Love in the Time of Gym Class

Presidential Fitness

When we paired up, we always paired up together. History projects, and math exams, and charades by the fence after the bell rang. We weren’t the only girls in our friend group. It was like do and re. There were other notes, sure, but you couldn’t forget the first two.

She held my feet, her hands on top of my dirty Keds. Kneeling in front of me while I faced the ceiling, my elbows out like chicken wings and fingers cupping my ponytail. I waited for the whistle, the gym floor cold under my back.

And when it came, I pulled my stomach muscles in and curled. And curled. My breath left me every time I got to the top. Her eyes crossed on my first rep. She pressed down on my feet, and I felt myself push her away and give in as I completed the circuit again. Her tongue caught between her teeth when I pulled up again. 

My stomach tightened. It was supposed to, though.

We’d done the chin-ups the class before, stood at the end of the line making up lies about presidents doing their own test. “Calvin Coolidge won the presidency because of his mile time,” I said.

“And Rutherford Hayes was stacked, like a log cabin.”

“The B stood for built. I read that.”

“Abraham Lincoln squatted the big blue ox,” she said.

“That was Paul Bunyan,” I said.

“They were lovers,” she said, and again, that peek of tongue between her lips, but suddenly it was my turn. I did a single pull-up and lost my will to continue. She hung like a wet towel from the bar until they told her she could get down. She never wanted to be seen failing. She quit games of chess halfway through when she saw the end game coming. 

“I disappointed our founding fathers,” she said. “I’m a bad patriot.”

I finished my crunches, and we switched positions. Her laces were pink and ridged. From this spot, I could see the line of her gym shirt skimming against her shorts and a half-inch of skin there. 

Once, when we had a sleepover, all of us, do and re and mi and sol, split a bag of Starbursts and dared each other to unwrap them with our tongues. Kissing practice. Sol said she didn’t need to practice on candy, and we gasped for breath, laughing. This boy, that boy. Their names circulated through our melody, breaking up the rhythm for a few weeks. We knew those boys were practice for something bigger. Starbursts were practice for something better, sweeter, we hoped.

All the sex appeal was hypothetical. The wrappers came out wet and waxy and partially torn. I couldn’t use my tongue well enough and resorted to my teeth, and I caught her watching me as I took the paper out between my lips like the worst ATM.

“Gross,” she said, but she smiled. “We should try cherry stems,” she said, but she turned to the room when she said it. “We should try cherries next time.”

Yes, next time, they sang. We sang.

I waited for the whistle. 

What if she crunched up, and I took that tongue in my mouth. If I leaned over her knees and held her there, her back arched up in a vee and my ponytail a mess.

But the whistle blew, and she stayed flat, the only motion her stomach rising and falling. 

The rest of the gym was waves of bodies moving. Heads coming up, going down, until I almost lost my own breath. My own stomach hurt watching her lie there. Lay there. I never knew the difference. It was one of those things where, no matter what I put, it felt right and wrong at the same time. I rewrote the sentence so I never had to use it.

Finally, her head tilted, the arch of her chin tipping toward me. Her glance rested on my face, but she didn’t raise her head from the gym floor. Instead, a slice of tongue appeared between her lips. Pink and soft and soft and pink, I watched until I felt like I needed to salute, to put my hand over my heart and pledge something I didn’t know yet how to give.