FOR THE STORY

ONE: Savannah

There are three things I need to accomplish tonight: make it to the club in one piece, survive my first real fight since middle school, and tell the story of a lifetime. No big deal.

In the rearview window, I see my Uber driver's eyes take me in the corner of his lips turned down. He's not a creeper, he's worried about me. Wonders if he should say something.

"You're going out in this...wearing that." Lacey had said. My roommate—MFA graduate, reporter for the journal, scrunched her lips in distaste as she looked me over. The same pained expression as when her boyfriend Chris breaks grammar rules like "their" versus "there."

But Lacey has a job, a respectable one. And I lost mine, accepted a new one under dubious circumstances. Not that I'd admit it to her. Yeah my Uber driver thinks I'm a streetwalker. But my assignment is much juicier than that.

The car slips on a patch of ice, then stops abruptly. In service of my first goal, I lose the heels before unbuckling my seatbelt. My driver asks if I'm sure of the addy—curious about dropping an outlandishly dressed young-ish women in a sea of abandoned warehouses in a snowstorm. Per club rules, we're parked a block away from my true destination.

"Thank you!" My tone is confident but I'm not sure at all. There's only one thing I know: this fight is going to happen whether I'm ready or not. Shoes in hand, I trot down the alley to the chipped black door housed in a nondescript brick building. 

I imagine eyes watching me from the windows above and shudder. That's silly right? Before I can knock with now-blue knuckles, the door creaks open and Boris the bouncer nods in recognition and lets me in.

Either my heart pumping double time or the thunder of a bassline shakes the catwalk beneath me, a rush of adrenaline blows through my system when I look down. Two stories below a hungry crowd surrounds a boxing ring off where a wiry girl spits— red blood mixed with saliva—onto the ring floor. Alpha isn't an ordinary club. Soon that girl in the ring will be me.

Tonight, it's my turn to put all my training to the test. Fighting is everything to me, the only thing that makes me feel alive. Fighting strips away all the trappings of adulting, the things I'm supposed to care about, but don't. It doesn't care if I'm behind on my mortgage, if my credit score sucks; that I live on eggs and cereal; or that my roommate probably thinks I'm a prostitute. Fighting doesn't care whether my idea of a good time is eating stale cheerios in my dark apartment with a pack of frozen peas on my face.

I should have said fighting is most things to me, since I'm supposed to uncover what's actually going on in this filthy, illegal establishment. But it's an easy thing to forget.