The Overnight Prodigy

Chapter 12: First Impression

The gym on Tuesday afternoon looked completely different from the gym Ethan knew during regular school hours mats rolled out edge to edge instead of stacked against the wall, the overhead lights turned up brighter than they ever seemed to be during fourth period, a cluster of maybe fifteen kids stretching and chatting in small groups with the easy familiarity of people who'd been doing this together for a while.

Ethan stood near the door for a second too long, the way you do when you're the new person somewhere and haven't figured out yet where you're allowed to stand.

"You're the sign-up sheet guy," someone said, and Ethan turned to find a kid he vaguely recognized from a lower grade eyeing him with open curiosity. "Chen, right? Coach Nguyen was talking about you."

"He was?"

"Said something about a throw in gym class. Everybody's been asking who you are."

That was not information Ethan particularly wanted circulating before he'd even done a single warm-up lap, and it got worse a moment later when Marcus Cole detached himself from a knot of upperclassmen near the far mat and walked over with the specific loose, assessing gait of someone used to sizing people up before they'd said a word.

Marcus was taller than Ethan expected up close, built lean rather than bulky, with the kind of stillness that made you notice it precisely because most people his age didn't have it. He looked Ethan over not rudely, exactly, more like a mechanic looking under the hood of a car someone had told him was fast.

"You're the gym class guy," Marcus said. Not a question.

"I guess. Ethan."

"Marcus." He didn't offer a hand, just kept looking, and Ethan had the distinct sense of being measured against some internal scale he had no visibility into. "Coach says you threw Griggs a couple times."

"It happened, yeah."

"Griggs isn't hard to throw. He's got no base." Marcus said it like a fact rather than an insult, though the effect landed somewhere close to an insult anyway, mostly aimed sideways at whatever hype had apparently been building around Ethan's name over the past few days. "You ever actually train? Anywhere?"

"No."

"Huh." Something flickered across Marcus's face not quite disappointment, more like the confirmation of a guess he'd already made. "So it was luck."

"Maybe."

"Definitely," Marcus said, in a tone that closed the subject as thoroughly as Isabella Cruz closed subjects about her family, and turned to walk back toward his own group without waiting for a response, leaving Ethan standing there with a small, unfamiliar prickle of something that wasn't quite anger but was standing very close to it.

He hadn't expected to like Marcus Cole immediately the reputation that had followed the name through hallway gossip hadn't exactly sold him on a future friendship — but something about the specific dismissiveness of it, the way Marcus had decided the whole matter in under thirty seconds and moved on like Ethan wasn't worth a second thought, sat wrong in a way Ethan hadn't fully braced for.

Coach Nguyen called the group together a few minutes later, running through basic warm-ups with the same brisk efficiency he brought to gym class, though everything here felt sharper, more deliberate footwork drills that made Ethan's calves burn within the first five minutes, stance work that revealed, embarrassingly fast, how little his body actually knew about holding itself the way these other kids held theirs without thinking.

He watched more than he participated for the first stretch, which felt like cheating in a way he couldn't quite justify to himself — the System doing its quiet work in the background, cataloging the angle of every stance, the weight distribution of every drill, filing it all away with the same effortless completeness it had applied to chemistry chapters and diagrams in textbooks. He understood, watching Coach Nguyen demonstrate a basic forward stance, exactly why the weight needed to sit where it sat, exactly what would happen to his balance if he got it wrong.

Knowing it and doing it turned out to be two very different experiences. His first few attempts at the stance felt wrong in ways he couldn't immediately fix his back leg too straight, his hips turned at an angle that looked right in his head and felt off in his body, the gap between understanding and execution wider than he'd expected given how effortless the mental part had been.

"Loosen the back knee," Coach Nguyen said, passing by, correcting him with two fingers against Ethan's leg. "You're locking it out. Bend it, just slightly."

Ethan adjusted. It felt marginally less wrong.

"Better," Coach Nguyen said, and moved on without further comment, which Ethan decided to take as a genuine compliment given the man's general economy with praise.

By the end of the first practice, sweat-soaked and sore in muscles he hadn't known he had, Ethan had a clearer read on what he was actually walking into than he'd had standing at the corkboard three days earlier. This wasn't going to be like reading a chemistry textbook. The System could hand him the blueprint, complete and immediate, the way it had with every throw and diagram and page of text since the dream but the actual construction, the muscle memory, the thousand small physical corrections that turned understanding into ability, that part was still entirely, frustratingly his own to do.

He caught Marcus watching him once more on the way out, a longer look than the earlier dismissal had contained, like the guy was recalculating something and hadn't landed on a new answer yet.

Ethan didn't know what to make of that either. He just knew he was coming back Thursday, and the Thursday after that, whether Marcus Cole thought it was worth his time or not.

He iced his shoulder that night with a bag of frozen peas he'd found buried in the back of the freezer, sitting on the edge of his bed replaying the practice in fragments the burn in his calves during footwork drills, the small correction Coach Nguyen had made to his stance, Marcus's flat assessment on the mat still sitting somewhere under his ribs like a splinter he hadn't managed to work out yet.

He thought about texting Jason a play-by-play and decided against it, mostly because he didn't have the energy to type out the whole story of getting quietly measured and found wanting by a guy he'd known for all of one afternoon. Instead he lay there a while longer, staring at the ceiling, running the stance drills through his head the way he used to run chemistry formulas before a test not because the System needed the repetition, but because some part of him wanted to feel like he'd actually earned the small progress he'd made that day rather than just having it handed to him.

It was a strange, new kind of tired. Not the tired of staying up too late scrolling his phone, but the tired of a body that had actually worked for something, and he found, somewhat to his own surprise, that he didn't mind it nearly as much as he'd expected to.