Second Skin - Chapter 0009 

Chapter 9

The side door to the court opened before anyone could process what had been said. It wasn’t the locker room door, but the other one, made of gray metal, on the opposite side, which led to the teachers’ corridor and which Sebastian had assumed was locked. It creaked against the wall and let through four adults, one behind the other, all dressed in tracksuits, each with a clipboard under their arm and a stopwatch hanging around their neck. They entered without haste, without introducing themselves, as if they were arriving at their own office, and spread out across the court, each heading towards a corner that seemed to already belong to them.

Only then did Sebastian realize what had been there all along, but which he, distracted by trying not to exist, hadn’t seen: piles of orange cones against the back wall, a measuring tape stretched out on the floor and secured at the ends with masking tape, a wooden box leaning against the side with a ruler resting on top, four thin blue mats stacked under the basketball hoop, half-erased chalk marks on the floor—none of them corresponding to any sport he knew—and a thick rope, hanging from a hook, rising until it disappeared between the beams.

The “lucky” day had been prepared before anyone even arrived.

He saw the four adults clearly: a woman around forty, her hair tied in a ponytail so tight it pulled at her temples, a whistle between her teeth, her eyes already counting the students in line; a man older than Smith, in a faded baseball cap, with a protruding belly and unshaven white beard, who moved as if his knees were protesting as he walked and rested his clipboard on it to take notes; a young man too thin to look like a real teacher, with a sparse goatee, a college sweatshirt draped over his open jacket; and a tall, lean man with thin-rimmed glasses pushed high on his head, who went straight to the wooden box to adjust the ruler.

Smith didn’t introduce them. He tapped his clipboard twice on his thigh, as if calling a dog, and the line straightened. “When I point, you go.” He pointed, and, together with the woman with the ponytail, he went down the line from each end, sending each one to their corner: “You, over there.” “You, over there.” “You, with her.” Without asking names, without looking at the clipboard. A quick glance, from sneakers to the top of their heads, was enough, and his finger already knew their destination. Sebastian observed two groups to understand the criteria and, when he realized it, felt his face burn.

It wasn’t alphabetical order. It was body type.

The “big” boys stayed with Smith: the huge blond boy in front, the boy with the shaved head, a tall black boy with a neatly trimmed afro and broad shoulders, plus five or six others who showed off muscles from some sport. The girls were divided into two groups, one with the woman with the ponytail, the other with the man with the baseball cap, and suddenly the immense court seemed to shrink from so much space being occupied.

The rest were left over.

There were seven of them, including Sebastian, and one only had to look at them to see what they had in common: a chubby boy who constantly tugged at his shirt hem, one with braces and a long neck, one with black hair falling into his eyes and legs as thin as lines, one with dark skin and round glasses with an inhaler bulging in his pocket, and two strangers who didn’t even look at anyone. Boys in that awkward phase, between childhood and adolescence, their bodies too small for the group, a stage the others had already left behind. The goatee-wearing teacher, the youngest of the group, stayed with them—it wasn’t hard to guess why.

Sebastian was the last to be pointed at. Smith’s finger lingered a second longer on him, moving up from his sneakers to his hair and back down again, and his mustache twitched slightly. “There.” That was enough.

The goatee-wearing teacher led those seven to the baseline, away from the others, and ordered them to sit on the floor, leaving an arm’s length between each one. The cold wood pierced their shorts. Sebastian bent his knees and watched the teacher lower the stopwatch from his neck, raise it between his thumb and forefinger like in an old movie.

“You’re going to do sit-ups.” The voice came out louder than the body promised, as if it were compensating. “Non-stop, until you hit a mark. I won’t tell you what it is. Because I hope you won’t be satisfied with that. Okay?”

No one answered. The chubby boy adjusted his shirt. The one with braces swallowed hard. Sebastian wanted to know the exact number: a tangible goal was more manageable than “to the limit,” especially when his limit was known, short, and public.

“Lie down.”

They lay down. A chill ran up their necks. Up above, far away, the tall windows showed the white January sky; between him and them, gray iron beams with accumulated dust and even a bird’s nest stuck in a corner—a detail he would never have noticed the day before. He crossed his arms over his chest, raised his feet, and waited for the stopwatch to click.

He knew sit-ups like an old enemy: first the trembling, on the third or fourth repetition, a tension creeping under his ribs; then his neck taking on the strain that his abdomen could no longer bear, and the throbbing pain at the base of his skull; then the burning sensation. In six schools, he had never gotten past the eighth. The numbers were already swirling in his head—between six and nine, depending on breakfast—and, after them, the certainty that the teacher would note his result with pity, or simply ignore it, which was worse.

Beep.
Up.
Down.
Up.
No trembling came, no burning. On the fourth repetition, he waited for the signal that never came; he rose again, all his attention turned inward, waiting for some snap, but there was nothing to hear. His belly folded and unfolded like an oiled hinge, and he returned to the floor only to rise again, without a single fiber asking for a break.
Seven. Eight. Nine.

On the left, the chubby boy fell backward, hands covering his face, panting. On the right, the boy with braces attempted a sixth, his feet lifting off the floor with each climb, his whole body throwing itself forward. Further on, the skinny boy sat, elbows on his knees, staring at his own belly as if demanding a favor. Five. Four. One of them didn’t even manage three. Sebastian saw everything through half-closed eyes: the drop running down the chubby boy’s temple; the sweat appearing on the upper lip of the boy with braces; the teacher with the goatee, mouth slightly open, pen two centimeters from the paper.

He understood the setup: the teacher had been handed the weakest group expecting the bare minimum, and the bare minimum was what he got—six boys who, combined, could barely manage ten sit-ups. And then there was Sebastian. The teacher’s expression wasn’t anger: it was the astonishment of someone opening an empty locker and finding something inside.
Twenty. Twenty-one.

Then his mouth closed, and his eyes left the ones who had stopped and settled on Sebastian.
He continued; stopping would have been a choice, and there was no reason for it. His body didn’t complain. He kept going up and down in an automatic rhythm—one second up, one second down—while his gaze jumped from the beam with the nest to his own knees and back with each repetition, and with each cycle the teacher took one more step closer.

At forty, he stopped counting. Not because he’d forgotten, but because the numbers frightened him.
The teacher checked the stopwatch. Looked at him. Checked the display again and took a step, as if a different angle might reveal a trick: a boy weighing just over forty kilos, so pale that the veins in his neck turn blue, moving up and down silently, dry face, breathing only through his nose. The other six were already seated, silent; the only sound was the rustling of Sebastian’s shirt against the wood, a whisper of fabric, and, in the distance, the whistles of the other stations.

He didn’t know how much time had passed. The teacher did. With a quick glance, Sebastian caught the red digits: four minutes and change. Four minutes of sit-ups. His rational side did the math—four thirty—and refused to accept it.

The teacher pressed the button. A short, sharp beep.
“Good,” the voice came out thin. “You can stop.”

That was for Sebastian alone. The others had been resting for so long that the plural would have been absurd. He went down one last time and lay there, looking at the nest, waiting for some belated message, a sign of pain—but nothing happened. He sat up.

Six pairs of eyes stared at him. The chubby one, mouth agape. The one with braces, brow furrowed as if solving an equation. No one laughed. It was another expression, difficult to name, something Sebastian had never seen directed at him before.

The teacher wrote down the names, one by one, and when he got to his, he hesitated, pen suspended in mid-air.
“Do you play any sports? Swimming, wrestling, I don’t know?”
Sebastian shook his head. Another automatic gesture to an adult. He’d lost count.

The teacher wrote. He checked what he had written. Then, without lifting his eyes from the paper, he announced to the group:
“You may move on to the next station.”

The next station was the man in the cap, standing at the side of the court near the teachers’ door. He looked like someone who had given that test to dozens of classes and expected nothing from any of them. He recited the same memorized speech, almost without pausing: the mark, I won’t say which one, I hope you don’t get complacent, all right. He didn’t even wait for the “all right.” He raised the stopwatch.

Sebastian knelt, placed his hands on the wood, and stretched out his legs. His right palm touched a sticky residue; looking down, he saw a dark stain of old chewing gum, crumpled and marked by shoe soles. He moved his hand ten centimeters.

Push-ups had always been worse than sit-ups: there was no rest between them, just frail arms holding up forty kilos. He remembered his first teacher in the Bronx, hanging onto his students’ arms while counting aloud: “One… One… One…” because Sebastian couldn’t get past the first push-up. He was nine years old. He still remembered that man’s last name.

Beep.
Down.
Up.
His chest almost touched the floorboards and pushed back up. The smell of the floor ten centimeters from his nose: old nail polish, dust, tennis shoe rubber, sweat ingrained in the cracks. Down. Up. His arms didn’t tremble. He waited for his elbow to give way, his shoulder to crack, his belly to sag before his chest—all the familiar failures—but nothing happened. His arms pushed against the floor, and the floor pushed back.

Around him, the others dropped faster than at the previous station. The sit-ups had used up what energy they had left. The chubby boy went down and didn’t come back up: he lay face down, arms outstretched, panting like a dog. The boy with braces did four. The skinny boy, three—on the fourth, his knees hit the floor with a thump that made the man in the cap turn his head. None of them reached five. The boy with round glasses, sitting down, rummaged in his shorts pocket looking for his inhaler.

Sebastian looked at the floor: the cracked board, the head of a nail sunk into the varnish, a dried insect with its legs up half a meter ahead, going up and down along with him. One second, another second. He no longer knew how many push-ups he had done. He only knew that the man in the cap had lowered the stopwatch and was watching him, clipboard tucked against his stomach, cap tilted backward, as if it had been forgotten there.

The beep came—late. Four minutes and forty, he read on the display as he got up. He hadn’t missed a single repetition.
“Stand up.”

They stood up. The six of them had their t-shirts clinging to their backs, their faces flushed, and a bead of sweat hung from the nose of the most robust boy. The boy with braces had his hands propped on his knees. And there was Sebastian, among them, with a dry t-shirt. He ran the back of his hand across his forehead, looked at it—and it was dry too. This, more than any recorded time, churned his stomach. He wasn’t even panting.

From that point on, the stations merged. Not in memory—he would recall them for days on end, with unsettling clarity—but in sensation: at each point in the circuit, exactly the same thing occurred, and the repetition transformed everything into a single blur.

There was the squat, with the tall man, glasses perched on his forehead, counting softly under his breath until, suddenly, he fell silent. The wooden box for measuring flexibility—a ruler perched on top—where the student sat with legs extended and pushed the mark with his fingertips. Sebastian felt it without the usual popping sound in the back of his thighs, when his knees give way on their own, and the ruler marked further than the ponytail instructor had recorded for the girls before him. She checked the instrument twice, searched his legs for any hidden folds, and noted it down.

He jumped vertically against the wall, chalk on his fingertips. He etched his white mark onto a spot where only Smith’s group’s prints remained, a hand’s breadth above the highest one. The goatee-wearing professor, called in to help, stood there motionless, staring at the spot like someone reviewing a bank statement and finding an absurd amount.

And then came the so-called “suicide.” Sebastian already knew the name from other schools and had always seen it as an exaggeration. It wasn’t. Running to the line, squatting, touching the ground, running back, squatting again, touching, advancing past the cones every five meters with the whistle of the ponytail-haired instructor marking a rhythm that accelerated series after series. It was the only task in which even the athletes from Smith fell: the huge blond bent over on the fourth lap, the shaved-headed boy coughing, hands on his hips. Sebastian ran, touched the cold wood with his fingertips, turned, and moved on. On one of the turns, his smooth-soled shoe slipped, but he adjusted his hips without thinking, in a movement he himself had never seen his body make. He ran until the final whistle sounded—and then stopped, not for lack of breath, but because the whistle commanded him to.

The instructor stopped the stopwatch, waited two seconds, looked up, measured the cones, stared at Sebastian, and only then wrote down the result.

At each station, the same brief hesitation occurred: the pause, the second glance, the pen suspended in mid-air. Every so often, Coach Smith would pass behind one of the instructors: slow steps, clipboard on his arm, glancing at his colleague’s file over his shoulder, glancing at the student, scribbling something on a sturdy sheet of paper, and continuing on. He never stopped next to Sebastian. But Sebastian noticed: the coach’s mustache trembled a millimeter behind the man in the cap, trembled again behind the man with glasses, and the third time it didn’t return to its place. It stayed there.

When the final whistle blew, everyone was called to the center—and the center had changed. The blue mats, previously under the basketball hoop, now formed a square around the central circle, two thin layers of foam. Inside the square, a rope hung from the ceiling. Someone had released it from its hook, and it hung in the dim light between the beams like a thick sisal root: darkened in the first few meters by many hands, lighter up there, where it disappeared into the shadows. And, right up there, attached to a crossbeam, was something small and yellow—a bronze bell, the size of a mug, with a short cord hanging from one side.

The students sat around the tatami mats. Each as best they could. One girl lay on her side, resting her cheek on her arm. The enormous blond boy squatted, elbows on his knees, head drooping; his once white t-shirt now displayed a dark triangle from his neck to the middle of his chest. The girls who arrived impeccably groomed, with their hair brushed, had strands stuck to their foreheads and loose hair ties. The one with the shaved head let a trickle of sweat run down his neck to his collar. All flushed, all soaked, all breathing through their mouths. And the cold air of the gymnasium exhaled steam over them.

Sebastian settled where there was space—on the fringes, between groups that had formed on their own: the “nerds” in one corner, the athletes in another, the popular girls lined up, and the rest behind them. He sat on one of the seams, pulled his knees to his chest, and stared at the bell.

Then he felt the gaze.

He didn’t notice it at first glance, but he felt it first, like when a part of the skin warms up before being touched. Only then did he turn his head and meet Smith’s gaze: standing beside the rope, clipboard next to his chest, fixed on him—not on the group. The small eyes slid over the dry t-shirt, the untouched hair, the thin arms resting on the knees, and rose to his face, lingering long enough for Sebastian to lower his gaze towards the ground.

He sensed what the man was seeing. It was exactly what he himself had seen on the back of his own hand: thirty-odd drenched students and a boy who looked like he had just arrived.
Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed Smith lift the first sheet from the clipboard and read the second. Then he lifted the second and checked the third. He went back to the first. His thick finger slid along a column, paused, moved forward again, like someone checking an inconclusive account and doubting the pen. Smith had already checked all the stations. He had seen everything with his own eyes. And he still wasn’t convinced.
He dropped the sheets, puffed out his chest.

“Okay.” The voice cut through the court. “We had a few surprises today.”
He left the sentence hanging, without looking Sebastian in the eye—a gesture more awkward than a direct reprimand.
“But the test isn’t over.”

With his other hand, he gripped the rope and gave a vigorous tug, using his whole body to propel himself forward. The rope snapped against the beam, the bell swung and released a muffled, timid sound that reached the ground. Smith pulled again, the rope resisted, and then he let go. It swayed, casting a faint shadow on the tatami mats.

“Well secured.” He tapped his thigh with the clipboard. “Now I want to see who rings that bell.”
All thirty heads snapped up at once.

Sebastian measured the distance—he couldn’t help it: the part of him that calculated wouldn’t ask for permission. The gym was taller than it looked, with the height of an old gymnasium, long windows in the middle of the wall and iron beams high above, and the bell hanging just below. About sixteen meters of sisal, he calculated, counting the rows of bricks on the side wall—five stories high, suspended in the void.

And Smith had saved the worst for last.

Looking at the flushed faces around him, his hands still trembling from the previous effort, Sebastian immediately understood the coach’s maneuver. It wasn’t a planning oversight, but a choice: to impose the most brutal challenge when no one had anything left to offer. Some people like to push others to their limits, preferably in public, and Smith, with that silent smile that never reached his eyes, was that type. He didn’t measure pure strength—he wanted to see what was left when it was exhausted. And, judging by his look, the outcome was already sealed.

“I’ll call you one by one.” He raised the clipboard. “When I say your name, you go up, ring the bell, and come down. Whoever doesn’t ring it sits down. No arguing.”

He started calling.

The list wasn’t alphabetical, Sebastian realized from the third name: first came the nerds, then the girls, then the average ones, then whoever was left over from the initial selection; the strong ones were left for last. He didn’t know if Smith was saving the best for the climax or if he wanted to wear down the rope and leave their hands cold. Maybe both.

The chubby kid in his group climbed up first. He gripped the rope with both hands, pulled, lifted his feet about twenty centimeters, and came back down. He tried again, same result. Smith didn’t say anything, just scribbled on the sheet, and that mark meant: “Next.” The boy with braces got a meter and a half off the ground, stayed there, mouth open, until his arms gave way and he slipped, his skin creaking like sisal, a sound that made half the group frown. He dropped down with red palms, shaking his hands. The girls, in general, went further than the nerds; a tall, thin girl reached three meters, gripped the rope with her feet, and swayed up there, trembling, before descending alone. She earned the only nod of admiration in that section. Four meters—the best mark so far—was achieved by a boy with long hair, whose group no one could identify.

One by one: climb, slide, sit. The bell didn’t even move. With each name that wasn’t his own, Sebastian’s heart tightened a little more, feeling his own name approach like a silent train.
Then came the group of strong ones.

Things changed drastically. The one with the shaved head reached five meters, using gym techniques: a pull, a foot lock, a pull. The blond giant reached six, froze, his whole body trembling, forearms vibrating, jaw clenched. He came down panting and kicked the mat as he landed. “Sit down.” Five. Six. Five and a half. Sweaty hands slipped, and, upon reaching the ground, everyone rubbed their palms on their shorts.

The last of the tall ones was the boy with the afro. The tallest in the group, long arms and a serene manner as he climbed. A low murmur ran through the circle as he adjusted his hair and faced the rope. He climbed with elegance: long pull, firm hold, another pull, his whole body acting in sync. Sebastian focused on his legs: right foot wrapped around the outside, left foot overlapping, sisal rope held between the sole and instep, knees alternating grips higher and higher. Five meters. Six. Seven. Someone whispered “almost.” Eight meters, and he paused to reposition his hands—wet.

He descended the eight meters in a second.
You can’t even call it a descent. The rope slipped from his hands, then there was no rope at all: his body turned sideways in the air, and the thud on the foam was a hollow crash that made everyone flinch. The mat did its job. He lay on his back for a moment, staring at the bell, then sat up and stood without limping, shaking his hands. Unharmed.
“HE FAILED!”

Smith’s shout drowned out the sound of the thud. It wasn’t doubt or compassion: it sounded like a verdict, loud enough for the whole court to hear, and the boy remained motionless on the foam for a second, staring at the coach. Sebastian saw that face clearly and understood the silent accusation. If he had broken his nose in the fall, it would have hurt less: a fractured nose can be explained, shown, become a story. But that shout, the thirty stares, the word echoing off the beams had no justification or remedy. The boy lowered his head, returned to his place, and nobody – not even his teammates – said anything.

Smith checked the clipboard, slid his finger down the list to the end, read the note squeezed into the margin—the same one from the beginning of the lesson—and, twitching his mustache, announced:
“Sebastian Cross.”

Sebastian stood up.

He stood right in the middle of the divide between the nerds and the athletes, leaving a gap exactly the size of a boy without a group. He crossed that space silently: his smooth-soled sneakers made no sound on the wood; his legs didn’t tremble, and he didn’t know if that was a good thing.

Inside his head, there was a whirlwind of disconnected questions, like exposed wires on an open panel. First, his eyesight—sharp without the glasses, which were nowhere to be found and, for now, unnecessary. Then, the rest: his body, which had done four and a half minutes of sit-ups without a single complaint. His arms pushing against the floor. His hips correcting the slippage on their own. Thirteen years mapping every limit, every angle, every repetition—and, in a single day, everything had changed without warning. He knew how to understand mechanisms, but what was happening beneath his own skin eluded him. There was no replacement part, no instruction manual. What is happening? he thought, for the hundredth time since the cafeteria—and, as always, the question remained lonely.

He reached the center of the mats. The rope still swayed slightly after the last pull. He looked up: the bell, high above, was just a distant yellow speck; beside it, Smith stood two meters away, arms crossed, eyes half-closed, as if expecting not surprise, but a fall.

Sebastian swallowed hard. His throat was dry—the only part of him that was.

He placed his hand on the rope. The sisal was rough, full of fibers embedded in his palm; still warm from previous hands and damp in the first two meters, saturated with sweat. His fingers couldn’t close around it: his hand was too small for that thickness, just as it seemed too small for the rest of that day.

And then he remembered.

He didn’t try to remember; the memory came ready-made, with unprecedented clarity. The legs of the boy with the afro. The right foot on the outside, the left on top, the sisal rope caught between the sole and the instep. The pull of the arm, releasing the knees, sliding the lock, engaging again. Even exhausted, they climbed almost effortlessly—it wasn’t the technique that stopped them, but the sweat on their hands, the trembling arm, the fatigue stealing half a second from each movement until that half second became a fall. Sebastian saw everything, every movement etched in his mind.

He extended his second arm. He pulled. His body rose, and he closed his legs around the rope just as he had seen: one foot wrapped around the outside, the other stepping on top, and the lock caught. He released one hand; raised it again; pulled once more. His arms were too short for such long pulls: each thrust of his gained only half a meter where the other gained one. So he doubled his force. Pull, lock; pull, lock; his legs did the heavy lifting, his arms only guided, and the rope slid past him as if it were the rope that was rising and he, motionless.

He didn’t slip. The dry palm gripped the sisal, and he remained where the palm held him. It didn’t hurt. He didn’t tremble. Between the fourth and fifth meter, he passed the chalk mark on the wall without even blinking. At the seventh, at the height of the tall windows, the white January light outlined his face, and he saw the dust floating in the air and, beyond the glass, the snow-covered rooftops of Harlem, brick buildings, and a row of cars between two of them. At the eighth, where the other had fallen, he didn’t even notice—he kept climbing.

Down below, the court shrank. He didn’t look down, but he knew what he saw: the circles of people sitting, the square of foam, Smith’s bald head gleaming like a coin. The air grew colder and stagnant as he rose, smelling of iron and old dust—the smell of a place no one goes. He passed by the gray-painted, peeling beams, with thick, dirty cobwebs in the corners, without noticing.

The bell.

It was real bronze, with green rust stains on the edges, and the side rope was just a worn, frayed piece of string that had been tied there for a long time. He locked his legs, let go of his right hand, and pulled the string.

The sound was minimal: a single, thin tap of metal against metal, and it slid the sixteen meters to the ground, landing silently—a silence that Sebastian heard from above.

Then he descended. This time he didn’t slide like the others, his hand burning; he passed the rope through his feet, adjusting the foot lock, releasing and tightening it, while his hands simply followed the movement. He landed in the same discreet way he had arrived up there. His sneakers touched the foam, he let the rope fall, it swung once behind him and stopped.

No one spoke. Thirty-odd faces fixed on him: the chubby boy’s open mouth; the big guy’s blond eyebrows, arched on his forehead; the boy with the afro, looking down, elbows on his knees, with a look that wasn’t anger; the tall girl who bit her lip to keep from laughing when he came in late, now with her lips closed; the teacher with the goatee, clipboard forgotten in his hand; the woman with the ponytail, hand on her hip and head tilted. All eyes on the same spot: a boy the size of an eleven-year-old, t-shirt slipping off his shoulders, white legs peeking out of his shorts, sneakers with laces of different sizes. The same body that had crossed the court forty minutes earlier amidst giggles. No one there would give ten cents for him—Sebastian knew that well, because he wouldn’t bet on it either.

Smith uncrossed his arms. He looked at the motionless rope, then at the bell high above. He stared at the clipboard and wrote nothing down. Then he turned to the boy, his face completely smooth—no furrowed brow, no twitching mustache—the expression of someone who had planned one thing and seen another. “Good.” The voice sounded ordinary, but it echoed in the silence. “At least someone managed to get through.”

He checked his watch and, as if obeying a command, the school bell rang. The electronic beep—which tried to imitate antique brass and sounded, at best, like a tired microwave—filled the gym through the loudspeakers. Sebastian, standing in the middle of the foam, heard the two sounds overlap in his head: the real brass sound that had just rung, and this one. No comparison was possible.

“On your feet!” Smith slammed his clipboard against his thigh. “Hurry up for your next class.”

The group rose as if leaving a funeral: slowly, groaning, dragging their sneakers along the wooden floor. Tired, sweaty, silent, they left through the locker room door in a disorderly line, and Sebastian was last, in his usual spot.

And he felt it. He didn’t see—his back was turned—but he felt, with the same clarity as the landing, a heat rising between his shoulder blades, the size of an open palm: Coach Smith’s gaze. And not only his. He knew, without knowing how, without anything to explain it, that the other four were also watching him from the back of the court, clipboards still, and that in the corridor ahead the students who had already passed through the door were turning to look. He didn’t turn around. He kept walking, head down, shoulders hunched, silent steps, as if he were still invisible. But he wasn’t anymore. And that, deep in his stomach, he felt too.