Headshot

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of graphic violence, child death, and gender discrimination.

The 12th Annual Women’s 18 & Under Daughters of America Cup, which is being held at Bob’s Boxing Palace in Reno, Nevada, opens on July 14 with a bout between Andi Taylor and Artemis Victor. The gym’s eponymous owner, Bob, does not coach women on principle, but he and the other coaches, all of whom are men, make a profit from maintaining the league that organizes the tournament, the Women’s Youth Boxing Association. All the boxers must pay $200 to get league membership and a “free” subscription to the magazine that profiles all the other boxers in the league.

Andi starts the fight distracted by the recent memory of a boy who drowned at a swimming pool while she was on duty as a lifeguard. Her opponent, Artemis Victor, is the youngest daughter in a famous boxing family. Artemis’s parents sit in attendance while Andi’s family is nowhere to be found. Andi drove up to Reno on her own and will be sleeping in her car. She wishes the effort she puts into boxing could show on her body.

Artemis hypes herself up by believing she is prettier than everyone else in the room. She is confident that she can win, but also feels the need to prove that she is as good at boxing as her two older sisters; she does not want to be seen as the weakest boxer of her family. Her eldest sister, Star, previously won the tournament and is now retired, married, and a mother. Soon, Star will become a homeowner, which Artemis doesn’t yet know.

When Artemis retires from boxing, she will become a wine distributor. She has an uncanny skill for reading people and is a vegan because she loves animals.

While Artemis is sizing Andi up for weaknesses, Andi lands the first strike on Artemis’s ribs, followed by several more around her torso. Andi feels validated by the idea that she could kill Artemis with her fist because most people don’t think she is capable of achieving anything. Her thoughts turn again to the dead bodies she’s seen in her life. When she confirmed that the boy had drowned, Andi vomited. She used her lifeguard salary, which she now considers blood money, to pay the tournament entry fee. Sometime before that summer, Andi discovered her divorced father’s body; he’d died of natural causes. The death of her father is less upsetting than the death of the boy because Andi sees herself as complicit in the latter.

Andi’s inelegant form allows Artemis to deal a clean blow to her chest. Andi’s late reaction makes it appear as though she is leaning into Artemis’s fist. The round ends with Artemis hitting Andi in the head, which wins the first of eight rounds in Artemis’s favor.

Andi and Artemis are united by their perception of themselves as young women, rather than girls. Boxing causes injuries and infections on their bodies, which will affect their lives. As an old woman, Artemis will have difficulty using her hand to grip objects, but by then no one will remember that she was once a boxer.

In between rounds, Andi thinks about her dead father. Artemis plans her next moves. Their coaches give useless advice. Both girls imagine winning the tournament and being validated by everyone, including those who do not go to their matches. This fantasy is a delusion: Nobody wants to watch them box. Andi’s mother and younger half-brother do not fully appreciate her place in the women’s youth boxing world. Andi wishes that her crush, one of her co-lifeguards at the pool, was watching the match, cheering her on.

At the start of the second round, Andi thinks again about how she let the boy drown, failing to administer CPR before the paramedics arrived because it hadn’t been part of her training. Andi’s crush saw her vomit, which will cause her crush on her co-lifeguard to end. Affected by these memories, Andi resents Artemis for wearing makeup during the fight. She thinks that fighting well will get Artemis to “see” her. Artemis, however, has corrected the weaknesses in her form, preventing Andi from getting in hits. She resolves to befriend Andi after she wins the fight. She gets several well-placed punches on Andi’s head. Andi panics and gracelessly swings her arms around.

Decades later, Andi will become a pharmacist. She will remember the details of the tournament more than she will remember Artemis, whose name and reputation will be completely gone from Andi’s memory, despite the fact that Andi idolized Star growing up. She will continue to think about the boy who drowned for the rest of her life, unsure if she killed him with her negligence. Andi will aspire to afford an apartment of her own so that she can live for herself. She will continue feeling dissatisfied whenever she looks in the mirror, driven to correct what she sees.

Artemis regularly looks at herself in the mirror as part of her training. This is how she manages to correct herself so quickly and precisely in the middle of the fight. Artemis dominates Andi in the second round; the few times Andi gets back at Artemis are a result of the surprising off-balance form her shoulders take. In the third round, Artemis hits Andi twice in the ear, which is the highest scoring part of the body in boxing. Andi knows that if she loses this match, she will retire from boxing altogether.

Andi uses a rolling fist technique to steer Artemis to her advantage. She hits Artemis’s right shoulder so that she can open up the left side of her head for blows. She launches a barrage of successful hits and ends the round in her favor. Before the next round, Artemis is enraged by Andi’s attempt to humiliate her. She privately curses Andi’s existence, predicting that Andi is destined to die alone and be forgotten. When the fifth round begins, Artemis attacks Andi across all sides of her body.

To Artemis, winning will not only prove that she is better than her sisters, but also that she is also worthy enough to access freedom from her family. Artemis resents that being from the Victor family carries very little power in the world outside of women’s youth boxing. In the real world, Artemis’s parents struggle with their finances.

Artemis charges into Andi, briefly toppling her over. Andi recovers but feels weak. She thinks about how her mother likes her new husband and Andi’s half-brother more than she ever liked Andi’s father. According to Andi’s mother, her father did bad things, which made Andi feel like she had inherited his badness. She relates to the boy who drowned. If boxing were measured in desperation, she would be the tournament champion.

Artemis ends the bout by winning her fifth round in a row. Andi regrets that she is alone with no one to support her.