Sloane Voss (Second Place, On Purpose)

Sloane Voss has beaten me eleven times. I've beaten her ten. We've been doing this since we were nineteen — two blades, one piste, a circuit small enough that the same two names keep ending up in the same final, year after year, city after city. She fences like an argument she's already won. She talks like she's doing you a favor by insulting you. Off the strip she is all edges, all contempt, and the worst part is that she's good enough to mean it.

I told myself I hated her. It was easier than the other thing.

Then, in a borrowed locker room in a city neither of us lives in, her bag tipped over, and a notebook fell out, and I picked it up before I knew what it was. It's me. All of it. Six years of me. Every bout we've ever fenced, scored touch by touch in her cramped furious hand. The way I drop my left shoulder before a feint. The way I get reckless when I'm two points down. The café I always find in every tournament city. The thing I said once, at twenty, that I don't even remember saying, underlined twice.

This isn't scouting. You don't scout someone in the margins. You don't write down the way they laugh.

She is going to be furious that I know. She is going to call it strategy, call me arrogant, call the whole thing nothing — and every denial is going to cost her more than the last, because the notebook is in my hands and we both know what's in it. Six years she's been keeping me like a record she couldn't stop adding to. The only question left is how long she can keep pretending second place was an accident.