Gym Candy Sparknotes

I read the realistic fiction novel,Gym Candy by Carl Deuker. The book is told from the point of view of Mick Johnson. Mick has played football since he was four and has always dreamed of being a football star, but when he decides he needs a little “boost” things don’t go as he planned. Mick lives in Seattle with his Mom and Dad. There is a lot to be learned from this story but main lesson I took from it is that cheaters never win. I believe this because if you win your event you still know you cheated and it doesn’t feel good. Another reason is if someone finds out you cheated, you will most likely lose the reward for winning. The other reason is when Mick cheats he harms himself.
The first time Mick starts to take steroids he knows it is

cheating, but it feels good to him. When people cheat they win whatever they cheated in typically but on the inside they still know that they cheated and what they did was wrong. When Mick starts to take steroids and his team starts winning all of their games Mick knows it’s because he is on the steroids. He feels wrong for doing it but he still continues to take steroids because the feeling of winning is too good for him to stop. Another reason why Mick doesn’t feel good about cheating is he starts to get a lot of acne and his nipples get puffy as a side effect of the steroids. The main reason why Mick doesn’t like that is because it's summer and a girl he really likes invites him to go swimming but he is to embarrassed because of his severe acne on his back and puffy nipples. Mick also starts to get very bad depression because of the steroids and he has another side effect which gives him very bad temper called roid rage.
Later on in the book Mick starts to take a more intense type of steroids called XTR. These injections that Mick takes cause paranoia and heavy depression. When Micks friend Drew finds the needle and vial in his duffel and threatens to tell the coach Mick attempts to kill himself. Although Mick fails to do so he has to go to a mental hospital and drug rehab center and he can’t play football when he gets out of them. Something else that gets messed up when Mick takes steroids is his friendship with his best friend Drew.
At the first part Mick takes steroids he thinks that they are completely harmless and that they will only benefit from them but once he starts seriously taking steroids he starts to go downhill.

The first thing that comes to him is depression. The book says “I feel like I am falling through an endless black hole”. Everytime he has to stop taking the steroids he gets depressed because he has to fall back a step. The steroids make him anxious and nervous because he scared about someone finding out. But when his good friend Drew finds out Mick does not know what to do so he tries to shoot himself. The next thing that happens is he wakes up in the hospital with his mom and dad in the room with him. They ask how he's feeling and talk about anything but steroids because they don’t want to remind him of it even though he was already thinking about it. In the very last part of the book Mick is laying in bed in the mental hospital thinking about what he wants to with his life when he gets out. He hears another kid down the hall screaming and crying. He says “the walls muffle the noise and I feel like the screams are coming from inside me. Then Mick starts to think it might be his dad's fault because he pushed him so hard and thinks about how his friend Drew was ratting him out. Then he realizes it was all his fault because no one made him take the steroids and no one made him cheat. Then he says “now the kid down the hall is screaming again and in my head i’m screaming

too”.
The book Gym Candy is full of important lessons to be learned but biggest one is cheaters never win. My first reason is even if you cheat and win it doesn’t feel good because you didn’t earn it playing fair. Another reason is if someone finds out that you cheated you will probably lose your reward for winning. Finally some types of cheating can harm yourself very badly. You should always be happy with who you are and what you’ve got.