singles.

Cooper is twelve years old and a treasure in his tennis whites, and I am unremarkable, eleven, blurred at the edges like some uncertain shoreline.  He only speaks to me because he sees Coach Drown's hands linger too long on my hips when he's teaching me topspins.  We're pairing up, Cooper declares, claiming me from across the court with the wide end of his racquet.  He spends the rest of practice serving straight down the line, aiming to concuss.  Cooper Corentin plays tennis like we're in trenches.  Come on, kid, fight back, he says.  If I were a fucking truck, would you just stand there on the dotted line?

Coach Drown is a truck.  Every Thursday afternoon, he rakes me over for roadkill, and I lie there bisected below him with the taste of gravel in my throat.  I should be used to it by now, but sometimes he still catches me full in the nerves like headlights.  I'm practicing my backhand these days.  Cooper has to twist to combat it.  It draws his white body taut, and Drown's fingerprints blossom blue behind his knees, dismissible as a trick of the light to someone who isn't looking.

After the set Cooper pulls me alone into a hallway, steadies me three feet in front of him, and lifts his right hand as if taking an oath.

I'm going to hit you, he says.

I don't nod, but I don't move away, either, so he strikes me.  The sound of his palm against my cheek is sharp and clean, like a gunshot.  Cooper waits a few seconds, then hits me again, hard as he can.  He heaves his whole body into the blow.  I hug the wall and slip to my knees, reduced again to driving detritus.  I am cooking somewhere on a back road.  I am two wings crushed on a windshield.  Cooper could stamp me to scraps beneath his clay-scuffed outsoles, but instead, he cups my elbows in his hands and draws me upright.  This time--this time--he makes a fist.

Why are you letting me do this to you? he says.

He flies for me.  I don't move because nothing makes me; he weakens somewhere between his shoulder and my eyes, because his knuckles only graze my jawline, tender.  My stillness scrapes a match inside of him.  He hurls me against the trophy case.  Plaques and old pictures.  Drown smiling '88 to '01 with his hungry hands on the smalls of small backs.

Flinch! Cooper yells at me.  Are you me!  What's so dead inside you that you can't even flinch!

Has Cooper Corentin wet a recent bed?  Does Cooper grow ice in his knees when a grown man passes too close behind him?  Cooper's got this bad habit of cutting through the backcourts when he takes his breaks, where batteries of rebounding tennis balls could shatter him at shin-level.  I used to think it was bravery.  Now I know it's only the same dented thing inside of him that robs the motion from inside of me, makes him move into the battlefield--makes me want to sit down in it.

Flinch! Cooper screams.   Damn it!  Flinch!  One of us has to make this stop!

He's right.  We've got the same handprints bruised beneath our wristbands.  He's right.  So when he winds his fist toward me for the last time, I deflect his arm through the trophy case with my racquet.

There is a sound like a car accident.  The entire pane falls at once to pieces, as if it had always been a breath away from breaking.  I close my eyes against the confusion of it all, and when I open my eyes, Cooper is elevating an arm that's weeping blood.  It's his right one, the one that knows how to punch back volleys in gorgeous, crippling lines.  I speak for the first time in weeks to try to take it back:

Cooper, I--

But Cooper kisses me standing there on the glass, quick and nonsexual.  Kisses me exactly like Drown doesn't, like a gift and not an extraction.  Someone must've heard that, he says when he leans away, and catches the crook of my elbow with his good hand to drag me away from the wreckage.

We run back through the locker room, sticky with steam.  We dodge Drown in the doorway and his face makes my pulse sting in my fingertips.  Our school embraces a busy slip of road that everyone small hates.  We plunge into the traffic without looking and have to separate around a blue sedan that can't stop in time.  Cooper bobs forward, safe, to the opposite sidewalk, and I--

(--could just stand there.  Roadkill.  Part of me considers it.  This morning, my mom wept as she butchered my breakfast in a chipped skillet, her spatula like a stiletto:  I'm worried sick about you.  I don't even know if you can hear me.  By then, I was too disembodied to shiver under cold showers, but I could return a good serve in my sleep.  My mother loves me.  She only took me to practice because it made me look awake.)

--fling myself backwards because I'm tired of waiting for cars.  Because I know in my child's heart that I will never again play tennis, so I don't value my balance.

Because this day, today, Cooper Corentin has reminded me how to flinch.