Trade Me (37 page)
Authors: Courtney Milan
Tags: #courtney milan, #contemporary romance, #new adult romance, #college romance, #billionaire
Eating disorders in male athletes are not well understood. For female athletes, there has been a lot of research on what is called the Female Athlete Triad, an eating disorder that arises when an athlete (typically an endurance athlete) does not take in enough food to cover her training. This often results in a loss of bone mass, a reduction or even a cessation in menstrual periods, and other energy deficiencies. Overtraining in this way does not always result in significant weight loss—that’s why it’s a little harder to detect.
Female Athlete Triad is obviously something that people initially assumed only applied to women. In recent years, however, there’s been a growing discussion of whether there’s a similar presentation for men (many think there is) and how to discover it (it’s harder, because men don’t have periods, and so they’re lacking that particular canary in the coal mine). In Blake’s case, his symptoms include the stress fracture he suffers at the race he runs in Spain, among other things. It’s complex, with multiple psychological factors that need to be addressed. Luckily, he’s going to be seeing a great therapist.
Another piece of this book—Tina’s background—came from a time much earlier than Tyler Hamilton’s book. Anyone who has ever had to read any number of immigration cases has probably run into a case involving someone who practiced Falun Gong. Falun Gong is a series of exercises, coupled with some teachings, that was popular in China in the 1990s. It was, in fact, potentially too popular, and the Communist government banned it.
Protests followed; one of those protests involved ten thousand practitioners showing up, unannounced and unexpected, in Beijing. Needless to say, this freaked out the central government, and they quashed the practice with greater vigor.
The torture that Tina’s father suffered is actually mild compared to what has been reported. The US State Department issued a report describing some of the practices; you can
read it here
. If anything, I’ve understated what could potentially happen to practitioners of Falun Gong in China. Some of the worst reports suggest that those who refuse to recant are not only executed arbitrarily, but their organs are harvested for medical purposes.
The immigration problem with Falun Gong, on the other hand, is a little more difficult. Anyone who has studied immigration law knows that it is a harsh business. Potential asylum seekers are expected to corroborate their stories—but it’s hard to get evidence that the government has put you in a secret camp. (I’ve seen it go down both ways—person A gets deported because there’s no evidence that he was tortured in a secret Communist reeducation camp; person B presents evidence that states that he was held in a reeducation camp, and then the immigration judge decides the evidence is fraudulent, because why would the government admit that it held someone in a secret camp?)
(I also want to point out that this cuts both ways: the fact that there is rarely evidence of horrible government shenanigans means that unscrupulous people seeking asylum may choose to claim that they’re practitioners of Falun Gong simply because their stories cannot be easily disproven.) The end result is that a lot of people who have claimed to practice Falun Gong have been deported.
I first heard about Falun Gong when I was working on the Ninth Circuit, where a substantial portion of the docket is composed of immigration cases, and for some reason, that inherent dilemma—damned if you don’t have evidence, damned if you do—has stuck with me.
There’s another piece of Tina that goes even farther back.
I have a lot of memories of Berkeley. One of my strongest ones, though, is this. My fellow physical chemistry GSIs in the chemistry department all taught Chem 1A in our first year as graduate students.
Teaching Chem 1A, at least the year I did so, was an exercise in helplessness. Our sections were scripted; the class skipped some very basic concepts in chemistry—things like balancing equations and dimensional analysis—that are foundational, on the theory that anyone going to Cal would already know.
Well, they didn’t all know. The students of mine who
didn’t
know those things were—inevitably—the ones who did not come from rich areas. They had science teachers in high school who taught gym class (nothing wrong with that—except if the gym teacher doesn’t know science). Our sections were scripted; instead of covering those basics as instructors, we had to do terrible things like show our students pictures of random things and have them talk about what they meant.
(To this day, these pictures still make me want to beat someone over the head. Y’all, any one-state system has the same entropy as any other one-state system. Stop teaching our kids lies in lieu of balancing equations! Obviously, I still feel a fiery rage when I let myself think about this.)
All the GSIs talked about it: The students who were at the greatest risk in our classes weren’t the ones who worked the least, or even the ones who most lacked aptitude. They were the ones who didn’t come from school districts that had money. They were poor and more likely to be immigrants or people of color.
Perhaps the greatest stretch of my imagination in this whole book is the one that nobody but me will notice. To this day, my deepest regrets are for those students who were set up to struggle from before the day they enrolled. The playing field was never equal. I wanted to write someone who succeeded despite the fact that everything in the system was set up against her.
I wish I’d been able to do more.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to everyone who listened when I told them about my idea for this book, and told me it was not a horrible idea to write it: Ann Aguirre, Tessa Dare, Sherry Thomas, Brenna Aubrey, Rawles Lumumba, Carey Baldwin, Leigh LaValle… I’m sure there are others on this list. Writing in a new subgenre is a scary thing, and this book terrified me on many, many levels.
I’m grateful to the many people who helped me get this book together on a tight turnaround: Robin Harders and Briana Lambert for editing, Martha Trachtenberg for copy editing, Julie Naughton, Rawles Lumumba, and Rebecca Hill for last minute proofing. Thanks also to Professor Robert van Houweling, who sent me his syllabus for PS 1, and the City of Berkeley, for not giving me a ticket when my meter had totally expired when I went to do my campus walk around.
I pulled on years of listening to people in my family talk about living in China to write this book. Tami, TJ, Mom, and Dad were all ridiculously helpful. And Tami answered last-minute questions about Mandarin at…um…the last minute.
Mr. Milan was very excited to finally know something about legitimate medical procedures that would actually be used in the book, and to be able to have actual input other than suggesting that everyone get chlamydia or syphilis. He thinks the cath lab (where they stick a catheter in your femoral artery and pump you full of dye so they can observe what’s going on in your heart) is awesome and you cannot imagine how excited he was that someone actually got cathed in the book. He answered lots and lots of questions. Like: how long does it take to cath someone? How can you tell if someone’s having a heart attack? At what point would you suspect and/or not suspect cocaine usage? What signs do you have that someone is using cocaine? I did not ask him all of these questions, but he answered them all anyway. Seriously, you have no idea how much he likes the cath lab. He is reading this over my shoulder as I write, and he wants me to drop a link to
this YouTube video
about cathing people. He thinks it’s
hilarious.
I, as a normal citizen, find it frightening.
Usually I thank people and say that any mistakes are my own, but I’m married to Mr. Milan and told him all these details three times, so if he missed something and it ended up wrong, it’s because he wasn’t paying attention. Feel free to blame him if something is off. (I’m kidding.) (I’m not kidding.)
Sean B. at the Denver Tesla not only let me test drive the car even though I told him that I was never going to buy one, he answered innumerable weird questions that nobody else had ever asked. Questions like, “What happens if I’m driving down the road and I throw my electronic key fob out the window?”
And as for my AK co-clerks…you know that I can never thank you guys enough. This book is dedicated to you for a reason.
Finally, if you’ve gotten this far—thank you for taking a chance on a new book in a new subgenre for me. I hope you enjoyed the ride.
Table of Contents
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or companies or products, is purely coincidental.
Trade Me: © 2015 by Courtney Milan.
Cover design © Courtney Milan.
Cover photographs © CURAphotography | Dreamstime.com.
Digital Edition 1.0
All rights reserved. Where such permission is sufficient, the author grants the right to strip any DRM which may be applied to this work.
