Total Knockout (4 page)

That got a round of polite, albeit lethargic, applause. Most people didn't believe the homework had decreased at all. No worries, though, because as I looked out at my people, I willed myself to energize those comatose faces. I wanted them to care as much about the council as I did—or at least to see that we really did do things that mattered. Things for
them
. It was my last year to prove that what I did counted.

I struck my fist as I swore that every classroom would have a recycle bin. I pounded the podium as I vowed the cafeteria would serve more nutritious foods. I could feel my brow dampen as I lamented on the utter lack of an arts program and guaranteed that every student would be given the opportunity to play an instrument if she or he chose to. Okay, so maybe I went off script a little, but I felt so in the moment, yet
out of it at the same time, like I was having an out-of-body experience. Words flowed without effort, without thought, without once referring to my speech. My chest rose with each new promise, each new declaration, and when I pointed out into the auditorium filled with students I would spend my final year at Angus with, I heard myself bellow, “If Lucia Latham wins, so do you!”

I thought I'd hear a rousing round of applause. There I was, practically promising to change their lives, and all I saw was a bunch of slack-jawed students staring back at me. I realized Mrs. Peoria was standing beside me, a forced smile on her face. Nudging me aside, she leaned into the microphone and stuttered, “W-well. That was very . . . energizing. Let's give a hand to Miss Lucia Latham, everyone.”

It was sparse applause, at best. As I walked back to my seat, I tried to figure out what had just happened. When I saw Cooper's face, I realized I may have been a little overzealous. His eyes were wide, almost frightened, like they were this morning when I popped him a little harder than I should have.

It wasn't until she practically ran onstage from the back, her curls bouncing with each step, that I realized
Melanie had finally arrived. She clutched a plastic bag and her face was flushed.

She mouthed, “It's okay,” as she took her seat at the end, dropping the bag onto the floor and adjusting her red beret. When Mrs. Peoria called her to the podium, my stomach cramped up, wondering what was about to happen.

Even though I wrote Melanie's speech and then recited it back to her that morning on the bus and forced her to take notes, once she was up at the podium her actual speech went like this: “Who wants free stuff?” The crowd cheered. “Vote for me and I'll give you free stuff!” And then she reached into her bag and began throwing what I later found out were black-and-white pirate pencil toppers. Students leaped over seats and each other in such pandemonium that Mrs. Peoria and our principal, Ms. Jenkins, finally had to physically restrain Melanie from throwing any more, like a ref stopping a fighter after the bell.

“Enough!” Mrs. Peoria yelled into the microphone as students tumbled on top of each other as if they were fighting for the latest Nintendo Wii game.

I couldn't believe what I was seeing. If there's one thing people like, it's free stuff. I don't even think it matters
what it is, just as long as they're getting something for absolutely nothing. Plus, it looked like they were finally having fun. To make matters worse, I knew that Melanie's doing this would make her seem sort of . . . cool. Her social status had dangled on the outer fringes, as many people had been afraid to approach her in the past, since she was the girl whose mom had died. For me to be president, Melanie had to come in second place, but with the pirate pencil toppers, I had a feeling that her social status had just been upped. Which meant the presidency might not be mine anymore.

In the midst of the chaos, I slipped offstage and hid behind one of the musty black curtains, telling myself to relax, to take it easy like Melanie always does. I gulped in deep breaths and tried not to freak. This would be,
had
to be, my best year yet.

“Did I ever tell you about the time I kissed my elbow and turned into a girl for a day?”

Cooper had shown up on my doorstep just moments after I got home. When I walked into the house, I'd heard Dad shuffling around in the back, but only yelled, “I'm home!” before settling on the couch with Paddy, which was where I still was when Cooper came over. I hadn't even bothered to look at my homework yet.

On days like this, I found Patchwork Puppy—aka, Paddy—more comforting than a reading assignment. My grandmother made him for me when I was three, out of old scraps of fabric she had lying around her sewing room. He was the shape of an
H
and worked equally well as a small pillow or a type of security blanket—my arm hooked right around his center, between his tail and
his head. There was no other stuffed animal in the world like Paddy—he was an absolute original.

“I bet if you kissed your elbow, you'd turn into a boy for a day. You should try it,” Cooper continued. I flipped through the channels on the TV, past shows I might normally watch but today didn't care about. “Look, it really wasn't as bad as you think. I mean, it wasn't bad at all. Loosh? You okay?”

“I'm fine,” I said. Ever since that stupid assembly, I'd wondered how the student body could ever take me seriously if I went off like a lunatic during my big speech. I reminded myself of that clip of Howard Dean I once saw on YouTube. When Lori Anne Overton, the yearbook photographer, snapped my picture as I cast my vote after the assembly, I smiled as if I had already won. But really, I was worried that everyone thought I was a crazy has-been, and that someone more fun and fresh—like Melanie—might be just the thing to make them really care about what the student council did.

One of the reasons winning in my final year was so important was because of the plaques. Each year, the graduating student council held a fund-raiser for something that the school needed. It varied every year and was dictated to the council by the PTA. Last year's
eighth-grade president, Mandy Donath, held a craft fair to raise money for new art supplies. In the art studio there was a plaque that had the year Mandy and her student council graduated and said,
Our new equipment has been generously donated by the student council, Mandy Donath, President
. These plaques go as far back as the 1970s. They left an indelible impression on the school for generations to come.

I wanted my name on one.

The PTA didn't decide what deserved the student council's fund-raising efforts until about a month into the school year. They wanted the money raised by winter break so that whatever it was being used for could actually be utilized during the school year. I didn't know what we'd be raising money for, or how I would conduct my fund-raising (although I had some ideas), but I knew that this final year of council was definitely the most important, in more ways than one.

As I flipped through channels, Cooper continued telling me about the day he turned into a girl and how it made him act super bossy and crave chocolate. I ignored these female clichés. He'd been telling me these silly little lies since we were seven and I lied about ruining his signed Nolan Ryan baseball card.

I know. I'm awful.

It was his birthday, and he'd come down to my house to show off the signed card, which was in pristine condition. I'd heard of Nolan Ryan but didn't know anything other than he was some old baseball player who used to pitch for the Texas Rangers. Cooper was visibly bummed when I barely gave it a once-over, so I started acting interested.

“Here, let me see it.” Cooper had handed me the card, watching closely as if I were holding a newborn. “Yeah, that's pretty cool, Coop. I bet this is worth a lot of money.”

“He's a living legend,” he said proudly.

After a few minutes I put the card on my desk and suggested we watch a movie in the living room. I didn't realize he'd left it behind until the next morning when I spilled orange juice all over it.

The doorbell rang while I was wiping up the sopping mess, and I heard my mom say hi to Cooper. A moment later, he showed up in the doorway.

“Hey, Loosh. I left my . . . what happened?” He looked stricken when he saw his card in the puddle of juice.

“Henry,” I cowardly said. I couldn't look Cooper in the eye and see the devastation I'd caused. “He was
in here playing even though he's not supposed to, and when I came back from the kitchen I found this.”

“My card,” Cooper said mournfully, peeling it carefully off my desk.

A couple of days later, Cooper said he was sure Henry felt awful about what had happened and told him it was okay and he wasn't mad. Henry was only four at the time, but he was smart enough to proclaim his innocence. When Cooper confronted me, I felt so ashamed—not just because of the lying, but for blaming it on my little brother. Once Cooper accepted my groveling apology, he began teasing me about my trying to make a blameless child take the fall.

Since then, he's always coming up with extravagant stories to show me how ridiculous I'd been. The first was when he told me his mom was letting him change his middle name to Gravy because he loved the stuff so much. I dared him to drink it from the gravy boat one night when I had dinner at his place, and he did—half the boat, which is a lot of gravy. He'd long since forgiven me, but he still loved making up stories.

“So when you were a girl,” I asked Cooper, still flipping through channels, “did you wear a dress and play with dolls?”

“About as much as you ever did,” he said.

I smiled and tossed the remote control aside and said, “Know what I want to do? Go down to your house and box.”

I was the one who got Cooper into boxing. Actually, I don't know if he's really into it or if he does it just for me. Either way, he never turns down a fight with me, and his form has gotten really good over the last year. I taught Coop everything he knows about boxing, just like my dad taught me.

Dad was the Golden Gloves Junior Middleweight champion of North Texas for two straight years. This was way before I was born, even before he married Mom. Those fighting days, he says, were the best of his life. And I believe him, too. When Dad talked about his days in Teddy KO's Gym in Arlington, his eyes lit up with a fiery intensity that made you want to listen.

He'd tell about the dingy gym that he loved so much—the smells of sweat, blood, and raw determination; the sounds of leather on flesh, of grunting, of jump ropes smacking the cement floors. He talked about fights when he literally didn't think he could raise his arm for one more punch but willed himself to keep going until he got that knockout. “Just goes to
show,” he'd say, “that there's always a little more in you than you think.”

Dad was boxing when he met Mom. She fell for the whole brute-contender thing, but when they got serious, Dad realized he needed a real job. He got his CPA license, they got married, and he kept fighting bouts. But when Mom got pregnant with me, she told him she was worried that it was too dangerous, so he quit competing. He kept boxing in the evenings at the gym and did some friendly sparring, too. Once I came home from the hospital, Mom said it wasn't fair that he got to go out four nights a week to the gym while she stayed home with me. So Dad cut it to just one night a week and early Sunday mornings. That worked for a long time—basically until this summer, when Dad got canned from his job and stopped doing pretty much anything. I guess you could say he'd given up the fight.

The afternoon of the election, as we boxed in Cooper's garage even though we were still pretty beat from that morning, I kept seeing Melanie flinging those pirate pencil toppers into the crowd. Every time I pictured the faces of the ecstatic, rejuvenated students grabbing that loot, I threw my upper body into hooks and jabs. And maybe I hit Cooper a little harder than we normally
allowed, but he didn't say anything. He didn't even call quit when I could see he was dying for a break, sweating and panting, his face as red as his gloves. I needed a break too, but I think I was too jacked on adrenaline to stop—my body simply kept going.

When our automatic buzzer signaled the end of an intense second round, I looked at Cooper panting in his corner of the garage and asked, “You want to stop, Gravy?”

“No,” he said. “Looks like you need it.”

“I'll slow it down.”

He nodded, and when the buzzer signaled the end of the thirty-second break, he put his gloves back up to his face and blocked my punches.

When I got back home, I put my boxing bag in my closet and hit the shower, taking my time like I usually did. I was running low on my eucalyptus-and-ginger body scrub and needed to ask Mom for more. When I got out I put on some stretchy pants and a T-shirt. I felt better about the elections—Cooper assured me that I would still win and asked for the millionth time if I was mad at Melanie. “Mad about what?” I'd kept asking as visions of pirates swirled in my head.