Happy Kid! (12 page)

“Kyle, you don't understand the role,” he told me.

That was true.

“You see, the man isn't really unhappy because he didn't receive a train when he was ten. The train is a symbol,” Mr. Borden explained.

“Oh,” I said. “Oh, okay.”

“Do you understand what the train is a symbol for?” Mr. Borden asked.

“Come on!” Melissa said impatiently when I didn't answer. “It's a symbol for
all
the things your character wants in life.”

I almost laughed because that couldn't possibly be right. Fortunately, I saw Chelsea silently nodding her head, agreeing with Melissa. She saved me, just in time, from making a total fool of myself.

Still, I had this feeling we weren't any closer to forming the satisfying relationship I'd been trying for.

Things didn't go a whole lot better with Ms. Cannon. Her idea of a restful and enjoyable activity after a long morning of answering SSASie questions was discussing a two- or three-page article about elections in foreign countries where all the candidates have long names no one can pronounce. So she assigned current events every single day instead of just on Fridays the way she usually did.

Normally I would have thought I'd be able to nail current events easy. It's in my blood. My grandmother makes sure I'm kept informed about every kidnapping, chemical spill, and terrorist event that occurs almost anywhere in the world, after all.

But, as it turns out, A-kids don't need their grandmothers to keep them informed on what's happening in the world. They get their current events directly from
Newsweek, Time, U.S. News and World Report
, and something called
The Christian Science Monitor
. They read the local newspaper every day and not just the comic section.

A-kids suck up current events the way creatures on the Sci Fi Channel suck up energy from doomed planets. And then the A-kids are stronger and more powerful. During current events days, our room looked like those scenes you see on television of the New York Stock Exchange where all these people are waving their arms, holding papers, and shouting things. Everyone wanted to be picked first in case someone else had chosen the same current event they did.

Nobody wanted to be the
second
person to talk about state representatives accepting bribes, the way I was because Melissa beat me to it. Or the second person to talk about how expensive it is to go to the state university, the way I was because Brad beat me to it. Or the second person to talk about how lack of exercise is killing people, the way I was because Chelsea beat me to it. Though Chelsea didn't beat me on purpose. She just spoke first.

I was always coming in second because it was hard for me to get up as much excitement for the news as A-kids did. I tried to jump up and down in my seat and go, “Me! Me! Me! Pick me!” But that was just not
me
. I couldn't just sit there, either, because how would that look to Chelsea? I didn't want her to think I wasn't like her, that I didn't love talking about things that had happened to people I didn't know in places I'd never been.

Then one day while I was checking out the same old “Kick-start Your Life with Something New” passage, I got an idea. Maybe
Happy Kid!
had never meant for me to use Borden's Playhouse to get out of my tired old ways that were keeping me from forming a satisfying relationship with Chelsea. Maybe it meant for me to use . . . current events.

I came up with a plan.

I got up early and went onto
CNN.com
just before I left for school. That meant I was getting the absolutely most recent news, news the A-kids hadn't seen because they're A-kids and had done their homework the night before the way they were supposed to. After nearly two weeks of current events, I knew certain topics to stay away from. Brad was into school stories. There was a girl in the class who always did war coverage. Melissa went for any article about corruption. Chelsea liked fitness articles. My plan was to choose something they
wouldn't
choose. Then, when I finally got a chance to speak, I would have a topic no one else had picked. It didn't even have to be a good topic because I was always chosen so late in the period that everyone expected all the good topics to be gone, anyway.

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?

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. Then 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.