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2815 Laura van den Berg Lane Turner/The Boston Globe/Getty ImagesFight Week Laura van den Berg A native of Florida, Laura van den Berg (b. 1983) has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, and a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She has published short stories and the novels The Third Hotel and Find Me , with additional forthcoming novels in 2024 and 2026. KEY CONTEXT Laura van den Berg boxes recreationally as a way to manage the symptoms of an anxiety disorder and PTSD. Van den berg grew up in Orlando, and this story takes place nearby in an unnamed central Florida town. On fight week, Kayla feels every muscle in her body harden. Electrical currents race around in her bloodstream; each movement is animated by a force that feels uncontrollable, uncontainable. Her coach keeps telling her to rest, to sleep, but how is she supposed to sleep? Her life has tapered to one fine and brilliant point. In bed at night she imagines each punch landing like a sledgehammer ripping through concrete. This will be Kayla%u2019s third fight. She lost her first, won her second. In the first, she felt caught in a herd of stampeding horses: overwhelmed, overpowered. In her second, the herd stilled and parted and her objective emerged from the dust with stunning clarity. She pressed forward, hurled the combinations she had spent countless hours honing. She pinned the other girl to the ropes and did not relent until the bell. After that second fight, the adrenaline high soared for days. Insults bounced off her, at school and at home. She walked around feeling like nothing in this world could ever hurt her again. Not long after that second fight, however, something irrevocable happened. Her best friend abandoned their coach for a rival gym. No conversation, no advance warning. Most afternoons, they met up in an empty field to do sprints and one day she simply was not there. When confronted over text, she said she wanted to win nationals this year and she didn%u2019t see that happening with Coach, whom she called a washed-up old f %u2014 . Kayla understands that this is a thing that happens in their world, that fighters come and go; she just did not think it would ever happen to them. They have not spoken since, though they still follow each other on social media. Every week they post photos: scowling in headgear on sparring days, flexing in dirty mirrors after lifting weights. Kayla feels like they are in silent competition with one another and maybe that has always been the case, even when they were still best friends. Same age. Same weight class. Only two white girls on the fight team. They both even have a dead parent knocking around in their pasts. Her former best friend%u2019s father was killed in a car accident three years ago. Kayla%u2019s own mother has been dead for a decade, after a blood vessel burst like a pipe in her brain. She collapsed in the grocery store, right by the citrus display. Life support for twenty-four hours and then gone. What do you know about the main character by the end of paragraph 3? As a result, what can you anticipate the story will be about?11Copyright %u00a9 Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. Distributed by Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. For review purposes only. Not for redistribution.