Kung Fu High School (18 page)

Back at home, I could hear the ball game on in the living room before I even unlocked the front door. It was a good sign. Once inside, I made sure to shut the door quickly to keep the heat in, and spun around to find Remo watching the ball game with Dad. No Melinda, thank god. I had an ill feeling she might've been at the house waiting for us, shrugged it off.

"Yo!" I screamed it more than I said it, because I still couldn't believe it. I was so excited. "You should've seen this kid fight!"

Both Remo and Dad looked real interested all of a sudden. It was nice and warm inside so I knew Remo must've turned on the oven a while ago.

"I didn't fight," Jimmy said. That was his story and he was sticking to it.

"What?" I didn't even turn away from my audience. "Hey, he temporarily paralyzed the shit out of at least twenty dudes!"

"Only fourteen," Jimmy said.

"Yeah, outside, plus three inside, that's seventeen. I have no idea how he did it so fast!"

I must've stumbled a little on my own because Remo got up real quick and sat me down on the couch.

"Where'd you get hit?" he asked.

I pointed to my leg and also to my lower back, right on my hip. Dad looked back to the television. It was nothing he hadn't seen before. There'd been much worse. Some bloodstains we couldn't ever get out of the carpet.

"Well, no puncture wound and I can't see anything yet but my guess is you got a nasty bone bruise on that hip. How'd you say you did it?" Remo tugged my shirt back down to its original position after testing the skin underneath a crashing tattooed wave.

"Got flung over a big-ass metal table."

"Yeah, well, you probably hit the corner of it. Ice, ice, ice," he said as he got up and took the trays out of the freezer, grabbed a small plastic bag from underneath the sink, and filled it up with the hard cold stuff then handed it to me.

"Why do I need that when I can just sit outside?" I asked.

Remo handed the ice bag to me, then pried my mouth open to look at the hole where my tooth had been. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Jimmy slip into the kitchen and fill the empty trays with water then put them in the freezer. He must've been hungry because he opened the fridge door next. Seeing the light on his face (not too different from the cloudy white day outside, the fluorescence on his nose and forehead, his dry hair), I realized something that caught my breath up in my throat.

He hadn't even broken a sweat the whole time.

I'd fallen asleep in front of the TV the night before and my ice melted and leaked all over the couch. Woke up around three and tried to avoid the wetness by moving to my bed, but Jimmy was there. I didn't blame him. He still wasn't ready for Cue's room. I wasn't either. So I went back to the couch and tried to soak the water up with a dish towel but basically, it didn't work and I had to sleep with my knees in a wet spot. I tried a bunch of different positions but the couch was too thin and the wetness was unavoidable.

I got up early and took a shower before anyone else in the house woke. Steam took over the mirror and the frosted window before I turned the fan on. It was the only way to heat up the room. Every irrational cell in me wanted to ambush Melinda with a shovel when she showed up at the house in a few hours. But we had to play along like we didn't know the scene in the cafeteria kitchen was an ambush.

Now it was everyone's problem because Jimmy was back. Whether he'd acknowledge it to himself or not, he fought. Would it take much more to bring out the dragon? I straddled the lip of the tub and stepped into the shower. Maybe Melinda was just trying to get rid of me, but why? She'd need me around to survive Ridley's onslaught. Hot water made my hip feel worse. My knee was still pretty stiff too. Thankfully my face was getting better, but I still had trouble chewing thanks to the hole in my gums and my jaw made a new weird popping sound when I moved it up and down. I been hit there a ton of times and it never made that sound before. Great.

After I was dressed, I took Dad his meds and I was real surprised to see him awake, sitting up in bed, and reading a magazine.

"Um, what's up, Dad?" I asked, real calm.

Actually, it kind of freaked me out. I mean, I'd read somewhere that once someone decides to die, they get all peaceful and act different and then the next day, or whenever they decide to do it, they're gone. No hesitation.

"I talked to Remo," he said.

Dad pushed himself toward me and stuck his hand out for the meds. Yeah, maybe he was a bit of an addict, but it was better than him being in withdrawal over the last day or so.

"Yeah? So he just came by out of nowhere?" I asked. I had to give it to Remo. The guy was pretty much the best friend I had in the world right then, helping to take some of the weight off.

"Yeah, he just came by. We talked. I don't know. Figured I was being more of a burden as I was, with the crying and everything. It'll still be tough but I still got some gas left in the tank."

"What'd you talk about?" I was genuinely interested. There was absolutely nothing I could think of that would cause such a change, apart from the suicide thing.

"His mother, but mostly he listened while I talked," Dad said.

Well, maybe Remo talked about what it was like to be a prisoner in your own head. How his mom started over from almost zero every five to eight minutes. Maybe Dad realized he didn't quite have it so bad. He could still think. He was still pretty much himself And though I thought all those things while I checked his back for evidence of his bedsores getting worse, "Oh," was all I said.

"Yup, I'm going to start painting again,
mi angelita.
Remo's coming by today with some new oils for me and he said he might even be able to snag some canvases too."

I was still in a state of semi-shock when I walked out the front door with Jimmy, hearing Dad's words echoing inside my head. He hadn't done any painting since Mom died and that was over three years ago.

"Jen!" It was Melinda, but her voice sounded far away. "Jen!"

"What?" I asked, and probably at exactly the right time too, because she looked like she was about to start shaking me. Or worse. And if she'd done that then I wouldn't've been responsible for what I did to her. The hand on my shoulder was Jimmy's and he looked a little concerned.

"What the fuck happened yesterday? There're stories going around already." Melinda was pissed off.

I nodded to Mark and Rico at their usual places behind her, but that just made Melinda worse. Her whole face and neck were going red, and maybe she would've hit me if the cops hadn't driven by right then. Real slow, measuring us up. Of course, they had to know something was going down soon.

When they'd left, Melinda said, "I'm only going to ask you one more time—"

I interrupted her, "I don't know what Ridley's planning but we're in trouble. He sent a huge shipment yesterday, just a little later than he thought he would. I guess he was trying to avoid paying the cops their share. Maybe that's why they're on patrol today. Sending a message."

Melinda nodded a "get on with it" type of nod. She was still red and not wearing a hat either. Steam was coming off the top of her head and pushing up into the air. It was freezing out. She probably ran all the way to my front yard.

"I heard him say that there wouldn't be any Grand Championships, that they were going to take care of us before then."

Melinda's face changed when I said it. Couldn't've been a full second, but she was more than surprised. See, the thing that tipped me off was she didn't ask why not. She didn't make me talk more about it. She just turned inward for a second like she was checking it against something she already knew. I'd known her long enough to know that it wasn't her usual run-of-the-mill surprised reaction.

"What else happened?" She was seriously wigging out.

"We got spotted. We had to fight our way out." I said it flat, didn't even look at her when the words came out, just started walking. Everyone kept up.

"So I heard. Supposedly it was a fucking wax museum in there." Melinda looked at Jimmy but something wasn't right with her.

"He didn't fight," I said. I knew Jimmy was going to say it anyway. Denial, justification, whatever. At that point, I really didn't care what he told himself We made it out of there without a trip to the hospital.

"Well,
you
didn't do it." She was still breathing hard as she walked. I'd be real tempted to say that she had run all the way to my house after all.

"Anything else?"

"That's it," I said.

When he got to school the aura around Jimmy had been magnified by a factor of a thousand. Everyone got out of our way. Some even half ran. I heard later that there were disturbances in his classes because plenty of kids refused to sit next to him. Hadn't they heard? He was
el Diablo.
It was official. Jimmy Chang = Satan.

Of course, I didn't make it to my first class of the day. Mock was standing outside the door to civics.

"Let's go," was all he said.

"Is Ridley gonna rig up my civics grade too? Can't get a good one if I never get to class." Sometimes I just can't help myself. Bad hip or no bad hip, I could take Mock. He was tall but he was weak. I was taken to Ridley's office. That's right. He actually had an office: an old portable classroom, basically an RV with no wheels dropped out in the parking lot between the tennis courts and the gym. The school stopped using them a few years ago when the student population took a dive, so Ridley moved in. No one complained.

"Melinda sold you out, Miss Jen. She didn't even think twice about it. She agreed to join me if I fulfilled a few requests of hers." Ridley was sitting down at his desk when I entered. The floor sounded hollow under my footsteps as I moved to the chair opposite him. The whole place had the odor of wet cardboard.

"How was my acting though, pretty good? I've been practicing with Freddy. But you knew that. I told you while you were hiding in the pantry." He looked at me and I was sure that he had no soul in there. The eyes were just foam-filled holes painted like pupils.

"You know what the problem is?" he asked.

"Not exactly." I shifted in the small seat so that I could put my leg out and take some pressure off my hip.

"The problem isn't that Freddy is a bad actor, because he's a great actor. See, the problem isn't with him, it's with us, or, at least, people like us. Normal kinds of people. We only see him as 'retarded,' and as nothing else. Did you know he's written fourteen plays?"

I wasn't really supposed to respond to that.

"Well, he has. We'll be staging one next summer with a mixed company. It's going to be great. It's a murder mystery called
The—
"

"I'm not getting this," I said.

Ridley inhaled, manipulating the silence. Outside, a gust of wind skirted the building and rattled the thin walls.

"See, Jen, I don't think anyone sees your potential. You're female. You come from a bad background. You're a half-breed. You're poor. You live in a shitbox and make ends meet with a little over nothing. You take care of your dad and your cousin, not to mention yourself. I know your circumstances and I admire that you pull through so commendably.

"But you haven't been given any chances to succeed because people aren't seeing you. They don't see you for the same reasons that they don't see Freddy as a person. They only see his condition. My point is this: don't you think it's time you got a chance like real people get, like all the rich kids on the north side get? A good education? Training in the arts and sports? An opportunity to travel and see the world? I could make it happen for you, Jen. You're not just a fighter. You're so much more than that."

My face was rock. Strike one for him on the "you're female" bit. A seething strike two for calling me a "half-breed," followed by a quick strike three for calling our home a "shitbox." Yeah, it needed the gas back on but it wasn't that bad. As for his supposed act of charity, it didn't matter. He was already out.

"When you first got here you were ranked two up from the bottom, did you know that? If it wasn't for your brother you would've been gone in the first couple of weeks. Part of the yearly flies," Ridley said, leaning back 'til his chair squeaked.

Kung Fu had the highest dropout rate in the state, about 20%, maybe higher. Those are the flies. Every year it happens at the same time pretty much, just after the freshman kick-in. Usually a few mothers squawk to the administration, to the cops, anyone really, about the beating their kids took but nobody ever listens. The cops write stuff down. They say they'll pass it on to their superiors, but they don't. That's just a show. The community is pretty much used to it. The silent acceptance took over long ago. That was just how it was.

"I thought for sure you'd be gone after that first real beating
WAN
you took. Slipping away from the first one, only to get much worse the second time, huh, Jen? You were the damn skinniest girl that whole year, the skinniest girl I'd seen in a year or two, but you came back. You took a few more beatings and you kept coming back.

"Damn. You're in the top twenty-five now, you know that? All in a little over a year. I've never seen anything like it. Guess I shouldn't have been surprised though. Cue probably beat you harder than anybody here, just so you'd make it." He looked at me right then, to see if it was true. I didn't move, didn't blink when he leaned forward and put both hands flat on the desk, oozing out two sweaty prints of palm skin onto the coffee-colored wood.

He'd never know and I'd never tell him. He'd only ever have a real good idea, but yes, it was true. Aside from the broken leg, I got all the highlights to prove it: over eighty stitches total, torn muscles, plenty of fractures, shoulders that had tasted a dislocation each, ball-and-socket joints like cracked-tooth mouths with the tongue pulled out and put back in all nice, and a back-alley corneal surgery on my left eye. Got an infection from it too, but I was real lucky. No long-term damage. That was how we met Remo. He fixed it as best he could and we went back to him ever since.