Page 1 of The Fighter

1

ALINA

Iam the queen of bad decisions.

If I said that to my friends, they would tell me I was being too harsh. Rosa, who trains at my gym, would cluck her tongue and scold me for being so down on myself. Annie, the ESL teacher who lives in the building around the corner, would grab a piece of paper and start making a list of all the smart decisions I’ve made to counter the narrative.

But they’re my friends—being supportive is in the job description. I know what I know. As evidence, I present my useless, waste-of-space partner in this gym, Simon Groff.

I met Simon two years ago, just after my mother died from a long and debilitating fight with early-onset Alzheimer’s. When she passed away ten days before Christmas, I was simultaneously relieved that her suffering had come to an end and also more than a little shellshocked.

I had been her primary caregiver, and until the very end, my days had been full of all the things I needed to do for my mom. Then she died, and I had nothing to distract me from the emptiness. Everything in the apartment I shared with her was a reminder that she was no longer around. I taught part-time MMA classes, but the gym I worked at was closed until the new year.

Rome was cold, damp, and miserable, and I just wanted to escape. I wanted to run away from it all and spend a week in the sun, drinking margaritas on a beach while I figured out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.

So I did.

I took a plane to Tenerife on Christmas Day, and I met a guy as soon as I arrived at my resort.

The years of caregiving had worn me out, and I felt pale and invisible. But Simon flirted with me. We spent a lot of time together. We were the only two regular attendees of the early morning yoga class the resort offered. We drank margaritas on the beach, and of course, we slept together.

That, by itself, wasn’t the bad decision. Vacation flings, I understand.

I even forgive myself for confiding in Simon, telling him about how I felt stuck and in a rut. Simon was, in those days, a good listener. “What do you want to do with your life?” he asked. “What is stopping you from living the life of your dreams?”

I considered his question seriously as I sipped my third margarita, and the answer seemed to come to me out of nowhere. “I want to move,” I replied. “I want to leave Rome and move to Venice.” My mother would take me there every year. One of my earliest memories is of chasing pigeons in la Piazza San Marco, laughing as they took to the air to avoid the chubby toddler intent on cuddling them.

“I’ve been to Venice,” Simon replied, a frown on his face. “Once, and that was enough. It’s not as magical as the tourist guides make it out to be.”

“I know.” Yes, the city was always jammed with tourists, and truly good restaurants were few and far between. People also had an unfortunate habit of dumping garbage in the canals when they thought nobody was looking and then complaining about the smell.

But despite its many flaws, I loved it. Venice always felt magical to me, and more importantly, it felt like home.

“What would you do there? Work in a gym?”

“I’d open my own,” I replied. Like a fool. “My mother left me some money. Enough to buy a building and survive the first year.” The money was a shock. I didn’t think she had any, but when I went to the bank after her funeral to attend to the details, a million and a half euros was sitting there. “She never wanted to invest it,” the branch manager told me. “She was insistent it should always be available in case she needed it in a hurry.”

Simon’s eyes were suddenly alert. He sat up on an elbow and stared at me as if he were properly seeing me for the first time. “Want to do it together?”

I knew nothing about Simon. I should have either turned him down outright or, at the very least, done my due diligence by looking into him first.

But I did neither of those things. Instead, fueled by tequila, hope, and sweaty, if not particularly good sex, I said yes.

Queen of bad decisions.

It’s Saturday, and the aforementioned bad decision has blown off the class he’s supposed to teach for the second time in two days. I grit my teeth and pray for patience as a cluster of over-muscled, protein-chugging men crowd around my desk, demanding to know where Simon is.

‘How should I know?’ is what I want to say. Simon’s interest in our gym has steadily tapered off to the point where he is now doing the bare minimum. No, not even that. He’s gone from teaching ten classes to eight, then five, until he settled at two. Just two classes a week, and he hasn’t bothered showing up to either of them this week.

He tells me that he’s pulling his weight by keeping the books and doing routine maintenance, yet we’re still paying a bookkeeper, and the bathroom taps have leaked for months. He was responsible for finding a contractor to renovate the women’s changing room, and the guy he hired was completely inept. Marcelo did half the work badly, and to add insult to injury, he’s refusing to come back and fix the mess.

Two months ago, I confronted Simon and asked him what the hell he was doing to justify his share of the profits. “I am out finding us new members,” he replied loftily.

Of course, that’s bullshit too. Enrollment isn’t up—it’s down. Probably because Simon leers at every woman that trains here until she becomes uncomfortable and quits.

“I’m so sorry,” I tell our annoyed customers. “Simon must have had an emergency. We’ll comp this class, of course.”

That does not mollify them. “Will you also comp the babysitter I paid for so I could attend this class?” one of the customers, Gerald, asks snidely. Gerald is a finance influencer whose advice comes with a heaping dose of poverty shaming, but as much as I violently disagree with every one of his opinions, he does have a point here. People made time in their schedules and showed up for their class. Unfortunately, their instructor couldn’t be bothered to do the same.

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