by Ryan Gattis
Kung Fu High School
Ryan Gattis
Table of Contents
Title Page
Table of Contents
...
...
...
Copyright
Dedication
The Student Body Diagram
Epigraph
THE PROMISE A.K.A THE PROLOGUE
KUNG FU HIGH SCHOOL
UNINVITED GUEST
THE SURVIVAL LIST
FAMILY STATS
GETTING THERE
WHY EVERYONE KNEW WHO JIMMY WAS
THE TEST
THE AFTERMATH
SATURDAY
SUNDAY
SUNDAY NIGHT MOVES
KINFÉS
THE TALENTED MR. RIDLEY
MELINDA AND THE WOLVES
CHANGES
HOME
STUFF SINKS IN
THE FIRST REAL KISS
MY BACK
NO
MORNING AFTER
CHECKING IT OUT
GETTING BACK
WEDNESDAY MORNING
DERMOODY BLUES
WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON
FIXING THE BEDS
KNOCKING
STILL NUMBED UP
THE FRIDAY OF ALL FRIDAYS
GEOGRAPHY LESSONS
THE SAND WITCH
GETTING OUT
JIMMY A.K.A. GYMKATA FOR REAL
PLAN B
THE DUEL
TROPHIES
ANOTHER WAY
THE JB
HALL BRAWL
PLAYING POOL
MELINDA A.K.A. MISS CHEMISTRY
SWINGING
GOING DOWN
DEALING WITH PRINCIPALS
THE SHOWDOWN
ACROSS THE QUAD
THE BRASS SECTION
THE FINALE
THE BIG BOSS
CONSEQUENCES A.K.A. THE EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Illustrations by Brandon Gattis
A Harvest Original
Harcourt, Inc.
Orlando Austin New York
San Diego Toronto London
Copyright © 2005 by Ryan Gattis
Illustrations copyright © 2005 by Brandon Gattis
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval
system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be
mailed to the following address: Permissions Department, Harcourt, Inc.,
6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.
www.HarcourtBooks.com
First published in Great Britain in 2005 by Hodder and Stoughton
A division of Hodder Headline
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gattis, Ryan.
Kung Fu High School/Ryan Gattis.—1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
"A Harvest Original."
Summary: Life at hellish "Kung Fu" High School is narrated by Jen B.
who, along with her brother, Cue, belongs to one of two gangs still
standing against the puppet principal and the tyrant drug kingpin.
[1. Drug traffic—Fiction. 2. Murder—Fiction. 3. Gangs—Fiction. 4. Martial
arts—Fiction. 5. High schools—Fiction. 6. Schools—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.G22737Kun 2005
[Fic]—dc22 2005004240
ISBN-13: 978-0156-03036-6 ISBN-10: 0-15-603036-5
Text set in Aries Roman
Display type set in Jen Hand, created by Laura Angela Reynoso
Designed by Kaelin Chappell Broaddus
Printed in the United States of America
First U.S. edition 2005
A C E G I K J H F D B
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, organizations,
and events are the products of the author's imagination or are used
fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events,
or locales is entirely coincidental.
This novel is very respectfully dedicated
to the memories of:
(Bruce Lee)
and
Robert Cormier
THE STUDENT BODY
I dreamt of so many good things happening for me here.
Now, there is nothing. Everything is finished, gone.
—Cheng Chao-an,
Tang Shan da Xiong/Fists of Fury
Bunting nodded. Continued to stare into space. Not
wanting to look at Janza now or anybody or anything.
Staring into the future, next year, beyond. Him, Bunting,
in command of the entire school. Stooges at his beck
and call. An army at his disposal. No rules except for
those he made up. The boss. More than that. Like a
dictator, for crissake.
Beautiful.
—Robert Cormier,
Beyond the Chocolate War
'Tis gone!
We do it wrong, being so majestical,
To offer it the show of violence;
For it is, as the air, invulnerable,
And our vain blows malicious mockery.
—William Shakespeare,
Hamlet, Act I, Scene i
THE PROMISE A.K.A THE PROLOGUE
You got the stopwatch? Good. Reset it. We'll time this. No, no, don't push that start button yet. Just wait. Now the way I hear it, it all began when Thug #1 punched Jimmy as he was walking on the road that went through the woods that Jimmy was known to walk every day after school. Well, not exactly punched Jimmy but tried, came up hard behind him and threw an awkward, crooked-wristed fist in his general direction. Completely sloppy technique—okay—now push the button.
Jimmy ducked, turned, and twisted while pivoting on his standing leg and delivered a forearm throat chop to Thug #1, incapacitating the ever-living shit out of the guy and hurtling his body backward onto the concrete.
Stop the clock. What's it say?
"Not even one full second. Well, almost a second."
Start it again.
Thug #2 comes out from behind a tree and has a shovel over his head like he's going to tomahawk Jimmy with the edge of it. Bad idea. Thug #2 obviously hasn't seen a single kung fu movie in his whole damn life because he still has a surprised look on his face when Jimmy straight leg kicks him in the gut, which makes Thug #2 catapult forward, doubling over, but while Thug #2 is trying to bring the shovel down on Jimmy and regain his breath, Jimmy leg sweeps him with so much force that he goes up into the air backward. Now, Jimmy—get this—comes up out of the leg sweep, stands up and extends his right leg backward into an "L" at the knee and actually clips the guy at the base of the neck with a kick that knocks him out and then, Jimmy doesn't stop there, he actually catches this guy by the back of the neck with the bottom of his foot. Completely cushions him, because, you know, the guy was out like a light, if he let him drop, his skull would've just gone smush.
"I can't even picture that. What do you mean?"
I mean he caught him with his foot. He held up the weight of a full-grown man with his leg extended backwards in that "L" shape. Like the guy's head was an inflated ball.
"I still can't see it."
Dammit, give me that pen. That napkin too. Okay, here:
THE NAPKIN
See? On partial extension, knee at a ninety-degree angle pointing backward while standing on one leg, Jimmy knocked the guy out with an aimed kick to the base of the skull, then he CAUGHT T
hug #2 by the back of the neck with the sole of his foot. Then he grabbed the shovel with his left hand and just stayed in that position. STAYED!
"What?! No fucking way. That's not even possible. Physics and shit. Man, Jet Li couldn't do that WITH wires."
Serious. Jimmy just did it for show. To scare everyone watching. Now stop that clock. Time?
"Counting Thug #2's running toward Jimmy and not our little argument, that would be 4 seconds total—4.3 to be precise."
Start it again and keep it running this time.
Because Thug #3 comes running at Jimmy and before he even gets close, he gets smashed in the shins with the shovel head. See, Jimmy pushed passed-out Thug #2 back up to standing real quick, took one giant step and swung the shovel so that it cracked #3's shins, then turned back around and caught #2 AGAIN but with his instep this time just as #2 was falling back over and before his head even hit the ground. Meanwhile, Thug #4 takes a flying leap at Jimmy, as he is supposedly busy trying to keep #2's skull from cracking but still manages to find time to block Thug #4's kick with the shaft of the shovel and then swat him out of the air like a lobbed baseball. BANG. After all that, Jimmy just lays #2 down on the ground gently like his body was some balloon attached to a soccer-ball head.
"I'm still not seeing it."
Ayight, just flip that napkin over. Here:
THE OTHER SIDE OF THE NAPKIN
Got it now?
"I mean, yeah, I got it. I just don't believe it. There is no way that would ever, ever happen."
You don't know Jimmy.
"Yeah, guess I don't. So, what happened after that?"
Jimmy walks to the nearest pay phone and calls an ambulance. The ambulance shows up with the cops and he gets booked for assault and all kinds of other things. Anyway, his mom bails him out of jail that night with the last of his fighting prize money and extracts a sacred promise from Jimmy. She looks deep into his eyes and makes him swear on the soul of his father that he will never fight again.
"Wait, what?"
She made her son promise never to fight again.
"And he did? He promised?"
He did.
"And he meant it?"
He did.
"Whoa."
Yeah. That was the beginning of the end. Oh, so what you got on that stopwatch?
"Time elapsed, 9.6 seconds to send 4 nameless and faceless bad guys to the hospital. Hero doesn't even get scratched. Just like the movies."
Yeah, like the first part of the finale, right before the big boss, but then our hero gets well and truly fucked up.
KUNG FU HIGH SCHOOL
The Good Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King High School, that's the block-letter official name chiseled into the three-foot-thick concrete sign that sits in the dying yellow weeds in front of the cluster of buildings that was my school. First, it got called M.L. King or MLK, simple enough. Then there was King Junior to be more precise and that was because he started having a national holiday all to his posthumous self, but the word was never officially added to the title because everyone thought it would lead to confusion and people would think we were a junior high. That didn't stop us from calling it King Junior anyway. King Joony followed not long before it was mercifully shortened to King Joo. It never was KJ and I don't know why that is. But I do know that by the time Ridley was running drugs out of the school cafeteria, people in the city just knew us as Kung Fu.
Wasn't really surprising that Kung Fu High School was a name someone from the outside came up with first. It was supposed to be an insult because there were so many Asian American kids attending but that was a bullshit reason. We didn't have any more Asians than anywhere else. Us students didn't care though. We liked it. It was Bruce Lee tough, a gory stamp of approval that featured a clenched fist crushing the blood right out of a still-beating heart. That was how we saw it in our minds. That was what the nickname meant to us, that Kung Fu.
The way most everybody talks about it though, you'd think it was the evilest place on earth. They don't even talk about us like we're humans because of what happened. Senseless animals, I've heard. Wild beasts, I've heard. Monsters? Demons? Heard those too and I've heard even worse. There are more rumors and stories about us than could ever be written down. Every single one made up because the brutal truth could never be released to the public. Not like it mattered. Nobody wanted to believe it was real anyway. That a school like ours could actually exist and that it could really go off the way it did. That so many people could be murdered. I guarantee the whole thing was easier for them to deal with if what actually happened stayed in their horror-packed imaginations and didn't occur in a regular old high school.
It was like this: main building was a four-story building, a giant box with minimal windows, connected to the two-story gym by a cake-wedge corner of bi-level cafeteria built long after the original plans. The central quad was marked out in huge rectangles of flat concrete. In front of the gym, a two-foot-high, six-foot-wide box, poured of the same concrete so that it looked like it was rising up out of the ground, was spaced between every three rectangles. Those solid things were supposed to be for sitting on, but that was a damn rare occurrence. On the east edge of campus was the other main building. Long and only one level, it housed the auto shop, home economics, and what passed for art studios on one end, while the special education center took up the other. Across from the gym was the theater and band building. Built on the original grade of the hill, the tiered theater angled down the small mound and the bottom, where the stage was, bordered the parking lot. It blocked off the quad from streetview. That was all KFHS was: five faded redbrick buildings plus a couple of disused portable classrooms, surrounding a dirty gray quad. Not so scary, not so special, and definitely not the seventh circle of hell. Long before our "gangbanger" Armageddon went down though, we had a reputation.
Don't even go there, they'd say when the talk first went around town. Haven't you heard that that one guy died there? It's true too. Robert W. Lewis, nicknamed Robbie, aged sixteen, did die here, right in front of his locker, #126, but it wasn't because he was stabbed or shot or kicked in the chest so hard that it turned his rib cage to dust and liquefied all his internal organs so powerfully that he vomited all his innards onto the laminate floor that was missing more than a few grayish white tiles. That shit isn't even possible. What actually happened was Robbie had a bad heart and Robbie had a heart attack after Robbie took some cocaine during Robbie's study hall period then Robbie got dead while reaching for Robbie's chemistry book. He wasn't the first person to die here, just the first white one with rich parents to make a fuss. So that was the story that got the status ball rolling but it was much worse than one white kid odeeing and that incident certainly didn't stop anything.
The circle was in effect Monday through Friday and if you got challenged, you had to fight. No choice. Two hundred people circle you up and sling you into the middle against Bruiser Calderon and you ain't going anywhere but at his throat or balls. Don't even waste time with his knees or those tiny eyes hidden under that caveman brow. Keep that chin down and cover those ears. Head butt if you can sneak one but focus on his soft points and don't get distracted.
For reals though, why the nickname Kung Fu? Personally, I think it was because 99.5% of our student body knew one form or another of martial arts. Serious. If it weren't for a few people that could only hold their own because of how big they were, the number would've been 100%. Dojos all over the city were booked out with kids from our high school who wanted to learn self-defense tactics fast. So then Express Dojos sprang up. Like kung fu kapitalism. They specialized in one-week intensive courses in anything you wanted: those popular Japanese forms, Karate, Sumo, Judo, Aikido, Jujitsu, Ninpo/Ninjitsu, Chinese styles of kung fu but specific ones like Hung, Kui, Lee, but never Mo, don't know why, then there was Wing Chun, all kinds of Korean Leg Fighting, Hapkido, Tae Kwon Do, Hwa Rang Do, Kuk Sool Won, Hup Kwon Do, the ill kind of Muay Thai where all the kids got yellowed shinbones from kick
ing stumps until the scar tissue prevented any kind of feeling apart from invincibility, and there was Kuntao, Indonesian Silat, Filipino Escrima, some dance-y Capoeira, Front-Foot Boxing, Vanilla Kickboxing, Krav Maga, even some styles most people thought long dead, I mean Tibetan, Mongol, some Nigerian craziness, all started popping back up too, but various mixtures always reigned.
Usually the big circle winners knew two or three real well and could switch up on you in the time it took to button your collar. Happy hybrids, everything was everything, even the type of shit that people only ever saw in movies was in our big house: animal styles like snake, eagle claw, and monkey, fists of the elements, seriously everything. Authentic? Not authentic? It didn't matter. So long as it worked, we stole it. We stole it all. I mean, that's the real American Way, right? Gee, Hawaii looks nice, we're fuckin' taking it, right? Roll over it, dress it up, or put a flag in it, just claim it as your own. All them fusions got crazy too. But no one ever saw that. It was all just a tall tale unless you experienced it for yourself.
But Robbie dying, that was fact and after that the other rich kids started getting transfers to other schools, prestigious public or private ones in different districts so they didn't have to show up for classes in the rundown part of the city anymore. The state threatened to pull our funding, which didn't help because the total population was almost three thousand mostly bad kids that had nowhere to go but to infect good schools, or so everyone thought. Besides, Ridley would've just found another high school to operate out of. Didn't matter where really.
It was the perfect cover and it was even better when all the rich kids with clean faces took off and the only dirty-faced white kids who were left might as well have been black, brown, red, or yellow too. So that was it. Asian, Latino, European, African, Indian, and every other American thing in between became one big mix. The only dress code in our world was instituted by us and it was just this: make damn sure you looked like everybody else. Giant-sized work coat with no shape to it, block-color wool hat keeping you warm over a button-up shirt, khaks or jeans, and a pair of boots. Any and all logos got taped over or torn out. Used to be a time when everyone wore 'em, no longer. Those kinds of identifiers could bring trouble down on you. The hard truth was, we were all targets. We were all the color of poor and just trying to survive the same sinking ship. For real. Can't say that the Kung Fu rep isn't deserved though.