Alex's grip slipped slightly on the bar and she reset, chalk dust on her palms, watching Leo finish his set out of the corner of her eye.
Twenty-three.
Clean reps, every single one, no kip, no compromise on the lockout. She'd counted without meaning to, the way she always did, and arrived at the same number she'd been arriving at for the past two weeks. A year ago he'd been at nineteen and she'd thought that was close to a ceiling. Apparently ceilings moved if you were annoying enough about training through them.
He dropped from the bar and rolled his shoulders.
"Twenty-three," she said.
"You counted."
"I always count."
"You say that like it's not slightly insane."
"It's not insane, it's data collection." She wiped her palms on her shorts. "A year ago you were at nineteen."
"I know."
"That's a four rep increase in a year on a movement you'd already been training for six years before that."
"I know, Alex."
"I'm just contextualizing it."
"You're bragging on my behalf."
"I would never." She got up onto the bar herself, found her grip, and started her own set.
A year.
It didn't feel like a year. It felt like the natural continuation of something that had always been running, the way a river doesn't feel like it's a year further downstream from where you last looked at it — it just looks like more river. But it had been a year. Grade nine now, both of them, and the version of herself standing in this park doing muscle ups was different enough from the version a year ago that if she lined the two of them up side by side she wasn't sure they'd immediately recognize each other.
Twelve clean reps. She finished her set and dropped, breathing controlled, satisfied with the form even if the volume was still a fraction of his.
"Twelve," Leo said.
"I know, I was there."
"I'm contextualizing."
"You're being smug."
"A little."
She wiped her hands again and looked at him, this whole — situation of him, basically. The Muay Thai had done something to his shoulders that calisthenics alone hadn't quite finished. He'd found a gym eight months ago, properly licensed, an actual coach who'd taken one look at his self-taught shin kick and spent the first three sessions just unlearning bad habits before building anything new. He went twice a week now on top of everything else, and it showed in the way he moved — economical, balanced, like his body had learned a second vocabulary and was getting fluent in it.
She would never tell him he looked good doing it.
She thought it constantly. She would never say it.
"What," Leo said.
"Nothing."
"You're staring."
"I'm resting between sets."
"You're staring at me while resting between sets."
"That's allowed."
He smiled the smile that meant he wasn't going to push it but was filing it away anyway, which was somehow worse than if he'd just pushed it.
They moved through the rest of the session — gymnastics drills next, since both of them had been part of the club for a year now and Leo had gotten unreasonably good at the ring work for someone who'd started purely to support Alex's interest and then discovered he genuinely liked it. She worked her beam routine on the low practice rail they'd set up improvised between two park benches, which wasn't regulation height but was good enough for drilling the sequence.
"You're rushing the dismount," Leo said, from where he was holding a still ring position with the kind of stillness that made it look effortless.
"I'm not rushing it."
"You are. You stick the landing fine but you're not finishing the line before you go."
"I finish the line."
"You don't. Watch the next one."
She did the sequence again. Watched herself in her head as she did it, the way he'd taught her to do years ago — feel the position from inside it rather than just executing the motion.
She'd cut the landing short. He was right. She always hated when he was right and he was right an irritating amount of the time about things like this.
"Fine," she said, landing. "I rushed it."
"Told you."
"You didn't have to look so pleased about it."
"I'm not pleased."
"You're extremely pleased."
"I'm satisfied that my coaching is effective."
"That's the same thing as pleased."
"It's really not."
They went through it a few more times until she had it clean, and then they sat on the grass with their water and did the part of the morning that had become, over the past year, the actual point of the morning rather than just the cooldown.
"What are you thinking about," Leo said.
"Nothing."
"You had a face."
"I don't have faces, that's your whole thing."
"You have a specific face. The one where you're thinking about something and trying to look like you're not thinking about anything." He looked at her. "Is it about how hot your boyfriend is."
"As if."
"It's a fair question."
"It's an extremely narcissistic question."
"It's self-awareness."
"It's narcissism with better PR."
He raised both hands in mock surrender, and she allowed herself exactly one half-second of looking at him — at the actual, factual, undeniable truth of the situation, which was that her boyfriend was objectively, by any reasonable metric, very good looking, and she was never, under any circumstances, going to confirm this to his face because his ego required no further inflation.
"I was thinking about the numbers, actually," she said, which was true, and easier to say out loud than the other thing.
"Which numbers."
"All of them. I was doing the math again last night." She pulled her knees up. "Flappy Bird crossed five million downloads this month."
Leo looked at her. "Five million."
"Five million. Worldwide. Which — for an app built by two thirteen year olds in five weeks, in 2009, is not a small number. It's not Angry Birds, but it's genuinely significant for what it is."
"And the money."
"A hundred thousand each. Total. Since launch." She said it plainly, the way she said most numbers, but there was something underneath the plainness that she wasn't fully hiding. "Twenty in the first few months, then the premium tier launched and it basically quadrupled the trajectory. Eighty more over this past year alone."
Leo was quiet for a second, turning his water bottle in his hands. "A hundred thousand dollars."
"Each."
"I know each, I'm just — saying it out loud is different from looking at the spreadsheet."
"I know." Alex looked at the grass. "And that's not counting your channel."
"That's a separate category of insane."
"It really is." She glanced at him. "Five hundred thousand subscribers, Leo. Do you understand what that actually means right now, in 2010? I looked into it. There are channels with a tenth of your subscriber count that are considered massive. You're sitting in the same range as some of the biggest channels that exist on the entire platform, and you're a fitness and cooking channel run by a fourteen year old."
"I don't think about it like that."
"You should occasionally."
"It's weird to think about it like that."
"It's accurate to think about it like that." She nudged his shoulder with hers. "A hundred thousand from the channel this year. On top of the Flappy Bird money. You're sitting on two hundred thousand dollars total."
Leo was quiet for a moment, looking out at the park.
"That's a lot of money for someone who still has to ask his dad to drive him places," he said.
"It is deeply funny when you put it that way."
"I don't feel like someone with two hundred thousand dollars."
"What does someone with two hundred thousand dollars feel like."
"I don't know. Different, probably. I just feel like — me. Doing the things I'd be doing anyway." He shrugged. "The money's just a number that's there. It doesn't change the mornings."
Alex looked at him for a moment, something in her expression softening slightly in the way it did when he said something that landed more honestly than he probably realized.
"It's invested, right," she said. "Both of ours."
"Mostly. Alfred helped me set up the accounts properly last year. Some of it's just sitting, some of it's in actual investments now. I'm not touching most of it."
"Same. My dad keeps trying to get excited about it and my mom keeps reminding him it's not actually his money."
"Phil wants to use it for something."
"Dad wants to use it for a boat."
"Does he."
"He hasn't said boat specifically, but I know my father. It's a boat."
Leo laughed, actually laughed, and the sound of it settled into the morning the way it always did, easy and unguarded.
"What about Haley," he said, after a moment. "How'd the practice test go."
"Thirteen-oh-six. Fifth one in that range now."
"Consistent."
"Consistent and good. She started at nine eighty, Leo. That's a three hundred point swing in less than a year."
"I know. I was there for most of it."
"You were there for all of it. I just sat in the corner and said unhelpful things."
"You said plenty of helpful things between the unhelpful ones."
"That's generous."
"It's accurate." He looked at her. "She's actually serious about nursing now. Like genuinely. She talks about it differently than she used to talk about things."
"I noticed that too. It's not performance anymore. It's a plan." Alex pulled at the grass. "Also Dylan's actually done. Properly done, not the on-and-off thing. She told me herself, six weeks ago. Said they'd grown into different people."
"That's a mature sentence coming from her."
"Right? I almost didn't recognize it as something she'd say."
"People change. Apparently even Haley."
"Apparently." Alex looked at the park, at the light coming up gold through the trees, the whole morning settling into the kind of quiet that didn't need filling. "It's strange. A year ago none of this existed in the form it exists now. The money, the subscribers, Haley actually being good at school, you doing Muay Thai properly instead of from sketchy internet videos."
"You doing twelve clean muscle ups."
"That too." She bumped his shoulder again. "It's a lot of change for one year."
"Good change though."
"Good change," she agreed.
They sat for a while longer, neither of them in a hurry to move, the park slowly filling in around them with the ordinary business of a Sunday morning — a jogger on the far path, a dog investigating something with great seriousness, the sun climbing high enough now that the grass had stopped being cold.
"Twenty-three," Alex said, eventually, apropos of nothing.
"I know."
"That's a really good number."
"I know that too."
"I'm just saying it because you like hearing it."
"I do like hearing it."
"I'm aware. That's why I said it."
He looked at her sideways, and she let herself look back this time, no half-second limit on it, because there was nobody around to perform composure for and because a year in, she'd mostly stopped needing to anyway.
"Twelve," he said.
"I know."
"It's a really good number too."
"I'm aware."
"I'm just saying it because I know you like hearing it."
"I do," she admitted. "Marginally."
He smiled at that, and they sat there a while longer in the kind of quiet that didn't need filling, the park warm and familiar around them, the whole accumulated weight of a year — the money, the subscribers, the downloads, all of it — somehow lighter than it should have been, because none of it was the actual point. The actual point was still just this. The mornings. The two of them.
End of Chapter 36
Leo rn :
Alex rn: