Melissa Esposito felt sorry for me. My father was wrong. You could die of embarrassment.
“That book isn’t what you think it is,” I said.
She held it out to me as if it were something dirty. “Of course it’s not.”
How long would it be before every A-kid in seventh grade knew Kyle Rideau was so miserable, he had to resort to reading a book for help? I wondered. When would Chelsea find out?
Then I noticed something just a little bit odd.
When Melissa picked Happy Kid! up off the floor, she only grabbed the front of the book. Her fingers were actually in between a couple of pages.
“Ah, Melissa, open the book to the page where your fingers are,” I said. “Read the beginning of the new chapter your hand is touching.”
I caught her off guard with that request.
“Why?” she asked.
“Just take a look at it and tell me what it says,” I told her.
Melissa always does what she’s told. It’s a very bad habit. “Listen to Others Sometimes,” she read out loud. “You might want to hear what they have to say just in case you’re mistaken and you don’t actually know it all. Perhaps your problems forming satisfying relationships have something to do with the way you treat—”
“That’s enough,” I said, stopping her from going on.
“Already read that part, Kyle?” Melissa asked.
“No. I’ve never seen that page before. But I think I might understand what it means,” I said slowly. “Close the book, Melissa. Close it without marking your place. Leave the bound edge of the book in your hand just like you’ve got it there, and let the pages fall open by themselves. Now read the page that showed up.”
“Listen to Others Sometimes. You might want to hear what they have to say just in—”
I snatched the book away from her. “All done. I’ll take this back now.”
“What was that all about?” Melissa asked.
I finally got it. But she didn’t. She thought Happy Kid! was just a regular self-help book for a kid who needed to help himself. And that, I was afraid, was what she would tell people.
“Watch this,” I told her.
I held the book in my hand just the way she had so it would open by itself. It opened to the first new chapter I’d seen in over a week.
Enjoy Surprises! That’s What They’re There For!
Just because you didn’t expect something to happen, it doesn’t follow that that something is bad. In fact, it could be good. Recognize those good surprises when they happen. Have fun with them.
“Oh!” I said when I finished reading. “It sounds as if I’m going to get a surprise.”
“That’s not what it sounds like to me,” Melissa replied.
I shut the book with a snap and let it fall open again.
“Look! It fell open to the same place.” I closed and opened the book again. “And it opened to the same place again.” I closed and opened the book over and over again. Every time it opened, it opened to the same place—“Enjoy Surprises! That’s What They’re There For!”
I closed the book and handed it to Melissa.
“Now you let it fall open,” I ordered.
She did, looked down, gasped, and closed the book again.
“You see,” I said, “this isn’t a regular self-help book at all. It doesn’t give sappy advice like ‘listen to your parents because they’re your best friends’ or ‘be nice and share your cookies.’ It gives readers messages that are just for them.”
I smiled, trying to look really creative and fascinating so that Melissa would think I was like the artistic loner in a teen movie instead of the one who dresses funny and brings his lunch from home. I could tell from the look on her face that it wasn’t working.
I stopped smiling and shifted to a less pleasant plan. Telling her the truth. “If you let the book fall open to where the book wants to fall open, you’ll find a chapter that has something to do with what is going on in your life.”
“The word for that is ‘coincidence,’ Kyle. I hope you had it as a vocab word sometime in your past. It means ‘two unrelated events that just happen to occur at the same time.’ ”
“It’s not a coincidence if the two unrelated events happen at the same time over and over again.”
“You’re reading too much into those messages of yours. They’re like horoscopes or fortune cookies. They mean what you want them to mean,” Melissa said. And she sneered while she was saying it.
I shoved Happy Kid! at her. “Try again.”
“Okay,” she said after she looked down at the open book. “I am seeing that same ‘Listen to Others Sometimes’ passage. Oooo. Spooky. The thing is, it doesn’t have anything to do with me.”
“Oh, come on! The book all but said you’re a know-it-all. You’ll never make me believe no one has ever called you that before. Don’t worry,” I concluded as Melissa started to object. “I won’t tell anyone what your message was. Unless someone finds out about the book and says something to me about it, of course.”
“You’re trying to blackmail me,” Melissa said, way too calmly for someone who was about to give in to blackmail. “That’s really clever. I didn’t think you were smart enough to do something like that. Okay. I won’t tell anyone you’re a loser who’s trying to improve his pathetic life by reading a book. For now. But if I feel I need to sometime in the future, I will.”
“Now you’re trying to blackmail me,” I pointed out.
“And succeeding,” Melissa said as she turned to walk back to her desk.
I hoped that Melissa agreeing to keep her mouth shut for a while wasn’t the good surprise Happy Kid! had been talking about. I had been hoping for something better.
I got a math test back first period with a big red C at the top of it. No surprise there. Jake got thrown out of art class for the first time for making body function jokes. That was only surprising because it had taken Mr. Ruby so long to do it.
When I got to social studies third period, I wasn’t expecting any surprises. It was current events day, after all, and current events day is always the same. I spend most of the period waiting for everyone else to get tired of talking so I can get a chance to say something. I was so certain nothing unexpected would happen that I didn’t even listen particularly closely to what the A-kids were saying. I couldn’t help but notice Melissa’s current event discussion, though, because in addition to knowing everything, she’s kind of loud about it. And she’s obsessed with stories about politicians and businesspeople committing crimes at work or cheating on their taxes. According to her, that sort of thing happens all the time and it is just plain wrong. Well, okay.
So I was just sitting there wondering about whether or not my mother had remembered to throw my dobok in the washer before she went to work when Brad started to speak. Like all A-kids, he went on and on for a while and then all of a sudden he said something that sounded like, “Blah blah blah blah blah test scores for accelerated and honors courses blah blah blah.”
“What?” I exclaimed. “What test scores? What courses?” Had he said “accelerated courses” the way I thought he had?
“Weren’t you listening?” Melissa complained.
Brad gave me a summary without acting as if I must be brain-dead not to have picked up on what was going on when he talked about it the first time. “The point of the article is that some teachers in our state want the SSASies revised so they’re easier to give to students. Test scores have had to be thrown out several times because teachers made mistakes giving the instructions or used the wrong kind of materials to help students prepare for them. The test results have to be accurate because a lot of schools use them to identify students who need extra help and should go to summer school or to identify students who are doing really well and should take more challenging courses the next year.”
“But Mrs. Haag said the tests were for the schools, not the students,” Melissa objected.
“They are,” Ms. Cannon said. �
��But once the schools have all these scores on student achievement for the different subjects, they can use them for the students individually as well as for the schools as a whole. So a lot of school systems use the results to place students when the kids move from one school to another within the school system.”
“From middle school to high school, for instance,” Brad added.
I was definitely getting the picture. “So next year we’d better be really careful when we take the SSASies, huh?” I said.
“I hope you were careful when you took them this year,” Ms. Cannon replied. “Those scores will be used to determine whether or not you can take any of the ninth-grade courses the high school offers for eighth-graders.”
That wasn’t a good surprise. I thought I was just going to automatically move on with Chelsea next year to those courses. I had to take a test to be with her?
I managed to casually glance around the room to see how everyone else was taking the news. There were some nervous laughs and a few people were making faces. And Melissa looked as if she really regretted not choosing the “Are we alone?” essay topic.
I tried to look as if I didn’t have a care in the world, but all the time I was thinking, Sure, I always get good scores on the SSASies. But just how well do you have to do to get into those ninth-grade classes?
After another bad day at school, I was looking forward to taekwondo that evening. But by the time I finished warming up and practicing my form, only five more people had arrived, all blue belts or higher, with me being the only person under thirty or so.
I was busy trying not to be negative about having to spend Halloween with old people who were all better at taekwondo than I was when I heard the door to the men’s locker room opening up behind me. Mr. Goldman nodded at whoever had just come into the dojang. I looked over my shoulder to see if it was someone I recognized.
A figure wearing a black belt over his white dobok was bowing before walking onto the mat. He straightened up, took one step forward, saw me, and stopped. Then he came toward me with his hand out. He had to come all the way to me because I couldn’t move.
The look of shock on Mr. Kowsz’s face as we shook hands would have been really funny if I hadn’t been so sure that I was wearing one just like it on mine. We bowed to one another. Neither one of us had expected this to happen.
CHAPTER 12
Mr. Kowsz was a black belt at my dojang, the place where I liked to go. Was that a good surprise because—
No ! There was no possible way it could be good. I was not being negative. I was not looking for the worst in life. Facts were facts. Because of Mr. Kowsz, everyone thought I was some kind of kid criminal. Now he was bringing all that into the dojang. My dojang.
“Line up!” Mr. Goldman called after we’d all run around the room a few times.
“Sir!” I shouted.
“Ten jumping jacks!”
“Hana!” I yelled as I began jumping. “Dul!”
All through the warm-up, my head kept twitching to my left so I could try to see what Mr. Kowsz was doing. He was always staring straight ahead and following Mr. Goldman’s instructions.
“Fighting stance! Front kick! Hana!”
I kicked and kicked and kicked and then switched stances and kicked some more.
After the drills, we worked on our forms for a while. My turns became spins that sent me stumbling, so I couldn’t move in a straight line the way I was supposed to, and my upward blocks looked as if I was waving. I was ready to move on to something else long before Mr. Goldman ordered all the students to put on their gear for sparring practice.
Everyone ran to their bags and started pulling out padded vests and helmets and shin, wrist, and mouth guards. Since I was the only person there whose rank was so low that he didn’t own any protective gear, I had to just stand there doing nothing. So I couldn’t help noticing all the guys putting on big plastic cups over their doboks. They were held in place with wide elastic bands around their waists and between their legs for all the world to see.
I tried not to stare.
“Kyle and Tim!” Mr. Goldman called.
I called out “Sir!” and ran over to him.
“I’d like the two of you to train together. Kyle doesn’t have any kind of protective gear yet,” Mr. Goldman explained to someone coming up behind me. Then he turned to me. “And this is Tim’s first class in nearly four months because of a foot injury. So you two start out together. Take it easy on each other.”
I sighed, turned, and put my hand out so I could shake hands with Mr. Kowsz. His helmet didn’t make him look any better.
Mr. Goldman ordered the others to find partners and line up across from them. “You’re going to start out with kicking only, light contact to chest protection if your partner has it. No contact at all to anyone who doesn’t have chest protection. That pretty much means no kicking Kyle. One-minute round. Fighting stance! Begin!”
I was the only person without chest protection. That didn’t sound good. But while I was trying to figure out what I should be doing about it, “Tim’s” right leg came up, twisted, and headed right toward me in a roundhouse kick. And then it stopped in midair just an inch or two from my ribs.
“You need to be in fighting stance,” he told me.
I just stood there staring at him. He had his fists up—one guarding his chin, one his chest—and his right leg was pulled back a bit. He was bouncing up and down, moving all the time.
“Fighting stance,” he repeated. “Get your fists up.”
“Oh, yeah. Right.”
I didn’t want him to think I didn’t know what fighting stance was, so as I moved into the correct position, I started to say, “I know—”
But I was cut off because Mr. Kowsz suddenly spun so his back was toward me. He looked over his shoulder, brought up a leg, and shot his foot out toward my chest. I gasped and stared at the foot that stopped just before hitting me.
He whirled back into fighting stance and patted his vest.
“Your turn,” he said.
What could I do? I only knew a few kicks. I was afraid a straightforward front kick would catch him in the crotch. Even though he was wearing that protective cup (I couldn’t wait for Chelsea to see me with one of those), my gut feeling was a kick to the groin was probably a huge mistake. I didn’t have time to think about all this! All the other students were dashing at each other and kicking and twisting and shouting. I had to do something. Another roundhouse kick was my best bet. I brought up my leg, pivoted on my left foot so that my knee was no longer pointing forward but to my left, and swung my foot toward Mr. Kowsz’s chest.
The entire top of my foot hit him at full speed. He went toppling over backwards and landed so that his hands hit the mat first with his chin tucked so that he was looking at his feet. He shouted when he hit the floor.
I stood there for a second with my hand over my mouth. Then I started to kneel down next to him. Before I could get all the way down, Mr. Kowsz was passing me on his way back up to his feet.
“Are you okay?” I asked, looking up at him. “Are you okay? Oh my gosh . . .”
Mr. Goldman was already next to us. “Continue training,” he ordered the rest of the class. “Tim, is the foot okay?”
“Yeah, it’s fine. He’s just got an incredible kick,” Mr. Kowsz said, nodding down at me because I was still kneeling on the floor.
“Light contact,” Mr. Goldman told me. “Taekwondo is all about control. You can’t just wildly kick and swing at people. It’s dangerous to do that here, and it won’t do you any good if you really have to defend yourself somewhere else.”
“I don’t know how that happened,” I said as I started to stand up.
“You need to know how everything happens when you’re training here. Now, you’re new, so I won’t make you do push-ups for losing control like that,” Mr. Goldman explained. “Instead, I’ll let Tim handle this situation. Stop! Get ready for next round!” he suddenly shouted to the other students.
Mr. Kowsz signaled for me to come closer. “Just be calm. There’s nothing to be upset about.”
I opened my mouth to shout “I’m not upset!” but shut it again without saying anything.
“Okay, now, kick me again the way you just did, but do it very, very slowly,” he ordered.
I did, and when my foot got close enough, Mr. Kowsz said, “Now tap my vest.” And I did that, too.
“Now do it again,” Mr. Kowsz told me. “And again . . . again . . . now faster . . . faster.”
When I had tapped his vest over and over again after kicking at different speeds, he said, “Isn’t your leg beginning to hurt?”
“Well . . . yeah.”
“Then stop. The point of repeating a motion is to create muscle memory. You want your body to be able to do things without your mind having to think about it. You don’t want to repeat the same motion to the point that you hurt yourself. Switch legs.”
So I did, and we started the whole thing over again. The others switched partners and did other moves. But there I was, doing the same stupid thing over and over. And just when Mr. Kowsz said we could get back in line with the others, Mr. Goldman announced that we were done. He also said we had to help our training partners undo their vests, so I had to untie the straps that crisscrossed behind Mr. Kowsz’s shoulders and a second set at his waist. What a treat that was.
Later, while the black belts mopped the mats and a brown belt vacuumed the entry, I got stuck emptying the trash from the bathroom and both the locker rooms.
Happy Halloween!
I got home, picked up a fistful of candy from the bowl by the door, and ran to my room to look at Happy Kid! Just as I thought, it was time for a new message.
Get Over Yourself
Didn’t your mother ever tell you that you are not the center of the universe? She should have. No wonder you have trouble forming satisfying relationships. Try to remember you’re not the only person in the world with problems, okay? Get over yourself.
Happy Kid! Page 11