by John Corr
Wafaa and Joe bowed, then faced each other in kamae, the basic stance. Wafaa attacked, punching right at Joe’s chest.
Instead of standing still and blocking, Joe moved straight in to meet Wafaa. With an open hand, he reached past her fist and scooped her arm out sideways. Even though he was a pretty heavy kid, he had the smoothest moves of all the boys.
Wafaa had really put her weight into the punch. But when it didn’t land on any target, the power of the punch carried her off-balance. She tilted sideways where Joe had guided her and hopped on one foot as she tried not to fall. Just as she found her balance, Joe stepped straight at her. He kept his arm stiff and swung it up. The heel of his hand connected with her chin. He shuffled forward one last time, driving her chin up, back and then down.
If he had been holding a cream pie, it would have been pure comedy.
But this was no pie-in-the-face routine. It was a serious martial arts move. Wafaa’s head tipped backward and her body followed. She rose up on her toes, stalled, then totally lost it, smashing down into the mats with a loud breakfall.
She bounced up, smiling.
Great timing. Great teamwork.
I laughed loudly. Joe’s stiff-armed shove had reminded me of when Dion shoved Zack into the video-game shelves at the mall. It had worked pretty well there too.
We were learning some useful self-defense after all!
Wafaa looked at me. She lost her smile. “Is it that funny to see me knocked down?” she asked. “Keep laughing. In a minute it’s going to be my turn to throw you.”
My chest tightened and my throat closed. I wasn’t laughing anymore.
Joe and Wafaa worked through the technique a second time. Wafaa punched with her other hand, and Joe led her out to his other side. The technique ended exactly the same way. A hand to the chin, a body to the mats.
She bounced up again. She wasted no time going into kamae stance.
Joe sat down a safe distance away, and I got up to face Wafaa. I did kamae too.
My turn to attack.
Wafaa’s turn to defend.
I closed my right hand into a fist. I looked into her eyes. She stared back at me, but her eyes didn’t reveal any feelings.
I stepped and punched. It was a lot slower and a lot lighter than it needed to be. This was partly to show I really wasn’t out to get her. That I wanted to play nice.
But I was also scared. We had learned early on that in aikido the person doing the technique uses the attacker’s power against him. The harder I punched, the harder I’d fall.
Today I punched pretty softly.
Wafaa frowned and slapped my fist away without doing the rest of the moves. Her message was clear. My wimpy punch didn’t deserve an aikido technique.
“Punch me,” Wafaa said quietly, so Sensei Rick couldn’t hear. “Don’t worry. I know what to do with it!”
I took a deep breath. If this was what it took to prove that I respected her, I was going to give it everything I had.
Again I made my hand into a fist.
Found my target on her lower chest.
And gave it everything I had.
BAM!
I heard the sound of me hitting the mats before I felt it.
Next thing I knew, I was looking up at the ceiling.
It wasn’t that she had knocked me out. It was that her timing had been perfect.
I had gone from vertical to horizontal faster than my brain could follow. She had used everything I had put into the punch against me. And I hadn’t held anything back.
I tried to feel out my body. My palms stung from slapping the mat, and my chest felt like someone had pounded it like a drum. But I hadn’t hit my head, and nothing actually hurt. Lying there, I just felt weird somehow.
I usually didn’t like the endless breakfalls we did in every class, but right then I was grateful for them. All that practice had kept me safe.
And that’s when I noticed it.
That was the weird feeling.
I felt safe.
I rolled over and jumped back up. Zack and Dion had stopped to see if I was okay. Sensei Rick had been helping them, but he’d also stopped what he was doing. He looked like he had been about to run over to check on me. I could see that Joe had crawled a little closer, and Wafaa, for the first time since I’d met her, looked nervous.
Standing, I threw my arms in the air.
“And the crowd goes wild!” I yelled.
I wanted to let everybody know I was okay. I wanted to let them know that I was more than okay. I hadn’t just survived the hardest throw I had ever taken. I had gotten back up and I was ready to go again. I was more than ready. I was ready plus. I had gotten back up plus.
I smiled at Wafaa. “I still owe you a punch from my other side,” I said. “You think you can handle it?”
She nodded slowly, thinking it over. Finally she smiled. “Let’s see what you’re made of, Little Ninja,” she said.
On the other side of the mats, I noticed Sensei Rick smile too.
NINE
As usual, when it was time for class to end, Sensei Rick called for us to line up. That night we were a very sweaty row of kneeling students.
As usual, we bowed to the front of the room. This showed we were thankful for the chance to train.
As usual, we bowed to Sensei Rick. This showed we were grateful to him for teaching us.
As usual, he bowed back to show he was grateful to us for coming here to train. Finally, he shouted, “Osu!” This was an akido word that showed respect. We shouted it back.
But there was nothing usual about what Sensei Rick said next.
“Great workout tonight, guys,” he said. “I mean it.” That in itself was weird. He did not hand out compliments often. “There are a couple of things coming up that you need to know about.”
Uh-oh. My neck started to feel tight. I hated surprises.
“First, soon we will be going on a little trip.”
This made as much sense to me as if Sensei Rick had started speaking to us in Japanese. Who’s going on a trip? Where?
“You’ve heard me mention my teacher, Kondo Sensei. What you may not know is that he has a ninth-degree black belt in Yoshinkan aikido. Only one other person in the whole world has attained that level.” He pointed at one of the black-and-white photos on the wall above him. “Only one other person has gone past it.”
Wow. Ninth degree. I wondered how long it would take me to get there.
“For most of the summer Kondo Sensei lives at his cottage, which is just over an hour’s drive from here. He even has a little dojo up there. Twice a year he runs an aikido training camp for adult students.”
My feet were falling asleep from kneeling for so long. Pins and needles were tickling like crazy. I started to wiggle around to get them out. I wished he would just get to the point!
“And here’s the part I can’t quite believe. He has invited all of you to come up to his cottage for a mini training camp. Just you kids. For a weekend.”
I stopped wiggling.
We stared at him.
Wafaa finally broke the silence.
“Sensei Rick, my parents would never—”
Sensei Rick smiled and raised his hand. “I’ve already been in touch with all of your parents. I emailed them all the info they need and then some. This is a real camp. Kondo Sensei taught children’s classes for many years, long before you guys came along.”
Dad knows about this?
There had to be some misunderstanding. With everything that had happened with Mom leaving, there was no way Dad would let me go overnight anywhere. I looked up and down the line, and the rest of the kids looked just as skeptical.
“I have to say, this isn’t exactly the reaction I expected.” Sensei Rick looked a little disappointed. “Your parents have all told me you can go if you want to. They would have told you themselves, but I wanted to see the look on your faces when you heard the news.” He shrugged. “You don’t have to come if you don’t w
ant to. It’s not for a couple of weeks, and nobody’s paid any fees or handed in the trip forms yet. But trust me—this is a trip you don’t want to miss. It’s beautiful up there, there’s lots of things to do, and you will have a chance to train with one of the world’s best. Doesn’t that sound even a little bit fun?”
He almost seemed sad. I didn’t know how I felt about the idea of being away from Dad for an entire weekend, but it did sound like it could be a little fun.
“Woo-hoo!” Joe shouted. He punched the air. Zack and Dion high-fived. Wafaa had a small smile on her face.
“That’s more like it!” Sensei Rick said. “I know you’ll find this hard to believe, but even I relax a little when I’m up at the camp!” He laughed. “I’ve got one other special announcement.” He hesitated. “But maybe I’ll save that news for when we’re up there.” He smiled, bowed again and said, “Osu!”
Our five voices called out “Osu!” as we bowed back to him. He made his way off the mats, pausing briefly to get his flip-flops on.
As soon as he was out of the room, the boys started yelling.
“This is going to be awesome!” Joe said.
“A whole weekend without Mom and Dad!” Zack crowed.
“I wonder how hard the mats are at this dojo,” I said.
Wafaa didn’t say anything. She picked up her bag and made for the door.
“Hey!” I called. “Aren’t you excited about this trip, Wafaa?”
She turned, smiled and shrugged. “Sure,” she said. “I just find it hard to believe that my parents will let me go up to some cabin in the woods with four stinky boys for the weekend. But if they really say I can go—which I doubt—I’ll think about it.” She bowed at the edge of the mats and stepped backward out the door.
She was still not being very friendly. I’d thought we had finally broken the ice between us with the last exercise. It had seemed like she was enjoying herself. Now she was back to ignoring us.
Joe had untied his belt and was trying to cool himself off by waving his jacket open and shut. I watched another drop of sweat roll off his shaved head. The fanning wasn’t helping. “What’s the problem, Ry?” he asked, dragging his sleeve across his forehead. “Great class, great news!”
“Exactly!” I said. “We just had a great class. We just heard great news. So why can’t Wafaa be happy? The class wasn’t just great. It was awesome. You threw her, she threw me, I threw you. We all got our butts kicked, and we all kicked some butt, right?”
“C’mon, Riley,” Zack said, rolling his eyes. “Not everything’s about you. Do you really think you’re the reason she has a hard time being in aikido?”
I threw my hands up. “How do I know? At first I didn’t think her bad mood had anything to do with me! I thought I was being friendly! Then you told me that it was all my fault.”
Dion shook his head.
“No, Ry,” Zack said. “We told you to stop bugging her about her…uh…”
“Hijab!” Dion said.
“I know,” Zack said. “I just forget the word sometimes. Jeez.” He frowned. “But no, Riley, you are not the reason she’s unhappy here.” He worked his belt knot loose as he spoke. He looked at me again when it came free in his hands. “I mean, you definitely didn’t help, but once you figured it out, that was fine.”
“I know, I know,” I said. “So what else?”
“What else what?” Joe asked. He had given up on fanning himself and now lay flat on the floor.
“What else is making her so unhappy? Class is not so bad!”
I thought about how focused Wafaa was even when we were doing our basic movements. She always put her feet at the right angles and never got her hands mixed up. She was the only one who never spun around too much or fell over before a throw came. She never cross-stepped into left-side kamae when we were just supposed to shuffle forward in right-side. To get out of an armlock, the rest of had just learned forward rolls. But Wafaa could already do forward flips to escape. Sensei Rick hadn’t even shown us that yet.
“She’s so good, but she never looks happy to be here,” I said. “Are we so awful to be around?”
“It’s not about you,” Zack said again. “It’s not about us.”
“Look,” Dion said. “We know Wafaa from school. I mean, we see her around, but we don’t know her know her. She’s in between our grades. But one day I was showing my friends one of our wrist locks. This one.”
He grabbed Joe’s hand. Joe, still flat on the floor, was too tired to care. Dion twisted his wrist and bent it backward, then let go. It flopped down loudly on the mats.
“So I’m telling them all about aikido. Turns out there’s a kid in my class who does judo here. When I say Wafaa’s one of the kids in aikido, he says she used to be in his judo class. And that she was amazing. She kicked everybody’s butt, girls and boys. And they aren’t just all white belts in there. They even have kids who are brown belts. He says that Wafaa got up to green belt, but something went wrong, and she just quit.”
“Hmmm,” I said. That explained why she was so good at the flips and falls.
I looked up at the judo pictures on the back wall. They reminded me of our first night here, how Wafaa had paid so much attention to them. And how she had taken out Joe.
But that got me wondering. “So if she was so good at judo, why did she leave it?” I asked. “Why start all over with a white belt in aikido?”
“This kid said she left judo because of some new girl coming in. And maybe something to do with her hoodie? She didn’t always have one, you know. She only started wearing it, like, last year.”
Zack didn’t miss his chance. “Hey, Mr. Know-It-All. It’s not called a hoodie! It’s called a hijab!”
The guys had only been trying to help me understand, but the more I learned about Wafaa, the worse I felt.
I said goodbye and left the dojo. In the lobby I passed a judo bulletin board. I had never stopped to look at it before. It was covered in photographs. Each of the kids wore a uniform that looked just like ours, except some were blue instead of white. The kids had different belt colors. White, yellow, orange, green, blue and brown. Only the adults in the pictures had black belts. One grown-up, maybe the top sensei, had a red belt. There were pictures of the kids standing on podium after podium, getting medal after medal, hugging trophy after trophy. This club won a lot of tournaments.
So many winners, and they all look so happy. What went wrong for you, Wafaa?
Suddenly there she was. Her smile was so big that my eyes had passed right over her at first.
And it wasn’t just her smile that made her tough to recognize. She didn’t have her hijab on. Her hair was dark and pulled back.
I leaned in closer to make sure. I covered up her hair with my hand. I had never seen Wafaa looking that happy, but this was definitely her.
A green belt was tied around her waist, just like Joe said, and a gold medal was around her neck. The sensei with the red belt stood beside her, arm around her shoulders. His smile was just as wide as hers.
She looked so different here. It wasn’t just that she had a colored belt and a medal, or that I could see her hair. It was that look on her face, her looking so happy.
We had been training together for a couple of months, but I had never once seen her look like that.
I wondered if I ever would.
TEN
The next two weeks flew by. We were all on our best behavior. No one wanted to be told they couldn’t come on the trip. I kept waiting for Sensei Rick to tell us how good we were being, but he never said anything. He just seemed suspicious at first, like he was on the lookout for trouble. Then he seemed relieved.
I had read books and seen movies about kids who went to camp. I had always thought it looked awful. All those…cheerful kids. Always doing… activities. Never sitting on a couch and playing video games or just hanging out, doing nothing.
At least this will be with kids I like!
The morning of our trip finally
came.
I had packed and repacked a few times. Just as Dad started backing the car out of the driveway, I panicked, thinking I’d forgotten my belt. I tore my duffel bag apart, then made Dad pull back up to the house. I ran inside while Dad stuffed everything into my bag again.
I rushed up to my bedroom. I dumped my laundry basket upside down. A couple of dirty T-shirts and some underwear fell out, but no belt. I kicked the pile around just to be sure. I dropped to the floor and checked under my bed. I could see a comic I had lost a month earlier, stuck between the wall and another T-shirt, but that was it. I grabbed the T-shirt and stood up. I twisted the shirt in my hands. I tried to calm down and remember the last place I had seen the belt.
Then I saw something that made me forget all about it. There, stapled on the corkboard over my desk. My best picture of Mom.
It wasn’t from a birthday or Christmas or any other special day. Just a random day. All three of us were out for a drive. We’d passed a sign that said Cherries 4 Sale, and Mom braked and pulled over. An old man in a straw hat was sitting under a cherry tree, selling the fruit for five dollars a basket. Mom gave him some money but said she wanted to pick her own. She didn’t even wait for an answer. She just grabbed a bucket from the grass, climbed up the tree and started pulling on the branches. The old man watched her from his chair, cheering her on. Dad and I almost died laughing. Dad pulled out his phone and got Mom to sit still for a second so he could get a shot of her up in the tree, holding the bucket.
“I found the belt!” Dad yelled from the bottom of the stairs. His voice jolted me back to reality. “It’s down here! It was stuck inside your uniform pants the whole time!”
I ran downstairs and out to the car. I buckled up as Dad backed out of the driveway again. I checked the clock on the radio. We were definitely late.
“Can we go fast?”
“No problem, bud,” Dad said. He shifted from Reverse into Drive and hit the gas. He knew how much I hated to be late. “What’s that?” he asked, glancing down at my lap.