In front of me, Amy slowed her feet and stood hovering above her bike seat. She toweled her face and looked tentatively to her left, then her right. She gulped some water and sat back in the saddle. I cycled harder. The icon with my username traveled higher up the board . . . then started to drop. Other, fitter riders were overtaking me. If I didn’t make the top spot, I wouldn’t get the special shout-out I needed, the moment at the end of class where I could do it right. My name dropped out of the top half of the leaderboard, and the chance at the gesture—the apology in the rain, the boom box overhead, the cue cards at the door in the snow—disappeared.
The track changed, and in the momentary gap between songs I shrieked, “AMY! IT’S ME!” Amy stopped again and turned around. I smiled ghoulishly at her, hair everywhere, wildly out of breath. “I’M SO SORRY!” I yelled, gasping for air.
“What the hell?”
“I—”
An insistent techno beat picked up, and the class moved on without us, bobbing in unison as they performed a series of complicated triceps push-ups.
“PLEASE TAKE ME BACK!” I shouted. “YOU SAID WOMEN LIKE THIS!”
For some reason I was still pedaling. I didn’t know if I was feeling a cyclist’s high or if this surge of adrenaline was the result of sheer emotional desperation, but I felt incredible. Amy’s feelings were harder to read. The music entered another lull, and we locked eyes. Her face softened, and she cocked her head and whisper-screamed, “Can we please talk about this later?”
“Yes, you can, thanks!” yelled Blake. “That’s enough! Okay, y’all, we’re going to pick it up!” They started undulating on the bike, using their abs to push themself up and over the handlebars like a magnificent, Lycra-clad seal. I followed their lead, clumsily rolling up and back. A few of our fellow classmates were staring. Eventually, the demands of Blake’s routine took over, and I was left to myself. I watched my name slip farther down the leaderboard.
The last song at X-Cycle was always a slow jam, something vaguely emotional over which the instructors could preach mindfulness, self-love, and the importance of regularly returning to the studio for its copyright-protected blend of cardio, weight training, and “adrena-rock.” Blake told us we should be proud of ourselves, that it wasn’t always easy to be vulnerable, to put ourselves out there in a group fitness setting. They encouraged us to close our eyes and groove, to feel free to leave what was holding us back in the studio when we left it.
The instrumentals gave way to a man’s voice, speaking softly: “We all want to help one another,” the voice said into the pitch-black studio. “Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness—not by each other’s misery.” The music swelled again. It was corny, and I found it comforting. It was too much, and I was happy to be hearing it. Two things really could be true! And so, robust glutes on fire, I cried lightly in a spin class to a techno remix of Charlie Chaplin’s speech from The Great Dictator, a situation I found surprising but not, in the scope of the year’s changes, impossible.
The class ended, and Blake shouted out the rider who had performed best, a beautiful man in a mesh top and tiny shorts, whose name on the leaderboard was Bry2k. Blake shone a flashlight at him, and the class cheered and twirled their towels over their heads in celebration of his achievement. This was when I would have given my big speech to Amy, had things gone to plan. I looked at my final ranking: twelfth out of thirty-seven. Not even close.
I unclipped and stood in the studio, bright red and covered in sweat, still breathing hard. Blake opened the door and high-fived exiting cyclists as they trickled into the lobby, making plans for tomorrow, laughing about brunch sweated off and Bloody Marys earned. I noticed a few of them staring at me, whispering to each other about the madwoman who had tried to get her girlfriend back, or something, in the middle of spin. As the last set of braided pigtails flounced out of the room, I saw Amy lingering by the door.
“I really thought you would like that more,” I said, clomping awkwardly toward her in my special clip-in shoes.
Amy sucked in an impossibly long breath, and I resigned myself to a future where we were no longer friends, where I had to block her on social media to stop myself from scrolling through her perfect life without me. Then she smiled. “Honestly?” she said. “It should have worked! Or it could have worked. Like, I see what you were going for, but the end result was crazy.”
I told her I was sorry for how I’d behaved at Emily’s wedding, for underestimating her, for not telling her how much her friendship—the utter surprise and real joy of it—had meant to me this year. I wanted the gesture to say all this, but it had just made things worse and insinuated to everyone at X-Cycle that she was involved in some kind of lesbian personal drama.
Amy dabbed her face, then threw her towel in a designated bin. “I didn’t hate it,” she said, leaning down to unstrap her shoes and put them in a different bin. “Like it was definitely thoughtful. Plus, top half of the leaderboard is impressive.”
I told her it felt like every ligament in my legs had melted.
“Blake is the devil,” she said, laughing. “But in a way, they are also my Jesus. Whenever I have an event coming up, I’ll do, like, all five of their classes in a week and get shredded.”
Amy leaned against the wall and grabbed her left ankle to stretch her quad.
“Also, can I just say, the hair looks amazing,” she said. “You’re gonna love being blond. It’s cliché, but we literally do have more fun.”
Her easy warmth made me panic. I needed to know she forgave me; had to confirm that we were good; wanted a promise, in writing, that she saw I was a ridiculous, needy, petty, cranky, genuinely very odd person and still liked me, still thought going for drinks or dinner and texting sometimes would be nice. I did not like being a person who needed this much, but that was the situation.
Amy pulled me into a clammy hug. “I missed you,” she said. “I was going to call you eventually, but I’m glad you came to me first. Also, at the end of class the girl next to me fully farted . . . out her front. Want to get froyo?”
Journaling Exercise: Self-Knowledge
Sit somewhere quiet with a blank notebook or sheet of paper. Without editing or judging yourself, write freely for 10 or 15 minutes. Try to answer （or at least think about） the following question: What do I want? If this is difficult, consider the opposite: What don’t I want?
I want better posture. I want a good life. I want to want to spend less time on my phone.
I want it to matter that I stopped going to Whole Foods. I don’t want, particularly, to wrinkle. I want a kitchen with a lot of natural light and a little rack to hang pots and pans on. I want to know if vitamins do anything. I want better-fitting pants. I want to be taken exactly the right amount of seriously. I don’t want to know so much about the lives of people I met one time in 2008. I want a closer relationship with my sister.
I want my friends to know I care about them. I want to accept that they care about me. I want to have faith in even one politician and/or human man. I want to feel like I understand the news. I don’t want to know anything else about what’s at the bottom of the ocean. I want a fulfilling job that pays a living wage. I want to have sex in a fancy hotel. I want to know how much protein I actually need and whether or not I’m getting it. I don’t ever want to eat chia pudding. I want another person to look at me with love. I want all of this to happen in a non-corny way.