The Journey Prize Stories 28 Read Online Free PDF Page B

weightlifting for women.
You just never know when to stop do you, little brother?
She scans the cautionary paragraphs: not enough testosterone to build muscle as quickly as tissue breaks down, the websites inform her. She clicks on a link in a sidebar to an album of female bodybuilders; she scans for the dykes, scrolls through the stomach muscles and linebacker shoulders, sipping her cooled orange pekoe, the tears rivering down her cheeks. Everybody had known. Everybody had seen but her. And this is the part she cannot tell anyone, even Greg—she does not understand why Mallory left, cannot explain it to anybody, how Mallory raged at her that things had been off for a year and she’d had no idea, how could she have known nothing at all. She texts Greg: I feel so old.

    She’s among the last ones there at night. This small group, buff stragglers. A staffer flickers the lights; library manners.
    Laura blasts her body with scalding water in the showers, the steam pressing cloud formations against the walls, her knuckles tense. She checks her shoulders. A faint string of burst blood vessels again. Is this how it starts, she wonders, people who get into pain? Backslide, wander, trip into it.
No, I’m not like that. I’m not one of those people
. When she pulls the towel around her body, her skin is red. The burst blood vessels stand out in dark purple, a kitchen tattoo. She checks her right shoulder and, yes, there’s the string of erupted blood vessels. Tonight, the damage reassures her.
    In the locker room, the last women are half-naked, benches draped with yoga pants and rain jackets. While she dresses, Laura cannot help but inspect the other women’s marks and scars. The tattoos. Laura would never get a tattoo. Too permanent. In undergrad, her roommate got a tattoo after she got a call from home that her childhood dog had been run over by a car. The tattoo was her dog’s licence number, printed across the back of her neck. “You look like you have a bar code,” Laura had told her, surprised when her roommate had burst into tears and rushed from the room, then for the rest of the term communicated with Laura only through Post-It notes. Mallory had leaned forward and whispered with a kind of awe, “Oh my god, I think that’s the most insensitive thing I’ve actually ever heard. You’re
amazing.”
Laura had never been able to tell whether Mallory was making fun of her or praising her.
    Both and more.
    Long-term rented lockers are decorated with family photographs. Mallory would have made Laura rent a locker, stock it with protein bars. Her thoughtfulness could be controlling. “I’m kind of insidious,” she had once told Laura proudly, and Laura had thought,
I want that
.
    â€œHey, Mallory.”
    Laura looks up from unhooking her bra, shocked, to see George, her mild smile, and, startlingly, missing a tooth.
    It’s too late to correct her about the name. And, she realizes, she speaks to so few people these days that not being called by her own name isn’t even really very surprising.
    â€œHello, Georgephine.”
    â€œSmoke?”
    â€œSeriously?”
    â€œYeah. Seriously.”
    Outside the building, they lean against the brick wall. “It’s so
warm,”
she says and George laughs. “You never smoked before?”
    â€œJust not for a long time.”
    â€œAh. I see.”
    â€œI’ve smoked.”
    â€œSure you have.” George smokes evenly, perfectly. “Anyway, look at you, the dedicated gym bunny and I’m ruining your perfect health.” Laura smiles into the darkness. It’s been a long time since anyone has flirted with her.
    â€œGym bunny. Ha.”
    â€œSeems like you’re here even more than I am.”
    â€œIt’s just recent.”
    â€œIs it? Lifting?”
    â€œYeah and even the gym. I’d actually never been in a gym before.”
    â€œReally?” George’s