Chelsea would be so impressed.
I was feeling great when I got to class. I sat down at my desk, crossed my arms, and leaned back to relax and enjoy watching the others compete for Ms. Cannon’s attention.
Then, out of the blue, like a meteor dropping out of the sky, Ms. Cannon said to me, “Kyle, you haven’t had a chance to say much this week. Why don’t you go first today?”
Now? I wanted to shout. Now you decide to pick me? Now when I’m not raising my hand and making a fool of myself jumping up and down in front of you?
That was my first thought. My second thought was, What was the topic I chose? Oh, that’s right. I chose the topic no A-kid would ever want.
Then, while I had the complete attention of everyone in the room and could have spoken about any important thing that was going on in the entire world, I had to sit at my desk and say, “CNN.com reported this morning that yesterday a man came out of a four-year coma and asked for a Snickers bar.”
There was a moment of silence—no one wanted to laugh at a current event that pathetic—then everyone turned toward Ms. Cannon, raised their hands, started hopping up and down, and shouted, “Me! Me!”
I had to grab the sides of my desk to keep myself from jumping up and screaming, Kyle! You moron! The stupid book made you kick-start your life with . . . with class participation! What good did that ever do anybody?
CHAPTER 9
I started taekwondo the first Tuesday in October.
The two-week SSASie testing period had ended the Friday before, so I had real homework again. I got Tuesday’s done in the afternoon, then I rushed through dinner so I could take a shower and fix up my hair since that night’s class would be the first time Chelsea saw me outside of school.
Oh, and I also had to make sure my feet were clean, because we train barefoot. Washing my feet a couple of times a week—as if I needed one more thing to do.
When I got into Mrs. Slocum’s car around six-thirty, Luke and Ted were already in their doboks, a two-piece white uniform with a cloth belt that ties at the waist. I was carrying mine in an old gym bag. Luke looked from me to the bag and said, “Oh, Kyle, man, you don’t want to use the locker room.”
“Mr. Goldman showed it to me when I went for one of my introductory lessons,” I said. “I thought everybody used it.”
“Only the adults,” Ted told me.
“You’re going to have to change your clothes with old guys,” Luke said. “Ick. You’re going to have to undress with—”
“Yeah, I get it.”
Sure enough, when I went into the locker room to change, the only person there was a heavy man with a lot of black, oily hair. He was nearly through getting into his dobok, so I made a big deal about looking for something in my gym bag until he left. Then I rushed to get dressed and was able to leave when another man arrived with an enormous black bag with a rubbery-looking helmet hanging off a strap on the outside.
Helmets? We were going to be doing something that required us to wear helmets? During one of my private lessons, Mr. Goldman had told me that after I reached the green belt rank, I could buy my own “gear”—a padded vest, ankle and wrist pads, and a mouth guard—but I was almost certain he hadn’t said anything about a helmet. How could I have missed the info about having to protect myself from blows to my head?
When I left the locker room, Luke and Ted were in the middle of the spongy blue mat that covered most of the floor of the training room, which Mr. Goldman had said I had to call the dojang because in Korean that’s what you call a training room. He also told me that before we stepped onto the mat in the dojang, we had to bow toward the flags hanging on the wall opposite us at the back of the room.
I just stood there for a minute because bowing is weird-looking, and I wasn’t going to do it unless everyone else was. Even when I saw that everyone else was doing it, I checked to see if anyone was watching me. That’s how I happened to see Chelsea coming up behind me with a big black bag of gear. She had her hair up in a ponytail and she was wearing a red scrunchie that matched the red belt over her dobok. She bowed without even pausing, as if she wasn’t even thinking about it, and marched across the dojang to drop her bag along the wall.
So I bowed, too.
But then what? Luke and Ted were pretending to grab at each other and then batting their hands away. Luke kept missing or getting hit because he was always looking away to see what Holly Cappa was doing. He didn’t make a sound except for shouting occasionally, the way we’re supposed to whenever we strike with our hands or feet.
There were ten or twelve other people on the mat, about half of them my age, and then some adults who might have been in their twenties or thirties or even older than my parents. Chelsea stood in front of one of the two walls that were covered with mirrors, put her foot in her hand, and stretched her leg straight out in front of her. Then she lifted it until her foot was as high as her shoulder. I’d never seen her do anything like that before. She looked fantastic. After she’d stretched both legs, she stood in front of the mirror with her hands up in fists. She suddenly spun around backwards, shifted her weight from one foot to the other, and brought one leg up as the rest of her body leaned away from it. Somewhere in all that she also did a kick.
I was still staring at her and thinking she was the most incredible girl I’d ever seen who wasn’t on television and that I ought to go up to her and say hello to let her know I was there and maybe compliment her on her scrunchie or something when Mr. Goldman marched into the dojang and called, “Line up, please.”
“Sir!” the others shouted as they started running to form four lines. I still had my eyes on Chelsea. She was getting into a line in the middle of the room. “New activities mean meeting new people, new people who might become your new best friends.” I had read that line in Happy Kid! over and over again. After wasting my time reading a play out loud in English and that current events article in social studies, I’d decided that passage and everything else in that book were just meaningless words. But standing there in the dojang, I suddenly thought that I knew exactly what “new activities mean meeting new people” meant.
I rushed across the dojang to take a spot beside Chelsea. Finally, we would be next to each other. Tonight was going to be the beginning of everything I’d been waiting for and looking forward to—the ninth-grade classes we’d take as eighth-graders, walking together in the halls at the high school, the Pr—
I had almost reached her when one of the black belts signaled to me. “We line up by rank,” she whispered. “You need to be over there with the other white belts.”
Over there. Behind Luke and Ted, who were yellow belts because they’d passed their test at the end of September. Next to a tough-looking woman and a skinny guy who shaved his head. On the exact opposite side of the dojang.
Try something you’ve never done before! I thought as I rushed to the back of the dojang so that I could find my place before anyone noticed. I’m never doing that again.
We hadn’t even got to the part of the class where Mr. Goldman made us run around the dojang six times—two of them backwards. Or the warm-up exercises that went on forever and ever. Or the ten minutes or so of just standing in lines and kicking and punching at nothing while Mr. Goldman counted in Korean. Or the crummy self-defense moves white belts had to learn. While the higher-ranked people were doing these really cool things that involved grabbing people’s arms and pinning them behind their backs so that they ended up on the floor, we were learning how to slap away someone’s hand if he tried to grab our belts. Which would be very useful in real life, I’m sure.
We finally got into two lines facing one another so we could practice something called step sparring. As far as I could tell, step sparring was just doing one move over and over again as the person across from you pretended to punch you. That’s a whole lot of fun. The person across from me was not Chelsea but some green belt who was way, way too into what he was doing, what with his shouting and leaping sideways. Th
en Mr. Goldman told us to turn, which meant we turned to another partner by moving along the line to another person. This is it, I thought. I’m going to get to step spar with Chelsea. I can see her in the other line. We’ll keep moving and sooner or later I’ll get to her.
She was getting closer . . . and closer . . . . . . and then she passed me because when we changed partners we moved two partners to our right, not one. I had to watch her move right past me and stop to spar with some woman brown belt.
I think she might have nodded at me as she went by, though.
“How was it?” Dad asked me when he picked us up in the parking lot after class. His voice had this sense of dread in it, as if he hated to hear what I had to say but felt he had a fatherly responsibility to show an interest.
“It was terrible, of course,” I said in a low voice from the front seat while Luke and Ted sat in back and discussed how soon they could try breaking boards with their feet. In order to avoid going back into the locker room, I hadn’t bothered changing out of my dobok. It was so wet with sweat that when I got outdoors, the cooler air made the cloth cold. I couldn’t bring myself to lean back against it in the car, so I sat hunched forward against my seat belt.
“It’s like being in the army or something. The teacher tells us where to stand and how to stand. If we don’t have one of the positions just right, one of the black belts comes over and tells us ‘bend your legs more’ or ‘keep your back foot over to the right more.’ And then we just stand in lines and kick at nothing. And we have to bow to anyone with a black belt. And we have to call them all ‘sir’ or ‘ma’am.’ ”
“Oh. Well, that doesn’t sound too bad,” Dad said.
“And on top of everything else, there were an odd number of white belts there, so sometimes I had to stand in front of a mirror and fight with myself.”
“It won’t always be that way,” Luke said from the backseat. “There’s some woman white belt who comes sometimes. You’ll be able to train with her.”
“Her daughter used to babysit for my brothers and me,” Ted added.
“She’s old enough to have a daughter who used to babysit for you?” I yelped.
“It doesn’t really matter who you train with,” Ted explained. “We’re not supposed to talk, anyway. It’s not like you’re there to make friends or anything. You get to change partners off and on during the lessons. And Mr. Goldman really doesn’t like it if people complain about who they have to train with. We’re all supposed to be equal in the dojang.”
“That’s why the black belts have to help teach us and help clean the dojang after class,” Luke said. “They aren’t supposed to think they’re better than anyone else.”
“We can’t talk? I noticed it was quiet, but I didn’t think it was because we couldn’t talk!” I could not talk to Chelsea at school. I didn’t need to go to a special class to not talk to her.
“Can we get our money back?” I asked my father.
“Your mother signed a three-month contract.”
“Three months! It will be Christmas before I can quit.”
“There’s going to be another testing period in December. Maybe you’ll be invited to test for your yellow belt then,” Luke suggested.
“Is that supposed to be something to look forward to? Being invited to take a test?” I demanded.
Dad reached over and patted my knee as if I were some kind of wild dog he was trying to calm down. Then he said, “I just want to go on record as saying I told your mother this was a bad idea.”
“Doing something new is one of those things that’s really overrated,” I told him.
Dad nodded. “I haven’t done anything new since 1991.”
“I’m going to take another shower!” I shouted when I got home.
I’m going to take a shower, I’m going to take a shower, I kept thinking as I went upstairs. But when I got to my room, I didn’t pick up some clean underwear and a pair of sweatpants. I picked up Happy Kid! I’m going to take a shower, I told myself as I balanced the spine of the book in my hand. I’m going to—
The front and back covers fell away from each other and the pages flipped open to a new chapter.
Nothing Comes Easy
Things aren’t always going to go the way you expect them to. Every plan has a flaw. Everything is harder than you think it will be. There’s no logical reason for this. It just is. Don’t worry about it.
“Everything is harder than you think it will be,” I read again. It couldn’t be a coincidence that I was reading that line at that moment. But what good did it do me? And why tell me “There’s no logical reason for this”? Wasn’t the book supposed to be helpful?
What exactly is this thing? I wondered as I stood there looking at Happy Kid! there in my hand.
I ran out of my room and down the stairs and found my mother folding clothes in the living room.
“So, how was your first class?” she asked. Her voice had that same sense of dread in it I’d heard earlier in Dad’s.
“Dad didn’t tell you?”
“Well, yes, he did.”
“Then you know I hate it,” I said.
Mom pulled one of Lauren’s bras out of a hamper of clean clothes. One of my new boxer shorts was tangled up in the straps. I so wish I hadn’t seen that. “Kyle, hate is an emotion that does no one any good. You don’t hate that class. You can’t hate something you’ve only done once.”
“Yeah, you’re right. I just think I hate it.”
“Reading Happy Kid! doesn’t seem to be helping you at all. You’re just as negative as you’ve ever been,” she complained.
“Let’s say I’ve had a setback. Where did you get that book, anyway?” I asked. “Where were you when that thing ‘screamed’ my name?”
“Hmm. Uh . . .”
She didn’t seem to want to tell me. Oh, no! What had she done? Bought it at one of those incense and crystal places?
“Oh, okay. I got it at Wal-Mart,” Mom suddenly admitted.
“Wal-Mart?”
“I was shopping for towels and underwear. I told you. I happened to push my cart through the book section of the store, and there it was.”
That made me feel safe, at least. After all, Wal-Mart won’t even sell CDs that require parental warning labels. What were the chances it would sell a book that would actually do something bad?
Now the only question left was, What was it supposed to do?
“A little stenchy, aren’t you?” Lauren said to me as she passed me in the hall. She tapped my soggy dobok with one finger and then wiped it on her pants. “A shower would be a good idea right about now.”
“I don’t need you to tell me when to take a shower,” I told her.
“Taekwondo isn’t improving your personality any, that’s for sure,” Lauren observed.
“Wait just a minute. You don’t have interests outside of school. How come Mom is always making this big stinking deal about me getting involved in something, but she doesn’t say a word about you?” I demanded.
Lauren smiled. “I date,” she explained as she continued on to wherever she was going.
When I woke up the next morning, my calves, thighs, and shoulders felt swollen and stiff. While Mr. Goldman had been spending way too much time making our class warm up and cool down the night before, I had been hiding behind the bald white belt and moving just enough to keep the black belts off my back. No wonder all the other people in the dojang didn’t mind stretching before class.
I dragged myself to school and shuffled through the halls as fast as my suffering muscles would let me. Mr. Kowsz yelled at me in the hall for holding up traffic. He had only had his cast off his foot for a week. The entire first month of school he’d hobbled around the building, holding up traffic. Now all of a sudden my being slow was a problem?
I managed to get into my advisory classroom just as Mrs. Haag and some of the girls were getting started on a big discussion on . . . current events.
Mrs. Haag patted the page of the ne
wspaper she’d been reading and said, “SSASie testing hasn’t been over for a week—a week—and already somebody has been reported for cheating at an elementary school. Can you believe it?” She laughed.
“Little kids cheat all the time,” Melissa complained. “They’re awful. We didn’t do things like that when we were their age.”
“I don’t think little kids cheat any more than anyone else,” Jamie called from the back of the room. “They just, like, haven’t had much practice, so they get caught more often.”
“It wasn’t a kid,” Mrs. Haag explained. “It was a teacher.”
“A teacher?” Melissa repeated slowly. “That’s just terrible.”
“It’s not the first time an adult has been caught cheating or making some kind of mistake giving these types of tests,” Mrs. Haag said.
“So, like, if I don’t do well on the tests, it could be because you, like, made a mistake handing me the test booklets?” Beth asked.
Mrs. Haag looked at her for a moment, then said, “Probably not.”
I limped to the front of the room so I could use the pencil sharpener while the four of them went on and on about all the reasons Beth might have done poorly on the tests, most of them having to do with the amount of time she spent talking on the phone and watching television. Then I limped back to my desk. Nobody cared.
It was one thing to have tried to kick-start my life and have my plan not go the way I’d expected it to. It was another thing altogether to be in physical pain because of it.
“Were you sore like this after your first taekwondo class?” I asked Luke when I got to art.
“Oh, yeah. I didn’t do many of the warming-up and cooling-down exercises they told us to do,” Luke said. “I meant to warn you about that.”
“Is there anything else you forgot to tell me?” I groaned as I tried to get settled on my stool.
“You’ll like it better when we do real sparring,” Luke promised. “It’s practice fighting. You get to kick and punch at someone, but you can’t actually touch him unless your training partner is wearing chest protection.”
Happy Kid! Page 9