The first BoingAlert workout was quite possibly the least enjoyable half-hour of Nick’s life.
After he had finally muscled his bed and desk out of immediate range of his television, Nick had gone right to the first exercise of the DVD without any special preparation and without even changing out of his everyday jeans and hoodie. The exercise, called “burnouts”, were just a simple hopping motion that the onscreen instructor made look very effortless. However, Nick became out of breath almost immediately, and after the sixth rep he simply let his leg muscles, burning with pain, collapse underneath him. At that point, dunking a basketball to impress Jennifer was the furthest thing from his mind.
As if summoned by the sound of him landing heavily on the ground, his sister Becca was standing in his door within seconds. “Told ya you couldn’t do it!” she gloated as the video of the shirtless muscleman continued to play on the TV.
“If you don’t shut up and leave right now I’m telling mom about how you take money out of her purse to buy stuff at the mall,” Nick threatened from his position on the floor, a position which must have made him even less threatening than usual, because Becca was not threatened in the least.
“Yeah, and if you do that I’ll tell her about all the weird naked Japanese drawings you have on your computer.”
“GET OUT!” Nick yelled, his face reddening as he thought of the hentai archive he had thought had been hidden effectively inside a folder labeled “school stuff” on his desktop. “NOW!” After Becca had happily pranced back to her room, Nick used the foot of his bed to weakly lift himself to his feet. The man in the DVD had switched to another exercise, something called “calf raises”, if the subtitle on the bottom of the screen was to be believed. Nick reluctantly got into position and again began to follow the onscreen cues.
Calf raises were a little bit easier than whatever the previous exercise had been called. Still, his already-abused legs were crying out in pain almost as soon as he started, and he found himself drenched in sweat despite the exercise requiring very little movement. If these were the beginner exercises, Nick didn’t want to know what the expert exercises would be like.
As the workout progressed, Nick tried not to become discouraged by his total lack of ability to successfully perform the exercises. He found that it helped to imagine make-out sessions with Jennifer in order to take his mind off the pain his body was experiencing. Still, it seemed like a long time until the buff guy on the screen walked up to the camera, clapped his hands a few times, and told Nick that he had done a good job.
Snorting in laughter, Nick turned off his PS4 and sat down at his desk, where the nutrient powder called “BoingStuff” was waiting for him. In order to see the quickest gains in his jumping ability, he was supposed to use the BoingStuff to make a smoothie after every workout. He had already secured permission from his mother to use the blender in the kitchen, and he had made her take a special trip to the grocery store to get the chocolate milk that was recommended for the most palatable flavor.
Curious to see what the powder looked like, Nick ripped open the first of dozens of single-serving pouches. A lightly unpleasant smell immediately entered his nostrils, and a few wisps of greenish smoke emanated from the newly-opened package. Figuring that the smoke was just the result of some kind of oxidization process, Nick waved his hand a few times to clear the smoke away before taking the pouch downstairs.
Soon, the off-white, nutrient-fortified powder had been incorporated into a chocolate-flavored, ice-filled drink. Pleased that making the BoingStuff smoothie had been significantly more successful than the BoingAlert exercises themselves, Nick took several large gulps of his creation.
It wasn’t as disgusting as nutrient drinks were often claimed to be, Nick thought. However, his toes and fingers were tingling in a way that they hadn’t been after he had finished his ill-fated workout. Was that just the feeling of nutrients entering his body? He downed the rest of the smoothie and the tingling feeling only became more pronounced; now it covered the entirety of his limbs as well as part of his chest. Setting the glass down on the counter, he shakily returned to his room and laid down on his bed, hoping that the tingling was just a side-effect from having just exercised harder than he ever remembered in his life.
Resisting the urge to possibly reinvigorate himself by drinking the half-full bottle of Mountain Dew on his desk, Nick lay there in his sweaty clothes until he drifted off into an early sleep. His dreams, none of which he would later remember, contained many of the expected things: scenes involving his own dunking prowess and the awe of his classmates. But they also involved stranger things: dark passages between the stars and sinister voices whispering in unknown tongues.