This coming-of-age short story explores the internal conflict of a high school sophomore who wrestles on an all-male team and struggles with unrequited feelings for her best friend, Mark. When Mark begins dating Sierra, a cold and calculating popular girl who once mocked the narrator, jealousy and self-doubt surface. Through the lens of a wrestling metaphor, the narrator grapples with questions of identity, belonging, and the rules of friendship and romance that seem to elude her. The story examines how personal accomplishment and athletic achievement cannot fill the void of romantic rejection and social isolation.
Sierra was one of those girls everyone hated and everyone secretly wanted to be—except me. I just hated her.
Even the teachers gave her a wide berth and never challenged her. She'd walk through the school with a cold expression on her face, wearing the latest and most fashionable clothes. She seemed to have a sixth sense about when something suddenly was no longer trendy and had become common and therefore unacceptable. The first day of school she passed me with her posse of only slightly less intimidating mean girlfriends and looked at the pearl grey Uggs I'd so carefully picked out to coordinate with my pink sweater and skinny jeans. "Oh God," I heard her say, "Could that outfit be more basic?" Her friends tittered.
I couldn't care less, though. I knew there were two options with girls like that: either you sucked up to them or you ignored them. There was no option of neutrality. But when I saw her kissing Mark, I declared war in my mind against her.
Mark was my best friend. He had been since grade school. I've always gotten along better with guys much more so than girls. Girls will act really nice to your face but then cut you down with their words behind your back. At least guys will say what they really think about you. Also, I've spent much more time with guys because there is one weird thing about me: I'm on the guy's wrestling team.
The local newspaper did a story about me a while back: "Local Girl On High School Wrestling Team." It's less impressive than it sounds. I'm short, so in my weight category it's pretty much me and all the rest of the ninety-eight-pound guy freshmen on the team who are too fragile to play football and too short to play basketball. I consider myself athletic and did martial arts as a kid, so it seemed like the one thing I could be good at in high school. There's no girls' team.
I'm a sophomore now, but even then I still get comments. "It's not fair: the girl always wins. If she beats him, he's a wimp, and if she loses she's a monster." But it doesn't seem fair that I shouldn't play just because of attitudes like that.
Mark's on the team too, in a higher weight category. We go out together afterward sometimes—do homework together and eat if we're not worried about trying to make weight. People have asked me if we're dating or if I'm a lesbian because I wrestle and my best friend is a guy, which is really confusing. I always furrow my brow and say "duh, no" to both questions, but the truth is, I do kind of like Mark that way. But he usually talks about the girls he likes to me, so I know he doesn't see me as girlfriend material.
I never knew he liked Sierra though. It makes me think less of him somehow—kind of like how Sierra disrespected me for wearing Uggs. I mean, he'd sometimes casually ask, because we were in lots of the same classes, if she had a boyfriend and stuff like that. I'd just shrug. I'd never told him that she made fun of me and the rest of the girls like me who weren't in her clique because we didn't meet her standards.
Mark is thin and scrawny, and in his weight category he's one of the top in the state. I'm okay. I'm beatable, I know, but not terrible.
Then I saw the two of them holding hands—Mark and Sierra—walking through the halls. I tried to make a joke of it. "You didn't even tell me," I said, casually. "I didn't think she liked dorky guys like you." Mark's smart, and although he's got a varsity letter and all, it's not like being on the football team.
I look at myself in the mirror sometimes and evaluate what I see. I'm small, pale, and ordinary. I wear some makeup, I try to look nice. I look okay, but nothing special.
It's so unfair. I've never been the kind of girl who was raised to be quiet and to hide her accomplishments. Like, there are girls I know who get straight As but purposely act dumb because they don't want to seem, I don't know, intimidating or something. I guess there are some people who might say that the fact I'm so focused on school—whether it's my classes or sports—is why I don't have a boyfriend. If people ask me why I don't have one, I usually say I don't have time. But then I think if Mark and I were dating, we're in enough of the same classes together and we are both wrestlers, so it would be easy to make time for him.
What makes my lack of a boyfriend even more frustrating is that girls like Sierra are so mean to the guys that they date. She hasn't done it with Mark yet, but I know she will—pretend to break up with them, ask them to perform little "tests" of their affection for her, flirt with other guys when they can see her. It's this rulebook that I just don't know. Maybe it's because I was raised by my dad and I don't have sisters. I just don't understand the language of girls.
"Wrestling match becomes emotional outlet for unresolved feelings"
"Narrator accepts emotional victory cannot be won like wrestling"
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