Really Good, Actually(82)
“Let’s get uncomfortable in our breathing!” yelled Blake, though I was way ahead of them. I pedaled harder, my name rising up the class ranking, inching toward Amy’s, which had hovered at the top since class began. Blake shouted at someone called TheRealSpinShady: “I’m sorry, but you do not pun in my class and then coast during a climb! Up that resistance or get out of here, babe!” Blake consulted the laptop next to their bike.
“Okay, we have a cyclist burning up the leaderboard. Can I get a big X-Cycle cheer for . . . AMY-I’M-SORRY?” Blake paused, checked the screen again. “No, that’s—Amy I’m . . . yep, okay! AMY-I’M-SORRY, damn, here they come! They know what they did, and they are repenting on the BIKE, baby!”
In front of me, Amy slowed her feet and stood hovering above her bike seat. She toweled her face and looked tentatively to her left, then her right. She gulped some water and sat back in the saddle. I cycled harder. The icon with my username traveled higher up the board . . . then started to drop. Other, fitter riders were overtaking me. If I didn’t make the top spot, I wouldn’t get the special shout-out I needed, the moment at the end of class where I could do it right. My name dropped out of the top half of the leaderboard, and the chance at the gesture—the apology in the rain, the boom box overhead, the cue cards at the door in the snow—disappeared.
The track changed, and in the momentary gap between songs I shrieked, “AMY! IT’S ME!” Amy stopped again and turned around. I smiled ghoulishly at her, hair everywhere, wildly out of breath. “I’M SO SORRY!” I yelled, gasping for air.
“What the hell?”
“I—”
An insistent techno beat picked up, and the class moved on without us, bobbing in unison as they performed a series of complicated triceps push-ups.
“PLEASE TAKE ME BACK!” I shouted. “YOU SAID WOMEN LIKE THIS!”
For some reason I was still pedaling. I didn’t know if I was feeling a cyclist’s high or if this surge of adrenaline was the result of sheer emotional desperation, but I felt incredible. Amy’s feelings were harder to read. The music entered another lull, and we locked eyes. Her face softened, and she cocked her head and whisper-screamed, “Can we please talk about this later?”
“Yes, you can, thanks!” yelled Blake. “That’s enough! Okay, y’all, we’re going to pick it up!” They started undulating on the bike, using their abs to push themself up and over the handlebars like a magnificent, Lycra-clad seal. I followed their lead, clumsily rolling up and back. A few of our fellow classmates were staring. Eventually, the demands of Blake’s routine took over, and I was left to myself. I watched my name slip farther down the leaderboard.
The last song at X-Cycle was always a slow jam, something vaguely emotional over which the instructors could preach mindfulness, self-love, and the importance of regularly returning to the studio for its copyright-protected blend of cardio, weight training, and “adrena-rock.” Blake told us we should be proud of ourselves, that it wasn’t always easy to be vulnerable, to put ourselves out there in a group fitness setting. They encouraged us to close our eyes and groove, to feel free to leave what was holding us back in the studio when we left it.
The instrumentals gave way to a man’s voice, speaking softly: “We all want to help one another,” the voice said into the pitch-black studio. “Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness—not by each other’s misery.” The music swelled again. It was corny, and I found it comforting. It was too much, and I was happy to be hearing it. Two things really could be true! And so, robust glutes on fire, I cried lightly in a spin class to a techno remix of Charlie Chaplin’s speech from The Great Dictator, a situation I found surprising but not, in the scope of the year’s changes, impossible.
The class ended, and Blake shouted out the rider who had performed best, a beautiful man in a mesh top and tiny shorts, whose name on the leaderboard was Bry2k. Blake shone a flashlight at him, and the class cheered and twirled their towels over their heads in celebration of his achievement. This was when I would have given my big speech to Amy, had things gone to plan. I looked at my final ranking: twelfth out of thirty-seven. Not even close.
I unclipped and stood in the studio, bright red and covered in sweat, still breathing hard. Blake opened the door and high-fived exiting cyclists as they trickled into the lobby, making plans for tomorrow, laughing about brunch sweated off and Bloody Marys earned. I noticed a few of them staring at me, whispering to each other about the madwoman who had tried to get her girlfriend back, or something, in the middle of spin. As the last set of braided pigtails flounced out of the room, I saw Amy lingering by the door.
“I really thought you would like that more,” I said, clomping awkwardly toward her in my special clip-in shoes.
Amy sucked in an impossibly long breath, and I resigned myself to a future where we were no longer friends, where I had to block her on social media to stop myself from scrolling through her perfect life without me. Then she smiled. “Honestly?” she said. “It should have worked! Or it could have worked. Like, I see what you were going for, but the end result was crazy.”
I told her I was sorry for how I’d behaved at Emily’s wedding, for underestimating her, for not telling her how much her friendship—the utter surprise and real joy of it—had meant to me this year. I wanted the gesture to say all this, but it had just made things worse and insinuated to everyone at X-Cycle that she was involved in some kind of lesbian personal drama.