Chapter 22: The Gym Alliance
The gym smelled of chalk dust and stale sweat, a smell Willum associated with Josh’s energy. Today, it felt like the scent of a crime scene. He stood in the entrance, his large frame feeling suddenly obstructive, as a group of human teenagers brushed past him, their laughter too loud.
He’d left Josh at home with the others, supposedly sketching plans for a garage wall. Josh had been quiet, focused, but the brittle energy was gone, replaced by a grim determination that worried Willum more. Action was the only antidote.
He found the break room. It was empty except for a woman sitting at the sticky table, staring into a mug as if it held terrible secrets. Maya. Josh had mentioned her a few times—a tough, competent instructor who didn’t suffer fools. She had short-cropped black hair and the lean, ropy build of a serious climber. One of the corporate visitors yesterday.
She looked up as he filled the doorway. Her eyes narrowed, not in hostility, but in assessment. “You’re Josh’s. Willum, right?”
He nodded, stepping inside. The fluorescent buzz was a physical pressure. “Can I talk to you?”
“About the shit-show yesterday?” She gestured to a chair. “I figured. I’m surprised he sent you.”
“He didn’t.” Willum’s voice was quiet. He didn’t sit, preferring to stand, his hands restless at his sides. “He’s at home. He thinks he’s starting over from scratch. I don’t think he should have to.”
Maya’s mouth tightened. She took a slow sip of her coffee, grimaced. “This tastes like burnt tires. Corporate’s cutting the budget on beans, too.” She set the mug down with a sharp click. “They ignored me, you know. When they were ‘assessing.’ I told them Josh’s retention rates for the youth program were fifteen percent higher than the integrated adult classes. I showed them the feedback from parents. They called it ‘anecdotal.’” She spat the word.
Willum felt a flicker of hope, sharp and desperate. “So you see it. What he does.”
“Of course I see it,” she said, her voice suddenly weary. “I’ve been here eight years. I’ve seen a dozen flash-in-the-pan instructors come and go. Josh isn’t that. He’s not just teaching them to climb. He’s teaching them that their bodies, their whole bodies, belong in that space. That they’re not just small humans. It’s specific. It’s vital. And they want to turn it into a generic play-hour so they can sell more bulk memberships.”
She looked at him, really looked. “He’s wrecked, isn’t he?”
The question was direct, uncomfortably so. Willum just nodded again, his throat tight.
Maya pushed her chair back. “Okay. What’s your play? You’re not here for my sparkling personality.”
“I want to fight it,” Willum said. The words felt clumsy. “But I don’t know the battlefield. He mentioned… testimonies. From the parents. From the kids.”
“A petition.” She let out a short, dry laugh. “Yeah. That’ll scare the suits. They’ve got spreadsheets.”
“Maybe,” Willum admitted. He finally sat, the chair groaning under him. “But it’s something he can see. Tangible proof he’s not crazy. That it wasn’t just in his head.” He remembered Josh’s trembling form on the pillow, the way he’d said they didn’t even watch the kids. “He needs to know people were watching. And that they saw him.”
Maya was silent for a long moment. She studied Willum’s face—the earnest worry in his eyes, the set of his jaw. She saw the anchor in him. “You really love him, don’t you?” The question wasn’t romantic. It was deeper, more familial.
Willum didn’t hesitate. “They’re my family.”
Something in her expression softened, just at the edges. “Alright. A petition. It’s not nothing. Parental opinion is the one variable their damn spreadsheets can’t quantify because they never bother to ask.” She stood up, her energy shifting from defeated to tactical. “I’ve got the next Pipkin youth class in twenty minutes. The parents usually hang around, grab a coffee, bitch about property taxes. I’ll talk to them. You…” She eyed his size. “You might be a bit overwhelming. But you can be the silent note-taker. Give it some gravity.”
She rummaged in a drawer, pulled out a fresh legal pad and a pen, slid them across the table to him. “Write down names. Kids’ names, too. Quotes. Be specific.”
Willum picked up the pen. It felt insignificant in his hand. “Thank you, Maya.”
“Don’t thank me yet,” she said, heading for the door. “I’m not doing this for you. That program is the only thing in this plastic-fantastic gym that feels real. I’m saving my own soul here, too.”
The next hour was a lesson in quiet diplomacy. Willum sat at a small table near the viewing area, the massive window overlooking the colorful, scaled-down climbing walls a blur of activity. Maya moved through the clustered parents with the efficiency of a field surgeon. Willum watched her approach a Pipkin mother who was nervously watching her daughter, a tiny thing with bright green hair, attempt a route.
He saw Maya lean down, speak softly. He saw the mother’s face shift from polite attention to acute concern, then to firm agreement. Maya gestured toward Willum.
The mother approached, her tail flicking with anxiety. Up close, Willum could see the fine lines of worry around her eyes. “Maya says you’re a friend of Josh’s? Gathering support?”
“Yes,” Willum said, keeping his voice low and steady. He angled the legal pad so she could see. “We just want to let management know how important his classes are.”
“Important?” The woman’s voice cracked. “He saved my Kira. She was so shy, hated her tail, thought it made her weird. Josh showed her it was a superpower. She calls it her ‘fifth arm’ now.” She looked back at the wall, where her daughter was confidently navigating an overhang. “If they take him away… it’s not just a class. It’s the only place she’s ever felt completely proud of what she is.”
Willum wrote it down, his handwriting careful and blocky. Kira. Proud of her tail. Fifth arm. The words felt sacred.
Another parent, a human father with a Pipkin son perched on his shoulder, came over. “Josh got my boy to top that blue route last week. Kid had been stuck for a month. Josh didn’t just spot him. He climbed the damn thing alongside him, talking him through every move like it was a duet. A human instructor can’t do that. They can’t get down in the dirt with them.”
Down in the dirt. Willum wrote it down.
One by one, they came. Some angry, some pleading, all with a specific, crystalline story. A kid who overcame a fear of heights. A kid who found a friend. A kid who, for one hour a week, wasn’t the smallest, the ‘other,’ but an athlete.
Willum’s page filled. The impersonal space of the gym began to feel charged, humming with a consensus the corporate team had been utterly deaf to.
Maya returned as the class ended, kids chittering with excitement as they reunited with parents. She glanced at the full page of notes, her eyebrows lifting. “Yeah. That’s what I thought.” She pulled out her phone. “I’m texting the other instructors. Two of them are on board. We can get this formatted, printed, presented. It won’t be ignored if we all threaten to walk.”
Willum looked at the list. It was no longer just names and quotes. It was a map of Josh’s impact, a topography of belonging. He could imagine placing it in Josh’s hands, the physical weight of it.
“He doesn’t think anyone saw,” Willum murmured.
Maya followed his gaze to the climbing walls, now empty. “Everyone who mattered saw.” She clapped him on the shoulder, a brief, solid contact. “Tell him the fight’s not over. It’s just getting started. And he’s not climbing this one alone.”
Willum folded the legal pad carefully, the paper crisp under his fingers. The burnt-coffee stink of the break room, the relentless fluorescent buzz—it all faded under the resonance of those gathered voices. He had what he came for.
More than that, he had a direction. The fear that had coiled in his gut since Josh’s shaking silence last night—the fear of helplessness—began to unspool. There was a route forward. It was messy, it was human, it was petitions and pressure. But it was something they could do together.
He walked out of the gym, the afternoon sun hitting his face. The air outside smelled of cut grass and concrete, ordinary and clean. He pulled out his phone, thumb hovering over the home group chat. He didn’t type the story. Not yet.
He typed four words: We have a plan.
The phone buzzed in his hand almost immediately. Three dots danced, then Malcolm’s response popped up. Define “plan.” Is it legally sound, or is it Pat’s variety of plan?
Willum almost smiled. He pushed the gym door open, the hinge whining, and stepped back into the stale chalk air. The final youth class of the day was wrapping up, the last of the tiny climbers being zipped into specially-made backpacks or hopping onto offered hands. He leaned against the cool cinderblock wall, out of the way, and watched.
He waited. The parents filtered out, their conversations fading into the parking lot. The human staff began wiping down holds and coiling ropes. The space emptied until the only sounds were the hum of the air conditioner and the faint tap-tap-tapping from high on the main climbing wall.
A Pipkin was up there, moving with a slow, meticulous grace along a complex route of yellow holds. He wasn’t climbing for joy or speed. He was inspecting, his tail occasionally flicking out to test a bolt. Willum recognized the methodical focus. This had to be Leo.
Willum waited until the Pipkin—Leo—reached the base of the routing ladder and descended, his tail wrapping expertly around a rung. He was older than Josh, his fur a steely grey at the temples, and his movements carried a weary precision. He carried a digital tablet in a chest-harness.
“Leo?” Willum’s voice was soft, but it echoed in the near-empty hall.
Leo looked up, his eyes narrowing. He didn’t startle. “You’re Willum. Josh’s human.” It wasn’t a question. He hopped from the ladder onto a low bench, putting them closer to eye level. “He’s not here.”
“I know.” Willum crouched down, reducing his footprint. The concrete was cold through his jeans. “He’s at home. He won’t be coming back. Not after yesterday.”
Leo’s tail, thick and rope-like, gave one sharp thwack against the bench. “I heard. I was out sick. Food poisoning.” His voice was dry, grated. “Came back to a mutiny. Maya told me.” He studied Willum. “You’re gathering sentiments.”
“It’s a start,” Willum said. He met the older Pipkin’s gaze. “But it’s not enough for them. They called his methods ‘niche.’ They want it scalable. Generic.”
Leo’s laughter was a short, bitter cough. He unhooked his tablet, his fingers swiping across the screen with practiced urgency. “Niche. Right.” He turned the screen toward Willum. It displayed a complex spreadsheet, rows and columns of dense data. “This is ‘niche.’ This is six years of incident reports. Slips, falls, minor injuries. Compare the integrated adult classes to the species-specific youth programs.”
Willum leaned in. The numbers told a stark story. The injury rate in the generic classes was a steady, low bump. In Josh’s and Leo’s classes, it was a flat line near zero.
“It’s not magic,” Leo said, his voice low and intense. “It’s because we know how they balance. We can see a tail-favoring habit from across the room and correct it before it becomes a fall. A human sees a kid sticking to the wall. We see the kinetic chain about to snap.”
He swiped again. Another graph. “Progress metrics. Average time to completion for beginner routes. Our kids are forty percent faster. Not because we push them harder. Because we teach their actual bodies.” He looked from the screen to Willum’s face, his eyes blazing. “I’ve been compiling this for years. Waiting for a day like this. Knowing they’d look at the bottom line and see a redundancy instead of a result.”
Willum felt a new kind of solidity form in his chest, colder and harder than the hopeful warmth of the parent testimonies. This was a weapon. “You have proof. Not just feelings. Data.”
“Damn right I have data.” Leo’s tail lashed again, a whip-crack of frustration. “They want to talk about liability? Here’s the liability report. They want to talk about progress? Here’s the progress. They want to talk about cross-species understanding?” He pulled up a final document, a series of survey responses. “Read the parent comments from the mixed-family workshop we ran last fall. Human parents finally understanding why their Pipkin kid needs a different spot. Pipkin parents seeing human kids struggle with empathy. It’s not a climbing class. It’s a diplomacy seminar with chalk bags.”
He stopped, his breath coming a little fast. He was vibrating with a pent-up, scholarly fury. “Josh builds them up. I make sure they don’t break. They think they can separate that. They can’t. The second you do, it all becomes wallpaper. Pretty, and utterly pointless.”
Willum straightened up, his knees popping. He looked at Leo, perched defiantly on his bench with his arsenal of graphs. “Will you fight with him? With us?”
Leo powered down the tablet, securing it back to his harness with a definitive click. “I’ve been fighting since before Josh was hired. I just didn’t have anyone in the trenches with me who was tall enough to throw a punch they’d feel.” He gave Willum a grim, approving nod. “You tell Josh the numbers are on his side. The numbers, and me. We’ll provide the proof their spreadsheets are blind to.”
Willum pulled out his phone again. The group chat was alive with demands for details. He looked from the screen to Leo, then back to the empty climbing walls, still holding the ghost-echo of tiny, triumphant shouts.
He typed a new message, his thumbs steady now. Plan has two parts. Heart and hard proof. Got the heart. Just got the proof. Coming home.
He didn’t wait for a reply. He pushed through the doors into the twilight, the data a cold, sure weight in his mind, balancing the warm, fragile weight of the stories in his pocket. For the first time, it felt less like a defense and more like an advance.