like an old fighter, with shoulders and traps harder than petrified oak, and fists of pure calcified bone. His face bears the marks of a thousand punches, delivered by men who train on heavy bags, tires, and even fence posts.
His nose is broad and broken, his brows scowling, his mouth sternly set above a jaw as hard as steel. His graying hair lays closely buzzed against the skull, and his ice-blue eyes pierce each one of us in turn as he surveys the students lined up before him.
“My name is Snow,” he says, in a deep, booming voice that instantly silences even the slight shifting of feet upon the mats, until you could hear a butterfly’s wings beating in the still air. “Boxing is the fight for perfection. We can never be perfect, because we are human and flawed. But every single day in this gym, we will strive for perfection. We will believe in perfection. And we will inch toward it, with infinitesimal steps, until we are the closest to god that man has ever been.”
He walks up and down the line of students, those sharp eyes examining us as if he’s already tallying up the weaknesses in every one of us. He sees Bodashka’s swollen face and Ares’s dingy, torn sneakers. His gaze fixes upon me, and I hold his eyes, refusing to flinch beneath that frosty stare. He won’t find a hair out of place on my person. My body is already a shrine to the gods. I sculpt and shape it every fucking day.
“The fight is not won in the ring, in the brilliance of shining lights and cheering of the crowd. The fight is won here, in this gym. It’s won in countless hours of training and conditioning, in the punishment you’ll take and the honing of your skills, for months and years before you ever face your opponent.”
I can feel the fierce energy swelling in my fellow students. Snow has the powerful presence possessed by all great teachers and leaders. He sets a standard before us. He’s painting a picture of what we could become: tempered, hardened, perfected. Already we strain against the bounds of inaction, wanting to show him that we can do as he says, wanting to impress him.
I feel something else: a desire to prove to him that I’m already superior to the rest of these fools. I want to distinguish myself above them all.
“This is not a fundamentals class,” Snow says. “All of you have been selected because you already know how to fight. We will focus on higher-level skills, which are more complicated and precise. You will follow my instructions exactly. Particularly when sparring with your fellow students. Remember, if you fuck up in golf you get a mulligan, if you fuck up in the ring, you’ll wake up eating through a straw.”
We wrap our hands and don our padded training gloves.
Snow breaks us into sets of two, assigning the pairs himself. Though he doesn’t know any of us yet, he’s able to judge our size and skill level with fair accuracy, so that most of us are evenly matched: Leo with Ares, Silas with Bodashka, Kade with August.
However, he matches me with the blond Freshman, which I can’t help but take as an insult. While the kid is tall, he’s obviously young and inexperienced.
He introduces himself in his gentle, accented voice. “Tristan Turgenev.”
“Dean,” I say curtly back to him, facing off across our mat.
He must be related to Claire or Jules Turgenev. I don’t really give a shit which it is. I’m annoyed that I’m babysitting instead of getting proper practice with someone like Jasper or Leo.
I love fighting. I love falling into my stance, easy and natural, knees bent and fists raised. I love the energy that flows through my frame and the knowledge that I can strike and hit as hard as I want. When my opponent answers back, I’ll slip his punches like I can see them coming from a mile away.
“I’m going to assume you all know the basic strikes and footwork,” Snow says, standing in the center of the gym. “Today we’re going to work on the left jab counter. A jab from a right-handed opponent is the most common punch you’ll encounter. To turn a left jab into an attack, you want to slip the punch, sending their glove over your left shoulder. Then you counter with a jab of your own right to their chin.”
He demonstrates the movements against an invisible