The greenish meter-long double-barrel fluorescent lights hummed a frozen, nearly naked shine upon the gymnasium of this semester’s inter-school table tennis state competition. Everyone felt a little unwelcomed.
Ten full teams composed this semester’s tournament. The eleventh, Cladwell College of the Arts University, was suspended for two semesters when its players showed up to a prior competition looking less like college students and more like mini-Schwarzeneggers, firing some downright nasty top spin smashes that could not have been natural, according to Albert Trotsky (whom everyone called Trotsky, sometimes Marx, and when he played a total shut-out style skunk, Stalin, which pissed Albert—Trotsky—off and made him go absolutely vicious with top spin serves, much to the delight of the audience). But Candice said natural is overrated and they should just make the whole competition thing more about the sheer limits of human biochemical synthesis and less about playing a fair sport. If everyone doped up as much as possible, the game would become this beautiful thing of technique and body position and focus. Otherwise, as it was right now, it’s a bunch of kids who sort of work out and sort of practice and sort of play pretty damned well, but whoever sort of practices and sort of works out and sort of plays well the most wins by default. At least according to Candice.
Anyway, this semester’s tournament was, as always, a kind of bracket of both individual and team skill—the more you won, the more you and your team played. So kids with other commitments, like tests (e.g., this freshman, Tim), tended to do poorly to get out of the tournament early. But Penny had threatened Tim with a topspin overhand straight into his wiener if he so much as lost a point. She was taller than him too, so the threat might have worked. Naturally, they—Penny and co. (technically Candice and co. since Candice was seeded first and Penny third but closing in real fast on Trotsky, who was lately more on the receiving end of a Stalin than the giving end)—were set to first play their rivals, University of Talent. Coach listed the other teams, but they didn’t matter. If you stood around long enough, Coach would tell you where to go and whom to play, and it wasn’t like they researched other teams before the competition. Except, of course, U. Talent.
U. Talent was the primary evil in collegiate table tennis. Located about twenty minutes downtown from Penny’s school, it had enough funding to repeatedly beat, and I mean destroy, Penny et al., and make a real mockery out of it too. But two semesters ago Penny’s side won an upset victory, which left U. Talent feeling pretty fucking miserable—according to the freshman, Tim, who wasn’t even there at the time but liked to pretend he was—and vowing to never let that happen again. Naturally, U. Talent put a lot more money into their table tennis program, offered scholarship deals to Wendy McNair and Bret Kagin (facing Candice and Trotsky, respectively), and brought in a new coach from Germany, which was, according to Coach, the western mecca of table tennis. China was the real mecca, but nobody understood Chinese coaches except maybe Clarice Gamete, a royal bitch if anyone deserved to be called that—and Penny’s nemesis. The two girls began at the same time and ranked up and down to such a coincidental effect that Penny was pretty damned sure Clarice was copying her so they would be forced to play each other for all eternity. They were evenly matched, too, which made it kind of a gamble who came out alive, figuratively and increasingly literally. Candice once said during a practice session that Clarice was sort of Penny’s long lost twin, which earned her a smash straight in the kisser. So and anyway, U. Talent hired this German, Dietrich Tisch, who was the all-around European ex-pro master whatever you wanted to call it of table tennis, and he spent his time shouting at his own players in German, mostly komm schon when they were winning and Scheiß when they were losing and gut gemacht when they won. Coach, for this semester’s competition, learned a few German phrases to maybe piss Dietrich and U. Talent off enough to make them lose their edge. That was Penny and co.’s best bet at beating U. Talent—that, and if Trotsky went back to his Stalin, but he was still looking fairly white before the competition. And if they beat U. Talent, they would play . . . Penny forgot the names of the other schools. Only the colors mattered anyway, theirs being this dull blue-and-gray that riled nobody up for a good fight.
While the other teams were setting up in the gym, Penny and co. were downstairs in the 1960s-style unisex changing room beside the fencing storage closet—they had to share the gym and locker room with the fencing team Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. The girls had changed into the blue-and-gray short shorts and team shirt ahead of time, but the boys always changed here, underground, in the dank, goosebump air. Pipes creaked above. The whole ceiling shifted whenever someone on the gym floor jumped or stomped, which right now was all the time with people setting up tables and spectator seats and the other teams warming up with jumping jacks in bright white sneakers and thick tall socks, the current fad of a more popular racket sport nobody on this team dared speak of.
“Hurry up and put your shorts on,” Penny said to Tim.
“When you two stop looking.”
“We have to see if you’re well-endowed,” from Candice.
“Why?”
“Because well-endowed men are shit at table tennis.”
“Really?”
“Ask Grossman,” Candice said.
Grossman shrugged and thanked her before Tim could ask if that was remotely true. Grossman wasn’t the kind of guy to disrobe in public, even a public of only men, and last anyone knew, Candice was into shorter, muscular guys with military or ex-con crew cuts.
Grossman ruffled his own shoulder-length hair he somehow kept in better, smoother condition than any of the girls’ hairs. He never tied it up either, and watching him play, according to both Penny and Candice and, hell, probably any girl, was like watching one of those shampoo and conditioner commercials except live and lasting five to ten minutes.
“All right, all right,” Tim now. “I’m dressed.”
“You’re not tucked in,” Penny said.
“Didn’t mommy teach you to tuck in?” from Candice.
“You two aren’t tucked in.”
“We’re not freshmen.”
Trotsky came out of the bathroom just as the ceiling shook a good quarter inch. “He plays better untucked,” he said, headband centered on his forehead like a certain idol he won’t admit; anyone in this sport knew that that little hair did not generate enough sweat in the four to eight minutes of Trotsky’s games to warrant a headband, but Trotsky was seeded second, and seeds one through sometimes three could do whatever they wanted within the limits of wearing their school’s blue-and-gray and the common court rules of collegiate table tennis. Trotsky took out his rackets from an oversized former track-and-field bag and looked them over. “Which one should I play?”
“You’re going to win,” from Candice, who today was driving the competitive energy, psyching even Penny for her game against Clarice, whose name at that moment she wished she could rhyme with something nasty. Dehumanizing your opponents, according to an unofficial pep talk given by a Trotsky in better spirits, was like probably the best way to deal with losing to them. “So either pip-out or inverted. You’re going to smash the ball or put so much spin on it Bret’ll be dizzy.”
“Blegh,” Trotsky. “I’m feeling a defensive game.”
“Your defensive game sucks.” She wasn’t wrong. Candice could beat Trotsky’s defensive game like a good ten out of ten, not even being polite, but against his attacking game of pure brute strength she’d be on the losing end near four to six at best. The Trotsky in good spirits went for an intense attacking style with corner shots and hard spins, but when he was in this shitty un-Soviet mood, Trotsky tried to match Penny’s defensive style, which who was he kidding he couldn’t do. Heck, defensive Trotsky against defensive Penny would still be a disaster for Trotsky, and everyone knew it. “So here,” Candice took his defensive paddle and tossed it to Penny. “She’ll hold onto that, and you crush U. Talent or I’ll crush your spirit and balls with it.” He grumbled and sat on the bench beside Tim adjusting his white socks so they’d be of equal height. None of them could allow any fodder for those U. Talent assholes to mock, except maybe Grossman, who wasn’t affected by that sort of insult—Penny guessed that he knew all the girls were watching his lustrous hair, on which, for the record, he claimed he used nothing more than shampoo about once per two or three days, averaging closer to three because outside of table tennis he didn’t exercise much and even in table tennis his style didn’t exactly count as exercise in the classical sense.
The five of them waited for the scraping and gulping ceiling to settle, tables set up and judges paid off or at least paid. Trotsky tossed his racket and caught it, on repeat, switching hands. Said it was for hand-eye coordination and reflexes, which Tim took to heart and also did but nobody else took seriously. Grossman didn’t like sitting and walked in circles around the small locker room. Candice was undoubtedly giving herself a pep talk of the like of like, you can do it; Wendy’s a stupid name; you got skill and spin and instinct. And Penny was trying to figure out how many games she should win after Clarice to still get out early.
“Okay,” Candice said.
“Okay,” Tim said, catching his racket one last time. Trotsky kept tossing his not seeming to care.
“. . .” from Penny.
“So we’re going?” Grossman said.
“I just said okay,” Candice said.
“But in like an authoritative okay we’re ready sort of okay.”
“No, it was just like an okay okay. Like I was okay.”
“Yeah, but we’re about to have to go up to the other teams and Dietrich Tisch, so that was far more of an okay we’re ready okay.”
“Listen, Grossman, it was a fucking okay okay, okay?”
“Okay,” he said. “Just saying.”
“Okay.”
“. . .” from Penny.
“. . .” from Trotsky still tossing his racket, pulling off a double rotation, full seven twenty, each throw.
“So we’re going?” Penny said.
“I’m ready when you are.”
“I’m third up, so I’ve been ready.”
“Then let’s go.”
“Okay.”
They stood. Well, all except Trotsky. It wasn’t until they were crowded at the door of the little locker room probably forgotten by the school when they noticed Trotsky hadn’t yet stood. He was still tossing his paddle up and catching it and tossing it up again.
“Hey, Trotsky,” Penny now. “You coming?”
“I don’t know,” after tossing the racket a couple more times. “I really don’t know.”
“Well,” from Candice, “I do, and you’re fucking coming.”
“Please, the language.”
She walked over to him, watched him toss the racket and catch it a couple more times, then smacked the thing out of the air, mid rotation. Sent it clattering across the room toward Grossman’s feet. “I said you’re coming, so let’s go before I beat your ass up there, kapeesh?”
He sighed.
She grabbed his ear and pulled.
“Ow, ow. Okay, I’m coming.”
“What was that?” she said.
“I’m coming. Jeez,” and stood straight, rubbing his ear. “I’ll be fine when the heat’s on.”
She made the I’m watching you gesture and said let’s go, and they followed her single file through the downstairs hallway that allowed only single file unless you wanted to walk sideways, chest to chest, which they certainly didn’t, and to the upstairs gym that looked a lot different than the cold, empty basketball court it normally was during weekday practice. The audience was also considerably larger than for the usual club tournament. Penny wondered how people knew about these sorts of things, since nobody ever went to anyone else’s sporting competitions. Maybe a handful of their football matches on the north side of campus where you could walk into a game fourth quarter without a ticket and sit with a couple bags of groceries in the cold fall air and watch a few attempted passes and maybe, at least, a field goal. Only reason any student showed up to a weeknight table tennis competition was for some demented prof’s bonus credit or a crush on short shorts, the latter being more likely.
“Shit,” Tim said. “She’s here.”
“Ooh,” from Candice who wasn’t caught up on the whole Tim story, him being a freshman and all. “Someone looking at you?”
“Yeah, her.”
“Who?”
“Some girl’s been making eyes at Tim lately,” Penny said. “And he’s not into her.”
“Not at all.”
“Where’s she?”
“You can’t look now.”
“That one?” pointing with her racket. “You’ll have all the luck tonight.”
They took their seats on the home team bench, pulled to the far side of the spectators and most other teams, collected in colorful splotches of messy huddles along the long wall. A few were warming up on the tables—third-rate foldable things this school could afford (the school could afford more, but this was all they could afford). Tim avoided eye contact with the audience and Candice checked out the men she usually checked out.
Trotsky stood. “I gotta piss,” and jogged across the hall to the basement probably to find that soft defensive racket and lose on purpose.
“What’s his deal?” from Candice.
Penny shrugged. “Ennui?”
Coach came over and asked where Trotsky was (met with the usual shrugs), looked around, didn’t see Trotsky, and gave them the briefing they were to forget as soon as possible: Grossman was up first against a newbie fifth-rank guy named Stiffen—like Stephen? from Candice; no, like Stiffen—and after that the order went as normal. Grossman stood, wiped his brow with a towel for unknown reasons, and walked as casually as one could to his match table, refereed by an elderly guy wearing a creased suit. Grossman shook hands with the kid named Stiffen, and they stood opposite each other waiting for the tournament director—an official-looking fellow with too much pomp to be in charge of a collegiate table tennis competition—to announce the formal start of the tournament. Candice and Penny and Trotsky—Trots still gone?—and not Trotsky but Tim, whom they didn’t admit they forgot about for a second, shifted in their seats to look for a more exciting match. Then Coach ran over and said that they changed things up this year. “It goes in alternating order: seed five then one then four then two then you, Penny, you’re last.”
“What?” from Candice.
“I didn’t make the rules,” he said. He was a super senior who stuck around to coach and finish off a degree in nobody knew what. “I’m just telling you guys what’s going on. So, Candice, get ready.”
“That’s stupid,” Candice said. “I’m not ready.”
Coach shrugged and backed off quick to the coach’s corner to mingle with the significantly older men. Coach never hung around with the rest of the team unless he had to. Candice was pissed, and Penny was ready to switch sides with Tim just in case when the tournament director announced the start of this semester’s inter-school table tennis state competition, thanks to the hosts with a nod to the blue-and-grays and to all who could attend. He stepped down from the library step stool Coach had them nab using an oversized backpack and plastic smiles for the library’s security guard, and the games began.
Grossman went into his usual style. Now, Grossman’s style was one strictly of patience, mental fortitude, and attrition. He wasn’t good, no, and he wasn’t exciting by like even watching men fish standards, which was pretty fucking low on Penny’s list of things she found exciting. But he was patient, and that, at his level, proved more often than not victorious. His whole mind game began the moment he stepped to the table with this attitude of the purest extract of aloofness, his back straight, his legs straight, his knees locked, and his left hand quietly searching for his short shorts pocket that didn’t exist. Sometimes Grossman stepped into a rank four match and held well, but his lobs were merely adequate and his straight shots straight, though he had these spectacular curves that, now and then, hung in the air, uninterested in gravity, before plummeting a fast forward into the opponent’s field. His stature was an average almost six feet, but when everyone else was hunched down near net-level, he looked immense and spectacular. Like why was this guy standing there as if he would leave at any minute to wander the campus in thought? So this poor guy Stiffen made the first serve, a regular rank five straight serve, and Grossman stood oddly off to the left of the table, swung his arm a conservative but coordinated swing, reciprocated, and landed the ball without unnatural spin back on Stiffen’s side. This proceeded, a back and forth pick pock pick pock until Stiffen scored a clean shot to Grossman’s mid-center. That was a good place to aim against Grossman.
The game continued. Penny, who admired Grossman’s mental stance, watched Stiffen score and score and score, not with ease but steadily, as in to his teammates from U. Talent steadily, but to Penny, the only one on their bench paying attention to the Stiffen vs. Grossman match, steadily only in the sense that Stiffen kept scoring and Grossman kept not scoring. But each successive point took Stiffen on average twice as long as the previous point, Stiffen bouncing back on his faux-athletic sneakers, white socks pulled a perfect halfway up his calves, and Grossman doing his thing, standing on his—holy shit, he’s standing on his heels! Penny tapped Tim’s shoulder with her racket and pointed, whispered look at that, his knees, and Tim whispered back wow, though she didn’t tell him if this was good or if it was, like, don’t ever do this because you’re not Grossman. He’d figure it out.
At around seven–nil, Stiffen’s favor, Grossman pulled the curve, a perfectly-orchestrated sidespin off the right of the table with just enough topspin to plummet when the thing stopped stalling in the air. Stiffen, confusion clear in his eyes, couldn’t get his racket around the ball in time. He froze and realized that this guy who just stood there—on his heels—shot a perfect return side and top spin off the right of the table, out maybe a foot, maybe two, then straight back and down and, well, by then it was too late. Seven–one. Penny chuckled, and Tim shook his head like he didn’t know what he was supposed to do. He asked where Trotsky was, but Penny shushed him and said keep watching. Grossman served and poor Stiffen wasn’t ready for it. What was he to expect—a beautiful curve or the equivalent of a complete amateur’s shot? He was ready for the curve, backspin maybe, but watched a complete amateur’s shot bounce first on Grossman’s side, float politely over the net a good three or four inches, land with a tock, and drift a diaphanous parabola off the side of the table. Penny laughed and told Tim yep, that’s it, Grossman’s got it.
“What do you mean?” from Tim. “He’s still down five.”
“Look at Stiffen. That’s nervous sweat, not workout sweat.”
“Ew,” Candice said, but she wasn’t paying attention.
“Huh,” Tim, the way people react when they want to act enlightened.
“Yeah, we’ve got one down.”
Sure enough, seven–one went seven–two went straight seven–all, poor Stiffen like he woke from a bad nap in the middle of the day. Couldn’t find his footing, stumbled, his socks misaligned. Dietrich the Tisch shouted from across the gym in a thick Teutonic accent sounding more encouraging than Penny would have given him credit for, and on cue Coach, who had been lost among coaches and some of the older girls, appeared and shouted what sounded like tote him but after a couple more tries must have been töte ihn, which Dietrich understood, judging by the sound of his English-turned-German going from standard Hochdeutsch to a clear Freislerian old hard German, which didn’t help Stiffen at all, caught in the middle of the Maxim gun crossfire with Grossman still looking at him and the ball as if nothing were wrong, playing a game he always played and—no, Penny thought—but yes, and yawned. Coach shouted something like entschuldigung, but that was anyone’s guess, while Dietrich cursed with his hands as much as with his mouth. Most of the judges and audience were now watching the two, Coach retreating, blending into the crowd. Stiffen was now freaked out like nobody had taught him how to deal with this shit, Germans on one side, Grossman on the other. And Grossman? This was all part of his game. Maybe he even knew his aloof approach would trigger the Dietrich–Coach battle, and it was game point–seven, Grossman’s favor. Tim now understood what was so goddamned beautiful about Grossman’s style, not that Penny or Candice would allow him to ever try it, Tim’s match expected to be the most standard of all matches. And just like that Grossman won, shook hands with Stiffen dazed and particularly confused, then with the ref, always polite, then with Dietrich, who was already tomato paste goose-stepping back and forth between gym wall and the court’s perimeter black line (this was a basketball court first and foremost). Tim moved over and Grossman sat down. He didn’t talk—he never talked after a match—and dabbed his brow that was wonderfully without sweat.
Candice was up, but before she left she turned to Penny and said with those principal pupils, “find Trots before I fuck him up,” which warranted only an okay because, hell, what else could Penny say? And good luck.
“Yeah,” Tim said. “Good luck.”
“Don’t need it. Just watch me.”
Tim nodded like she was still watching and Penny said she’d be back soon and went past the physically heated Dietrich to the—
“Oh, hi Penny.”
“Clarice.”
“See we’re playing again.” She chewed gum and stood most her weight on one leg like a pro. She wasn’t wearing socks—radical—and had on an ankle bracelet her hunk of a boyfriend had given her. Penny didn’t know why she remembered this, but it pissed her off. Clarice always pissed her off. But her lower jaw stuck out a little, which made up for part of her awfulness.
“So we are.”
“I love your earrings.”
“And you’re still with the same guy.”
“I’m excited,” chewing loudly, and looked past her. “Cute team.”
“Already one–nil.”
“Stiffen sucks.”
“He’s your teammate.”
“And he sucks,” with a shrug. “I hope you’ll be more fun. I don’t want to win too fast.”
“Yeah, wouldn’t that be just awful.”
A great big smile, full of gum. “See you soon.”
#
Penny found Trotsky near the back corner of the locker room, seated bum to the floor hitting two table tennis balls in quick succession a la The Great Escape, a stoic pock against the floor, sullen punk against the locker, and back to the rackets (of which he held two), alternating hands for each pair of hits, left right, left right, and so on. His face was reading some deep level emotions Penny wasn’t used to from a guy who went, on average, between killing it intense on the tables to a Grossmanesque casualness but never this mixture of what she couldn’t describe but knew wasn’t just a bathroom break. Deep breath from Penny as she sat beside Trotsky still hitting the two balls, which by itself was a real accomplishment—not something Tim, Grossman, or even Penny on a bad day could do, but Trotsky kept at it like it was just another run of perfectly-calculated parabolas and quaternions. No biggie, he’d say. She pulled her knees up to avoid touching her ass to the piercing basement cold. “So,” she said.
“. . .” the balls going pick pick against the paddle—the hard side this round—tock tock on the floor, punk punk against the locker, large arc back to the paddle, and a softer poff poff this time on the flip side.
“Getting warmed up, huh?”
Again a pick pick, which she could almost have interpreted as an answer.
“Grossman won. Attrition worked wonders. Should’ve seen.”
Punk punk.
“Dietrich and Coach got into a fight already, and the kid Stiffen was like freaking out real bad—you could see the sweat coming down his face as Grossman kept returning and playing the most casual serves. Like, any kid with a hand could have returned them, but Stiffen choked.”
Tock tock, punk punk, and an arc.
“They changed the order too. Candice is up now, then Tim. Haven’t seen Wendy and can’t speak for Tim, so it might be on us to beat U. Talent.”
“. . .”
“So you’ll be up and ready to crush them?”
Pock pock.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake will you say something?”
“Yeah, sure,” followed by a full circle of both rackets and both balls, no break. “It’s just, like, why? Why should we beat them, why does it matter which of us wins so long we’re having fun? That’s the whole point, isn’t it, to have fun? I didn’t play because it was work, you know, and like now it feels it’s work, except defensive is still fun. So I can crush them on offensive, but that’s no fun. Somewhere along the way fun turned into not fun. I don’t get it.”
“Right,” she said. “And you think defensive will be fun forever?”
He shrugged.
“It’s like school, you know. You take things you think are fun, get to work and keep at it a few years, and then you’ve got every old person you know saying,” in her deepest voice, “this isn’t fun, this is work. Heck, even profs think their jobs are shit, and they get four fucking months off. Everything becomes unfun eventually.”
He stopped hitting the balls, which deflected off his rackets at odd angles, hit the floor, bounced, and died against two locker-met-floor walls. “Shit.” The ceiling pulled sea-sickness waves above them. “What’s the point of anything, then?”
Penny shrugged. “You’ve got to make that up for yourself, I guess. But I don’t think this is helping you get out there with your offensive game.”
“Like, if I stopped working hard and doing all those things, none of it would ever get bad, right? So why bother doing it in the first place?”
“. . .”
“. . .”
“I guess,” she said, “if you’re not gonna do anything in the first place, you’re not gonna have any fun at all. Hundred percent no fun. So you could either take fifty percent fun or hundred percent no fun.”
“But you’re promised the fifty percent fun becomes hundred percent no fun someday.”
“Yeah—no, not necessarily. It’s like you hear some people love their jobs, right? They found something they ninety percent find fun. Figure in that everything is unfun at some point, like even table tennis royally sucks sometimes, right, but that doesn’t mean it’s totally unfun, just at that moment, on that day. You’ve got one side where you do nothing and nothing is fun, adding to a hundred percent chance of no fun, then you’ve got that other side, a maybe fifty percent fun with a thirty to sixty percent range chance of it continuing to be fun. So I don’t know the math but that adds up to a lot of a chance you’ll have fun at some point in the future versus a complete certainty you won’t have any fun at any point in the future.”
“We’re stuck doing things in hopes they’ll continue to be fun?”
“That, or we’re stuck looking for things to call fun.”
“Like eating your favorite food until it’s not your favorite food.”
“Or listening to your favorite song until it’s shit, then finding another favorite a week later. Always something good out there.”
“Huh.”
“Sounds tough, I know.” She stared at one of the balls. The ceiling groaned.
“You’re not too bad, Penny,” he said.
She smiled. “I try. So you want to see Candice lose?”
“I suppose.”
“Oh,” from Penny. “She also said if you don’t play offensive she’ll fuck you up, her words exactly. So I guess you can figure in the math that it’s like a hundred percent chance no fun with a side of getting fucked up if you don’t at least try.”
“Sounds about right.” He stood and helped Penny up. That was Trots. He dropped the cheap crap racket he wasn’t supposed to use. They might, she thought, beat Dietrich and U. Talent after all.
Back upstairs the vibe was bad, a perceptive kind of mood you could feel, not hear. Dietrich was calm with that flush Teutonic jawline and Clarice smiled gum between her teeth and Candice sat on the bench not watching Tim jump around like a potato on springs but watching instead the gestalt of the room, out of focus. Turned out Wendy was a low-key county, state, and regional best at the backhand sidespin serve who kept out of the papers and collegiate photo journals enough to not be noticed by almost everyone. That kind of serve got most good amateurs, even number one ranked amateurs like Candice. Nobody even shouted a go Tim or you got this or nice shot, of which there weren’t many, and Penny wondered where the hell Coach had gone. A coach provides ninety percent of a team’s superlatives, and this coach had vanished, leaving the blue-and-grays to do the coach’s job of cheering on little Tim against this kid who had no way of being a fourth-ranked player by any measure—that guy’s socks were striped, Penny said, which resulted in a mix of boos for that guy, who also had a mullet-like thing going on at the back of his head, and cheers for Tim, words mixing together, and from Tim’s perspective they were booing and cheering that weird hairstyle all at the same time, which made Tim real self-conscious about his extraordinarily standard freshman haircut no one had ever said anything about. At least Candice was getting into it again—the shock of that backspin loss skipping remorse straight to anger—shouting slurs you wouldn’t want to hear at a collegiate inter-school table tennis competition.
One of the refs not adjudicating any match walked over and told Candice to calm down, please, to which she said something along the lines of fuck off, please, with extra emphasis on the please, and so that of course did not go well, this ref at first reading perplexed that a kid of about twenty would dare say such words to a man of about, well, much older than twenty. Then he got real close in her face—and there was Coach, just in time to push apart the two making enough ruckus that even Tim and his opponent were watching the blue-and-grays yet again cause trouble more interesting than a small plastic ball bouncing back and forth a casual span of about three meters, give or take. So that match ended. Nobody bothered to check the score while a couple other refs ran over to see what the commotion was about and to separate the Candice-Coach-ref ordeal.
Okay, Coach said, after that ended. Y’all don’t do anything stupid, to which Candice said, if you’d’ve been cheering Tim, we wouldn’t have had to do anything stupid. Next match called, it was all on Trotsky, and Candice made clear with a line of sight between her eyes and his. He shrugged. The entirety of Penny and co. knew that he was by far the number one seed on their team and was only number two because most computer-assisted statistical score sheets indicated that he was in what they called a hole or rut or funk, in colloquial terms. A losing streak of about fifteen to twenty Elo-ranked matches had that effect. Maybe it was a trick, Penny thought. A long con so he could dominate this seed two showoff looking all smiles and attitude. Yeah right.
The match began a coin toss for U. Talent, Bret serving a solid sidespin, which Trotsky returned high lob, pushing Bret to look up into the fluorescent lights (he blinked, twice) and step back, conceding his also offensive style. Large lob returned, and there was the Trotsky they wanted to see, the beautiful Stalin at his roots, just a lad, a glorious jump smash that had Bret tripping over his own sneakers making that awful sneaker vs. gym floor eeksh sound.
“Hey Coach,” Candice said. “What was that German thing you said before?”
Coach stepped closer. “It meant kill him. It’s like töte ihn, but I’m not sure that’s right.”
“Dietrich was pretty sure,” Penny, just before Candice shouted loudly enough for nobody not to hear. Trotsky looked over and smiled like he knew what she said, and ah, there was Dietrich tomato red not quite storming them, not quite not looking intimidating, and Trotsky firing V-2 missiles at Bret, alternating corners on a Fibonacci sequence because he could, which to Bret was as good as random, and the showoff smile fell down a notch to the this is why you’re seeded number two frown. Penny and co. cheered, everyone on their bench chanting Stalin, Stalin, Stalin, and it looked like Trotsky, for once, enjoyed it too. Yeah, Penny thought, this was fun.
The schools were now two–two, matched up, and it was Penny on the line, her teammates saying the usual good luck and you’ll beat her and you better not fuck it up from Candice and a weird fatherly pat on the back from Coach. Penny shook hands with the ref, the same one for all five matches now tired and probably wondering what more these two teams could do, still in the early phase of the tournament as a whole. Clarice showed up, casual as always—how else?—without shaking anyone’s hand. Of course not. Flip of the coin in Penny’s favor, and a nice big smile from that prognathous bitch.
Penny faced the audience, who had unmistakably shifted their attention toward her table, a good number of them aware of the fun-looking chopper and the cool far lobs Penny was capable of—crowd pleasers, Candice called them. Tocked the ball hard and with enough bounce to force Clarice into a smash—even a light touch would make it go too far—and pulled back. Clarice on the top spin, and here was the wonderful back spin chop, gliding, and perfect on Clarice’s end, the girl still chewing in the heat of it all. The only way out of a chop situation that worked consistently was to force the opponent to back off the table far enough—a high lob with sudden forward spin—to position Penny in the lob-smash range, flick of the lower arm, and point. That was how she did it, always, which was why Penny was seeded third and no higher. She was for that reason a good judge of someone’s game sense. Got beat? Three or higher. Could beat? Three or lower. Fifty-fifty? Clarice, who by the way said something quiet during Penny’s next serve, her back to the ref, so Penny only knew she said something but not what it was she said. Mouth movement was all right by tournament standards—some kids grunted like they were playing the other racket sport nobody here discussed—but talking apart from a congratulations was seen as a no-no, with the ref or whichever superior watching saying something to the extent of cut it out. Next serve Penny listened closer, and, ah yeah, there it was. Mid-return Penny grunted a you too loud enough that the ref and of course Clarice and a few others heard, though most of them not sure what she said. But Clarice was sure. So began their usual game, a two-tiered match of mental malice and cold competition. Where the first tier was an honest game of table tennis, the second was a battle of insults eavesdropped by the ref not on purpose, Penny’s team on purpose, and the crowd once they realized this was the same pair who insulted each other spectacularly the previous year. Should have seen it, some of them would say, and confused this sport with another racket sport, pretending grand overhead serves to the tune of whore scream-grunted in time with the hard tock of the ball.
But to continue the spectacle of cussing each other out, they tended to play easy, meaning fewer wonderful lobs and more close combat tick tock tick tock until someone won the current verbal exchange.
“Ladies, please,” from the ref sitting back.
“Go fuck yourself,” from Clarice, to both of them.
“Up yours; it’s looser,” Penny now, and tick tock tick tock from the ball, the ref red-faced not in a Dietrich hue.
Penny tossed in an unexpected curve and scored another point. The danger of outscoring Clarice came at the cost of a greater barrage of increasingly vile invectives. Last year Clarice swore she’d cunt-punt Penny across the gym and made a thrust into the table that cost her the point and shifted the table. This year, though, oh this year it was worse than that, Penny found out. Clarice had practiced her verbal game, and she popped gum at Penny’s teammates, suggested unethical academic trysts, and dug into that deep-seated, ever-present, post-collegiate dread. She’s got you, Penny thought. That was right when the insults exploded, overdrive to maximum, dysphemism to straight metaphor—a whole new world and meaning to insult. What was this barrage coming at her—phrases of ontological precedence, ancestral simian semblances, lunar-epidermal comparisons, a holy hell of histaminic discrepancies, a casual whiff of calcareous complexion and labile temper, and god damned the blue-and-grays were feeling that something-in-the-air-wasn’t-right tension, constricting and escaping only just from the depths of Penny’s chest, nearing game point now but also nearing that teary-eyed anger you reach when you’re tossed between pure vitriol and impassioned sorrow, Penny hardly making an effort to retort, realizing that, no matter who won the physical game, Clarice was taking home the gold fucking trophy of verbal victories, and Penny would never hear the end of it. Never. Clarice would find her, someday, somewhere, and all the memories would flood her with overwhelming disappointment—unless she stopped it. Last serve, the whole team’s bench on their feet now shouting incongruous bromides, a white noise with the cheering and ooing and booing and gasps that happened and were about to happen. There it was, two hit-and-returns in, Clarice giving that shit-stained smile of hers—giving up on purpose, Candice shouted to no avail—and hit the ball to her own side first, game over, nothing left but to—
And Penny returned the shot. No, she did not just return the shot. She did the one honorable thing that was left for her to do, Candice reading the body language like two strokes ahead and running toward them, but even she was too late. Penny side-stepped the table, her whole body left of the thing, and wound up her arm what people later said looked like she was about to whip a baseball near ninety-nine mph into the bleachers, fastball spin, and swung as hard as she could that dumb little racket—paddle, goddammit, it’s a fucking paddle—and swung that dumb little paddle as hard as she could into the ball. Slow motion captured the concavity, squish, and she launched that motherfucker at an incline of about two degrees vertical, perfect topspin straight into the what she said was the sparkling left eye of Clarice Gamete, too slow to react, and it spun like for three seconds grinding into the eye somewhere between half-shut and half-burning, before the ball, yes the ball, slid down the cheek—top spin out of juice—and plopped into the fish hole mouth with an audible pop even the referee later said he heard. But that wasn’t it, no, not why Candice was still running and why Trotsky and even Coach were following close behind (Grossman watched from an agape standing position in the back corner, practically invisible): Penny’s forward momentum wasn’t about to stop itself, and plus the added swoosh of the paddle she was falling precariously toward the half-choking vision of her enemy, and she landed fist-first into Clarice (put politely), smashed the paddle edge into the left half of the nose of her U. Talent nemesis and tackled that skunk (her words). At this point Dietrich’s pupils also rushed forth, though they later claimed Dietrich told them to and they were only following orders. Things turned complicated, with Penny wailing fists into that face and fixing the prognathous malformity for free, the referee jumping up to wrestle Penny off the pulp beneath her, the U. Talent kids rushing the table, two of them collapsing over the ref, who blew a useless whistle and clawed them to get up while they clawed him to get off them, and the other half of U. Talent running into Candice, Coach, and Trotsky wielding their paddles now like baseball bats to protect their match winner from a proper beating. Here we had the first inter-school table tennis physical combat at any inter-school table tennis state competition, with more referees appearing than Grossman knew were at the event, and the student body in the audience coming down to protect their blue-and-grays, and the other teams making for the gym sides, colliding with students coming down from the stands, pulling even the innocent into the brawl, which was, by now, for better or worse, a nonmusical mosh pit. Except Grossman, who remained at the far side and gaped at what the school newspaper later called a light kerfuffle.
It took all referees and a few honest coaches to return order—someone had a shrill hell of a whistle that put a strong and fast end to the hair-grabbing and cheek-flicking and nose-pinching nonsense. Then they pulled everyone off everyone, told anyone who tried to make a fuss to please shut up, until, at the center of it all, someone (wasn’t me, Candice said) pulled Penny off the still supine body of Clarice, nosebleed finger-painted across her face, moaning and turning her head with at least a minor concussion.
A half hour later they had settled that it was indeed Penny who started this mess and that she should therefore be disqualified from the tournament. But, despite her disqualification, since she technically did win her match against Clarice before attacking her opponent, and since Clarice had been told multiple times to please not insult Penny (and technically vice versa), the adjudicating body decided that the Penny vs. Clarice score stood in effect, thus qualifying the blue-and-grays (minus Penny) for round two, with a three–two victory over U. Talent (loud cheers from everyone except U. Talent). And since Clarice’s nose was broken, her makeup washed in blood, and her mind thoroughly discombobulated, it was a true victory for Penny, who also had to promise, as part of her disqualification, never to approach Clarice Gamete again. She agreed, smiling brightly at the defeated Clarice (the touch of blood on her upper left canine making for a great school newspaper photo), and left the gym to hugs from all her teammates. Great fucking shot, Candice said. You scare me, from Grossman. And Trotsky, during his hug, whispered: that was the most fun I’ve ever had.
The Piker Press moderates all comments.
Click here for the commenting policy.