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THE STUDENT GYM IS open 24 hours a day. Like the Student Retention Office complex, the student gym is gleaming and well-appointed. In fact, the SRO helped to fund its construction. Students and their guests can use it for free. After faculty and staff raised a stink, it was decided we would be allowed to use the facility too. During certain hours. For a fee.
It was already after nine at night when we arrived. We walked in past the juice bar, paid our admission to the sullen student worker, and entered a warehouse-sized room ringing with metallic clanging and crowd noise. Despite the crush of sweaty bodies, the state-of-the-art climate control was keeping the air fresh and chilled. The SRO funding had also provided recessed halogen lighting and polished hardwood floors.
“It’d be nice if we could get some of this lighting in my lab,” Emma said. “Or at least put back the lights they took away.”
“They can’t use the SRO grant for general maintenance,” I said. “Believe me, I’ve asked about it.”
When the facilities crew came through my office to remove two of my four fluorescent light tubes, they accidentally broke the plastic diffuser cover. They apologized good-naturedly and explained that replacing it wasn’t in the budget. Pat thinks the bare fluorescent tubing has a stylish industrial look. Emma says the exposed fixture makes my office look like a Kuewa meth garage. I don’t want to pay for a replacement light cover, so I’m siding with Pat.
Emma pointed out a couple of her students from her introductory biology class. They were shirtless, sweaty, grunting and utterly focused on working the leg press machines.
“At least I know they’re capable of expending effort on something,” Emma said. “Even if it’s not biology class.”
“Great example of contextual motivation,” I observed.
“Hey, look,” Emma nudged me. “There’s Glenn.”
“Who’s Glenn? Oh. Sherry’s boyfriend Glenn.”
He was enmeshed in an elaborate contraption that would have filled a small room. If I didn’t know he was in that machine voluntarily, I would have guessed he was being subjected to some kind of high-tech torture. He spotted us and smiled, and extricated himself from the machine as Emma and I approached. He was wearing a black fishnet tank top, shiny black leggings, red and black wrestling shoes, and fingerless red weightlifting gloves. A lacquered yin/yang symbol hung from a black leather choker. In the warm lighting of the workout room, his orangey tan made him look like a human Creamsicle.
“Hey, Glenn,” Emma bustled over to his machine as I struggled to keep up with her. Emma’s short legs moved quickly, covering a surprising amount of ground. “Where’s Sherry?”
“She’s out back, having a smoke—Oh.” He grinned, realizing he had just ratted out Sherry to her paddling coach. His teeth were so white, they were almost blue. “She totally wants to quit. She’s trying, I swear.”
“It’s okay,” Emma assured him. “I know all about it. She says it helps to keep her weight under control. It’s killing her endurance, though.”
I noticed that the black netting of Glenn’s shirt had caught on his nipple ring. I winced and folded my arms tightly.
“I’m trying to help her cut down.” Glenn shook his highlighted hair out of his face, misting all three of us with his sweat. I noticed he’d had his hair redone, luminous gold and caramel streaking from his no-longer-grey roots to his perfectly tousled tips. I wondered what color my hair would be if I stopped getting it dyed. I hadn’t seen my natural color in over a decade.
“But you can’t make Sherry do anything she doesn’t want to,” Glenn was saying. “I gotta tell you, she’s really looking forward to the race. I mean, she was sad about what happened to that lady on your team, her friend, what was her name? Karen?”
“Kathy,” Emma corrected him.
“Oh yeah, Kathy. Anyway, Sherry’s super excited now she knows she’ll have a seat in the boat for sure.”
“Sherry and Kathy were good friends?” I asked, and immediately wished I hadn’t. Now Glenn was going to tell Sherry, my student, that I was asking nosy questions about her. Or worse, that I suspected she had a role in Kathy’s death. Which, I suddenly realized, was not such a far-fetched idea.
Kathy and Sherry had been the two slowest paddlers on the crew, and Emma was only going to pick one of them to paddle in the Labor Day race. Kathy had been the one thing standing between Sherry and a spot in the team canoe.
Fortunately, Glenn didn’t seem to find anything strange about my question.
“Oh, yeah!” he said. “I mean, the whole crew was pretty close. You know, Sherry’s kinda competitive, but yeah, they were pretty tight. They were all doing that weird diet together.”
I glanced at myself in the wall mirror. “So how does that diet work again?” I asked.
“It's kinda hardcore,” he said. “Only five hundred calories a day.”
“Oh, right,” I said. “Never mind.”
“And Sherry has to inject herself with this stuff at the same time every day. It’s called human, uh...”
“Human chorionic gonadotropin,” Emma said.
“Uh, yeah, thanks, Emma. Yeah. It’s hard for Sherry, cause her diabetes? She’s gotta take insulin, and it’s got these little bitty needles, exactly like the, uh...”
He gestured, searching for the words.
“Human chorionic gonadotropin,” Emma repeated. “You can just call it HCG.”
“Cool, thanks, Emma. Yeah, the HCG. Those little needles look exactly the same, so Sherry has to be super careful not to get them mixed up. She told me it would be bad if she took two doses of insulin by mistake.”
Glenn shook his layered hair again. This time, I stepped back to avoid the sweat spray.
“That diet sounds complicated,” I said.
“Seriously,” he agreed. “But she’s totally into it. I told her I think she’s already skinny enough, but she wants you guys to do good at the Labor Day race and she says she doesn’t want to slow the team down. Sherry’s totally, I don’t know what the word is, but when she wants something, she gets it.” Glenn flashed a flawless blue-white smile. “I kinda dig that about her.”