“So where’s your enormous cheering section tonight, Grace?” Soosie said. “Did they all leave without buying drinks?”

Grace smarted. “Hey, I’m still trying to get a following. But it’ll happen, especially in Level Two.”

“And then what?” Rolle asked. “Move up again if your crowd plateaus? Those Level One roughnecks-they’re healed before they’ve even felt your punch. How’s that interesting? Look, you’re obviously a good sparrer, and you decided to take a risk for bigger money-good career

move and all-but long-term, that hurts the whole thing. It thins out the one division that anyonecan relate to.”

“But,” said Soosie, “they’ve got to walk through the door first to see a match. Your idea doesn’t fill seats.”

He was losing. Looking dumb in front of Grace suddenly felt humiliating, but he wouldn’t quit.

“This stuff isn’t about people who can’t get hurt beating each other. When all this started …” He paused to shoot a glance at Grace, “… it was about people who’d been given a raw deal proving that they were tough. It’s not about points. It’s about overcoming. About willpower.”

Soosie scoffed. “People don’t pay to watch willpower.”

Grace left, unconvinced, twenty minutes later.

“You like her,” Soosie said.

“Nah.”

“Yeah, you do. And you hate that she’s right. We need more sparrers with her spirit. No sense in limiting them to spectators. You want to make money doing this someday, right? Well that’s how it’s going to happen. Remember, Rolle? Money. The green stuff.”

“Only for us. I don’t think that girl ever saw green money until a few weeks back.”

“How many times has someone held being an Eyesore against you? Tell me you’re not going to do the same thing to her.”

***

When he was twelve, Rolle tried to drink a Coca-Cola with his forehead. It happened while he was at a friend’s house watching TV, about a week after his mom put the ventilator into his room to clean the air. He thought he was bringing the can up to his mouth. He knew where his mouth was, and felt so certain of it that he spilled sticky cola down his face and front of his shirt. He could never quite explain it to anyone who wasn’t an Eyesore. Few Eyesores really understood how it worked. Some wire in the brain got crossed and up seemed down, left seemed right. At that moment, his forehead seemed indisputably to be his mouth.

A few more things like that happened. He got vertigo looking down a curb-from his perspective it seemed like a sheer mountainous cliff. After watching cartoons one afternoon, he tried to walk upside down, using his hands as feet. Then, he told mom. She took him to the doctor.

By then, Rolle already idolized doctors and aspired to be one someday. He felt special because the doctor talked to him in an actual office, a room with an oak desk and shelves filled with medical DVDs. He said flashing light caused it, and that sometimes things that didn’t look like they were flashing actually were-TVs, phones, ATM windows. Rolle had been exposed to something-like a virus-that would stay with him probably into adulthood, that had no cure. It could be managed, though. It wouldn’t hurt him as long as he didn’t look at flashing things too long.

Then his ever-honest mother explained things. How the ventilator worked. How the disability could be an advantage. How he could study with books instead of monitors, find other interests instead of video games.

Around the country, other parents put “ventilators” in their kids’ rooms, releasing the fine mist of psychophysiological disruption on their children. But only the crazy parents-the ones who quietly broke health laws to keep their kids free from medical treatments that they saw as needless, the ones who wanted kids who’d read books instead of play vids, the ones who thought that making their kids pariahs would stimulate them intellectually. The crazy parents.

The ones like his mom.

Rolle knew the excuses most parents gave, and he respected his mom for never making them. They said they didn’t think the results would be permanent. They said they wanted to give their kids an edge during the developmental years to keep them from becoming couch potatoes. They knew the kids would struggle. Brilliance came from struggle. Some day, the kids would appreciate the temporary disadvantage in the long run. But it hadn’t been temporary.

Still, Rolle knew there were others-parents who were actually pleased with the outcome. They’d helped slow down an accelerating world, preserved libraries and paper money.

They forced society to accommodate for one more handicap. People hated them for that, no one more than their children.

Several years later, some of those kids whose parents wanted them to be future Da Vincis or Edisons took up karate, tae kwon do, or capoeira and started beating the living hell out of one another for fun, imitating the mixed martial arts fighters from televised bouts that their parents had rendered them incapable of watching. A scene was born.

***

“You always were a rebel, Rolle. Girls like that.”

“Sure. Twenty-five-year-old rebels who live with their mothers.”

Mom laughed. “So you didn’t ask her out because you’re staying here?”

“There are plenty of other reasons. She’s a little bit nuts.”

“Like attracts like.”

Talking to Mom about Grace made it painfully clear to Rolle that he had nothing better to do, that he’d read every book there twice already, that every friend he’d ever had was back at college or had left for another town where the sparring was allegedly better. But she’d hit on something.

“You’re wrong,” Rolle said. “I never sparred to be a rebel.”

“I wasn’t talking about sparring.”

“What? Med school?!?”

“I wanted a fighter, but I took something away from you to make it happen. I made you …”

“Wait. Mom. You think I quit med school because I’m an Eyesore?”

She winced at the word.

“Mom, I quit because it was reallystinking hard. It’s hard whether you take tests on paper or on a display screen. Those chumps even envied me-thought I got breaks that they didn’t get. Some of them dropped out too.”

“I always thought it was to spite me,” she said. After minutes of silence, she added “If preferring to clobber people for money over healing the sick is the worst thing you do to disappoint me, then you’ve let me off pretty light.”

Rolle shrugged. “Most sparrers I know would agree with you. But not me.”

“You forgive too easily.”

He thought of Soosie and Loudon. Of Grace. “A lot of sparrers I know would agree with that too. And they’d say that’s why I’m a pushover on the mats.”