The Knockout

by Sajni Patel

  “Do you feel that?” Coach asked, bearing the brunt of my kicks against his pads.

  “Yes,” I puffed, focused on removing the pain in my shins. They always hurt the worst.

  “We’ve trained hard, but now we train our hardest alongside you. You are our heart right now.”

  I grunted with another kick and wiped the sweat from my neck.

  “We are the body pumping lifeblood through you, and you will be our strength manifested at USMTO.”

  Yeah, no pressure.

  I took a short break for lunch and then, while my stomach digested, I sat down for stretches and meditation. At some point, I even lay down on a mat. I didn’t even care how dirty or sweaty it was. My body, my mind, my bones and muscles and thoughts all just had to go bleh for a quick minute.

  We continued our day with warm-ups and sprints and drills and god-awful plyometric conditioning and ended with sparring matches. We always removed our shoes at the door, but we made sure our feet were clean before stepping onto the mat.

  Coach began with wai khru, a sort of performance of respect for all the teachers and masters that came before him. I expected to perform this at USMTO in honor of him.

  Coach sparred with me once, but I fought alongside others to increase my reactions to a number of variables. No one took it easy on me. No one treated me like the golden child, someone special just because I was going to USMTO.

  Coach called me over for a weigh-in at the end of practice. I lifted the hem of my now-soaked tank top and wiped my face as I stepped onto the scale.

  “You’re tip-toeing at one-thirty.”

  I groaned. “I know. I’ll pack on the calories.”

  “Make sure they’re the right calories.”

  “Will do.”

  “Try to keep stress at a minimum, and don’t change up anything sudden. No new restaurants or food brands or new vitamins or medicines, yeah?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Every day began at six in the morning and ended at eight, at which time I made dinner for my parents. Tonight, we ate green curry shrimp salad, which was quick and easy to make. Sauté shrimp in butter and olive oil, add garlic and green curry paste, and level it over mixed greens and my all-time favorite, feta cheese.

  Mama leaned against me on the sofa as we ate because, honestly, we were just too beat to sit straight and proper at the dining table. We had our feet on the coffee table—forgive us etiquette gods—our plates balanced on our bellies, and the TV on but turned low.

  “Have you put together a pitch for the business list?” Papa asked.

  “Sort of. Lily is helping me, though, and she’s going to go with me, so no worries.”

  “Such a good friend,” Mama commented. I hoped she didn’t go into a spiel about how much she wished she could help too. That she should be the one working on a pitch with me and going door-to-door. Usually, she wanted me to figure things out on my own, independence and self-sufficiency and all that, but this was one of those moments where she wanted to help. We all knew this was something a little beyond me.

  She didn’t go into her spiel, though. Which was good. She didn’t need to feel bad or frustrated when she was doing everything she could already.

  “How was practice? Ready to fight?” Papa coughed.

  “Yeah,” I muttered, unable to form cohesive thoughts much less verbalize them.

  Mama’s eyelids drooped over perpetual eye bags from her second job, and we were both content to let Papa talk. He didn’t converse much when he was really sick, when he was just too tired and in pain and lethargic and didn’t have the energy to sit and chat, not to mention the side effects of his many meds, so when he did talk up a storm, we welcomed it more than he would ever know. He talked about sports, politics, UT, and of course USMTO.

  “I’ve been getting involved with the federation: phone calls, emails, research, that sort of thing.” He grinned at my grin. “And we’re making this happen. This will be an Olympic sport, just you watch.”

  “Y’all are awesome parents. I love you to death and back.”

  “Death can wait,” Papa said pointedly. He slapped my knee. “Get your homework done.”

  “Okay.” I struggled to get off the couch, my muscles über sore. “Coach wanted me to start with the chiropractor and massages . . .”

  Mama nodded. “Already taken care of.”

  “Really?” I asked, surprised. I mean . . . how had my mom scraped money together for that already?

  “Yes. After school tomorrow, before you go to the gym. You’re going twice a week now.”

  “But isn’t it—”

  “Choop,” Mama said bluntly, an Indian parent word/grunt for quiet, I won’t hear of it.

  “Thank you.” I hugged them both tightly, knowing this was going to be another strain. I would work extra hard for this. There was no place to waste a single penny. I pulled away and went to the hallway, turning back before I forgot. “Are we doing Holi this year?”

  Mama sat up. “No. We never go. Why do you ask? Do you want to go?”

  I shrugged. “I dunno. Just wondering.”

  “We can go if you’d like, but there is no obligation to go.”

  “Okay.”

  “And I got the email from school about Cultural Heritage Day next week. Do you want to wear something Indian?”

  I rubbed my arm. “I don’t think so. But I have an old salwar kameez if I change my mind.”

  Not that I especially wanted to go to school wearing one. It wasn’t a big deal, but I was way more comfortable in sneakers, shorts, and a tee. Could I wear kicks with the long tunic and leggings? Probably looked weird. And the dupatta? What was the point of an extra-long shawl hanging over one shoulder?

  Nah. Shorts for the win.

  Mama nodded knowingly, and I turned the corner into the dark corridor. We saved on electricity by walking in the dark and leaving the AC off. I pulled up my window halfway to cool off my room, making sure the screen was secure. As the thought of jumping into bed overtook me, I remembered needing to talk to my parents about shopping for new gear. So I made my way quietly, apprehensively, with a heaviness in my gut for even thinking about asking them for more money. I stepped back out into the hallway to ask, but accidentally eavesdropped on them instead.

  “I feel bad now,” Mama said quietly. The walls were super thin.

  “It’s fine,” Papa insisted. I couldn’t see them, but his habit was to rub her lower back when she fretted.

  “Do you think we’re the reason why she isn’t . . .”

  Indian enough, I finished in my head.

  Papa said, “No. She is everything we want her to be and everything she needs to be.”

  “She should have that tie with our culture. She shouldn’t be left out because of me. She is not me.”

  “I know, I know. You can’t beat yourself for it.”

  “Maybe I should’ve sucked up my pride and swallowed my words so she could be at mandir and have friends there and fit in.”

  “Don’t dwell on the past.”

  “She should go, huh? She should go and have fun and explore her culture without feeling like an outsider.”

  “She can go if she wants. We never said she couldn’t.”

  “Maybe if she had some Indian friends, she would be more comfortable. I’m not exactly the comforting type when it comes to them. And you can’t be around so many people.”

  “What ever happened to Rayna? They’re not friends anymore?”

  Mama replied, “She hasn’t talked about her in a while.”

  “Are you sad that she doesn’t go?”

  A long, deep sigh filled the room. How could an unspoken response be so very clear?

  Six

  I’d braided Lily’s hair during our sleepover at her house that Saturday, but only with the stipulation that
it be natural. The thick, coarse hair grabbed onto the style of double braids beautifully. Afterward, she kept my feet in place while I did crunches. I had to build up resistance in my core after Jenny’s brutal hits.

  “Sorry I couldn’t go with you this morning. Did you get any more sponsors today?” she asked.

  We’d gone to what felt like a million businesses over the past week. We got the runaround and disinterested faces and folks who were like, “Are you for real?”

  “I’m definitely not a salesman. I feel like I’d buy anything a sales guy told me to, but I can’t get someone dying of thirst in the desert to buy a bottle of water from me. I don’t have those haggling skills that my mom has. She’s hardcore.”

  “So’s mine. I think first-gen Asians are like that, though.”

  I laughed. “I feel like a little kid hiding behind my mom so she can negotiate stuff for me.” To be honest, I wished that she really did have time to go with me. She would’ve persuaded more than the few sponsors and extra five hundred bucks that I’d gotten.

  “Maybe the ‘I need money for something that you don’t benefit from, but can you go fund me, anyway?’ approach isn’t working.”

  “We’ll keep trying. Gotta do something new.”

  “Like what?” she asked.

  “Let me think. Um. I mean . . . I’m going to USMTO. The nation watches it. I can boost their names. Isn’t that enough? They can hang a picture of me in their business and proudly declare they supported a local, national athlete. It’d be easier if I could throw in the words: Olympic team. They’d scramble for that.”

  “Duh! Why the crap weren’t we saying that?”

  “There is no Olympic team.”

  “No. But we should be saying that USMTO leads to the World Championships that could lead to the Olympics.”

  I face palmed. “We gotta go back to those guys then.”

  “Square one tomorrow.”

  “Ugh. Thanks.” I switched up my sit-ups with side ones, touching my left elbow to my right knee and vice versa.

  “How can you work out after so much Filipino food?”

  “That’s exactly why I gotta work out . . .” There was no saying “no” to Lily’s mom’s Filipino cooking. One: Filipina moms were as notorious as Indian moms in making guests eat. It was loving Asian hospitality at its most aggressive. Two: it was rude not to eat. Three: Filipino food was delicious. Tonight, she’d made shrimp lumpia (I only ate three, I swear!), which almost always led to pancit, as well as healthy and hearty chicken afritada over rice.

  “My mom made extra for you to take home. Don’t forget.”

  “I never leave your house empty-handed. Unspoken rule.”

  “So your parents want you to go to Holi?” she asked.

  “Yeah, I’m pretty sure they want me to get in touch with my Indianness.”

  “So go.”

  “You don’t understand how uncomfortable and—”

  “Lily!” her mom called from downstairs. “Your friend is here!”

  “Okay!” she yelled back.

  I propped myself on my elbows as Lily kept a death grip on my feet. I could still kick her or, even better, punch her. Not that I would. “Which friend? Oh my god, did you invite Rayna?”

  “No. You’d be super pissed if that went down.”

  “Then who?” I inquired as Lily’s mom asked the surprise guest if they wanted to eat.

  A throaty laugh ensued, followed by a deep voice responding, “Not right now. Thank you, ma’am.”

  Oh, god, don’t tell me it was who I thought it was!

  A knock rapped on the door, followed by Lily’s enthusiastic, “Come in!” right as she jumped back and scuttled into the corner, a giant grin on her face.

  Yep. It was Amit. I hadn’t moved a muscle when he walked in with a sheepish but awkward smile and a backpack hanging in his hand. He waved as Lily invited him to sit at her desk.

  Not wanting him to feel any weirdness or out of place, I smiled as naturally as I could. He pressed his lips together and concentrated on emptying his books from his pack. I shot Lily an annoyed look.

  She shrugged and said, “So, I figured that we could all study together since we have this big test in computer science coming up.”

  “That’s a good idea,” I begrudgingly admitted, pulling my knees to my chest and blindly searching the bed beside me for my notebook. Grabbing the slender one with the metal spine, I dragged it down. “We can do prime and integer factorization?”

  “Yeah. Next logical step from our session Thursday,” Amit said.

  “Sounds about right,” I added, seeing that he had two days to let that info sink in.

  We should’ve read the chapter aloud to fill the void, but I for one had to read silently, taking in every word and maybe rereading a dozen times before getting it. For the first ten minutes, having Amit around was no different than not having him here. Except, ya know, being hyper-aware that there was a very cute boy in our presence.

  Until Lily broke the peace and asked again, “So, are you going to the celebration or not?”

  I froze, panic-stricken. Please, lord, do not let Amit venture into this conversation.

  He glanced up from his textbook. At this angle, I noticed that a thin notebook was splayed open in front of it, as if he tried to hide it by pretending he was studying the chapter.

  “Um, maybe. I don’t know.”

  “I’ll go with you,” she offered and bit into a Twinkie. God, that junk food looked so good, like it could be the last Twinkie in the world.

  “Stop coveting my food. You can’t eat it,” Lily added and, worse than an enemy, slowly finished the rest in front of me and licked her fingers.

  I threw a pillow at her face. “You’re so wrong.”

  She laughed.

  “Why can’t you eat Twinkies?” Amit asked.

  “I’m cutting back on sugar.”

  “Why?”

  I shrugged. “It’s the healthy thing to do.”

  “That’s cool. I don’t think about food that much. I probably should.”

  “Lily needs to. Eating burgers and Twinkies every day.”

  She stuck out her tongue and rummaged through her drawer for another. She didn’t eat just junk food, obviously. Her mom made delicious, healthy Filipino food and her dad was a salad connoisseur, but it was fun messing with her when she taunted me.

  “I can’t stand you,” I joked.

  “Tell me what to wear and I’ll go,” she repeated.

  “I don’t know if I want to go.”

  “Where?” Amit asked.

  “Holi,” I muttered.

  He perked up, extending his neck so that half his face could be seen from behind his pseudo studying. My face warmed as our eyes locked. We slowly moved past the silent, accidental stares to something a little more meaningful, like I could interpret his thoughts.

  He beamed. I couldn’t see his smile, but it reached his eyes and made them crinkle at the edges.

  Lily watched all of this quietly. With her here, there was no pressure to be cool around Amit.

  “If you want someone to go with, you can come with me, I mean, with us. My parents and uncle and me,” he stuttered with a croak.

  “I don’t know. What if your parents . . .” How to put this? “Do your parents know my parents?”

  “Yeah.”

  I frowned, my heart heavy and sinking like a rock stuck in a well of mud.

  “I asked them if they would mind. They’d love to see you again, um, that is, to have you join our family. We could pick you up.”

  “See me again?”

  “Guess we all knew each other when we were kids. Anyway, they remember you, and you know how desi parents are, all wanting to meet every friend and every Indian their child goes to school with.”

 
The sinking sensation halted. “Yeah?”

  He lowered his book, revealing the extent of his bright smile. “Yeah.”

  The years of heavily guarding myself from other Indians sprouted up, as aggressive as ever. I tried to reason with my brain that there was no justification to distrust Amit. He’d never once been mean to me or ignored me or turned up his chin. He knew I wasn’t into attending mandir or doing anything religious or ever showing my face within the Indian community. And he was okay with that. He never made me feel less than.

  Then again, he didn’t know about Muay Thai. He didn’t know how other Indian parents looked at me like I was some abnormality for fighting, how they took away my friends because they thought I was a bad influence.

  I played it off and nodded, my gaze flitting back to my textbook. “I’ll think about it.”

  Through the next hour, Lily managed to stay quiet in her corner, leaning against a stack of pillows and a throw blanket tossed over her legs. My legs and back started to cramp and forced me onto the soft bed. Lily had a memory foam mattress and it was like lying on a giant marshmallow.

  Amit moved on to proofs of P being unequal to NP theorem. When he answered questions aloud and engaged in conversation about the chapter, he didn’t have any issues.

  “You understand this,” I stated.

  “Yeah, when you explain it like that.” He grinned. And something stirred in my gut. “Do you want to work on calculus?”

  “Sure.” We switched up books.

  Amit pushed out of the chair, the seat pivoting in momentum, and came to stand beside me. He bent at the waist to flip through the chapters to my most basic of grievances.

  He chuckled. “All the way to the beginning, huh?”

  “Yep.”

  “You can sit on my bed, you know?” Lily said from her nest.

  “Thanks.” He carefully sat beside me, as if I would spit poison. He kept half an arm’s length from me and explained calculus equations simply (math for dummies, remember?) but passionately. The way his lips assembled strings of derivatives was mesmerizing. I couldn’t stop fixating on his mouth. Why had I never noticed it before?