the challenge-match endnote: towel-snapping as a developmental stage — "They were the age staring down…"
They were the age staring down the barrel not of Is anything true but of Am I true, of What am I, of What is this thing, and it made them strange.
Context
The locker-room body passing through a phase, clocked like a plateau. Towel-snapping is developmental — "only 16s... only for a year or two" — "a brief flared genuflection to jock-stereotype," a primate stage of "red-assed bonding in steamy rooms" the body grows into and out of on schedule. And the phase has a question attached to it — not Is anything true but "Am I true," the sixteen-year-old body confronting what it even is. The jock-stereotype thrashing is that anxiety worked out through the flesh.