Page 30 of Takedown

"You're smiling," Danny muttered, mid-tie-up, barely moving his mouth. "Stop smiling. You never smile at practice. It's like watching a bank smile."

"I'm bearing down intensely."

"You look like you inherited something."

"I'm focused—"

"Kovac! Whitfield!" Halloran, from the wall, without opening his eyes, because the man does not need eyes. "It's a wrestling practice, not a garden party. If you got breath to chat, you got breath for sprints. Everybody — feet!"

Forty guys groaned onto the line. As we set, Miles drifted past me, straightened his headgear, and murmured, in the voice of a man commenting on weather:

"Inside out again, Whit?"

I looked down at my shirt. My shirt was fine. My shirt was completely fine.

Miles winked and took off down the mat, laughing at his own joke for six lengths, the absolute menace, and I ran sprints with my heart going harder than the running called for, doing the math on exactly how much Miles Bellamy knew, and arriving at the answer I'd keep arriving at for weeks: everything, and he's decided to be funny about it, which — I understood even then, at some level below language — was Miles's own code for something. Nobody gets that fluent in cover unless they've had a use for it.

Another file for another drawer. The building was filling up with them.

* * *

After sprints, Halloran killed the music and posted two sheets on the board by the Ledger, and the room crowded in, dripping.

Sheet one: GARDEN STATE INVITATIONAL. Two days, sixteen teams, the first real test of the winter — ranked guys at every weight, the tournament where the season stops being theoretical. Friday bus, Sunday finals. The room made its noise: half growl, half Christmas.

Sheet two: ROOMING ASSIGNMENTS.

I have faced ranked opponents. I have faced my grandmother across a crossword she suspected me of helping with. I have never scanned any document in my life with the specific cardiac violence with which I scanned that rooming list, top to bottom, while pretending to read it casually, while Danny Kovac pretended to read it casually eight inches to my left, both of us radiating casualness at levels detectable from weather satellites—

BELLAMY / OKAFOR. PETROV / REYES. PEMBERTON — wait, wrong sport, wrong list — KOVAC / WHITFIELD.

Drilling partners room together. It's the convention. Same weight, same schedule, same weigh-in clock — it's logistics, it's on forty rooming lists in forty programs every weekend of the season, it means nothing, it is the single most ordinary line item in collegiate athletics.

"Huh," said Danny, at the list, in the town's word, in a voice of total unbotheredness that wouldn't have fooled a parking meter.

"Mm," I agreed, reading sheet one again with enormous interest, retaining nothing, my entire bloodstream doing the thing champagne does.

Behind us, Halloran's office door was open. Halloran was at his desk, not looking at the board, not looking at us, filling out paperwork with the placid focus of a man who had personally drawn up that rooming list, as he drew up every rooming list, alone, the night before.

I've never asked him. I'm never going to. There are questions you don't ask an oracle, and did you know is the first one — because the answer is yes, the answer was always yes, the answer is that man knew before we did and moved us around his board like weather he'd decided the season needed.

"Bus leaves Friday, two o'clock," Halloran called out, to the room, to his paperwork. "Bring your books, bring your headgear. Kovac — grapefruit's are on the meal plan, tell Whitfield to expense his bit."

The room laughed without knowing why it was funny. Danny made a sound like a man swallowing a whistle.

I stood in front of the rooming list of a Division I wrestling program, twenty years old, ears burning, expense his bit ringing off the concrete, and revised — again, they never stopped, that whole fall was one long revision — my estimate of exactly how much that old man saw from his folding chair against the wall.

All of it. He saw all of it. He'd seen it before we had.

And he'd put us in a room together anyway.

* * *

Night session. Tuesday. The Pit, half-lit, just us — officially setups, increasingly a word that meant everything except setups, though we did in fact still drill, because rule one was real and the wrestle-off was real and neither of us was romantic about that. We drilled hard for forty minutes. Then we didn't.

After, we lay on our backs on the mat, shoulder to shoulder, watching the pipes sweat, in the state the Pit specializes in: emptied out, honest, no color in the room and none needed.

"When," Danny said, to the ceiling.