I pulled my leggings up and decided to put on my shoes in the foyer, joining the rest of X-Cycle’s Guilty Pleasure acolytes.
The mastermind of the Guilty Pleasure ride was a physically gorgeous person called Blake. Amy had told me so much about their “butts and guts” glute-and ab-focused rides that seeing them in person felt like a celebrity encounter. They had a dazzling smile and enormous arms and seemed to be roughly fourteen years old. Their X-Cycle-branded T-shirt was cut in a scoop so deep it formed a reverse-bib; they radiated enough positive energy to power a small town. On a corkboard featuring the day’s class schedule, a sign-up sheet informed us that Blake was “not afraid to rock out.” I watched them bounce around the waiting area, air-kissing fit strangers and slapping the butts of friends. I wondered what was keeping me so fearful of rocking in any direction.
Blake embraced a girl in mesh shorts, asking after her dog while she lunged, squatted, and touched her toes without any visible effort. The girl looked like everyone else in the bright green lobby: sandy-blond hair, visible abs, the air of a job in corporate finance. I sat underneath a neon sign that said limit/less and tried to seem casual and unembarrassed. I did not feel that way; I felt like a walking Before photo surrounded by dozens of possible Afters, all of them named Amber. Still, I reasoned, I belonged there as much as any of them. Had I not looked up the class schedule? Did I not also have fifty-three dollars? （Not really, but I had spent it, and surely that was all that mattered here.） Finally, Blake blew a little whistle they wore around their neck and flung open the doors of the studio, reminding everyone to grab earplugs, because “I am NOT getting off my bike mid-class just because YOU can’t handle my playlist!”
Inside, I shimmied past the first row and clipped into spot 23, smack in the middle of the second line of bikes. Usually I was a very-back-row, very-back-corner kind of gal, but today I had other needs. I placed my water bottle in its little water bottle groove and clipped my right foot to the pedal. When Amy entered, I ducked my head and pretended to be busy adjusting my seat height. She didn’t notice me, and I kept my head low as she clipped in, pedaling lightly, rocking back and forth on her feet to stretch her hamstrings and calves. It was nice to see her without the risk of finding out whether she wanted to see me. I watched her tighten her ponytail and hoped she wouldn’t notice me until I was ready.
Amy and I had not spoken since the wedding, unless you counted the Edible Arrangement and the one post-Arrangement apology text I’d sent in case she didn’t like pineapple. When that went unreturned, I resolved not to bother her. If I felt an urge to text her or compose one of my Big Emails, I would open a Google Doc called “dots” and add a period to the page. Looking at this document （eighty-seven dots and counting） made me feel unbalanced, though I had managed to avoid leaving even one emotional voice message, and surely that was something. Helen would check in with me about it in our sessions, and each week I reported having left Amy alone, Helen would tell me she was proud. I always acted like this was an unnecessary and even babying gesture, but I knew deep down that if she didn’t tell me she was proud every two or three sessions, I would simply fall apart. I had not mentioned my plan for today, my one last effort to win Amy back; I suspected Helen would not fully approve.
Blake shut the door behind them and flicked the lights on and off. “Alright, my pretties, time to RIDE!” they yelled into the studio. “I’m asking you all to send some energy to your asses right now, because let me be clear: they’re gonna need it!” The hot girls on either side of me tittered knowingly. X-Cycle’s classes were famously intense. Before I ruined everything, Amy and I would attend fitness classes at many different studios, though I had so far avoided any at X-Cycle. I’d told Amy it was because its West-West location was too far from Merris’s, but truthfully it was because of the leaderboard.
X-Cycle was famous for its leaderboard, a large screen at the front of the class featuring a cutthroat ranking of every rider, with live stats about how hard and fast they were pedaling. Instructors would consult the leaderboard and scream messages of support or disapproval to cyclists—by name—in front of everybody. KylieG, you are not giving me everything right now, or FitMom73, yes baby, FEEL that resistance! I could not imagine anything I wanted less than to be singled out during group exercise.
The class started with a low-key warm up but quickly progressed into challenging, fast-paced choreography. I did my best to follow along, dipping forward and tapping back and bobbing my head side to side in time with the beat. Blake kept telling us we were superstars and encouraged us to “generate power” with the bodies we cherished, which had done us the favor of carrying us around all day and getting us here, to this darkened room full of top-of-the-line exercise equipment. Blake asked us to think about what we loved about moving our bodies, and I surprised myself by obeying.
It was tempting to make fun of Blake’s attitude, their relentless positivity and cutesy sayings about moving your feet to the beat or leaving your stress at the door. But instead I felt my legs working in the dark and thought how much more powerful they were than they had been this time last year. I felt strong. I felt happy. I felt, actually, grateful. Aside from my other purpose, I was in Blake’s class to “push myself,” something I had been trying lately, though acknowledging this humiliated me to my weak, untrained core. Blake turned the music up and encouraged us all to add resistance. It was time to climb.
I took a deep breath and pressed into the balls of my feet, pushing down with my left and pulling up with my right, bouncing in time to a song about being an extremely powerful slut. My thighs burned, and I felt sweat bead and drop down the shallow valley of my back. I looked around and saw I was keeping up with the Ambers—not easily, necessarily, but I was doing it.
I had worried, during the long hours on the stationary bike, that maybe nothing was happening. Certainly I did not look any different, which was the only way I knew how to measure the progress of a fitness regime. And although over time I rode for longer distances, swam faster, ran easier, I had not gotten smaller. There had been no sudden six-pack, no overnight glow-up. I was glowing laterally at best, but I had kept at it, there being not much else to do on long nights in my hometown, and because I had started to feel some of the so-called endorphins that people in tank tops were always promising arrived with strenuous movement.
“Let’s get uncomfortable in our breathing!” yelled Blake, though I was way ahead of them. I pedaled harder, my name rising up the class ranking, inching toward Amy’s, which had hovered at the top since class began. Blake shouted at someone called TheRealSpinShady: “I’m sorry, but you do not pun in my class and then coast during a climb! Up that resistance or get out of here, babe!” Blake consulted the laptop next to their bike.
“Okay, we have a cyclist burning up the leaderboard. Can I get a big X-Cycle cheer for . . . AMY-I’M-SORRY?” Blake paused, checked the screen again. “No, that’s—Amy I’m . . . yep, okay! AMY-I’M-SORRY, damn, here they come! They know what they did, and they are repenting on the BIKE, baby!”