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Even when your mother is asking you to do her a favor (be a good girl) it sounds like she is asking you to wear a coat made out of clear plastic. How do words get like that? thinks Rachel. How do words become so gross and synthetic?

Rachel had a theory about other humans: people are the most scared by what makes zero sense to them but that they cannot, no matter how they try, avoid.

But she is also just a child - just a girl waiting to see what her life will be like compared to the lives of the other people she knows.

The granny roles will be easy for her because old people just get to say whatever everyone else is thinking. Like children and fools, grandmothers are not held to the same standards as the rest of society. They are given permission to wear their true feelings externally.

You are no one. No one will ever remember you. You'll die and then you'll be alone and forgotten and people won't have to pretend like you exist anymore, they won't be forced to pretend that your existence matters because your body will be rotted and gone and no one will have to say that you are real.

In this way, decades into the future, boxing will be for Andi Taylor a kind of failed identity marker- something she tried on and wore around but that she later realized wasn’t her, or didn’t fit with the rest of her life, or her as a boxer didn’t fit the way the world needed her to be in order for her to survive.

Izzy looked at her mother and saw a sleeping alien. Iggy looked at Izzy's sleeping mother and saw Izzy's mother sleeping.

The desire to please people is the desire to not be singular.

A life taken over can be wonderful. But it can also be sappy and stupid and dramatic. A play directed by God is many people’s stage of choice.

Rose Mueller loves every girl who agrees to fight against her because they have agreed to be with her without needing to speak to her.

Nobody can ever possibly know what a specific body is good at unless they’re inside it.

It was, is always, a big deal to traverse so many states, to be assigned to meet another you, an equal, another girl who lives in another world who also spends time alone hitting things with her hands.

Girls are born with all of the eggs they will ever make. Tiny future fighters are nested inside the infant bodies of baby girls. Men are dead ends, but girls are infinite backwards and forwards.

It's a warmth that she'll feel again very few times in her life. It's almost like love, but it has a surer, less desperate edge to it.

Rachel Doricko's grandmother wonders if people will ever live on other planets. It doesn't seem so far-fetched. Building a city in the dessert seems like an equally impossible challenge, and here she is, with her girl-boxer granddaughter, at a youth women's boxing tournament, sleeping in what looks like uninhabitable land.

In a village everyone knows everyone's business. In a village it's much, much easier to eat what you have been served.

Tanya Maw's sister is two years older, the perfect age gap for wisdom transmission.

It can be intoxicating to play a sport that requires one to look in their opponent's eyes.

Thank god Izzy has a life where she is more than this, more than just my daughter performing my every wish.

Their coach stands outside the ring, in a neutral corner. He looks like the relative everyone wished declined the obligatory invitation to Thanksgiving dinner.

What a sad thing, to be a good girl, thinks Rachel. God, how I hate the sound of it. Good girl, thinks Rachel, is mountains and mountains worse than good boy. All a good boy has to do to be good is put on a clean shirt. Nobody wants to be a good girl, thinks Rachel. There can't be a single girl in here who wants to be just fine.

Andi is in snooze city because sleeping is her all-time best coping mechanism.

She will be loved by no one as thoroughly as her mother loved her younger half brother, and that will make Andi desperate and dogged for the entirety of her life.

Artemis thinks if she wins, if she's able to somehow beat her eldest sister, become the most fabled, the most brutal, the most beautiful of the Victor sisters, that a secret door will open for her, out into the world, away from her family, away from her mother, where Artemis has agency without her family that is greater than all the other types of agency she has previously known.

The stylists at the salon Artemis goes to never seem to listen. Don't cut too much, she tells them. I need it long, she says to them. She always leaves the salon feeling like some part of herself has been stolen.

Artemis Victor has no idea what it takes to own a house, but she knows what it takes to beat other people, which is what owning property seems like, beating other people at owning a piece of the earth and making that piece of earth yours, not to be shared with other people, because the owning of the property is a product of your victory over other humans, as in, you won more dollars than them so now this slice of land is yours for keeps.

When Rose Mueller's father asked her why she wanted to try boxing, Rose Mueller said she wanted to box because it seemed like a sport where the rules were clear at all times. In boxing, Rose Mueller told her father, it seems hard for there to be any mystery. In church, Rose Mueller thought to herself, there is so much mystery. I need to learn to be in a space where I can see people and understand what is going on in their minds.

There are people who, just by looking at disasters, implicate themselves in the violence at hand. These people, the self-implicating people, are far less likely to be victors, but they are more emotionally intelligent, and more likely to be able to see details that others might miss.

As Rose Mueller moves on Tanya Maw, to the right and then to the left, and to the left again, she sees her own legs morphing into flowers. Her arms become a tangled web of thorny rose vines, and at the end of her arm, where Rose Mueller’s glove used to be, there is a pink bouquet. The bunch of flowers smashes into Tanya Maw’s face.

Tanya Maw has a stray speck of black outside the center of her left eye. It’s like a small piece of her pupil broke off and is orbiting a black moon.