on a barstool and make cracks. Now he was admitting it—he owned this vanity. He wanted what fools want; he shared their belief in the flesh. Still, shivering with embarrassment, he went. He drove to the gym after school let out, put himself through his routines. The gym he'd chosen lay in a failing shopping center in Maiden, far from the orbits of all his worlds. At this gym, middle-aged men sweated on exercise bikes. Bands of thickly muscled boys with outdated hair-cuts hoisted enormous weights and spoke to one another in loud, encouraging insults. The boys could have been the brothers of his old friend Biff, noisily confident, in love with their own beauty and ready to murder any man who admired it as they did. Will kept to himself. He detested and, grudgingly, admired them from across the carpeted field of barbells and machinery.
He was mortified and he was faithful. He grimaced under five-pound weights. Sometimes, when he was red-faced and exhausted after lifting an especially insignificant weight, he glanced around and smiled, helplessly eager to let any witnesses know he was in on the joke. When he saw that no one had been watching him and no one appeared to care, he picked up another weight and started again.
The five-pound barbells became easy for him and he promoted himself to tens, then to fifteens. After almost two months he began to notice a slight swelling in his chest. At first he refused to believe it was the result of his efforts. He had not imagined his body capable of responding to discipline or hard work. His body had always seemed to live on its own. It had looked the way it looked, stayed healthy without sufficient rest or abstention from liquor or any elaborate attention to questions of nourishment. Now Will examined his reflection and saw that two small mounds of muscle were beginning to rise under the flat white skin of his chest. He turned sideways, then faced front again. There they were, undeniably. Little humps of muscle he'd made.
He worked harder, and he grew. It felt like a miracle. The muscles of his chest revealed themselves and then, more slowly, the muscles of his shoulders and back. He felt as if a second body were emerging. He watched as it asserted its shape: the raised straps of his triceps, the solid pillows of biceps. He started buying books on nutrition and, still stinging with shame, buying exercise magazines in which glossy, tanned men demonstrated new exercises. He tried the new exercises. He bought vitamins, forced himself to eat five meals a day. He lived inside this new body, watching its changes with a hope he had not yet been able to manage for another man. He was embarrassed about that, too—what kind of person was he turning into?—but he let himself go. He let himself be admired, by his own eyes and the eyes of others. He was becoming a hunk. He, Billy, the skinny boy whose only powers were his wit and his talent for saying no. At the gym, as he grimaced under his increasing loads, he spurred himself on by thinking about bulk and power, the end of doubt. When the weather turned he bought tank tops; he bought his first pair of Speedos. He began living as two people, the self who had been a frightened child and the self whose landscape of musculature threw small flesh-colored shadows on his own skin. Occasionally he imagined showing his enlarged body to his father. He imagined his father's admiration and, more obliquely, his father's desire. Sometimes Will felt guilty for spending his time and his energies on a project so perishable. Sometimes he was filled with a soaring sense of possibility that took him back to the days, more than ten years ago, when he went driving at night with his friends, in those big borrowed cars that could take them anywhere.
1982/ “Hello?”
“Mary Stassos, please.”
“Speaking.”
“Mary, this is Cassandra. Zoe's friend. Do you remember me?”
“Cassandra. Yes.”
“Mary, listen. Zoe's okay, but she's in the hospital.”
“What?”
“Don't get all plucked, she's okay.”
“What is it? What happened?”
“Well, honey, she took a few too many pills.”
“What?”
“She slipped up a little. Too many little red something-or-others, it could happen to anybody. Now listen, she's fine, they say they'll let her out tomorrow or the next day. She didn't want me to call you, and I almost didn't, but then I thought, what the hell, I've never obeyed anyone, why start