“Look at those blond curls,” they’d marvel. He would always correct them. “That’s my son,” he would say. At some point, he got tired of it. He stopped holding my hand when we went out, so it wouldn’t invite questions or comments from total strangers. It was easier for him, I guess. Not for me.
My mom, on the other hand, she never cared what other people thought. Even though her age kept her out of the PTA’s social circles, she volunteered in the school cafeteria at lunch and helped organize the Halloween carnival every year. We spent a lot of time together, especially on weekends when my dad was at the bowling alley for fourteen hours straight. I get my love of dogs from her. She’s always had dogs, sometimes four or five at a time, all of them sable-and-white rough collies. They’re a fantastic breed—smart, trainable, extremely devoted. When I was in middle school, my mom started breeding them and entering them in dog shows all over California. She and I would drive hundreds of miles to compete with one of them, and I got to see a lot of the state that way.
You’d think that spending so much time with my mom would have made it easier for me to talk to girls, but it didn’t. My mom was old and plain and agreeable, and the girls at my school were young and pretty and looking for trouble. Whenever I tried to impress them, it backfired. They’d roll their eyes or laugh. Do you know what it does to a boy when a girl laughs at him? Every time it happened, I tried to think of something clever to say, but that only made it worse. And I really hated that everyone called me A.J., which wasn’t my name, it was just a nickname that a teacher had given me in kindergarten, and somehow it stuck, even with my family. I spent most of my time with my dogs. They were less complicated than people.
Everything changed in freshman year. I’d always been a skinny kid, but I was pretty strong and flexible, and during tryouts Coach Johnson saw something in me. Natural ability, you could say. He put me on the wrestling team. There were fifteen of us across five weight classes, and already ranked second in the county even before I joined. What appealed to me about wrestling was the simplicity of it—you didn’t kick a ball or use a racket or wear elaborate gear, and you didn’t depend on someone else to help you score a point. You relied only on yourself, on your own ability. I fell in love with wrestling. Unless I was sitting in class or taking care of my dogs, I was training at the gym.
Coach Johnson taught me a lot, maybe more than anyone has ever taught me before or since. “Remember,” he would say, “what you practice on the mat has to be practiced off the mat. Focus. Speed. Opportunity. FSO. You’ve got to be watchful, quick, and seize any chance you get, because life will rarely give you a second shot.” We won all our matches that season, and got a statewide ranking for the first time in our school’s history. Between my training, my diet, and the fact that I grew a foot during that year, I looked amazing. It sounds conceited to say it, but I don’t know how else to put it: I looked amazing.
By the time I started sophomore year, it was the girls who tried to impress me, by decorating my locker or making playlists for my training runs. One day in biology, Mrs. Barron asked us to split into small groups for a new project she had for us, an illustrated booklet on cellular respiration. I hated group projects because of that awkward moment when everyone chose their friends and I was left scrambling for a partner. But right away someone tapped my shoulder. It was Neil Gilbert, a lame kid with oozing acne on his face. My secret nickname for him was Crater Face. “Wanna do the booklet together, A.J.?” he asked.
“I’m already doing it with Stacey,” I said, and turned back and winked at Stacey Briggs. That was another thing about being on the wrestling team: it had given me some confidence.