Total pages in book: 130
Estimated words: 126003 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 630(@200wpm)___ 504(@250wpm)___ 420(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 126003 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 630(@200wpm)___ 504(@250wpm)___ 420(@300wpm)
I slipped in behind a group of guys. I’m so small, they didn’t even see me. Of course, inside it was a different story. Everyone was noticing me. But I just chatted up a guy not much older than me, and kinda stuck to his side. He wanted to fight, had been coming for a few weeks already and had put his name in for the first fight, but he was afraid. I talked him into it because if he got in the ring it didn’t matter if he won. He would be invited to the next fight.
He was not my boyfriend. I would not say the relationship we had was dating. But we did go out a few times. He was as shy around girls as he was in the ring, but he got me to the next fight. At least, he told me where it was. He wasn’t going back.
I put my name in for the first fight. They laughed at me and there was no fight for me. But I stayed all night and when they were making arrangements, I was there. There were lots of people like me hanging around until three in the morning trying to get another chance. So yeah, they saw me. But they never really saw me.
No one ever really sees me.
It was about five months later when I finally got my first chance at fight one in Miami.
It really was a quick phase in my brand-new life. A temporary thing. And I was OK with that at the time. I had just left fighting, I wasn’t yearning for it yet. Hell, I wasn’t even missing it yet.
I wanted to be normal. I wanted to be like Nandy. I had already hired her, paying her in gift cards. I still laugh about how I pulled out my stack of gift cards after our first lesson and asked her which one she wanted.
She looked at me like I was a freak, but only for a moment. Then she shook her head and took the American Express.
The next time we had lessons she informed me that I had paid her a whole year in advance. And that’s how I got my first American friend.
I liked her immediately. She was so damn normal. She had a family—a big, huge family—and she went to school. She took classes in things like dancing and piano on the side, and had other friends who lived both close and far away. And sometimes, when we were together, she’d get a call from one of them and she’d excuse herself to go have a chat.
I wanted her life so bad. I wanted to pretend that I grew up in some normal town, with parents, and school, and a life filled with music, and sports, and friends.
So that’s what I did. I reinvented Irina van Breda.
Anyway, the Miami fights were a means to an end. A way to finance my lie. The purses were huge, too. In dollars, not Brazilian real. Fight one started at five grand for the winner and if you made it all the way to the end of the night, fight ten, you were three and a half a million dollars richer than when you started.
No one ever made it to the end of the night. The guys here were definitely a different kind of fighter. Most of them were from local MMA gyms. Some of them were already professional, just looking for some quick cash.
They were bigger than me, and more powerful than me, but none of them had been trained by Maart since they were six.
My best night was three wins in a row. But over the course of several months I made over three hundred thousand dollars—the bulk of it in the last tournament when I started at fight one and made it all the way through fight three.
Obviously not everyone can start in fight one. So when I first started getting fights, they put me in wherever they had a spot. Sometimes it was fight two, sometimes it was fight ten.
But of course, fight ten really wasn’t any different than fight one if the guy opposite me had upset the winning streak of the guy he just beat.
It was fun. I was starting to like it. But I had what I needed. More than what I needed. The condo I was looking at was only two hundred and twenty-nine thousand dollars, so it was time to stop.
I didn’t want to admit that I enjoyed what I was doing just a little bit too much. That I was starting to put names to the faces. The tournaments were only once a month, so it wasn’t like I was seeing these guys all the time. Of course, they all knew me. Not my name, obviously. I was Hurricane Irene to them. Or Honey B, as it turns out. But that last night they were nodding at me when I was taping up my hands. A few of them even said hello.