in her hips where the mat had taken her — and she stood under the spray with her forehead against the tile and let the day run off her in stages. She made tea she did not drink and toast she did not eat, and sat at the small table in the dark kitchen with the streetlight laying its square on the linoleum and her phone dark on the counter, and the hour came and went. She was not waiting for anything, which was a lie, and she knew it was a lie, and she stayed at the table anyway.

The knock came a little past ten, three soft strikes, unhurried, the rhythm of someone with all night and nothing in the world that could make them hurry. She had never given Jade her address; it had not mattered. Jade had known it since September, as she had known Lisa's weight and Lisa's tells and Lisa's history long before they ever shared a mat. Lisa opened the door. Jade stood in the cone of the porch light, coat open over a gray hoodie, hands bare and red with cold, and in one of them, held loosely, as if she had forgotten she was carrying it, the collar — black leather coiled in her fist, brass catching the light. "You left this," Jade said. "I know." "In the middle of the room. In the center of the circle. Like you wanted me to find it." Lisa said nothing, because she did not know the answer, and Jade stepped past her into the apartment without being asked, as she had stepped into every room of Lisa's life, and walked to the kitchen table and set the collar down between the cold mug and the streetlight's square, and leaned against the counter with her hands in her pockets and looked at Lisa standing in the doorway of her own kitchen.

"I went back for it," Jade said. "After I left. I sat in my car for an hour and then I went back, and it was still there, in the middle of the mat, and I stood there looking at it and I couldn't work out what you meant by it." "Maybe I didn't mean anything." "You mean everything. You've meant everything since the first time I saw you on a mat." The words sat in the small kitchen. Jade's voice was not the voice she used in front of a room. It was lower, and a crack ran through it that Lisa had never heard before, a hairline fracture under the surface of the sound. "I've never had to keep anything," Jade said. "Everything I've ever had, I took. You can't lose what you take. It doesn't get a vote. It doesn't matter if it wants to go. It's already yours." She looked at the collar on the table. "You're the first thing I've ever had that gets a vote. And tonight you almost left. You got up off that mat and you walked out without it, and I sat in my car and I couldn't breathe."

"You could have sent them," Lisa said. "The videos. You could have burned me to the ground tonight, and I'd have had nothing left to fight with." "I don't want the videos," Jade said. "I've never wanted the videos. The videos are how you take somebody. I've been taking people my whole life, and I'm so tired of it." Her voice broke on tired, actually broke, a crack she could not hide, and she turned her face to the dark window for a moment, and when she looked back the armor was trying to reassemble itself and not quite managing. "Put it on." Not a command. The closest thing to a request Lisa had ever heard come out of her mouth. "No," Lisa said. Jade nodded slowly, as if she had expected exactly that, pushed off the counter, picked the collar up off the table, and walked to the door. Her hand was on the latch. "Then when you want it, you'll come and get it. I won't come back for it again. That's the one thing I've never asked anybody for, and I won't ask twice."

The latch turned. The door opened an inch and the cold came in, and Lisa heard her own voice come out of her, rough and low, before she had decided to say it: "Jade." Jade stopped. The door hung open and the cold poured in around her. She did not turn. Lisa crossed the small kitchen — four steps that took everything she had — and stopped behind her. "Give it to me." Jade turned then, slowly. She looked at Lisa's bare throat, at her face, reading her fully and without hurry, and what she found there moved something behind her own eyes, fear and hunger and something younger than either, something that had never been looked at in the light. She held out the collar. The leather was cold from the walk, cold from the night, and it warmed in Lisa's palm while she stood there holding it, and Jade watched her hands, and Lisa watched her watch. Then Lisa raised it to her own throat, worked the fastening as she had worked it a thousand times in the dark, and closed it. The click was small. In the quiet kitchen it was enormous. The leather settled into the groove the day had worn into her skin, and the weight of it was the weight of the whole year, and it was also — with a clarity that went through her like the draft off the open door — the weight of a choice. The first choice she had ever made about it since the sand.

Jade's hand came up. It was cold from the walk, and it touched the collar where it lay against Lisa's throat — not adjusting it, not checking the fit, just touching it, as you touch something you never expected to be given — and her thumb found the brass ring and rested there. Her eyes were wet. Lisa had watched that face wear more masks than she could count: the hostess, the teacher, the conqueror, the girl who took things because taking was the only way she knew. She had watched it crack, on the jetty in the dark, in the empty wrestling room after the price. This was not a crack. This was the wall coming down in the light. "Nobody has ever given me anything," Jade said, and her voice was wrecked, young, stripped of every mask Lisa had ever watched her wear. "Not once. Not in my whole life." Lisa stood very still with the leather warm at her throat and the most dangerous person she had ever known a breath away, her thumb on the ring, and the shape of the trap came clear at last, all the way down to the bottom of it: the collar had never been the leather. It had never been the beach or the videos or the room full of girls. It was this — being seen. Being the one thing in the world that someone could not take and could not stop needing, as Jade needed her, as no one else in Lisa's whole life ever had. "Say it," Jade said. "Not for them. Not for the room. For me." And Lisa, collared by her own hand in her own kitchen, with her sister's voice still ringing somewhere at the back of her head — I'm going to find that part of you and I'm going to cut it out — said: "I'm yours." The words hung in the dark. Jade's hand tightened on the ring, and her breath went out of her in a rush she could not stop, and she closed her eyes, and when she opened them they were clear, no mask at all, just a girl, eighteen years old, holding the only thing anyone had ever chosen to give her. "Thank you," she said. Not you're mine. Not I own you. Thank you, as you thank a person for taking a weight you have carried alone for years.

Jade's coat came off somewhere in the hour that followed, and the hoodie, and she sat at Lisa's small table in her socks with the collar lying between them like a third cup, and they did not talk about the videos or the room or the match or any of it. They talked about the season, the girls, the conference meet in March; Jade's hands moved when she described a takedown she was working on, and Lisa watched them move and heard her own voice answer, and it was the most ordinary hour of her year, and the most dangerous, because ordinary was the one thing she had never learned to defend. Near midnight Jade stood to go. She did not reach for the collar. She did not touch Lisa. She stopped in the open door with the porch light behind her and looked back, and her face was bare of every mask Lisa had ever learned to watch for, and she said, "Thank you," again, as if the first time had not been enough, and stepped out, and the door clicked shut, and the apartment settled into its small noises, the fridge, the radiator, the wind at the glass. Lisa stood in the middle of her kitchen with the leather warm against her windpipe, listening to the car start and pull away, and the trade she had just made sat in the quiet with her: she had given Jade the one thing that could never be taken. Not deleted, not threatened, not held over her head. Hers to give, and given, and gone — and she was not sure she wanted it back.