Well, that makes no sense at all, I thought as I tossed the book into a corner of my room. So other people have problems. Does that change the fact that I have them? No, it does not.
I picked up a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt from the floor and headed into the bathroom for a shower.
I made the very, very big mistake of telling my father that Mr. Kowsz had suddenly appeared in my taekwondo class and that I’d given Moo a kick that had sent him flying. I then had to spend the whole weekend listening to Dad’s stories of his bad experiences with sports. And he had a lot of them. Which I guess shows that I’m not the only person in the world who has problems, though you’d think he’d have gotten over his by now.
When my grandmother showed up Sunday afternoon, I asked her if things had been as bad as Dad made them out to be. She said they were worse.
“And people wonder why I stick to yoga,” Lauren said. “I can do it by myself and not have to listen to other people’s complaints.” She was lying on the couch with a bag of pretzels on her stomach and her chemistry book (her best subject, to the whole family’s surprise) propped against her bent knees. This was as close to being in a yoga position as anyone had ever seen her.
“When have you ever done yoga?” I asked.
“That reminds me.” She turned her head so Mom and Dad would be able to hear her. “I’d like a yoga mat and a yoga tape for Christmas!” she shouted. “And I guess I’ll need some yoga workout clothes. Unless you’re going to get me a car, of course.”
Our living room opens onto the dining room, so we could see Mom bring a stack of plates to the table and start placing them in front of each of the chairs. She ignored Lauren and jumped right on me—as usual. “I don’t think your experience Friday night at taekwondo was all that bad. You did knock an older man over, a man who had just recovered from an injury of some sort. They were pretty nice to you, all things considered. I hope you apologized.”
“Don’t you get it?” I protested as my father came into the living room and grabbed some pretzels from Lauren’s bag. “Everything was ruined before I knocked Mr. Kowsz on his butt. Except for the kids from school, no one at the dojang had ever seen me before I walked in the door. I was just another student—a student who showed up on time and kicked well. That was all I had to do to make them like me. I didn’t even have to talk to anybody.”
“Why will any of that change?” Nana asked from one of the good living room chairs.
Lauren threw a pretzel at me. “He’s afraid Moo will tell all his little friends at the doojingle or whatever they call it the sad story of Kyle and the screwdriver. Then everyone will know that he’s a junior terrorist and think he’s going to use his newly learned martial arts skills for evil instead of good. Am I right?”
Everyone was looking at me. I hate that. Even when it’s my own family. Sometimes especially when it’s my own family.
“Well . . . you know . . . maybe . . . sort of—”
“Ah, the screwdriver,” Nana sighed.
“You didn’t do anything wrong, Kyle,” Dad said with his mouth full. “We’ve told you so over and over again.”
Then Mom said, “You’ve been upset about the screwdriver so long, it’s as if your anger has control of you now.”
Dad, Nana, and Lauren all rolled their eyes at her because she was using family-counselor talk in the house again.
“Well, it is,” Mom insisted, sounding as if she was losing a little control herself.
“I suppose you all just think . . . just think . . . I should get over myself or something?” I sputtered.
“Actually, I think that’s exactly what Mom was trying to say,” Lauren said, while the rest of my relatives nodded their agreement. “Get some control and move the hell on so the rest of us don’t have to listen to this anymore.”
On Monday morning I was actually happy to go back to school. Well, “happy” is probably not the right word. Since my relatives thought I was a whiner, I figured I might as well be at school.
I wasn’t in any hurry to tell Luke about Mr. Kowsz taking taekwondo. It was too depressing. I wouldn’t have had much of a chance to talk about it during art, anyway. Jake spent a big chunk of the period telling us all about how he and his buddies were followed by a security person at the mall Halloween night. He was really excited about it.
Then Luke said there were only three guys at the Halloween party he’d gone to, and he and Ted were two of them. All the girls wanted to do, he told us, was talk and listen to music, and either Beth or Jamie spilled grape soda down the back of his dobok. He didn’t know for certain because they both denied it, but it had to be one of them. They were right behind him with cans of soda when it happened.
I felt better when I left art since it seemed like maybe I wasn’t the only person who’d had a bad time on Halloween.
I was heading down the hall toward the cafeteria after fourth period when I ran into Mr. Kowsz chasing a couple of guys out of a boys’ room. I started to just rush past him, but then, at the last minute, I turned around and said, “I didn’t apologize for knocking you down the other night. I am sorry.”
He stopped and gave me that creepy skeleton grin of his. “Now that I know you can kick like that, I’ll never let it happen again.”
That went really well. So I said, “Did you hurt your foot in class?”
He nodded. “In a black belt class right after school got out last June. We were sparring, and I collided with the person I was training with that night.”
“The other guy get hurt?”
“She was a woman,” Mr. Kowsz admitted. “A big one, though. Her foot was black and blue for a few weeks afterward, but that’s all. I got the worst of it.”
He looked down at his own feet for a moment and kept talking. “I don’t know how it happened. Usually I don’t have any trouble concentrating in class. The moves are so complicated, it pretty much knocks everything else out of my mind.”
“That happens to me, too!”
“But I was involved with that school board inquiry about the incident on the bus last year, and because of that, I had to take a computer class at a community college and change some plans for a trip I was supposed to take with one of my kids. What with one thing and another, I couldn’t keep my mind clear,” Mr. Kowsz sighed.
“Oh, wow. I’m sorry,” I said again.
“Ah, it was nobody’s fault. Things don’t always go the way you expect them to.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “I guess . . . I guess you can’t get down on the whole world when those things happen.”
Mr. Kowsz nodded. “That’s right. Well, you’d better get going, Kyle. You’re going to miss lunch. But first—when do you go to taekwondo classes?”
“Tuesday and Thursday nights.”
He flinched. “Part of my black belt training involves helping with a class one hour a week. I’ve just been assigned Thursday nights, and sometimes I’m going to have to fill in for one of the other black belts on Tuesdays. Is that going to be okay with you? I’d rather not have the people there know we’ve had some trouble between us. I’ve been going there for years. At the dojang I’m just Tim a Black Belt. Except for those years when I was Tim a Brown Belt or Tim a Blue Belt, or whatever I was, of course.” He smiled and lowered his voice. “I have never been Moo there.”
“Oh, no! Don’t tell them anything! I want to just be Kyle a White Belt, too. Or Kyle a Yellow Belt or Kyle a Green Belt. You know. Whatever.”
“Okay,” Mr. Kowsz said, sounding relieved. He patted my shoulder. “Go get some lunch. I’ve got to go check another one of the boys’ rooms, anyway.”
I rushed off to the cafeteria. I had taekwondo back. Now all I wanted was to get into some of those ninth-grade courses so I could be with Chelsea in eighth grade. If I could just manage that, my life might not stink.
CHAPTER 13
“I told you so,” I whispered to Luke and Ted when Tim the Black Belt stepped out of the men’s locker room into the dojang at th
e beginning of that Thursday’s class.
They hadn’t believed me when I told them that Mr. Kowsz was a black belt and that he trained at our school. All during warm-up they kept staring at him. Then Mr. Goldman yelled at them because they weren’t concentrating, and they got down to work.
About halfway through the class we broke into two groups and formed lines in front of long punching bags that were weighted on the bottom like those kids’ toys that pop back up when you hit them. These bags were a whole lot harder to knock over, though. And if you did, they didn’t come back up.
I know because I did it.
When Mr. Goldman told us to form two lines, I came this close to getting into the wrong one. Then I noticed that everyone under eighteen was in the other group. I just managed to join them before we started a kicking drill.
Chelsea was right behind me. Since I am much better at kicking than I am at any of the things she sees me doing at school, I was really glad she was going to get a close-up view of me doing it.
I was careful not to look at her after I kicked the bag. I just did it, and then turned and ran to the end of the line as if I were too cool to care. Then, while I was standing there in fighting stance, bouncing up and down, staying loose, she came running back to the end of the line after her kick.
But the only kick I could do on a heavy bag was a roundhouse kick. It got boring doing the same kick over and over again while the higher-ranked students were doing spin kicks and combinations I hadn’t learned yet. So after I’d been through the line a couple of times, I started trying to place my kicks higher up on the bag or to kick harder so the bag would wobble more. Before long, each time I hit the bag, it would wobble so hard that Chelsea had to wait for it to stop before she could kick.
“You’re going a little overboard, Kyle,” Tim warned from where he was watching us and instructing people on how to improve their form. “Use a little less power.”
I nodded my head. And I was going to do that. I was going to stay in control and be more careful the next time I kicked. But then Chelsea came running past me so she could get in line, and for just a second our eyes met.
I forgot what I was doing and when I got my next turn at the bag, I kicked it so hard it went right down on its side. And Chelsea actually laughed when I leaned down to pull it back up.
Mr. Goldman shouted across the dojang and said I had to do ten push-ups, so I lost my place in line ahead of her. But so what? So what? I made Chelsea laugh!
The next morning the book opened up to a new page.
Fighting Fires
As soon as one problem is taken care of, another one pops up. If you let it get you down, you’ll be down all the time. And who wants to form a satisfying relationship with someone who isn’t cheery? Think of yourself as a firefighter and life as a long, long, long series of little brushfires. The little fires will start to burn, and you will put them out. Most of the time.
Oh, no, I thought as I finished reading the passage. This was definitely a warning. Wasn’t it? Didn’t it mean there was a new problem coming?
On the way to school, I jumped whenever the bus driver braked or even slowed down for another bus stop. I kept looking for signs that something was wrong in advisory. But the only unusual thing that happened was Melissa’s late arrival without a pass. That was her brushfire to fight, not mine.
I started to relax a little after math because we had a pop quiz that I couldn’t possibly have done well on. That might have been what Happy Kid! was trying to warn me about. Then in art Mr. Ruby told us we’d be handing in all our class work—which, in my case, was not a lot—the next week. If that was what Happy Kid! had been tipping me off about, I definitely wished the message had been clearer and come earlier.
By the time I got to social studies, I thought I’d already found my problems for the day. So when I noticed the room was a little quieter than usual, I didn’t think much about it. Melissa was whispering excitedly with Chelsea and another girl at the back of the room. Chelsea kept shaking her head no and looked mad, which was exactly how I thought any girl Melissa was hassling ought to look. But instead of wondering what they were whispering about, I imagined the two of them fighting. In my mind, Chelsea took care of Melissa with a few well-placed kicks. Melissa never got close enough to her to land a punch.
Then I got to English.
Melissa was up at Mr. Borden’s desk, the way she was always up at the teachers’ desks before class. All the other people in the room had silently slipped into their seats and were sitting there as if they were waiting for something to happen.
Melissa said, “Ah, Mr. Borden?” in a low voice that sounded a little worried, though it was hard to tell because I’d never heard her sound worried before. “Did you see the English portion of the State Student Assessment Surveys?”
Mr. Borden finished writing something on a piece of paper before he answered. “Not until after the tests were given. English teachers aren’t allowed to give the English portion of the test to their advisories.”
“So you know they gave us a question that we had practiced in class? The ‘Are we alone?’ essay?”
“Yes.”
“And is that okay?”
Mr. Borden shrugged, shook his head, and said, “I don’t know. I found the essay question on an old test in a filing cabinet belonging to the head of the English Department.” His voice grew a little louder. He wasn’t shouting, just making sure Melissa wasn’t the only person who could hear him. “We were told we could use them. I certainly didn’t cheat, if that’s what you’re implying.”
Melissa’s mouth dropped open, and she stepped back as if Mr. Borden had taken a swing at her. “No. I just wanted to know if it was okay that we saw the question before the test.”
Mr. Borden looked as if he was a little embarrassed about having accused Melissa of accusing him of cheating. Especially since everyone in the class had just heard him do it. He started speaking to all of us, not just Melissa. “Here’s the problem: If I start asking questions about whether or not we should have used that essay for practice, this class could end up having to take the English portion of the SSASie over again. That seems like a lot to put so many of you through when no one intended to do anything wrong. I guess the people who make the tests must recycle questions every few years. I happened to pick an old question they were getting ready to recycle. I think it’s okay for you to figure you were lucky.”
Everyone in the class looked shaken, the way you do when you’ve just avoided being hit by a car you didn’t see coming in the first place. Except for Melissa, who looked as if she’d just found a dead body. Personally, I agreed with Mr. Borden. I felt very, very lucky to have seen that essay question before the day of the test. My essay was going to have to make up for any mistakes I might have made on the rest of the English SSASie. Oh, yes. I was feeling lucky, lucky, lucky.
“What got Melissa going about the SSASies today?” I asked Brad on our way out of class.
“The article on revising the SSASies that I used for current events last Friday,” Brad said, looking embarrassed. “She’s decided that we got some kind of unfair advantage on the English test because we had a chance to practice writing the essay.”
“But it was an accident,” I reminded him. “It wasn’t the only essay Mr. Borden gave us in September.”
“We all told her that when she tried to get us to speak to him with her. Nobody wanted any part of that. But she always wants to do the right thing.” Brad sighed.
“Melissa?” I asked in disbelief. “Really?”
“Oh, yeah. I went to grade school with her. I bet she brings it up again. Believe me, she is nuts that way,” Brad told me just before we separated outside the cafeteria.
I believed him.
When I got to science class that afternoon, I started wondering if Happy Kid! really had been trying to warn me about that math quiz or turning in my art assignments. Those kinds of things happen all the time. They weren’t important enough to be
brushfires I had to put out.
Melissa, on the other hand, was another story. The SSASies were my ticket to another year with Chelsea. If we had to take the test over again because of Melissa and write another essay on a different topic, what would be my chances of being able to see Chelsea in that special English class for A-kid eighth-graders?
I was sitting at my desk, getting my science notebook out of my backpack when Luke came rushing down the aisle toward me. “I just got invited to go see Master Lee II tonight!” he exclaimed, all excited. “Opening night!”
I dropped my notebook on my desk. “I’d forgotten all about it.”
“A kid from my social studies class asked me. Do you know him? Phil Rook?”
I shook my head.
“He asked Blake Levine, too. What about him? Do you know him?”
“No.”
“Oh. Well, Phil’s dad is going to drive us there,” Luke said uncomfortably. “It’s sort of Phil’s . . . thing. I wish you didn’t take those accelerated classes so we could hang out with the same people.” Then Luke suddenly brightened up. “Are any of your friends from your social studies or English classes going?”
“Maybe,” I answered. It was only quarter after one. Maybe some of them were going. Maybe, now that we’d been in class together for more than an entire year, one of them would call me this afternoon and ask me to go see Master Lee. Maybe Luke wouldn’t have to feel sorry for me because I had no one to see it with. “Maybe I’ll see you there,” I said.
“Hey, I’ll go see ol’ Master Lee with you,” a voice said from behind us.
People talk about blood running cold because it really happens. I felt my blood chilling in my veins as I heard those words.
“Ah, gee, Jake—” I stammered.
“Tonight is opening night, right? You look it up in the paper and see when the shows are,” Jake said. “And I don’t want to go to any early kids’ show, either. Look for one of the shows around nine.”
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