by Douglas Rees
“Bogus,” says Blake.
Victor says nothing. Real loud.
We get to the dojo. It is the first time I have ever been there. It is in a strip mall with a big sign over the door that says NUEVO MUNDO DOJO in graceful black letters that look kind of Japanese.
“Great sign,” I say. “Did you do it, Chris?”
“Nope,” Chris says. “José.”
And José ducks his head in that way he does when he’s feeling shy, that way l like so much.
“Come in for a minute,” Victor says.
The dojo is simple and right, which makes it beautiful. I can almost taste the quiet. The walls are white and the floor is blue. It’s covered with blue mats. In one corner is what looks like a shrine or an altar. It’s a little square table with a bowl of water and a bowl of clear oil on it. And on the walls on either side of this are two big picture frames with the rules of the dojo in the same kind of writing that’s on the sign. One says:
ONE: I will become better, for I am infinitely perfectible.
ONE: I will become truthful, for that is strength.
ONE: I will become peaceful, for that is my truest self.
ONE: I will become brave, for fear is almost always unnecessary.
ONE: I will become careful with my courage, for it is not to be wasted.
The other one says:
The Spirit of the Warrior
To flee rather than fight is honorable.
To fight when flight is impossible is honorable.
To fight in defense of the weak or the truth may be honorable.
To neither flee nor fight is most honorable.
To fight for its own sake is never honorable.
Victor takes off his shoes. So do Leon and José. So do I. So does everybody except Blake. He runs out into the middle of the mats and says, “Hey! Should I take my shoes off?”
Victor walks across the mats to his shrine. He lights the oil in the bowl and a perfect little flame starts up.
“Come here,” he says to Blake.
At first Blake doesn’t move. Then he looks into Victor’s face, and he does.
I hear Victor say, almost whispering, “Water is for spirit. Salt is for the body. Flame is for will. Every day when you come we will contemplate these things together. Then you will work. After that, you will join the beginners’ class. After that, you will practice while I teach my other classes. After that, I will take you home. Every day but Sunday. In the dojo you will call me sensei. That means teacher. You will bow to me. I will bow to you. There will be respect between us, always.”
“Yeah, right,” Blake says. He grins, but he’s nervous.
“You think you’re bad,” Victor goes on. “You think you’re tough. But, chico, you don’t know what those things are. I do. I know all about them. The path you are on now is the path I was on. But you do not know the truth of that path. It will destroy you. You are not strong enough for it. It nearly destroyed me, and I am much stronger than you are. But I will show you the path of honor. Honor saved me. It will save you if you follow it. Take off your shoes and join me.”
Leon nods his head toward the door. José and I put our shoes back on and we all tiptoe out.
I look back over my shoulder. Blake is taking his time about it, but he’s untying his shoes.
23
FACEPLACE
THINGS WERE DIFFERENT at school today. First, two kids I don’t even know came up and said, “You think you’re so cool? Well, you suck. We’re gonna get you good.” And they walked off.
Which was a surprise. But not as big a surprise as when the same kind of thing happened three more times before lunch. What is the universe up to now?
And when José and Laura and I sat together in the cafeteria, nobody sat near us, even though the place was crowded.
Then in gym class I got knocked down from behind when we were doing jumping jacks.
And in algebra, Tiffany said, “Great Web site, Witch Bitch,” and then she whispered something that I didn’t hear because if I had heard it I’d have slugged her and that would have got me into Garbage’s office for another Zero Tolerance of Kestrel session.
Besides, maybe I owed her a pass. Because she gave me a clue to what was going on. And as soon as I got home I got on the Web and typed in my name.
You know FacePlace, right? Maybe you don’t if you’re reading this a hundred years from now. Maybe they have something better. Or worse.
FacePlace is this Internet thing where you post stuff. Make up websites for yourself.
Or for other people. To slam them. Because the beauty part of it is, nobody knows exactly who did it. Except I do know exactly who did it.
Being a witch, I don’t have a lot of time for FacePlace. I don’t have a site of my own, or anything. I mean, the Craft isn’t for every bozo on the bus, as Ariel says.
But today I am there. Big time. At kestrelwitchbitch.com. And the site is a horror.
The homepage says:
Enter and Be Damned.
Join the Spawn of Satan.
Let Kestrel Witchbitch
Take You to Hell!
And there are these flames flickering all around the edges and a picture of me, only it isn’t really me because I do not wear red horns on my head, and those are definitely not my breasts bouncing around.
You click on me and you go to this:
Witchbitches Are Cool,
Witchbitches Rule,
Witchbitches Take Over
Your High School
And below that are pictures of the burned part of the school. And I am in every one of them, pointing and grinning. And under the pictures it says things like:
Nobody can make me wear a sucky uniform.
I made them think Blake did it.
Satan rules. Burn the school.
I caste this spell.
And there are other pages. Some of them are old-fashioned woodcuts of witches’ sabbaths, or what people in the old days thought witches’ sabbaths were like. Some of them are pictures from the school. Some of them are of Laura (“This is my first slave.”) Some of them are porn. I am in a lot of them. My face stuck on. Pictures taken of me with cells when I wasn’t looking.
The captions say things like:
Hi, I’m Kestrel Murphy. Kestrel the Kool, Witchbitch Number One. Worship me or die. I came to this sucky school (Richard Milhous Nixon Union High) this year. But none of you are cool enough for me. Because I am the Queen of Evil and you don’t respect that. So I am going to make you get down on your knees to me with my magic powers. If you don’t you will be punished….
There’s a slide show, too. When you run it, there’s a girl’s voice under it that says pretty much the same things.
“You punks are so lame. Everyone who doesn’t worship me is lame. I mean, look at this school. So boring. It needs to be burned down….”
I look at the whole thing. Then I get to the comments. Which I will not write down. Because they are worse than anything on the site.
And by now I’m crying. I mean, everyone knows this kind of stuff happens. But that doesn’t make it okay. Because it’s so sneaky. And so unfair. And because I know exactly who did it. Because this is a really good website, and Blake’s too dumb to have done the graphics. And because T&A always spelled wrong on that note they left on the back of my English book. And because, how do I get them for it? This is not something to say interesting about. It’s not interesting. It’s hell.
The first thing I do is post.
“Hey, this isn’t me. This is something a couple of the Queens have done. Got done, because they are too damn stupid to do something complicated like this.” And then I go on and say a lot of things about T&A and the Craft and what it really is and by the time I’m done it’s about four screens long.
I read it over, because I am not going to have one single spelling mistake or grammar error in this. And then I read it over again. And I do not post it. Because, angry as I am, and right as I am, I can’t put i
n so much about the Craft.
And then Ariel is knocking on the door and telling me it’s time for dinner.
“I don’t want any!” I holler. And something in my voice, like maybe the fact that I’m crying again, makes her ask,
“May I come in?”
“No,” I say, and open the door.
When Ariel knows what’s going on, she looks over the site like she’s Sherlock Holmes and she’s going to catch the Hound of the Baskervilles and neuter him.
When she’s done, she says, “It’s pretty professional. I wonder if they paid to have it done.”
“What difference would that make?” I say.
“It might suggest there’s an adult involved,” Aunt Ariel says. “Somebody who could afford this kind of work.”
“The Queens have money,” I say.
“Mmm-hmm. And if they all shared the cost, that could work. But I can’t help wondering if someone we both know and love wasn’t involved.”
“Garbage? You think he’d do something like that?” I say.
“I think he would if he thought he couldn’t get caught. Which is probably the case.”
Aunt Ariel sits in front of my computer with her hand over her face. Then she says, “Let’s have dinner. Then we’ll cast a spell.”
And we do. But my stomach isn’t in dinner and my heart isn’t in the spell. And even though Ariel e-mails FacePlace and tells them the site is about a fourteen-year-old girl and isn’t her work and they promise to take it down, I still don’t want to go to school tomorrow.
Which is what I have to do.
24
BLAKE JOINS THE UNIVERSE
THE SITE IS GONE THE NEXT DAY. But the feelings aren’t. Not mine. And not anybody else’s, either.
Things are okay when I enter the hallowed hells of good ol’ Richard Milhous Nixon. For about two seconds. Then somebody slams into me from behind, and says, “Oops,” and goes on. It’s no one I know, no one I ever saw before.
The same thing happens twice more on my way to first period. If I didn’t know better, I would seriously begin to wonder if some people didn’t like me.
When second period comes, I only have to go five doors down the hall, so I only get slammed into once.
This time, José sees it.
And José changes into someone else as I watch. I don’t know who it is, but it’s a little bit Leon and a little bit Victor. And maybe a little bit some Aztec warrior from way back. And it’s all in the way he walks over to the guy who slammed into me.
The guy sees it, too.
“Oh. Hey, sorry,” he says to me. “I thought you were somebody else.”
“Like who?” José says.
“Oh, just some girl I know,” the guy says.
I have never realized before how tall José is when he stands up straight.
“Maybe you should stop bumping into girls for fun,” he says. “Then you wouldn’t make no more stupid mistakes.”
The guy stands there. He looks totally geeky and uncool.
“But I’ll tell you what you can do, if you like bumping into people,” José says. “You can try bumping into guys. You can bump into me if you want to. Want to?”
“I gotta get to class,” the guy says.
“That’s cool,” José says. “Be careful.”
And the guy oozes away and down the hall.
“Maybe you’d better wait for me after classes,” José says. “I could walk you around, you know?”
“Yeah,” I say. “You can do that.”
And from then on, I have José and he has my back. And knowing that José has it gives me this warm, glowy feeling that does not go away between classes. In fact, it gets stronger.
But that is by the end of the day, and before that, at lunch, I see that the universe is going crazy trying to figure out how to protect Laura, since even José can’t be in two places at once.
Because the universe sends her Blake Cump and Jason Horspool and the rest of Blake’s guys.
Blake, who was just un-expelled because Leon and Laura’s doctor mom went to Gorringe and told him it was better to have Blake in school than out of it, and made him believe it. So now here he is to protect Laura.
Blake and his guys do not eat lunch with us. They do not even talk to us, except a little to Laura.
But when the three of us sit down together, they sit just down the table from Laura on both sides of her. And José sits beside me, across from Laura. And then one of Blake’s guys gets up from where he is and comes over and sits on the other side of me. We have an army.
Well, two armies. That do not like each other. But still, when lunch is over—and it’s pretty quiet since we do not want to talk Craft or coven in front of Blake and his guys—Blake gets up from the table and he says, “Hey” to José.
And José says, “Hey.”
And it is one of those guy things that is about respect, and they have given it to each other. Like a couple of knights who do not like each other but still bow a little when they pass.
And after that day, the sucky harassment stops. And why it stops just shows you how black and white the universe can get when it wants to. Because even the Queens and their court do not want to mess with Blake.
But if you are reading this a hundred years from now, you are probably asking yourself, “Why did a world-class pinche like Blake do something good? Is this not totally out of character for a perverted rat creep from hell without a single good thing about him?”
Yes. Except for one small item. And that is this: Laura’s class, one she takes on Thursdays, is at the dojo. And Blake likes Laura.
Blake Cump likes Laura Greenwood. And it’s not a new thing. He’s liked her since fifth grade. And now he gets to see her at the dojo in her little white beat-you-to-a-bloody-pulp suit. And for the first time in his life, Blake Cump does something good for somebody else.
I know all this because José has a new Blake story for me every day. He tells me them while he’s walking me to class, which he keeps doing, and which still gives me the warm glowies.
They are strange stories.
“You know,” he says. “I think Victor and Blake are making friends. Victor buys Blake dinner every night before the coche takes him home. And he says he wishes he could get Blake out of that family he’s in. He says he can’t understand how Blake turned out as good as he has, now that he’s met the rest of them.”
This is disgusting. I never even thought there might be more like Blake.
“Who told his parents they could have more children?” I ask.
“I bet they didn’t ask permission,” José says.
“Victor and Leon and Mrs. Greenwood are trying to figure something out for him,” José says later this week. “Victor says he’d almost be willing to take him. Chris would go along with it, but I don’t think it’s going to happen. Too many complications.”
“Why would somebody want Blake in their house?” I ask.
“Especially when Blake doesn’t like Mexicans and Victor doesn’t like Anglos,” José says. “Weird world.”
“They don’t?” This surprises me. I always assumed Blake didn’t like anybody. And Victor is quiet, but he’s always nice.
“Victor likes you and your aunt because she speaks Spanish,” José says. “That’s about it. And Blake never says anything, but you can just tell. Or maybe you can’t, since you’re not Mexican. But yeah. They’re making friends.”
“The universe is getting truly strange.”
I hate to admit it, but I am getting curious about Blake. But I will not say this, even to José.
But I can ask Laura, because she’s a girl.
“I don’t know what I think about him,” she says when I call her. “What do you think I should do?”
Nobody ever asked me for boy advice before. I have to think about my answer.
“I mean, I’m grateful to him,” Laura says. “But I’m kind of afraid of him, too. I mean, there’s a lot of anger in him.”
; “No kidding,” I say, looking at Ratchy, who is running across the floor chasing some invisible mouse thing. “What do your rentz say?”
“Well, that’s kind of weird,” Laura says. “They sort of like him.”
“That goes way past kind of weird and gets into Central Weirdland,” I say. “It is all fifty states of the United States of Weirdland. Don’t they know what he’s like?”
“Well, you know my mom did all these tests on him and stuff,” Laura says. “And it turns out he has a very high IQ, which doesn’t impress my mom totally because she thinks IQ scores are mostly bogus—”
“They are?” I interrupt.
“Yes. My mom says there are thirty-two identified categories of human intelligence,” Laura says. “IQ scores test for eight. So she says you’ve got a 75 percent chance of being a genius without it showing up on a standard IQ test.”
“There is no way Blake Cump is a genius,” I say. “Even the universe isn’t that crazy.”
“Mom says he’s very kinesthetic,” Laura goes on. “And our schools aren’t set up to teach kinesthetic people. That’s part of his problem.”