Excerpt
Chapter One
ELYSE
Ruiz’s left hamstring is lying to him, and he knows it, and he is going to tell me it feels great.
“It feels great,” Ruiz says.
He’s face down on table one with his cheek on the headrest and his practice jersey hiked up, and I have two fingers pressed into the belly of his biceps femoris, about four centimeters above the knee crease, where the muscle has been guarding since preseason like a dog that heard something in the yard.
“Great,” I say. “Tell me when it hurts.”
I press a little deeper. He’s quiet for three seconds, which is two seconds longer than a man stays quiet when it doesn’t hurt.
“Ruiz.”
“It’s a pressure,” he says into the headrest. “It’s a pressure situation. It’s not pain.”
“Pressure is a sensation. Pain is a sensation. The line between them is where you stop lying to me.” I take my fingers away and make a note on the tablet on my hip. L hamstring: guarding persists, distal third. Pt reports “pressure situation.” I put that last part in quotes because it’s accurate and because Dr. Webb reads my notes and appreciates primary sources. “You’re doing the eccentric set before practice and again after. Three by eight. Slow on the way down. If you rush the lowering phase I’ll know.”
“How will you know?”
“Because you’ll be back on this table on Thursday telling me it feels great.”
He laughs into the headrest. He’s a good kid. They’re mostly good kids, even the ones who are thirty-four. It’s the first Monday of the Sidewinders’ second regular season, and I have five athletes to see before lunch and a documentation backlog that will not reduce itself, and the season is long, and I like this part. The beginning. When everybody still believes their bodies.
