Out of Bounds (The Summer Games #2)(62)

I never became immune to his attention. Over the years, I built walls in my mind to protect myself from the truth, and by seventeen, I was a shell of a person. Living for so long under the pressure of my father had extinguished the native passions I’d had as a boy. I didn’t have a life or personality outside the gym. I didn’t go out; I didn’t have friends. I had no interests outside of gymnastics.

I was in the gym every single day, working my ass off for a borrowed dream. At the time, I never considered how unhappy I was. Occasionally at night, when I had a moment alone with my thoughts, I’d consider a different life, an easier life, but I would hear echoes of my father’s voice, telling me to persist. Of course I wasn’t happy, I’d told myself. I was training seven days a week. What elite athlete enjoys the long workouts, the tears and sweat and blood?

Besides, it wasn’t that I was depressed; I’d learned to be nothing, completely numb to the world, not happy or sad or angry. I couldn’t muster a single feeling at all, but I told myself it was okay. My father had enough passion for the both of us. He believed in me; he knew I could achieve greatness if only I kept my nose to the grindstone.

Six months before the Olympic games, an injury in my shoulder broke through the numbness of my life. It started as acute tendinopathy, but because my daily workouts never gave it a chance to heal, it ballooned into a full-blown chronic condition. I would wake up every day feeling fine, but after warm-ups I began to feel it. Like a distant train chugging toward me on the horizon, the pain built slowly, punctuated by agonizing bursts of the horn until it came upon me in full force. In my apathy, the throbbing became the only thing my mind could focus on. My doctor said the shoulder wouldn’t heal unless I took six weeks off. My father had thrown a fit inside the doctor’s office, even slinging a potted plant across the room when the doctor had asked him to calm down. I didn’t flinch when it shattered against the wall; I just sat there, thinking to myself that I should have been embarrassed, but I couldn’t remember what embarrassment felt like. In my deadened state, I couldn’t bring myself to rage alongside him. It was like hearing an acquaintance’s parent has passed away—I recognized that an objectively sad thing had happened, but it wasn’t my heartbreak to bear.

My dad reached back and pulled me out of the doctor’s office, shouting about how I couldn’t take six weeks off.

The following morning, he’d walked into my room with a small bottle of pills.

“Where’d you get these?” I asked. There was no prescription taped to the side of the blue bottle.

“Your new doctor,” he lied, closing my fingers around the bottle. “Take one a day, two if you need it.”

Then he turned and walked out of the room, closing the door to any discussion.

The tiny pills rattled in the plastic bottle as I dumped one out and stared at it in the palm of my hand. Without hesitation, I swallowed it and leaned down to drink from the tap in my bathroom. I didn’t feel different right away; I laid on my bed with my eyes closed and sometime later, after the high had settled in, I realized I was smiling for the first time in years.

The next day, I took another one, shielded by my father’s instructions. I needed the pills for my shoulder. As crazy as he’d seemed that day in the doctor’s office, I couldn’t argue with the results. I was confident in the gym again, no longer tempering my practice to the level of pain. He refilled the bottle a second time and I gladly accepted, but the new supply didn’t last nearly as long as the first.

I took two to three pills a day during the months leading up to the games. My father never asked questions. He refilled the bottle and dropped it on my nightstand every week. Like a hungry Pavlovian dog, the heavy rattle would make my mouth salivate, and boy was I a well-trained pet.

I never once considered what I was doing to myself. After all, I wasn’t addicted; I was completing a course of treatment.

Until the pills betrayed me.

I had slowly reached the maximum dose per day, and even doubled it after reading sketchy medical forums online, but eventually the tablets became shadows of themselves, offering only memories of their former potency. I didn’t know what had changed about them. I demanded the name of the source from my father, and when he refused and told me to consider reducing the number I was taking, I took things into my own hands.

I didn’t know how to buy drugs, but I knew 12th and Chicon was a long-rumored drug market in Austin. I drove down in my beat-up truck and looped the street a dozen times, watching the cop cars lingering around, flashing their lights at any loitering pedestrians. The tenth time I looped around the block, I caught sight of two guys in an adjacent alleyway. They were tucked away in the shadows, smoking cigarettes and speaking jocular Spanish. I pulled my car to the side of the road and hopped out just as they turned to assess me.

They looked like the epitome of thugs: baggy pants, dark tattoos spiraling up their arms, and narrowed, wary eyes. Their skin was dark and leathery from years in the sun and as they watched me approach, I wondered if maybe I’d made the wrong decision.

“Whatcha looking at pinche gringo?”

I took a step back and glanced over my shoulder; there wasn’t a cop car in sight. If I needed help, no one would come. I turned back to stare at them and rolled back on my heels, finding I wasn’t really scared of them, but rather of speaking the words I’d come there to say.