He insists I’m the blockheaded one after I walked a mile to 7-Eleven at 2 am alone, without pepper spray. He once nearly jumped off the stair railing to prove he could fly and I had to bribe him down with a free pint of strawberry Haagen-Dazs. My parents think Tian is a role model child, but I think Tian is blockheaded. I ask why they insist on playing since it’s not like we have unlimited snack packs of almonds and dried tofu, and they’re getting sweaty and wasting energy that could be spent finding a way out. We’d normally walk home together, but now the courts are the only places untouched by the sinkhole and it’s too risky trying to walk out. Now we don’t play together, but I sit on the bench outside of the courts, listening to the whir of the racket and the thumps of the ball hitting surfaces. Even so, I insisted we play although the more we played, the more our skills diverged until I was just wasting his time fetching missed balls on my side of the court. Tian and I played tennis together growing up, but he was always better because, according to my parents, he worked smarter while I needed dumbed down, repetitive movements. The one time I manage to hit the ball to the other side’s baseline is because I’m high off adrenaline, running to the courts to confirm with the others that their houses had also been swallowed up by the sinkhole, my pent-up anxiety released through the racket. Tian insists I can do better, but I prefer watching from the sideline. When I’m trying my hardest, my forehand sends the ball into the opposing side’s service court and no further, and my backhand is a crapshoot. We don’t bother with our chances since nearly all the stores have been looted empty. They’ve been replacing the balls less and less frequently because the Penn stock is nearly empty and the only place to get more is from the sporting store half an hour away. It’s because I’m whacking all the pressure out, Tian says although it looks exhausting to me regardless of ball pressurization. None of them are pros though, and I can’t tell when the ball needs to be replaced beyond when its yellow felt dulls although Tian insists there’s a huge difference-he has to swing much harder to hit winners with the used balls. Tian claims real pros are skilled enough so that the ball dying doesn’t affect them as much. They have a finite number of brand-new balls. Pro players switch for new balls every seven or so games, but Tian and everyone else only open a new can for each match. Tian says tennis is beyond human comprehension, which is why he likes it: the spin, the warmup suicides, the fact that nobody makes a tennis ball that doesn’t fluff up and die after thirty minutes.
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