Boy Sorceress Pt. 01

"Didn't you have sponsors, or get some-"

"Geez, Skip, you ever heard of the NCAA? An alumnus buys you a cup of coffee and you're disqualified. Expelled, too! We weren't allowed to get a bite of another student's lunch for free, let alone get a fucking sponsor!" I muttered some profanities. Well, some more profanities.

Skip walked alongside me in silence for the better part of a minute. "You said you had friends at college. Friends that used to call you."

I huffed, but nodded. "Yes. I made friends in my calculus and engineering classes. We used to play D&D together on the weekends, after I made up my studying for the week and did my essays and shit."

We reached the end of the block in silence. I looked over and saw Skip shooting surprised glances up at me. "What?"

"Nothing," he said, shaking his head. When I kept staring at him, he added, "Didn't take you for the Dungeons and Dragons type of guy, that's all."

"Fuck you, Skip. And fuck you for taking me for a stereotype."

"I'm sorry. I meant no offense." He met my eyes and smiled. "An adventuring party of your own, huh? Don't you miss them?"

I faced away from him. Yes, I missed them. I missed having fun with people that weren't liable to suddenly body slam someone and declare they will send the opposing team home in body bags. I had fun with people who dreamed of making hoverboards and flying cars and shit. For a brief moment in time,I had been one of those people. I didn't say any of those things to Skip. I just shrugged.

"I think you miss them," Skip declared after a brief silence. "I think you should go back to college and-"

"And what? Be a year behind everyone? That would be really awesome. I can lead up to it by begging the administration to take me back. The very same people that had dropped me like a hot potato as soon as the MRI was done. That would be just swell."

Plus, I was a fucking whale. I wasn't going to go waddling around people I actually liked while I looked like this.

"I don't mean to be a dick, Kevin. I'm just telling you what I think. No judgment, or sanctimony. You need to get back to college and see about your options. You need to meet with some people and sort out the financing-"

"There is no financing, Skippy!" I huffed. "Not with my medical bills and my family's credit history. Don't you think I would already be at college if I could swing it? For fuck's sake!"

I hurried along at a pace that was a bit more normal for me. Skip skipped alongside me to keep up. "Didn't the school pay for your medical bills?"

"No! Not the university, not the NCAA, no one put up a fucking dime."

"Well, that's not right!"

"Oh, wake up and smell the land of the fucking free, Skip! The NCAA doesn't give a dime unless your bills exceed ninety grand. And mine fall just short of that magical number. The University..." I just shook my head. It took me weeks of wrestling with the red tape before they finally informed me that they had absolutely no obligation to give me a cent.

"You need to hire a lawyer," Skip said.

"I already did that. Spent some much needed cash just to be told that I had no case, either against the NCAA, or my university, or the university we had played, or the families of their players, or anyone."

"Look, when I robbed my grandmother and she wound up in the hospital, my family was slammed with a horrible medical bill." Skip pulled out his cellphone and started to tap its screen. "They hired this lawyer that specializes in medical bills. He gets the hospitals to admit to the real prices of medications and procedures and such. He cut grandma's bill to less than half of what it was and got the hospital to agree to a very lenient payment plan. The man works miracles. Here! Let me give you his number!"

He put a hand on my arm and I stopped. The look in his eyes made my blood boil. "Get the fuck away from me, you junkie piece of shit!" I shoved him aside and stormed away.

It was pity. His eyes had looked at me with pity.

He called after me, something about sabotaging myself and letting go of my anger. I barely heard him. I stomped my way through town until I found a liquor store. I bought a six pack and a fifth of Scotch from the very wary clerk and went home. I got a proper buzz going, yelled abuse at some reality television and went to sleep in the middle of the night.

I woke up the next morning, feeling like shit. I was slightly hung over, but that went away after a big glass of water. The sick feeling remained in my stomach. I sat heavily on my couch and stared at the ceiling.

The night before, a junkie, who had robbed his own grandmother to get the cash for his next fix, had taken pity on me. Can you get any lower than that?

When I compared our lives, he was, by any objective measure, doing better than me. He was supposed to be lying dead in a gutter somewhere, and I was supposed to be looking forward to the NFL Draft, or a great job. Instead, I was unemployed and partially disabled, whereas he was enjoying gainful employment. Worse than that, his advice from last night was actually well-meaning and sound. Particularly the stuff about the medical lawyer. Even worse than that, if I was to call him up and ask for the number, he'd surely give it to me, no apologies necessary. That was really bringing me down. The junkie, who had robbed his own grandmother, spent months in jail and overdosed half a dozen times, was now the bigger man.

If this wasn't rock bottom, I sure as shit didn't want to find out what rock bottom was really like.

With that thought in mind, I decided my own little pity party was over. No more getting drunk and whining on about how screwed I got. No more wasting time. I had to turn things around. I sat up on the couch and my gaze fell to the pile of notices on the coffee table. My resolve nearly faltered. I had such a terrible financial mess to deal with.

Taking a page from Skip's book, I closed my eyes and tried to envision what I wanted to happen. I wanted to be out of debt, with a degree, a good job, back together with my friends, a girlfriend...

I was still a virgin. Twenty-one and a fucking virgin. "Oh, fuck," I groaned out loud to the apartment. That fact alone was enough to bring me down. I didn't even want to imagine what Skip would have said to that. The look in his eyes would have driven me berserk. I'm fairly sure he's got it worked out on his own, what with Ashley poised to be my first and the dick-stabbing, followed by the Frankendick thing and me being disgusted by women's nails and being too busy at college...

I really should've kept my mouth shut last night. I've embarrassed myself to no end.

As I dwelled on my regrets, I slowly realized I hadn't said anything particularly embarrassing. Skip didn't strike me as the guy that was going to turn around and start telling people I was a virgin at my age. Besides, he already pitied me. Even if he paid my sex life any mind, it was hard to go lower than I already was in his eyes.

I took a deep breath and cleared my mind. I again tried to envision my goals. With the goals in mind, I started to work on the steps I needed to take to achieve them. I needed to hire a medical lawyer to see about my bills. I needed to talk to some finance people and get another loan so I could finish school. I needed to get in touch with my friends from college, so I had someone to talk to. Someone I could turn to for help and support. I really, really needed to get a girlfriend.

I drew another deep breath. I was a fat, unemployed giant with no friends, no money and no sexual experience. The girlfriend bit was going to be a challenge. I told myself that no fairy godmother was coming to wave her magic wand and fix all my problems. Either I did it, or it would never be done. Things could only turn around if I turned them around. I just had to break down the Herculean effort of fixing my life into tiny steps, like Skip did.

I realized that the goal of getting a girlfriend was contingent on getting my life back on track. If I got back into society, got some self-respect, some new, decent threads, a good job and had friends around me to show the world that I wasn't a nutjob, then a girlfriend would come along. It was an inevitability of life. While that meant that I would be a virgin for a while to come, it also meant that I had one goal less to worry about.

Another deep breath brought my gut into the edges of my vision. The girlfriend thing was going to happen, provided I lost the fat that was making half my wardrobe tight over my stomach and the other half way too fucking small for me. I added losing weight to my list of goals and prioritized it. The path to my goals would be much smoother for me if I stopped being a wallowing tub of lard. No one likes a fatso.

This wasn't going to be one of those stupid diet things that only result in a yo-yo effect. I had audited one biochemistry and one physiology class in college. They had only been meant to teach me about how to get the best out of my performance on the field, but the subjects were very intriguing. For a short while, I had even considered a career in biotechnology. The stuff I heard in those lectures informed my weight loss program.

The first thing was modifying my diet. I was eating like an active linebacker and had been doing so for almost a decade now. I had a brief pause while I was undergoing my first rehab program, but that left me hungry all the time. I would need to eat smaller meals, but I would need to eat them every few hours, to keep my insulin up during the whole day. If your insulin is up, so is your general metabolism. I'd need to stretch the duration of the meals to at least twenty minutes each, so my stomach can tell my brain it's full. I learned that in physiology class.

Step two was changing what I ate. I had to get rid of the fast food and the fatty shit, like muffins, and replace it with fruits and vegetables. I got up and went through the kitchen cabinets. There was hardly any junk food left in them. I had eaten it all. I shrugged and compiled a shopping list, making sure to include bran and muesli on it.

The prospect of a diet is always an unpleasant one. I knew I'd need all my resolve to stick with the new diet but, after last night, I had it in spades.

The diet was to stop me from gaining any more weight. However, the human body has a miraculous capacity for reducing its metabolism and preventing weight loss that comes from a diminished diet. No matter how little you eat, your body can always spend less. It can also make you ravenous with hunger. To lose the weight, I'd need to actively burn off the calories.

My rehab was complete and the knee was okay, even though I can now predict weather changes with it. The problem was that running full tilt was off the table for me, particularly if it was over uneven terrain, or included making sudden changes in direction. My knee could endure a full load, so long as it was slowly applied and released. Any violation to those guidelines brought about a risk of repeating my injury and getting a permanent limp.

I really wasn't looking forward to using a cane at twenty-one, no matter how pimp that might make me look. I had done a lot of stationary biking during my rehab stints and they had always left my balls throbbing with a dull pain, so biking was off the table. I was left with only two options for exercise: swimming and hiking. Since I swam about as well as most rocks, hiking was the order of the day.

I listened to the radio on my way over to the supermarket to buy my new groceries. The weather forecast said it would be a warm autumn day and that there was no chance of rain. My knee already said so, but I wanted a professional's second opinion, just to be sure. Skip wasn't at work when I got to the supermarket. It didn't matter. I'd apologize and hit him up for that lawyer's number later.

I paid for everything with cash from my gangsta roll, as I usually did. I made my own money by building cars from spare parts I found. I fiddled with stuff ever since I could remember, fixing broken down appliances and such, but I only started working on cars after we had moved to Riverside. Mostly cause there are two salvage yards in town. They are a fountain of free parts, if you can intimidate the guard dogs with a look.

Building a car took time, effort and skill, but it required very little money down. This was perfect for me, since my parents never gave me an allowance, not even after I got them jobs here in Riverside. They claimed they didn't want me to grow up spoiled, but I think they were just greedy.

I built my first car during the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of high school. I sold it for almost three thousand dollars and felt like I had conquered the world. I built two cars a year since then. One in the spring, after I spent the whole school year finding parts for it, and one in the summer, cause I'd have the time to devote my days to it while school was out.

A teenaged boy could only get so far on football fame, particularly if he only wore two pairs of jeans the whole school year long, so I sold the cars I built to buy the stuff I wanted: clothes, deodorant, computer, cellphone, etc. I was frugal. My poor upbringing had taught me how to be. I shopped carefully and only when it was necessary, stretching everything I had to the limit.

I deeply regretted giving one of my cars to Ashley. Especially since it had directly led to my hospitalization for a puncture wound to the penis, but I pushed those thoughts aside. That was in the past and that was where it was going to stay. The money I could have gotten for that car was long gone, never to return. I was focused on today. Today was all that mattered.

In college, I only had the time to build one car over my summer breaks. Like I already said, if not for my frugal ways, I'd be destitute. As it was, I still had over four hundred dollars left, not counting next month's rent and utilities. And that was after I spent thirty on groceries. It was a bad situation, to be sure, but I was confident I'd either find a job by the time that money ran out, or I'd find a chassis to start building another car on. Maybe fix some appliances for a quick buck, too.

Of course, I could always sell my current car, but it was my baby. It was a 1973 Ford Falcon GT, the Pursuit Special from the Mad Max movies. Well, that was the body I had put over it and painted black with two wide, white racing stripes. It didn't look like the V8 Interceptor from the movies, cause it didn't have the giant superchargers sticking out of the hood, nor were the wheel arches flared. The engine also wasn't an actual V8 monster. My car was more inspired by Tarantino's "Death Proof". It was armored like a proper Hollywood stunt car. It was the fifth car I ever built, and it was my proudest achievement in life.

The car was what had brought me and my college friends together. I had been a huge guy from the football team. An anomaly in each of the Intro to Engineering classes I had taken. But the minute the other engineering students saw my car, they recognized it as the unmodified Pursuit Special. I offered them a few rides and I was neck-deep in buddies. It's that cool a car, particularly amongst the kind of guys that study mechanical engineering at college.

I would probably have to sell it in a few weeks. I wished I knew where I could find a V8 engine to restore and a giant supercharger, too. The two Riverside salvage yards had superchargers, intercoolers and several V8 engines between them, but those were all broken due to metal fatigue or crashes. Which was a real shame. If I could make my baby look like the iconic V8 Interceptor, I could probably sell it for a lot of money. Maybe even enough to cover my medical bills with it. As it was, the car just had "V8 Interceptor" written across the back in shiny, aluminium lettering.

And yes, it's called aluminium, not aluminum. Check your facts or be prepared to get yelled at by your college chemistry professor. IUPAC doesn't screw around.

Even though it was past noon by the time I got home and put away my groceries, I decided to go hiking that very day. There was no point in stalling, now was there?

Eight miles west of Riverside is Stony Mountain, a mountain with some nice trails that offer scenic views of the countryside and even has a popular, if unimpressive, ski slope. Of course, the ski slope had no snow on it, but the trails were always open. I had visited a few times, back when I had been in high school.

I stuffed my backpack with water bottles and sugary snacks. It's important to have some sugar intake every forty minutes while you're doing exercise, otherwise your muscles start to burn the very protein that they're made of. With a small hit of sugar, the body resets its metabolism to burning sugar and fat, instead.

I put on a fresh pair of boxers, a clean T-shirt and socks. I put a replacement for each into the backpack, along with a small towel. I put on my knee brace and pulled a pair of sweatpants out of my closet. When I grabbed a hoodie, I revealed a jersey from college beneath it.

The writing on the back read 0.621mph. It was a joke jersey my engineering friends from college got me after the first time they saw me play and heard people chant kph at me. The sight of it nearly made me tear up.

I told myself they could wait until tomorrow. I had made a decision to change things around and I was going to stick with it. Today was the day I started on my weight loss. Tomorrow, I'd start to make amends and reach out to people. The competitive athlete in me wanted to go for a double on the first day, but the memory of the pity in Skip's eyes kept me on the straight and narrow. It was one thing a day, each day. I was going to let them pile up.

Maybe I'd go for a double next week.

I put on my hoodie and closed the closet. A pair of sturdy hiking boots that laced up the ankles completed my outfit. I looked myself over in the mirror opposite my front door, sighed and drove to Stony Mountain.

After a brief warm-up routine, I started my hike. There were many trails available, ranked by how steep and demanding they were. I chose the easiest one, the main trail that looped all the way around the mountain twice before reaching the top. My knee should be able to handle it and there was no point in going overboard with the first real exercise I had in almost a year.

I really enjoyed the hike. The trees were still mostly green and I was honestly looking forward to seeing the deciduous ones change color over the coming days. The air was crisp and smelled fresh. The birds were singing and the sun was obscured by clouds. I was safe from overheating, though I did take a big drink of water with each sugar break.

I spent most of my time and concentration on watching my footing and making triple sure I didn't step into a hole, or anything. Between that and admiring the scenery, my mind was too busy to dwell on the cesspool my life had become. Even the laundry list of steps I needed to take to dig myself out of it was bereft of my attention, for the time being.

At one point, my knee started to feel tender. It snapped me out of my reverie and I looked around. I was about halfway up the mountain and I had made a ten mile circle around its slopes. I realized I was also tired, having made a vertical ascent of more than half a mile as I hiked. I hadn't done anything as strenuous as that in almost a year. In light of those two things, I decided to end my hike at a big clearing I knew. It was some ten minutes ahead of me.

The clearing itself was a crossroads between the main trail, which I had climbed to get there, and a steeper, side trail. It was a large, flat meadow, ringed by trees and the mountain itself. There was a tall promontory on the eastern side that provided a great view. Few people bothered to climb it and some even missed it until they were right next to it, since the same trees that ring the clearing also obscure the promontory from view. All in all, the clearing was a perfect place to rest before going back down the mountain. The summit could wait for another day. A day when I had more faith in my knee.