The Late Bloomer by Ken Baker

He straddles my body like a cowboy over a steer.
    Before he can hog-tie me, I jump to my feet. “What the fuck areyou—” Before I can finish, Angry Guy kicks me back down to the road with a swift sneaker to the sternum.
    Tonya comes running toward us from her porch screaming, “Leave him alone!”
    â€œGet up, asshole!”
    Ah . . . Angry Guy is actually Angry Boyfriend. Tonya must have confessed to cheating.
    â€œI didn’t know she was your
fucking
girlfriend . . . you
dick.
She told me she didn’t have a fucking boyfriend.”
    This confuses Angry Boyfriend, who, with his dumb-guy face and beefy muscles, obviously has spent more time in the gym than the library.
    As his feeble brain processes the data, I grab my baseball mitt, flash Tonya the evil eye and continue walking home.
Dad’s right. Girls are nothing but trouble.
    A month later Tonya stands on the railroad tracks by our house and gets struck from behind by a speeding train. She dies instantly. No one knows for sure whether it was a suicide, but some of her friends think that she has been depressed recently, confused about her life and unhappy with her boyfriend.
    Mom buys Kyle a new dress shirt and slacks for her funeral. I stay home.

(PROLACTIN LEVEL: 225 NG/ML)
    â€œThere are faster and taller goalies out there,” Dad has told me more than once. “But no one works harder than you do, Kenny.”
    And after several years of monkish dedication—during which I choose hockey over girls, drinking, goofing off and all the other social activities most of my peers engage in—all my hard work starts to pay off when I am invited to train at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs. I get on a plane for the first time in my life. None of my brothers has ever flown; my father has only flown once.
I knew I was better than them!
    There I play against the young ice studs who will go on to become National Hockey League all-stars: Jeremy Roenick, Mike Modano, Steve Heinze, Tony Amonte. At sixteen I’m ranked the top goalie my age in the country, meaning that I have a legitimate shot at making it to the big leagues, or at least earning a Division I scholarship, even though I have absolutely no career aspirations other than stopping pucks with my body, which, much to my chagrin, does not look nearly as impressive as the goaltending feats it can perform.
    I am a junior in high school; yet, I can’t stop thinking about how my sixth-grade health teacher warned us to expect biological changes over the next few years. Soon, she lectured, our childlike bodies wouldtransform into adult figures. “All of you will start thinking a lot more about sex,” she said, eliciting a chorus of giggles. She said that boys, bubbling with testosterone, would go girl-crazy; ovulatory and estrogen-infused, girls would go boy-crazy.
    Whatever. Those health class lectures seem like trailers for movies that promise epics but turn out to be turkeys.
    I have shaved only once, and that was just to see what it felt like, because I couldn’t see any stubble, at least not without a magnifying glass. I have never had a wet dream, and while I have recently shot up to five feet eleven inches, I have spaghetti-thin arms and a belly that jiggles and a waist that won’t harden no matter how many sit-ups I do or how many meals I skip.
    I’m pushing 180 pounds, which would be fine if I had more muscle, which is denser (thus heavier per square inch) than fat. I learn this sad fact at a junior Olympic tryout in Colorado Springs in the summer of 1986. The first day of camp, the coaches line us up in a gym and ask the players to strip down to our underwear. It’s time for the official weigh-in, they announce.
    I have been dreading this moment, running five miles a day at the high school track and skipping breakfast and dinner for the past month. I weighed 185 pounds on June 1 and wanted to slim down to 175 by