Mr. Brandolini's Assignment

v. quenched thirst

Dedicated to demeanour because she fucks basketball coaches

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v. quenched thirst

I only pretend to dislike yoga because it’s the one thing my mother loves.

We had signed up for class almost a year ago and seriously, that room with that big Tanjavur painting and the wooden floor and the cheap cane chicks on the windows became like my favourite place in the world because a lot of shit was going down in my life, the shittiest of the shit being that I was developing a tendency to think about Jürgen Lilienthal a lot more than what I considered normal, or what anyone considered a normal amount of thinking to do about any one person at any given point in time. The least shitty of the shit was that I wrote my SAT and got like 8 on the essay, which was the biggest, cruelest kick to my (unhealthily inflated) ego, especially because Jürgen got 10 and he literally wrote about how a Jethro Tull CD helped him understand the meaning of life (as if he’s got it all figured out). Anyway, so yoga was like this refuge from all the trials and tribulations of love and standardized testing. And I suppose it still was, in February 2014, only then I was in a better position when it came to both of those things.

 Monday to Friday passed and I didn’t go to yoga class, mostly because my mother didn’t go either and she always woke me up for it. But Saturday was boot camp and I didn’t want to miss it, even though Ma was still asleep at 6.45 when I woke up. Boot camp wasn’t exactly military-style boot camp – we just split into teams and took turns challenging each other, so like one time our team will declare that we’ll do fifteen rounds of the set and the other team will challenge that they can do more, and if they do end up doing more, they get the points, even if we could do it too. Sometimes it gets lame because we’ll be like OKAY WE’RE GONNA DO THIRTY and the other team is just like HAHA SUCK IT WE’LL DO THIRTY-ONE which is so boring, but whoever wins the challenge will get ten points, or twenty, depending on how hard the set is. It was pretty fun. We had a rolling trophy and everything.

 I was a bit late because I took a bus and the MTC system is highly unreliable. Everyone was already lying down and breathing and there was one space free in the corner of the class.

 After five minutes of breathing we did our basic stretches and then we were split into the boot camp teams. I stayed where I was. A guy walked up to me.

 ‘Sup, palm tree.’

 I blinked.

 ‘Oh. Hi.’

 It was Aggressively Flexible Omar, now wearing sweatpants and a muscle tee, both navy blue and matching. I, on the other hand, was wearing a frayed Jack Daniels t-shirt and slacks.

 ‘Weight-induced panic?’ Omar inquired, bouncing up and down on his toes to warm up. ‘Didn’t see you the whole week.’

 ‘Partly,’ I said. ‘And partly because boot camp is fun in a second-grade kind of way.’

 He was looking around at our team.

 ‘It appears I am team captain.’

 I didn’t respond. I was too busy trying to figure out how old he was. He could’ve been anywhere between eighteen and thirty, which was a troublingly wide range.

 I found no suitable opportunity to ask him. A question like how old are you had certain contexts in which it’s warranted, like in educational institutions or at kids’ birthday parties or when your hookup gets a call from her mother at 11 PM and both of you are half-dressed and panting in a public bathroom. But I technically had no reason to want to know how old Aggressively Flexible Omar was, so I let it slide and assumed that he was twenty, twenty-one-ish, unless proven otherwise.