Chapter 3: First Day of PE
Gym 3 loomed before him, a cathedral of imposed health. The walk there had been a slow-motion march through the crisp autumn morning, every step ringing with finality. Priya’s advice echoed in his head—seven AM, machines, headphones, function not form—but the mantra felt brittle, a paper shield against what was coming. He pushed through the heavy glass doors.
The air inside was different. It was warm, thick with the pungent, slightly metallic smell of human sweat and the sharp bite of industrial cleaner. The sound was a low roar—the rhythmic thump of running shoes on treadmills, the clank of weight stacks, the grunt of effort, all bouncing off the vast expanse of concrete and glass. And the light was unforgiving, a flat, shadowless fluorescence that left nothing to the imagination.
He stood just inside the entrance, his backpack feeling like an absurd relic. To his left, a wide archway led to the locker area, which was merely an open space with benches and cubbies. No lockers. No doors. Students were there, in various states of disrobing. Some were already naked, stretching calves against the wall or chatting. Others were in the process, peeling off shirts, stepping out of shorts, folding clothes with a ritualistic care. Brent’s gut twisted.
The class was gathering near a bank of mats unrolled on the floor. Twenty, maybe twenty-five students. All of them nude. Their bodies were a random sample—pale, dark, soft, lean, muscled, rounded, scarred, a galaxy of human shapes under the bright lights. His analytical mind tried to catalog them as Maya had taught him, to reduce them to a set of objective observations, but it was overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of data.
He spotted Theo standing comfortably in the center of a small group, gesticulating broadly as he told a story, his entire body engaged in the telling. Theo saw him, gave a huge wave, and mouthed “You got this!” Brent’s attempt at a smile felt like a grimace. He looked away, his eyes scanning for a shadowed corner, a piece of equipment to hide behind. There was none.
His hands were cold as he walked to the bench area. He set his backpack in a cubby. His fingers trembled on the zipper of his hoodie. He shrugged it off, folded it, placed it neatly on top of his bag. The room air touched the skin of his arms. He glanced around. No one was looking at him. Everyone was immersed in their own pre-class rituals.
He sat on the bench to untie his shoes. Each lace felt thick and uncooperative. He pulled off his shoes, his socks. The concrete floor was grainy and cool under his bare feet. This was the point of no return. He stood, unbuttoned his jeans, pushed them down over his hips. The denim pooled around his ankles. He stepped out, folded them. He was standing in the middle of the room in his boxers, the last textile barrier. He saw a guy across the way simply hook his thumbs in the waistband of his briefs and remove them in one fluid motion, tossing them into his cubby before walking toward the mats. The action was so casual, so unthinking. For Brent, it felt like disarming a bomb.
He took a sharp, shallow breath. He closed his eyes for a second. It’s just a list of facts. It’s an unremarkable body. It does its job.
He pushed his boxers down and stepped free.
The air touched everywhere. A full-body blush ignited from his chest to his hairline. He felt hyper-visible, a sentient toothpick in a room of lumber. He kept his eyes fixed on the cubby, arranging his clothes with excessive precision, buying seconds. When he could stall no longer, he turned and walked, stiff-legged, toward the gathering class. He focused on a crack in the concrete floor, counting his steps, his arms held awkwardly at his sides. He didn’t know where to put his hands. Crossing them felt defensive. Letting them hang felt obscene. He settled for letting them dangle, fingers slightly curled.
He found a spot at the very edge of the mat group, as far from the center as possible. He stood, staring straight ahead at the far wall, trying to make himself two-dimensional. The noise of the gym, the laughter, the thumping music from someone’s distant speaker—it all blurred into a meaningless haze. He was a raw nerve. Every pore was an eye staring back at the room.
“Hi!”
The voice was bright, sudden, and inches from his left ear. He flinched, his whole body jerking sideways. He turned his head.
A girl stood there. She had a wild mane of auburn curls that spilled over her shoulders and down her back. Her face was open and friendly, dotted with a few pale freckles across her nose. She was smiling, a wide, genuine smile that crinkled the corners of her clear green eyes. And she was, of course, completely naked.
Her body was compact and powerfully built, like a dancer or a gymnast. Defined shoulders, arms with smooth, lean muscle, a narrow waist flaring to strong hips and taut thighs. There was a faint, silvery scar on one knee. She held herself with an easy, grounded posture, her weight balanced on the balls of her feet.
“You look totally new,” she said, her voice carrying a bubbly, conversational warmth. “And also like you’re about to bolt for the exit. I’m Colette.”
She thrust a hand out. The gesture was so normal, so utterly mundane, that it was the most shocking thing that had happened all morning. A handshake. While nude. Brent’s brain stalled, then frantically rerouted. He lifted his own hand, felt her fingers grip his. Her palm was warm and dry. He gave a weak, single pump.
“Brent,” he managed to croak.
“Nice to meet you, Brent.” She released his hand but didn’t step back, her presence a friendly invasion of his personal space bubble. He could smell a faint, clean scent of soap on her skin. “First time in the meat grinder?”
“Is it that obvious?”
“A little. You have the ‘deer in stadium lighting’ vibe. Don’t worry, it wears off. Mostly.” She tilted her head, her curls bouncing. “You’re cute. In a tousled, terrified genius kind of way. What’s your major?”
The directness, the compliment delivered so offhandedly, short-circuited his fear for a split second, replacing it with pure social confusion. “Computer science,” he said automatically.
“No way! My dad’s in machine learning. My mom’s an AI developer. It’s all Greek to me, though. I’m theatre. I live for this stuff.” She gestured expansively at the room, at her own unclothed state, as if it were a thrilling stage. “The human form in space, you know? Vulnerability as performance. It’s fascinating.”
Before Brent could formulate a response—Was it performance? It felt like torture—a sharp, piercing whistle cut through the gym din.
Conversation died. All heads turned.
A woman walked to the front of the mats. Coach Ingrid. She was naked, her body a testament to her profession—corded muscle definition in her shoulders and arms, a flat, ridged stomach, powerful legs. Her hair was in a severe, practical blonde braid. She held a clipboard and a stopwatch. Her gaze swept over them, cool and assessing, missing nothing.
“Good morning, Foundations,” she said, her voice a clear, carrying alto that required no shout. “Welcome to your body’s new operating system. I am Coach Ingrid. You will be with me for the next fourteen weeks. You will hate me for approximately ten of them. By week fifteen, you might tolerate me. The goal is not to make you athletes. The goal is to establish a functional, sustainable relationship with the physical machine you live in. You will learn to operate it without the distracting interface of clothing.”
She paced slowly along the front row. “You are not here to be looked at. You are here to look inward. To feel what muscles are working. To understand your own leverage, your balance, your breath. Clothing lies. It hides instability, poor form, and weakness. We are removing the lie. Your first task: find a partner. This will be your spotter, your form-check, and your accountability for the semester.”
A fresh wave of panic surged through Brent. He stared rigidly ahead, hoping to become invisible. He felt Colette shift beside him.
Without hesitation, she looped her arm through his. The contact was electric—the warmth and firmness of her skin against his, the press of her upper arm. “Partners!” she declared, her voice cheerful and final.
Brent’s face was a furnace. He didn’t dare look at her. He gave a stiff, tiny nod.
Coach Ingrid’s eyes passed over them, registered the pairing, and moved on. “Excellent. Partners, face each other. We begin with a joint mobility assessment. Mirror your partner’s movements. Slow, controlled. We are waking up the joints, not testing range of motion. Follow my lead.”
The next hour was a meticulous, agonizing dissection of physical incompetence. Under the coach’s unblinking eye, they performed squats, and Brent was acutely aware of the stark contrast between his own shallow, shaky descent and Colette’s deep, poised movement—the clean flex of her quadriceps, the steady shift of muscle in her back. They did lunges, and he wobbled, his bare feet sliding slightly on the mat, while she was a statue of stable strength. During push-ups, he managed five before his arms trembled violently, his spine sagging. Colette, beside him, knocked out twenty with metronomic ease, the muscles of her shoulders and back rolling smoothly under her skin.
“Don’t fight your body, Brent,” Coach Ingrid’s voice came from directly above him during a plank hold. He was shaking, sweat dripping from his nose onto the mat. “Observe it. Where is it failing? Is it the anterior core? The shoulders? Breathe into the weakness. It’s just data.”
It was the most humiliating experience of his life. His lungs burned. His muscles screamed. And he was acutely, painfully conscious of his own nakedness with every inelegant grunt, every wobble, every gasp for air. He saw drops of his own sweat land on the mat between his hands. He saw Colette’s steady, controlled breathing from the corner of his eye. Yet, she never commented on his struggle. She just offered quiet, practical tips. “Try shifting your weight forward an inch on that lunge,” or “Your hands are too wide for your frame on the push-up.”
Her help was clinical, devoid of pity. It was about the function.
When Coach Ingrid finally blew the whistle to signal the end, Brent’s legs nearly buckled. He stood, panting, his skin slick with a full-body sheen of sweat. He felt completely dismantled.
“Good first session,” the coach announced. “Showers are mandatory. You do not leave sweat on my equipment or take it back into the dorm. Clean the machine. Dismissed.”
The class began to move as one toward the shower area, a naked river flowing toward the steel columns at the far end of the gym. The roar of water began, echoing in the cavernous space. Steam started to rise.
Brent hesitated, but Colette gave him a gentle nudge with her elbow. “Come on. It’s the best part. The hot water on screaming muscles? Divine.”
He followed, too tired to muster fresh dread. The shower room was a larger, industrial version of the dorm’s. Rows of columns, each with three heads, stretched into the mist. Dozens of students were already under the streams, a forest of moving, washing bodies. The sound was a deafening cascade.
Colette walked straight to an open spot and snagged it. “Here we go!” she said, beckoning him to the head right next to hers.
He took the one next to her, hanging his imaginary towel on a non-existent hook. He fumbled with the knobs, and a blast of hot water hit him. This time, the heat was a profound relief. It pounded onto his knotted shoulders, onto his aching back. He heard himself groan involuntarily.
“Told you,” Colette yelled over the water. She was already soaking her hair, her curls darkening to deep copper as they wet. She grabbed soap from the dispenser and began lathering her arms, her movements efficient and unselfconscious. “Not so bad, right? The hardest part is just showing up.”
Brent watched the water run in grimy rivulets down his own pale chest. He reached for the soap. The lemony scent was the same as in the dorm. The routine was the same. But his body felt different—it felt used. It felt real in a way it never had after hours at a desk. The trembling in his limbs wasn’t just from fear now; it was from honest effort.
He glanced at Colette. She was rinsing soap from her underarms, her head tilted back, eyes closed against the spray. There was no performance here, no theatre. This was just maintenance. Clean the machine.
He realized, with a slow, dawning clarity, that for the entire brutal hour, despite her proximity, her touch, her undeniable form, he hadn’t gotten an erection. The sheer, overwhelming demand of his physical struggle had colonized every part of his awareness. There had been no space for that particular anxiety.
The terror was still there, a cold stone in his gut. But it was now layered with the bone-deep fatigue of work done, and the first, faint whisper of a truth Priya had promised: in the furnace of effort, the nakedness could, for moments at a time, just… fade.
He scrubbed the soap over his skin, washing away the sweat and the panic of the morning. The water roared, a white noise that drowned out everything else. Colette began humming a tune he didn’t recognize, completely at ease in the chaotic, steamy, public space. Brent kept washing, his mind blissfully blank, focusing only on the simple, mammalian goal of getting clean.
The water shut off with a sudden, hollow clunk, leaving his ears ringing in the abrupt silence. Brent blinked, water streaming from his lashes. Colette was already wringing out her hair with a sharp twist of her hands, droplets flying. "Race you to the cubbies?" she asked, a playful challenge in her tone, but she didn't wait, just turned and walked, her bare feet slapping wet prints onto the concrete.
He followed, the air now chilling his wet skin. The walk back felt different. The gym was still a vast exposure, but his body was too tired to sustain the same level of panic. It was just a transport system, carrying fatigue.
At the benches, they dressed beside each other. There was no coyness, no turned backs. He pulled his boxers on, the cotton sticking slightly to his damp skin, then his jeans. He watched from the corner of his eye as she stepped into a pair of bright blue underwear, then pulled a soft-looking sweater dress over her head in one fluid motion. It was mundane. It was intimate.
"So," she said, shoving her feet into worn leather boots without sitting. "I'm starving. They make us do calisthenics on an empty stomach. Criminal. Wanna grab lunch at the cafeteria? I promise not to talk about squat form."
Brent, pulling his own sweatshirt on, felt the invitation hang in the air. His instinct was to retreat, to hide in his room with a textbook. But the memory of her steady, non-judgmental presence during the workout surfaced. "Yeah," he heard himself say. "Okay. That sounds good."
The main cafeteria was a roar of clattering trays and overlapping conversations, a jarring return to conventional society. They found a small table near a window overlooking a barren quad. Colette attacked a plate of spaghetti with a theatrical gusto that made him smile.
"So, computer science," she said, twirling pasta. "My parents would adopt you on the spot. Seriously, dinner at their place is like a tech symposium. Dad debugging the smart fridge, Mom arguing about neural net ethics with the Roomba."
"You really understand it?" Brent asked, pushing his own food around.
"Understand? Sure. I can follow the logic. It's just... bloodless." She gestured with her fork. "It's all abstracted layers away from the messy, breathing human result. I need the mess. I need the immediate, sweaty, can-you-feel-this feedback of a live audience. Code compiles in silence. A scene either lands or it doesn't, and you know it right in the gut of everyone watching."
He found himself leaning forward. "But theatre is a system too. Blocking, script analysis, character motivation—it's all logic trees and conditional outcomes."
Her eyes lit up. "See! You get it! You just mapped my passion onto your framework. That's actually kind of brilliant." She took a long drink of water. "But I'll stick with my framework. Less typing."
The conversation flowed easier than he expected. He told her about Dr. Vance’s logic class; she groaned in sympathy, describing her own tedious "Theatre History: Pre-Elizabethan" lecture. The sunlight through the window caught the red and gold strands in her still-damp curls.
"So, you’re in the open dorms too, right?" she asked, wiping her mouth. "Which floor?"
"Fourth," Brent said.
"No way! I'm directly underneath you. Third floor, west corner. If you ever hear someone practicing monologues at two AM, that's me. Apologies in advance."
A laugh startled out of him. "I'll be the one clicking a keyboard above you at three. So, we're even."
She smiled, and it was different from her earlier, bubbly grins. This one was smaller, more particular, just for him. A warm, quiet current moved in his chest. He noticed the precise curve of her lower lip, the faint dusting of freckles across the bridge of her nose he hadn't seen from a distance in the gym.
He was attracted to her. The realization arrived not as a shock, but as a simple, undeniable fact, settling into his bones alongside the muscular ache. It was a problem. A massive, complicating problem.
Because he would see her again. Tomorrow. And the day after that. In Gym 3, under those lights, with no barriers. His earlier relief—that exertion had overridden everything—felt naive now. That was before he knew her laugh, before he saw the intelligence animating her face. The nakedness wouldn't fade into background noise anymore. His body would betray him. It would be a spectacular, humiliating failure of the system's entire philosophy.
His appetite vanished. He spent the rest of lunch wrapped in this new, grinding anxiety, even as he enjoyed her company.
Back in the fourth-floor dorm that afternoon, the space felt different. The openness was no longer just a threat to his privacy; it was a stage where his own treacherous physiology could publicly declare an interest he wasn't sure he knew how to handle. He saw Maya at her desk, tapping at a calculator, and Priya reading in a lounge chair with her headphones around her neck.
He needed a new algorithm. He walked over, his footsteps hesitant on the concrete.
"Maya. Priya. Got a second?"
Maya swiveled in her chair. Priya marked her page with a finger and looked up, her gaze calm and assessing.
"We have many seconds," Maya said. "You have the look of a man who just discovered a critical bug in his operating system."
"It's Colette," he said, the name feeling strangely heavy on his tongue. "From the gym. We had lunch."
Priya's eyebrow arched just a fraction. "And this is a problem because...?"
"She's... I'm..." He struggled, lowering his voice even though the general noise of the floor provided cover. "I'm attracted to her. And we're gym partners. And we live in this." He gestured at the open space, at the distant shower columns. "How does that work? The system isn't designed for this. The 'no emotional payload' thing falls apart completely."
Maya leaned back, a slow smile spreading. "Ah. The human element corrupts the pure data stream. Welcome to the actual experiment, Brent."
Priya nodded, folding her hands in her lap. "The theory assumes a baseline neutrality. It doesn't account for chemistry. So you have to account for it yourself."
"How?" The word was desperate.
"Same way you handle everything else here," Maya said, her tone practical. "You manage your input. You control your focus. In the gym, your focus is on the movement, the form, the breath. You weaponize the effort. The burn in your muscles is a bigger, more immediate signal than anything else. You make it louder."
Priya added, "And you reframe the attraction. Right now, it's a scary, amorphous thing that you think will control you. Break it down. What do you actually feel when you see her in that context?"
Brent thought of the gym. "Anxiety. That I'll... react. And be seen."
"Okay. So the attraction is currently just a source of performance anxiety. That's a self-centered fear, not a connection to her." Priya's voice was gentle but incisive. "Redirect it. See her as your partner in the work. See the muscles she's using. Listen to her advice about your form. Be present in the collaboration, not in your own dread."
Maya grinned. "And if all else fails, biological hack: flex your thighs. Really hard. It pulls blood flow. It’s a diver's trick. Useful in many... tense situations."
It was bizarre, actionable advice. It treated his body like a glitchy machine that needed troubleshooting. It was the only kind of advice that could possibly work here.
"So I just... override it," he said slowly.
"You integrate it," Priya corrected. "The attraction exists. Fine. Let it be a background process. Don't give it your main processing power. The task in front of you is the squat, the lunge, the pull-up. That's the program you're running."
Brent stood there, the gears in his mind turning. He could try. He would have to try. The alternative was skipping class, failing, letting the environment defeat him.
"Thanks," he said, the weight in his chest lightening just a fraction, replaced by a nervous resolve.
He turned and walked back toward his bed, the echoes of the gym and the sound of Colette's laugh mixing with Priya's calm analysis and Maya's crude practicality in his head. Tomorrow was another test. A much more complex one. He lay down on his bed, staring up at the steel rafters, and consciously tightened his thigh muscles until they quivered, a dry run for the morning.