Peter Yoon

The gym smells like it always does — rubber and radiator dust, the particular mustiness of a mat that's absorbed twenty years of sweat. Through the tall windows, the brick houses across the street sit under a sky the color of a dead television. Peter holds his phone up, one-handed, whistle swinging against his chest, and he's laughing at something before he even starts recording. That's Pete. He laughs before the joke lands.

"Check this out," he says to no one, to everyone, to the eleven kids running suicides behind him who don't care. The filter blooms across the screen — cartoon sparkles, some ridiculous new jawline stretching over his own — and I watch it from wherever I've been watching from, close enough now that watching stops being the right word.

The drawing finishes. His face, and not his face. He laughs again, that same easy sound I've heard through a phone speaker for fifteen years, and lowers his arm.

I lower it with him.

I know this gym because he's shown it to me in videos a hundred times, panning across the banner that says CENTRAL WRESTLING like it's a cathedral. I know the whistle's weight before I feel it settle against my sternum. I know his wife's name is Dana, that she texts him a heart at 6 AM most days, that there's a woman named Sue in Ann Arbor he doesn't mention except once a year, usually in November, usually after a few beers, always followed by *nah, forget it, doesn't matter now.* I know his kids' school schedules. I know the freckles under my fingers when I touch my own face, disbelieving, are the same freckles I've been jealous of since we were nineteen and he could get away with anything because of that face, that warmth built into the skin of it.

The kids on the mat haven't noticed anything. Why would they. A coach is a coach is a coach, bald head shining under gym lights, whistle, shorts, same New Balances he's worn since I've known him.

"Coach, you good?" one of them calls. Marcus, maybe — I don't know these kids the way Pete does, not yet, not really, and that gap between his memory and mine sits behind my eyes like a headache.

"Yeah," I say, and his voice comes out of me easy, familiar, the voice I've heard order coffee and cry at his father's funeral and yell his own name back at me across a bar in 2009. "Yeah, I'm good. Water break. Everybody, water."

They scatter toward the fountain in the hall. I stand at the edge of the mat where he stands every day of his working life, and I look down at the wedding band on my — his — left hand, and I think about Dana's heart emoji sitting unanswered in his phone, and I think: one week. I have one week inside my best friend's life, wearing his face, carrying his ring, and somewhere in me, underneath the wanting that got me here, is a colder thought I didn't expect: *now I get to know what it's like to be loved like this.*

By a wife who leaves the porch light on. By kids who wait by the door. By a whole gym full of boys who look up when the whistle blows.

I press the whistle to my lips and blow it, and it sounds exactly the way I remember it sounding, every time he's ever called me on a Sunday to tell me about practice, about Dana, about the ache in his knees, about Sue, sometimes, in November.

The boys re-form on the mat. I clap my hands together — his hands, freckled at the knuckles same as the nose — and say the thing I've heard him say in a dozen videos, the thing that's his and now, for seven days, mine too.

"Let's go. Line up."