Happy Kid! (13 page)

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.

“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 newspaper 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.”

“Play fighting?” Jake broke in. “You do play fighting there?”

“We practice,” Luke repeated.

“You dress up in special outfits,” Jake said. “That's playing.”

“Okay,” Luke said. “Some of the people at our school play that they're fighting with knives and sticks, too.”

“Knives? Really?” I exclaimed.

“Well, they're made of wood,” Luke admitted. “But you learn how to disarm someone who is attacking you with one of them.”

“Will we be doing that soon?” I asked hopefully.

“In a year or so, I think,” Luke replied. “You have to be a red belt before they teach you that.”

“Hope nobody attacks you with a knife before then,” Jake said as he went to work on one of the dirty cartoons he liked to draw in class. “Especially a real one.”

Chelsea was a red belt. That meant she'd be learning the knife stuff soon. She was so cool.

I was almost glad I was taking taekwondo because Luke and I would have something to talk about now besides all the movies he was seeing without me. Then I thought, Hey, I could talk with Chelsea about taekwondo. Not during our taekwondo classes, but here at school.

In fact, I wondered if maybe that was what
Happy Kid!
had meant when it said things wouldn't always go the way I expect them to. I could still use taekwondo to form a satisfying relationship with her. Only not at the dojang the way I'd planned.

Okay, then. If that was what
Happy Kid!
was telling me I should do, I had to think of a way to get a conversation started with Chelsea. How hard could that be? I just needed to get to social studies early so I'd have a chance to talk to her before class started.

Even moving as slowly as I was, I got to social studies in plenty of time. I was actually heading across the room toward Chelsea's desk when I noticed Ms. Cannon was looking at me.

I assumed she was going to start talking about graduate school because she hadn't mentioned it in days and was overdue. Imagine my surprise when instead she said to me, “Are you okay?”

“Oh, I'm fine. Fine,” I said as I kept walking. “I started taekwondo last night, and I guess I overdid it.”

“Oh, really?” Ms. Cannon said. “What got you interested in that?”

I couldn't believe it. She always chose the worst possible time to pay attention to me.

Then I realized that if I started talking taekwondo with Ms. Cannon, it would be really logical for Chelsea to get involved with the conversation, too. So I stopped where I was and said to Ms. Cannon, “I got interested because I have friends who study taekwondo.” Just to make sure I'd said enough to get a discussion going, I added, “I'm working on a yellow belt.”

It worked. Ms. Cannon was interested. She said, “So what
is
taekwondo, anyway?”

“Um, you know, it's a martial art. Master Lee uses it in his movies,” I explained.

“Oh, I don't watch
those
,” she said with this little laugh, as if maybe I shouldn't have brought that up. “Isn't there a philosophy behind taekwondo? What is that about?”

A philosophy? Things definitely weren't going the way I expected them to, because I didn't even know what
philosophy
was.

“Don't you take taekwondo, Chelsea?” Melissa asked, butting in to a conversation that had nothing to do with her.

“Yes,” Chelsea said, smiling. “I've been training since I was in third grade.”

Ms. Cannon turned toward her. “How does that work? Do you get different colored belts as you get better?”

“That's right. You start off as a white belt and move up through yellow, a couple of greens, a couple of blues, a couple of reds. Then you get to brown and black.”

“What belt do you have?” one of the kids asked.