Free The Sweetheart by Angelina Mirabella Page A

he leads you through a series of stretches, he jumps to his feet and claps his hands together. “Now. Last night you saw what can happen if you don’t know how to take a bump. So we’ll start there.”
    For the next half hour or so, Joe shows you how to go down in a way that is supposed to lessen your chances of injury. He models a dozen or so falls, his figure seemingly suspended in the air before he hits the mat with a loud clap, and then, in testament to the effectiveness of his technique, quickly rolls on his side and jumps to his feet. The trick, he says, is to “level out”—to distribute your weight over your whole body, to flatten yourself into a plane rather than attempt to break the fall with a limb. “Pretend the mat is a bed of nails,” he tells you. “You got to hit ’em all at once, or it’s going to hurt like hell.” On top of that, you have to “work loose” to keep your muscles from tensing.
    â€œGo ahead,” he instructs. “You try it.”
    As you soon discover, falling is more difficult than one might imagine. The first time isn’t bad; the lesson is fresh and you are in your prime. But as soon as your body hits the mat, it begins to have the real experience of pain. Even with all of this working loose and leveling out, you are still a falling body crashing into a solid surface, and every subsequent fall is preceded by less capability and more fear. You fall again and again, but rather than get better, you get clumsier and fall harder. It probably doesn’t help that you can’t quite shake the self-consciousness of wearing so little. Every time you hit the mat, Joe kneels down beside you to offer his critique, pointing to the places where you hit (the small of your back) and where you should have hit (the whole of your back), or, even worse, physically moving your body into the correct position (feet flat, palms up). Work loose? Fat chance. Whenever he makes contact, you turn to stone. On your final attempt, the back of your head ricochets into the canvas hard enough for you to cry out.
    â€œYou’re thinking too much,” Joe says, standing over you, hands on his hips, elbows cocked. “You can’t think it; you have to feel it.”
    You might have managed one good fall if he had just given you an inch of space. You remain flat on your back with your hands fisted and your neck throbbing. You would stay like this for the rest of the day if you could, but after a while, it becomes clear that Joe is not going to budge until you respond, so you roll onto your side, push yourself up—this much of the drill, you can manage—and say, “I’ll work on it.”
    When you are upright again, Joe grabs you by the bicep and jerks you to attention. This time, his grip is more than intrusive—it’s downright menacing. His face is close enough for you to see the hairs missed during his morning shave, just under his nose. You understand that he means for you to meet his eyes, but that is asking too much, so you stare instead at the hairs.
    â€œWas that sass?” he spits.
    â€œNo.”
    â€œBecause it sounded suspiciously like sass. And I will not tolerate sass. Is that clear?”
    â€œYes.”
    Joe throws down your arm and nods toward the locker room. “Go on. I think we could both stand to take five.” He climbs out of the ring, grabs a clean towel from the top of a stack, and dries his hands while you silently rub your arm, your feet glued to the canvas, your eyes on the exit.
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    Here is the sad truth about lady wrestlers, Leonie. Their careers are roughly the same length of time as the average life span of a fruit fly: four weeks. Will this be your fate as well? You have been here less than two days, and already, two friends are gone, the prospect of injury has become frighteningly real, and your boss is just plain frightening. So