On the Saturday of the second week, Delia woke up at 4:50 in the morning with a pounding headache that she would later diagnose, accurately, as the result of staying up until 2:00 studying and not drinking enough water.
She lay in the dark for a few minutes, trying to will herself back to sleep. It didn't work.
She noticed that Reagan's bed was empty, which was not unusual. Reagan was always up early, always somewhere else. Delia had stopped registering it.
But the headache was bad, and she needed water. And the water in the bathroom on their floor tasted wrong, and she'd discovered last week that the water fountain on the ground floor, near the gym entrance, was somehow better. Colder. Maybe the pipes. She didn't know.
She put on her robe and her slippers and shuffled downstairs.
The ground floor of Carver Hall was quiet and slightly weird at 5:00 in the morning. The fluorescent light in the stairwell buzzed. Someone had left a pizza box by the elevator. The common room was dark except for the glow of a soda machine.
Delia went to the water fountain, drank, felt marginally better.
She was on her way back to the stairs when she heard it.
Sound from the gym. Not music, not the thud of a basketball or the clank of weights. Something more regular than that. More rhythmic. The sound of movement, quick and controlled, interspersed with sharp exhalations of breath.
Delia stopped.
She looked at the gym door, which was propped open slightly. She stood there for a moment, having an internal debate about minding her own business, which she lost.
She walked over and looked through the gap in the door.
Reagan was alone in the gymnasium.
The lights were low. Only half the overheads were on, casting the space in a yellowish half-light. The floor was empty. Reagan had set up in the center of the room, near the hanging heavy bag. She was in training clothes, no shoes, bare feet on the rubber mat.
She was moving.
Delia had no vocabulary for what she was seeing. She didn't know the names of the techniques, didn't know the philosophy behind the sequence, didn't have any framework for understanding it technically.
What she understood was this: it was beautiful.
Not in a performance sense. Not showy, not dramatic. Beautiful the way something is beautiful when it has been done 10,000 times, until every inefficiency is gone. When a thing has been refined past the point where you can see the effort anymore, and what's left is just the thing itself.
Reagan moved through a sequence of kicks. High, precise, snapping out and returning.
She pivoted, changed angle. A spinning motion that seemed to defy the expected relationship between rotation and balance.
She landed, and there was no sound. She absorbed the movement rather than letting it dissipate into the floor.
She went to the heavy bag and hit it. Not wildly, not hard for the sake of hard. With a series of strikes that made the bag travel the same distance and return to the same position each time, like a metronome.