Locker Rooms Quotes

How could he convey to someone who'd never even met her the way she always smelled like rain, or how his stomach knotted up every time he saw her shake loose her hair from its braid? How could he describe how it felt when she finished his sentences, turnec the mug they were sharing so that her mouth landed where his had been? How did he explain the way they could be in a locker room, or underwater, or in the piney woods of Maine, bus as long as Em was with him, he was at home?

The hair on the back of her neck was tingling, and she felt like someone was watching her. She knew she was alone as the locker room was silent.

Sam picks the stone up and clenches his entire body in deep concentration. Nothing happens. " Oh come on," he says to the stone. " I promise to use it for the power of good. No girls' locker rooms, I swear.

I’m heavy,” she mutters as my arms scoop under her legs and around her waist.  We leave Brady and Shithead behind us as I start the walk toward the locker rooms, where the first aid room is. “Shut up, Anastasia. You’re not even half my warm-up weight.

I burst into the locker room and— Penises! Sweet Jesus. Penises everywhere. Horror slams into me as I register what I’m seeing. Oh God. I’ve stumbled onto a penis convention. Big penises and small penises and fat penises and penis-shaped penises. It doesn’t matter which direction I move my head because everywhere I look I see penises. My mortified gasp draws the attention of every penis—er, guy, in the room.

And after all those hours in the locker room, all those nights on the team bus, all the conversations and all the jokes and the blood, sweat, and tears, the boy didn’t dare tell his coach his biggest secret. That’s betrayal. David knows it’s a huge betrayal. There’s no other way to explain how much a grown man must have failed as a person if such a warrior of a boy could believe that his coach would be less proud of him if he were gay. David hates himself for not being better than his dad. That’s the job of sons.

So you want to tell me what a sixth grader was doing in the eighth-grade side of the locker room, in a eighth-grade fight?" he said. "Winning," I said.

Now, I figured that the built-up gas in most boys' locker rooms was enough to cause an explosion, so I wasn't surprised when the flaming dodgeball ignited a huge WHOOOOOOOM!

Shut up!" Henry says, "You're going to wake up Jerry Rice." "Jerry Rice?" Carter says, covering his mouth with a hand. I don't think I've ever seen Carter laugh so hard. "Carter, would you like to be the godfather?" Henry asks. "You know, in case anything happens to me and Woods this week?" "Charming," Carter says. "I''d be honored. Does JJ get to be godmother?" "Obviously," I say. "Can I hold Jerry Rice?" JJ asks. "He''s so cute." "No way, man," I reply. "I don't want to wake that thing up before practice. We'll be late if we have to feed it." "What does it eat?" Carter asks. "I have to breast-feed, cause I'm the mom," Henry says, continuing to push the stroller toward the locker room. "Actually," I say, "It eats a metal rod, made out of, like, lead. So basically, we're learning how to poison babies." "Radical," JJ says as we approach the gym,

As far as I was concerned, physical education was evil. You take a bunch of teenagers, make them strip down in front of each other in a locker room, have them don hideous matching uniforms, and then measure their worth based on their ability to chuck balls at a net, into a hoop, or at each other. It was just. Evil.

Readers are bullied in schoolyards and in locker-rooms as much as in government offices and prisons.

Anyone who thinks that homophobia doesn't exist in this day and age has never been the gay boy in a boys' locker room

So I was ugly. I was never fat, really, and I never wore headgear or had zits or anything. But I was ugly. I don't even know how ugly and pretty get decided - maybe there's like a secret cabal of boys who meet in the locker room and decide who's ugly and who's hot, because as far as I can remember, there was no such thing as a hot fourth-grader. - Lindsey Lee Wells

The last time Assistant Principal Parker called, a girl in the school's locker room had accused Julie of being a whore during the two years she'd spent on the street. My kid took exception to that and decided to communicate that by applying a chair to the offending party's head. I'd told her to go for the gut next time- it left less evidence.

As he walked out of the locker room he stripped off his bloody shirt and threw it in the garbage. Helen’s vision stabilized again, and she watched his bare back moving away from her. The last cobwebs clearing from her eyes, she decided that if Lucas was gay then she was going to have to get a sex change operation. He would be so worth it.

You're a freak. But I really can't accept these-' Were you raised in a barn? Don't be ruuuuuude, my boy. They're a gift.' Blay shook his head. 'Take them, John. You're just going to lose this argument, and it will save us from the theatrics.' Theatrics?' Qhuinn leaped up and assumed a Roman oratory pose. 'Whither thou knowest thy ass from thy elbow, young scribe?' Blay blushed. 'Come on-' Qhuinn threw himself at Blay, grasping onto the guy's shoulders and hanging his full weight off him. 'Hold me. Your insult has left me breathless. I'm agasp.' Blay grunted and scrambled to keep Qhuinn up off the floor. 'That's agape.' Agasp sounds better.' Blay was trying not to smile, trying not to be delighted, but his eyes were sparkling like sapphires and his cheeks were getting red. With a silent laugh, John sat on one of the locker room benches, shook out his pair of white socks, and pulled them on under his new old jeans. 'You sure, Qhuinn? 'Cause I have a feeling they're going to fit and you might change your mind. Qhuinn abruptly lifted himself off Blay and straightened his clothes with a sharp tug. 'And now you offend my honor.' Facing off at John, he flipped into a fencing stance. Touché.' Blay laughed. 'That's en garde, you damn fool.' Qhuinn shot a look over his shoulder. 'ça va, Brutus?' Et tu?' That would be tutu, I believe, and you can keep the cross-dressing to yourself, ya perv.' Qhuinn flashed a brilliant smile, all twelve kinds of proud for being such an ass. 'Now, put the fuckers on, John, and let's be done with this. Before we have to put Blay in an iron lung.' Try sanitarium.' No, thanks, I had a big lunch.

....and his head and shoulders were on the bed next to the boy who had captured his heart like cupped hands would capture a butterfly, and had never, ever clutched him too tight and never let him go.

Hey, Tate. Do you just screw in the locker room or do you do blowjobs as well?” Hannah Forrest, queen bee of the mean girls, shouted to my back while I walked to Calculus. Her drones laughed with her. I spun around to face them and held my hand to my heart. “And steal all of your business?” I took the time to enjoy their dumbstruck looks before I twisted on my heel and headed to class.

What the hell is going on in here?” Hannah jumps in surprise when Coach Jensen appears in the shower area. Oh, hey, Coach,” I call out. “Not what it looks like.” His dark brows knit in a displeased frown. “It looks like you’re taking a shower in front of your girlfriend. In my locker room.” “Okay, then yeah, it’s what it looks like. But I promise, it’s all very PG. Well, except for the fact that I’m naked. But don’t worry, no kinky shit is going to happen.” I grin at him. “I’m trying to win her back.” Coach’s mouth opens, then closes, then opens again. I can’t tell if he’s amused or pissed or ready to wash his hands of this whole thing. Finally, he nods and opts for option number three. “Carry on.

I don’t know. Word around the girls’ locker room is that all of you are so hard up, you were cruising the senior center, trying to find a prom date.” – Nick

...if I was going to play this game and love it, it had to love me back.

Ana feels like pushing her neighbour up against the wall and telling him that the locker room where those boys sit telling their stupid jokes end up preserving them like a tin can. It makes them mature more slowly, while some even go rotten inside. And they don’t have any female friends, and there are no women’s teams here, so they learn that hockey only belongs to them, and their coaches teach them that girls only exist for fucking. She wants to point out how all the old men in this town praise them for “fighting” and “not backing down,” but not one single person tells them that when a girl says no, it means NO. And the problem with this town is not only that a boy raped a girl, but that everyone is pretending that he DIDN’T do it. So now all the other boys will think that what he did was okay. Because no one cares.

Because it’s you and basketball, Christian. Only one of you can break my heart.

You’re my friend,” Chris whispered back, and his other hand came up so he could rub Xander’s lower lip with his thumb. “That makes you beautiful.

The whole world heard you tell poor Angie Robinson that “Chris Edwards was your heart”—man, it’s one of the most fucking romantic things I’ve ever heard.

You’re mine,” I said, kissing her mouth once as I humped her. “Mine.” I kissed her again. “Mine in that fountain. Mine in the locker room and in the janitor’s closet. Mine in the dean’s office.” I took her jaw in my hand. “You’ll have my kids and be my woman and fuck me, because that’s what I want.

She lets someone play with the number 16 again. For one single game. Alicia gets up from the bench in the locker room and leads her team out and storms the ice, and Zackell watches her and for a single moment forgets that it isn’t him.

Nine inches may actually be a conservative estimate of what it might look like hard. He must destroy men’s egos every time he walks into a locker room. And I don’t even want to think about what he destroys with women…

So you really don’t have anything against women in the locker room?” “I have something against you in the locker room.” He pulled me from sitting to lying on top of him. “Why?” “Because the only dick I want you seeing these days is mine.” “That’s an oddly sweet statement.” “I’m an oddly sweet kinda guy. Now shut up and kiss me.” My

What were you thinking,sending that rabid monkey child to my school?" I shouted into my communicator. "Beg pardon?" Raquel asked. "Jack.My school.The girls' locker room. Ring any bells? If Carlee hadn't sworn to my ogre of a gym teacher that Jack was neither my boyfriend nor my brother, I probably would have been suspended!" "Your gym teacher is an ogre?" "Focus!If I get suspended,my grades take a hit. If my grades take a hit, I might not get into Georgetown. And I will get into Georgetown." "I'm pleased to see you finally taking ownership of your education. And I'm sorry about Jack;I asked him to contact you discreetly." "That boy wouldn't know discreet if it tap--danced on his stupid blond head." "Still,if this discreet were tap dancing,it wouldn't be very discreet,now, would it?

Melody began to mumble incomprehensibly under her breath as she worked frantically on securing her most important papers into bankers boxes. Her father stomped into her room, eating a banana. Melody looked up at him with a sweaty and nauseated look on her face. “What are you tramping around so heavily about?” she asked him. Bernie finished the last of the banana, and then held the peel in his hand as though it were a washcloth he had just found on the floor of a gym locker room. Melody pointed to her trashcan with her eyes. “I make an insane amount of noise when I approach you, because you once yelled at me claiming that I was 'sneaking up on you',” Bernie replied, using finger quotes on the last phrase. “That kind of treatment stays with a guy.” Melody shook her head. Her father knew how much she hated finger quotes. Why he insisted on using them was beyond her. “I was five at the time”, she said. “Ah,” Bernie said, with a knowing grin on his face. “The angry period.

Hey, guys, I'm going to change,” Tony announced. “You all need to get out of here for a little bit.” “So fucking change. You change in the locker room all the time-what's the bug deal?” Slade asked. Tony groaned and his eyes narrowed at Slade. “Oh. Gotcha!” Slade turned and announced, “Everybody ...

My locker room is serious. It is quiet. No one smiles. I don’t like people telling jokes in my locker room. Now is not a time to tell jokes. From the minute we leave my hotel room, do not fuck around. The time for fucking around is over. Some serious shit is about to happen.

David drives back to Björnstad. Sits in the car and cries in anger. He is ashamed. He is disgusted. With himself. For an entire hockey life he has trained a boy, loved him like a son, been loved back as a father. There is no player as loyal as Benji. No bigger heart than his. How many times has David hugged number sixteen after a game and told him that? "You are the bravest bastard I know, Benji." The bravest bastard I know. " And after all those hours in locker rooms, all those nights in the bus, all the conversations and blood, sweat and tears, the boy didn't dare tell his coach his greatest secret. It's a betrayal, David knows it's a terrible betrayal. There is no other way to explain how much a grown man must have failed for such a warrior of a boy to make him think his coach would be less proud of him if he was gay. David hates himself for not being better than his father. For that is a son's job.

If you've ever been there, you've never forgotten. The feeling is as haunting and familiar as the smell of a junior high school locker room.

This is what you get for being a Good Samaritan. You die in a girls' locker room at the hands of a deranged overachiever.

The scent of the sea and the burning asphalt being carried on the southerly wind made me think of summers past. The warmth of a girl's skin, old rock n' roll, button-down shirts right out of the wash, the smell of cigarettes smoked in the pool locker room, faint premonitions, everyone's sweet, limitless summer dreams. And then one year(when was it?), those dreams didn't come back.

Je suis ce que je suis.” – Death “Is that a spell?” – Nick “It’s French, Nick. Means ‘I am what I am.’ Sheez, kid. Get educated. Read a book. I promise you it’s not painful.” – Death “I would definitely argue that. Have you seen my summer reading list? It’s nothing but girl books about them getting body parts and girl things I don’t want to discuss in class with my female English teacher. Maybe in the boys’ locker room and maybe with a coach, but not with a woman teacher in front of other girls who already won’t go out with me. Or worse, they’re about how bad all of us men reek and how we need to be taken out and shot ‘cause we’re an affront to all social and natural orders. Again – thanks, Teach. Give the girls even more reason to kick us down when we talk to one. Not like it’s not hard enough to get up the nerve to ask one out. Can you say inappropriate content? And then they tell me my manga’s bad. Riiight…Is it too much to ask that we have one book, just one, on the required reading list that says, ‘Hey, girls. Guys are fun and we’re okay. Really. We’re not all mean psycho-killing, bloodsucking animals. Most of us are pretty darn decent, and if you’ll just give us a chance, you’ll find out we’re not so bad.’” – Nick

How much discipline? In January 2012, I beat Nadal in the finals of the Australian Open. The match lasted five hours and fifty-three minutes—the longest match in Australian Open history, and the longest Grand Slam singles final in the Open Era. Many commentators have called that match the single greatest tennis match of all time. After I won, I sat in the locker room in Melbourne. I wanted one thing: to taste chocolate. I hadn’t tasted it since the summer of 2010. Miljan brought me a candy bar. I broke off one square—one tiny square—and popped it into my mouth, let it melt on my tongue. That was all I would allow myself. That is what it has taken to get to number one.

Often the difference between success and failure is belief.

They made love until Chris had to leave for the airport, without sleeping at all. After Chris had left, wearing wrinkled jeans and Xander’s sweat and seed on his skin, Xander flopped back onto the bed and looked miserably at the clock.

There was a kind of autumnal stain in the air that reminded me of the smell of leather work gloves, a high-school locker room at homecoming, the inside of an ancient canvas tent.

The place did kind of resemble a locker room if locker rooms were gorgeous and smelled good.

The locker room is like taking the subway after midnight: Chances are you are going to be fine, but you never know who is going to pull their dick out.

Sam, who had not had the chance to bitch and yell at them for two weeks, unloaded in the locker room and everyone felt better.

Buck ambles out of the locker room with a towel draped across his bare shoulders and his hockey pants on, thank the Lord. The amount of fur he sports makes him resemble a matted yeti.

Are you shitting me, Stevie? That’s why you’ve avoided me all these years? That’s locker room talk.” Wait. Was it? Was I exaggerating this whole time about the words he said about me?

I burst into the locker room and— Penises! Sweet Jesus. Penises everywhere. Horror slams into me as I register what I’m seeing. Oh God. I’ve stumbled onto a penis convention. Big penises and small penises and fat penises and penis-shaped penises.

Of course, even when you see the world as a trap and posit a fundamental separation between liberation of self and transformation of society, you can still feel a compassionate impulse to help its suffering beings. In that case you tend to view the personal and the political in a sequential fashion. "I'll get enlightened first, and then I'll engage in social action." Those who are not engaged in spiritual pursuits put it differently: "I'll get my head straight first, I'll get psychoanalyzed, I'll overcome my inhibitions or neuroses or my hang-ups (whatever description you give to samsara) and then I'll wade into the fray." Presupposing that world and self are essentially separate, they imagine they can heal one before healing the other. This stance conveys the impression that human consciousness inhabits some haven, or locker-room, independent of the collective situation -- and then trots onto the playing field when it is geared up and ready. It is my experience that the world itself has a role to play in our liberation. Its very pressures, pains, and risks can wake us up -- release us from the bonds of ego and guide us home to our vast, true nature. For some of us, our love of the world is so passionate that we cannot ask it to wait until we are enlightened.

The locker rooms were clean when we departed because I asked the players to pick up after themselves. I believe this is just common courtesy. Somebody’s going to have to clean it up, and I see no reason why it shouldn’t be the person who messed it up.

In the movie where somebody is invisible all the sudden—you know, a nuclear radiation fluke or a mad scientist recipe—and you think, what would I do if I was invisible...? Like go into the guy's locker room at Gold's Gym or, better yet, the Oakland Raiders' locker room. Stuff like that. Scope things out. Go to Tiffany's and shoplift diamond tiaras and stuff.

If I'm beautiful, I'm beautiful for you.

all his life he has been teased and rejected. About everything. His looks, thoughts, manner of speech, home address. Everywhere. At school, in the locker room, online. That wears a person down in the end. It’s not always obvious, because the people around a bullied child assume that he or she must get used to it after a while. Never. You never get used to it.

As the class went through the Greeks and the Romans and the Renaissance painters, (who were easy enough to remember if you’d ever seen Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) there was more dick on display than in a locker room.

I let out a string of curses that would put even the boy's locker room to shame, ending with an emphatic kick to the mailbox post.And the worst part was of coure it wasn't there yet. My weird nerves all day were pointless.

Never let the terms of masculinity be dictated by someone who thinks it's bound up with sexuality. If you really want to know something about what it means to be a man, just ask Gareth Thomas, who stood up in a locker room and told his teammates on the Welsh national rugby team that he was gay. I might not know much about much in this world, but I know for damn sure that no one in that locker room was more of a man at that moment than he was.

How could he describe how it felt when she finished his sentences, turned the mug they were sharing so that her mouth landed where his had been? How did he explain the way they could be in a locker room, or underwater, or in the piney woods of Maine, but as long as Em was with him, he was at home?

Mastery requires patience. The San Antonio Spurs, one of the most successful teams in NBA history, have a quote from social reformer Jacob Riis hanging in their locker room: “When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that last blow that did it—but all that had gone before.

No guy has ever set the record straight for me." I know she's thinking of the boy from freshman year, the one who told everyone that Chris had sex with him in the locker room. And I'm thinking of Mrs Duvall, of what she said before. She would probably lump Chris in with the party girls, the girls who sleep around, the girls who aren't "better than that." She would be wrong. We're all the same.

Several of my critics have said, 'Bowerman just tacks up a piece of paper in the locker room and turns his runners loose.' They're partially right. I do give the athletes a relatively free rein and for good reason. One of my principles is 'Don't overcoach.

If we address frankly what is evoked by cheese, I think it becomes clear why so little is said. So what does cheese evoke? Damp dark cellars, molds, mildews and mushrooms galore, dirty laundry and high school locker rooms, digestive processes and visceral fermentations, he-goats which do not remind of Chanel … In sum, cheese reminds of dubious, even unsavory places, both in nature and in our own organisms. And yet we love it.

She used to look forward to changing in the locker room when other girls stole shocked glances at her emaciated body last spring. Now they would look at her and think she was fat--just as fat as all the other girls, maybe even fatter. Nothing separated her from the parade of thunder thighs trooping up the stairs from the locker room to the gym.

How big is the world when you’re twelve years old? Both infinite and infinitesimal. It’s all your wildest dreams, but it’s also a cramped locker room in an ice rink.

As a leader, it is so important that your words equal your actions. It is imperative that you make sure that you go through a self-evaluation process on an almost daily basis to make sure that your actions are in line with your words. You must do what you say and say what you do.

C’mon! Anything over eight inches is strictly for show-and-tell. It’s there, but you can’t use it. It might look good in a locker room, but let’s face it—those extra two inches are leftovers.” “Leftovers,” Luna gasped, holding her stomach and shrieking with laughter. “Let’s hear it for l-leftovers!

Georgette was a hip queer. She (he) didn't try to disguise or conceal it with marriage and mans talk, satisfying her homosexuality with the keeping of a secret scrapbook of pictures of favorite male actors or athletes or by supervising activities of young boys or visiting turkish baths or mens locker rooms, leering sidely while seeking protection behind a carefully guarded guise of virility (fearing that moment at a cocktail party or in a bar when this front may start crumbling from alcohol and be completely disintegrated with an attempted kiss or groping of an attractive young man and being repelled with a punch and - rotten fairy - followed with hysteria and incoherent apologies and excuses and running from the room) but, took a pride in being a homosexual by feeling intellectually and esthetically superior to those (especially women) who weren't gay (look at all the great artists who were fairies!); and with the wearing of womens panties, lipstick, eye makeup (this including occasionally gold and silver - stardust - on the lids),long marcelled hair, manicured and polished fingernails, the wearing of womens clothes complete with a padded bra, high heels and wig (one of her biggest thrills was going to BOP CITY dressed as a tall stately blond ( she was 6'4 in heels) in the company of a negro (he was a big beautiful black bastard and when he floated in all the cats in the place jumped and the squares bugged. We were at crazy pad before going and were blasting like crazy, and were up so high that I just didnt give ashit for anyone honey, let me tell you!); and the occasional wearing of menstrual napkin.

The character you possess during the drought is what your team will remember during the harvest.

Only I still had a problem. The problem was my parents. Of the many things I was afraid of in those days - spiders, insomnia, fish hooks, school dances, hardball, heights, bees, urinals, puberty, music teachers, dogs, the school cafeteria, censure, older teenagers, jellyfish, locker rooms, boomerangs, popular girls, the high dive - I was probably most afraid of my parents.

Tori felt like she'd accidentally wandered into the men's locker room. Everywhere she looked there was rippling muscle. Testosterone hung thick in the air, and she had the overwhelming urge to chop some wood or fix a carburetor... maybe skin an animal or two.

If this had been a public-school locker room, there would have been some gray jumbo-sized garbage cans nearby, and I probably could've taken care of cleanup by myself. But apparently the girls of St. Andrew's don't throw anything away, because all they had was a tiny wastebasket and some recycling bins. There were bins for paper, plastic, and glass, but none for rotting corpses. Go figure.

Gavriel leaned down and spoke against my neck, his hot breath sending shivers down my spine. “Remember what I said. I own you, Sunshine. But being mine comes with its perks. I take care of what’s mine." Streaks of arousal flooded my core as he spoke, "I’ll give you all the things you’re too afraid to ask for. You want to fuck him in the locker room, don’t you? If you need someone to give you permission, I’ll be that person.

My life was awful. When I was a kid, I was fat, pretty ugly and had awful hair. I used to get teased every fucking day, slammed up against lockers, punched in the face - you name it. Hell, I had to go to prom with one of my female friends because I couldn’t even get a proper date. I can’t even look back at those photos because I look so bad. I transferred schools, but the teasing just got worse. After an, let’s say, ‘incident’ I had with the school play the bullying just got worse. But I made it through high school, only to find out that real life was pretty much the same. I just stayed in my dark room all day and didn’t talk to anyone. I didn’t go outside. I just stayed inside and drew. I’d draw vampires, mummies, heroes, villains. Anything to help me escape all the bad in the world. I went to art school and didn’t really belong. All I could draw was comic book characters. I tried to put my only good talent to use by drawing a cartoon and pitching it - only to have it turned down. Life to me was just pointless. I started drinking, doing drugs and just generally wasting my life drawing.
Then one day, I saw bodies falling from the sky. I witnessed people dying. And that’s when I decided to turn my life around. I called up anyone I knew who had an instrument and we formed a band. Being on tour for the first few years was bad. All we’d do is get drunk and do drugs, but I loved it. Because I was doing something I loved with people I loved. And a few years ago I met the most perfect woman ever. It’s like we share a wave-link or something. She just knows me without even knowing me, if you understand. And now, 2011, I have a beautiful baby girl, a caring wife and I get to perform for my adoring fans everyday. I am living proof that no matter how bad it gets, it gets better. I am Gerard Way, and I survived.

I took a few dragging steps toward the locker-room door. 'You're doing something to me that I wouldn't do to a dog,' I mumbled. 'What you're doing to me is worse than if you were to kill me. You're locking me up in shadows for the rest of my life. You're taking my mind away from me. You're condemning me slowly but surely to madness, to being without a mind. It won't happen right away, but sooner or later, in six months or in a year - Well, I guess that's that.' I fumbled my way out of the locker room and down the passageway outside, guiding myself with one arm along the wall, and past the sergeant's desk and down the steps, and then I was out in the street. ("All At Once, No Alice")

My mom would spy by satellite, turning down the air conditioning, colder and colder, with a tapping keystroke via her wireless connection, chilling that house, that one room, meat locker cold, ski-slope cold, spending a king's ransom on Freon and electric power, trying to make some doomed ten bucks' worth of pretty pink flowers last one more day.

It is the culture you create that is going to determine whether your players perform and execute.

Culture drives expectations and beliefs. Expectations and beliefs drive behaviors. Behaviors drive habits and habits create the future.

There had been a time in high school, see, when I wrestled with the possibility that I might be gay, a torturous six-month culmination of years of unpopularity and girllessness. At night I lay in bed and cooly informed myself that I was gay and that I had better get used to it. The locker room became a place of torment, full of exposed male genitalia that seemed to taunt me with my failure to avoid glancing at them, for a fraction of a second that might have seemed accidental but was, I recognized, a bitter symptom of my perversion. Bursting with typical fourteen-year-old desire, I attempted to focus it in succession on the thought of every boy I knew, hoping to find some outlet for my horniness, even if it had to be perverted, secret, and doomed to disappointment. Without exception these attempts failed to produce anything but bemusement, if not actual disgust. This crisis of self-esteem had been abruptly dispelled by the advent of Julie Lefkowitz, followed swiftly by her sister Robin, and then Sharon Horne and little Rose Fagan and Jennifer Schaeffer; but I never forgot my period of profound sexual doubt. Once in a while I would meet an enthralling man who shook, dimly but perceptibley, the foundations laid by Julie Lefkowitz, and I would wonder, just for a moment, by what whim of fate I had decided that I was not a homosexual.

the locker room,” Alex counters. “No way, it has to be on the ice. He’s going to take her to the rink tonight, flip on the scoreboard and play porn while he fucks her over the goal. They’re both wearing skates of course, porn everywhere, blaring through the speakers, there’s a hockey stick involved somehow, and he’s all veiny and sweaty and says things like my semen are scoring tonight.

I sometimes rented a car and drove from event to event in Europe; a road trip was a great escape from the day-to-day anxieties of playing, and it kept me from getting too lost in the tournament fun house with its courtesy cars, caterers, locker room attendants, and such — all amenities that create a firewall between players and what you might call the 'real' world — you know, where you may have to read a map, ask a question in a foreign tongue, find a restaurant and read the menu posted in the window to make sure you're not about to walk into a joint that serves only exotic reptile meat.

At the door to the locker room Dime asks [Ennis] to autograph his ball. Ennis rears back. He's chuckling but his eyes are wary. 'Why you want that? I'm just an old equipment hand, nobody cares about my autograph.' 'As far as I'm concerned you run the team,' Dime answers, so Ennis laughs and takes the Sharpie and signs his name to Dime's ball, and this will be the only autograph that Dime collects today.

Locker rooms, in Schwartz's experience, were always underground, like bunkers and bomb shelters. This was less a structural necessity than a symbolic one. The locker room protected you when you were most vulnerable: just before a game, and just after (And halfway through, if the game was football) Before the game, you took off the uniform you wore to face the world and you put on the one you wore to face your opponent. In between you were naked in every way. After the game ended, you couldn't carry your game-time emotions out into the world - you'd be put in an asylum if you did - so you went underground and purged them. You yelled and threw things and pounded on your locker, in anguish or joy. You hugged your teammate, or bitched him out, or punched him in the face. Whatever happened, the locker room remained a haven.

[High angel] Carter's fucked-up sense of humor in action.' [The angel] Lucinda flushed deep crimson. 'How can you use such language so carelessly? You sound like you're… like you're in a locker room!" I smoothed down my tank top. 'No way. I'd never wear this in a locker room.' 'Yeah, it isn't even in school colors,' said Peter. I couldn't resist toying with the guardian. 'If i were in a locker room, i'd probably have on a short cheerleader skirt. And no underwear.' Peter continued playing off me. 'And you'd do that one cheer, right? The one with your hands splayed against the shower wall and ass sticking out?' 'That's me,' i agreed. 'Always ready to take one for the team.' Even Cody[, the other vampire] flushed at our crassness. Lucinda was practically purple. 'You–you two have no sense of decency! None at all.

It's halftime. Both teams are in their locker room discussing what they can do to win this game in the second half. It's halftime in America, too. People are out of work and they're hurting. And they're all wondering what they're going to do to make a comeback. And we're all scared, because this isn't a game. The people of Detroit know a little something about this. They almost lost everything. But we all pulled together, now Motor City is fighting again. I've seen a lot of tough eras, a lot of downturns in my life. And, times when we didn't understand each other. It seems like we've lost our heart at times. When the fog of division, discord, and blame made it hard to see what lies ahead. But after those trials, we all rallied around what was right, and acted as one. Because that's what we do. We find a way through tough times, and if we can't find a way, then we'll make one. All that matters now is what's ahead. How do we come from behind? How do we come together? And, how do we win? Detroit's showing us it can be done. And, what's true about them is true about all of us. This country can't be knocked out with one punch. We get right back up again and when we do the world is going to hear the roar of our engines. Yeah, it's halftime America. And, our second half is about to begin.

Jill's face was hard when PE ended, and I had the feeling she was trying not to cry. I tried talking to her in the locker room, but she simply shook her head and headed off for the showers. I was about to go there myself when I heard a shriek. Those of us who were still by the lockers raced to the shower room to see what was happening. Laurel jerked the curtain back from her stall and came running out, oblivious to the fact that she was naked. I gaped. Her skin was covered in a fine sheen of ice. Water droplets from the shower had frozen solid on her skin and in her hair, though in the steamy heat of the rest of the room, they were already starting to melt. I glanced over to the shower itself and noticed that the water coming out of the faucet was also frozen solid.

Look at me." I stood in front of both of them. To Liz I said, “You and Davis are adorable together.” I moved to Chloe. “And you and Gavin are—” She raised her eyebrows at me. “—interesting together. You can’t let my fight with Nick ruin your relationships with your hot boyfriends. Come on, now. My fight with Nick has been going on for years. It’s like this black hole, with gravity so strong that not even light can escape, sucking in winter breaks and dates and whole relationships, until the world—are you listening to me?” When I’d started waxing poetic, Chloe’s attention had wandered around the room. I grabbed her chin and turned her face to me again. “Until the very world is devoid of love!” “It’s not that bad,” Nick’s voice came faintly through the locker room wall. We all looked at one another.

It sometimes strikes me that there is only one taboo left in young adult literature. By and large, no one complains any more when we write about drugs or sex. We can write about masturbation; terminal illness; the horrors of war; illegal organ transplants; matricide; the chilly delights of necrophilia; scenes of locker-room bukkake – none of this raises an eyebrow. No, the one thing which still causes people pause – the final hurdle – the last frontier – the one element which still gets a few adult readers up in arms about whether a book is appropriate for kids – is intelligence. Some adults still balk at the assumption that our readers, the teenagers of this country, are smart, and curious, and get a kick out of knowing things. One of the great things about writing YA today is that this is changing.

We got out of our car in Agra to be faced with 150 people and instantly knew that we were their target. We were white (we still are) and wealthy (in comparison). And these people are masters at the art of distraction. You’ll spot the one approaching from the left, but not the imminent threat from the right. And if you say no they have ways of making you say yes. We were greeted with, “Give me money” by street urchins, “Give me 20 rupees,” by a man in a ‘locker room’ looking after our camera equipment, and graceful, exquisite and amused smiles by some of the most magnificently beautiful women in the world. Ladies with coconut oil in their hair, eyes the colour of artisan’s gold, and spirituality in their hearts. And everywhere we went we were greeted with the Añjali Mudrā gesture and the word Namaste, indicating 'I bow to the divine in you.

It had been a long while since I’d watched any television, and things had only gotten weirder. Beauty pageants for infants; ruddy men in trucker caps fighting over abandoned storage lockers; public shamings of compulsive hoarders and pre-diabetics; affluent suburban women made up like transvestite hookers, competing with each other in feats of coarseness and cruelty; barely literate pregnant teens with tattoos, unfocused eyes, and futures like wrecked cars; apoplectic crypto-fascists spitting bile and paranoia; a carnival midway of weight loss devices, hair growth creams, erectile dysfunction potions, and pottery from which herbs grew like green hair. It was like the day room of a surrealist mental hospital, or any big city ER on a summer Saturday night.

And so, I’m also afraid of women. I’m afraid of women who’ve either emboldened or defended the men who have harmed me, or have watched in silence. I’m afraid of women who adopt masculine traits and then feel compelled to dominate or silence me at dinner parties. I’m afraid of women who see me as a predator and whose comfort I consequently put before my own by using male locker rooms. I’m afraid of women who have internalized their experiences of misogyny so deeply that they make me their punching bag. I’m afraid of the women who, like men, reject my pronouns and refuse to see my femininity, or who comment on or criticize my appearance, down to my chipped nail polish, to reiterate that I am not one of them. I’m afraid of women who, when I share my experiences of being trans, try to console me by announcing “welcome to being a woman,” refusing to recognize the ways in which our experiences fundamentally differ. But I’m especially afraid of women because my history has taught me that I can’t fully rely upon other women for sisterhood, or allyship, or protection from men.

There is something exciting about this. Peter still doesn't want to have sex with Mizzy, but there is something thrilling about downing a shot of vodka with another man who happens to be naked. There's the covert brotherliness of it, a locker-room aspect, the low, masculine, eroticized love-hum that's not so much about the flesh as it is about the commonality. You, Peter, as devoted as you are to your wife, as completely as you understand her very real worries on Mizzy's behalf, also understand Mizzy's desire to make his own way, to avoid that maelstrom of womanly ardor, that distinctly feminine sense that you will be healed, whether you want to be or not. Men are united in their commonness, maybe it's as simple as that.

Every shove, every epithet, every time I was too scared to walk down a certain hallway. Every time I got threatened. Every time I didn't report it. Every time I got called sissy or faggot or homo. Every time I sat in class waiting for a teacher to mention gay people. Every time they didn't. Every long walk to the cafeteria. Every time I stopped breathing in the locker room while I stripped to my underwear. Every time I saw a girl wearing her boyfriend's class ring, knowing Walker could go to jail because of me. Every time I burped up acid because my stomach was churning so hard. Every second I spent assessing how I dressed, how I walked, whether I lisped. Every hour I spent writing the things I couldn't say out loud. Every time I shared those words with other people.

So at my old school,” he said. “There was this kid on the baseball team. People thought, I don’t know. They saw that he went to some website or something.” ... “They made it impossible for him to play. Every day, the found another way to mess with him. Then one Friday after school, they locked him in the storage closet.” He winced, as if remembering and I knew. I knew then. “All night long and the whole next day. A tiny, dark, disgusting airless space. His parents thought he was at the away game and someone told the coaches he was sick, so no one even looked for him. No one knew he was trapped in there.” His chest was heaving and I was remembering how he told me he didn’t used to have claustrophobia and now he did. “He was really good too, probably the best player on the team or could have been. And he didn’t even do anything. The guy just went to these sites and someone saw. Do you get it? Do you get what it would mean for me? The assistant captain? I want to be captain next year so maybe I can graduate early. No scholarship. No nothing. These guys aren’t” - he made finger quotes - “evolved. They’re not from Northern California. They don’t do all-day sits or draw pictures.” The dagger went straight in. “It’s brutal in a locker room.

trompe l’oeil row of lockers marked the hallway down to the Social Room, a lounge designated for the seniors, where there was a microwave for making popcorn during free periods, and a Coke machine that cost only fifty cents instead of seventy-five like the ones in the cafeteria, and a chunky black cube of a jukebox left over from the seventies and now loaded with Sir Mix-a-Lot and Smashing Pumpkins and the Spice Girls.

How? How did you get Torin to Hex Hall?” Dad blinked rapidly, and at first, I thought he was surprised by my question. Then I realized that, no, he was fighting tears. Seeing my father, who practically had a PhD in Stiff Upper Lip, on the verge of crying because he was so happy to see me made my own eyes sting. Then he cleared his throat, straightened his shoulders, and said, “It was exceedingly difficult.” I laughed through my tears. “I bet.” “It was Torin’s idea,” someone said behind me, and I turned to see Izzy standing there. Like my parents and her sister, she was dressed in jeans and a black jacket, although she also had a black cap pulled over her bright hair. “We had tons of old spell books, and after you and Cal disappeared, he started looking through them. Found a spell that would let him travel to a different mirror.” “Of course, the problem was finding your mirror,” Aislinn said, coming out of the darkness. “Aren’t you afraid that he’ll permanently peace out from his mirror and start hanging out in girls’ locker rooms or something?” Aislinn’s eyes slid to Izzy. “Torin has his reasons for wanting to stay with us,” she said, and even in the dim light, I saw red creepy up Izzy’s cheeks. Maybe one day, I’d get to the bottom of whatever was going on there. Preferably once I was done getting to the bottom of the thousand other things on my agenda.

you may not have noticed, but i'm not what you'd call conventionally beautiful. in fact, you might say that i'm the opposite of that. say, you know - to vocalize, sometimes ad nauseam? do you think that there's any minute in a day when i'm not aware of how big i am? do you think there's a single minute that goes by when i'm not thinking about how other people see me? even though i have no control whatsoever over that? don't get me wrong - i love my body. but i'm not so much of an idiot to think that everybody else loves it. what really gets to me - what really bothers me - is that it's all people see. ever since i was a not-so-little kid. hey, tiny, want to play football? hey, tiny, how many burgers did you eat today? hey, tiny, do you ever lose your dick down there? hey, tiny, you're going to join the basketball team whether you like it or not. just don't try to look at us in the locker room! does that sound easy to you will?

That was some shady shit out there, Rome,” Braeden said once the total chaos of winning the game had gone down to a considerable roar. We were finally in the locker room, and I was stripping off my sweat and grass-stained gear. “Total douche move.” I agreed. It wasn’t the first time a team had tried to take me out of a game. It was pretty much common practice, especially when something like a title and championship was at stake. Still, I’d never quite had anyone come at me like that before. The play was already in progress. Sacking me wouldn’t have changed the touchdown I’d just thrown. Except of course to keep me from throwing another one. That guy deliberately came in like a freight train and plowed me down. I lay there stunned for long moments, waiting for the air to come back in my lungs and for my body to process the shock of the hit. Thankfully, he wasn’t that good at tackling and it did nothing more than stun me. And it got him thrown out of the game. It really hadn’t been a big deal. Like I said, it happened a lot. But it was the first time it happened in front of Rimmel. I couldn’t help but notice how the large screen on the field had zeroed in on the girl in number twenty-four’s hoodie, who was climbing over the railing and preparing to leap down onto the field. The security guard was yelling at her, but she barely noticed him. Her eyes were trained out on the field, where I was. It was almost laughable that her tiny ass was going to rush out onto a field full of men more than double her size to make sure I was okay. G**damn. I loved her even more just then. When the guard put his hand on her ankle, trying to stop her from going back to her seat, something happened. Something that never had in my entire life of playing football. The game faded away. For once, I was out on the field and unable to focus on only the game. It took a backseat to the girl teetering on the edge of the railing.

He said I was a dirty boy,’ whispered Lockie. ‘I was a dirty boy and that was why he did stuff to me, because I was dirty. It was my fault.’ ‘Bullshit!’ Tina shouted and half the locker room turned around. Tina grabbed Lockie’s hand and they didn’t stop moving until they were out on the street. The cold was a shock after the warmth of the gym but she kept him walking fast until they got back home. ‘It wasn’t your fault, Lockie. It’s never the kid’s fault. The uniform was an evil piece of shit and nothing he said to you was true.’ ‘It was my fault—it was,’ whined Lockie. ‘Why? Why was it your fault?’ ‘I was supposed to stand by the stroller. I was supposed to hold on and not move while Mum got the prize. Dad had to carry the cake. I was supposed to stand by the stroller and not move. It was my fault.’ Lockie’s tears burst like a dam. His small shoulders heaved and his sleeve became a tissue.Tina leaned down and grabbed him by the shoulders. ‘Look at me, Lockie.’He did as he was told.‘This wasn’t your fault. Kids do stuff like that all the time. I have no idea what you’re talking about but I can tell you that my little brother wandered off every chance he got. It wasn’t your fault, Lockie; you were just being a kid.

if they label you soft, feather weight and white-livered, if the locker room tosses back its sweaty head, and laughs at how quiet your hands stay, if they come to trample the dandelions roaring in your throat, you tell them that you were forged inside of a woman who had to survive fifteen different species of disaster to bring you here, and you didn’t come to piss on trees. you ain’t nobody’s thick-necked pitbull boy, don’t need to prove yourself worthy of this inheritance of street-corner logic, this blood legend, this index of catcalls, “three hundred ways to turn a woman into a three course meal”, this legacy of shame, and man, and pillage, and man, and rape, and man. you boy. you won’t be some girl’s slit wrists dazzling the bathtub, won’t be some girl’s, “i didn’t ask for it but he gave it to me anyway”, the torn skirt panting behind the bedroom door, some father’s excuse to polish his gun. if they say, “take what you want”, you tell them you already have everything you need; you come from scabbed knuckles and women who never stopped swinging, you come men who drank away their life savings, and men who raised daughters alone. you come from love you gotta put your back into, elbow-grease loving like slow-dancing on dirty linoleum, you come from that house of worship. boy, i dare you to hold something like that. love whatever feels most like your grandmother’s cooking. love whatever music looks best on your feet. whatever woman beckons your blood to the boiling point, you treat her like she is the god of your pulse, you treat her like you would want your father to treat me: i dare you to be that much man one day. that you would give up your seat on the train to the invisible women, juggling babies and groceries. that you would hold doors, and say thank-you, and understand that women know they are beautiful without you having to yell it at them from across the street. the day i hear you call a woman a “bitch” is the day i dig my own grave. see how you feel writing that eulogy. and if you are ever left with your love’s skin trembling under your nails, if there is ever a powder-blue heart left for dead on your doorstep, and too many places in this city that remind you of her tears, be gentle when you drape the remains of your lives in burial cloth. don’t think yourself mighty enough to turn her into a poem, or a song, or some other sweetness to soften the blow, boy, i dare you to break like that. you look too much like your mother not t

Athletes, by and large, are people who are happy to let their actions speak for them, happy to be what they do. As a result, when you talk to an athlete, as I do all the time in locker rooms, in hotel coffee shops and hallways, standing beside expensive automobiles—even if he’s paying no attention to you at all, which is very often the case—he’s never likely to feel the least bit divided, or alienated, or one ounce of existential dread. He may be thinking about a case of beer, or a barbecue, or some man-made lake in Oklahoma he wishes he was waterskiing on, or some girl or a new Chevy shortbed, or a discothèque he owns as a tax shelter, or just simply himself. But you can bet he isn’t worried one bit about you and what you’re thinking. His is a rare selfishness that means he isn’t looking around the sides of his emotions to wonder about alternatives for what he’s saying or thinking about. In fact, athletes at the height of their powers make literalness into a mystery all its own simply by becoming absorbed in what they’re doing. Years of athletic training teach this; the necessity of relinquishing doubt and ambiguity and self-inquiry in favor of a pleasant, self-championing one-dimensionality which has instant rewards in sports. You can even ruin everything with athletes simply by speaking to them in your own everyday voice, a voice possibly full of contingency and speculation. It will scare them to death by demonstrating that the world—where they often don’t do too well and sometimes fall into depressions and financial imbroglios and worse once their careers are over—is complexer than what their training has prepared them for. As a result, they much prefer their own voices and questions or the jabber of their teammates (even if it’s in Spanish). And if you are a sportswriter you have to tailor yourself to their voices and answers: “How are you going to beat this team, Stu?” Truth, of course, can still be the result—“We’re just going out and play our kind of game, Frank, since that’s what’s got us this far”—but it will be their simpler truth, not your complex one—unless, of course, you agree with them, which I often do. (Athletes, of course, are not always the dummies they’re sometimes portrayed as being, and will often talk intelligently about whatever interests them until your ears turn to cement.)

But that was where his excitement began to melt into cold anxiety. His dad had been the Gryffindor Seeker, the youngest one in Hogwarts history. The best he, James, could hope for was to match that record. That’s what everyone would expect of him, the first-born son of the famous hero. He remembered the story, told to him dozens of times (although never by his own dad) of how the young Harry Potter had won his first Golden Snitch by virtually jumping off his broom, catching the golden ball in his mouth and nearly swallowing it. The tellers of the tale would always laugh uproariously, delightedly, and if Dad was there, he’d smile sheepishly as they clapped him on the back. When James was four, he found that famed Snitch in a shoe box in the bottom of the dining room hutch. His mum told him it’d been a gift to Dad from the old school headmaster. The tiny wings no longer worked, and the golden ball had a thin coat of dust and tarnish on it, but James was mesmerized by it. It was the first Snitch he had ever seen close up. It seemed both smaller and larger than he’d imagined, and the weight of it in his small hand was surprising. This is the famous Snitch, James thought reverently, the one from the story, the one caught by my dad. He asked his dad if he could keep it, stored in the shoebox when he wasn’t playing with it, in his room. His dad agreed easily, happily, and James moved the shoebox from the bottom of the hutch to a spot under the head of his bed, next to his toy broom. He pretended the dark corner under his headboard was his Quidditch locker. He spent many an hour pretending to zoom and bank over the Quidditch green, chasing the fabled Snitch, in the end, always catching it in a fantastic diving crash, jumping up, producing his dad’s tarnished Snitch for the approval of roaring imaginary crowds.