Girl Fights Back (Go No Sen) (Emily Kane Adventures) (18 page)

“What the hell is wrong with you,
bitch! You can’t do that to my friend,” he snarled trying to sound
intimidating. Emily parried his hand, twisting it down and around and sending
him tumbling head over heels. He lay on his back a few feet away groaning. The
last guy, the athletic one, rushed toward her, thinking he would take care of
her. She gave him a very hard look and pointed her finger at him. “Do you
really want to risk it?” she asked. “If I take out your knees, you’ll be off
the team.” He shrank back.

By this time the driver had
recovered himself, picked up his knife and lunged towards her with unconcealed
rage. Wendy was terrified for her friend. But Emily seemed so... calm. She
waved her left hand in a lazy circle in front of the driver’s eyes. It seemed
like such an innocent gesture, so graceful, so unthreatening. But without Wendy
quite understanding how it happened, she twisted his right arm up and in,
sending his entire body cartwheeling into the side of the building, his
shoulder weirdly misshapen.

“What is wrong with you! Are you
afraid of this bitch?” the girl shrieked at the last guy standing. She pulled
what looked like a little gun out of her bag and tried to point it at Emily.
But before she could fully extend her arm to fire, Emily had slapped her gun hand
toward her chest and slapped her hard across the face. The gun flew across the
parking lot. As the girl twisted away from the second slap, Emily kicked the
back of her knee and forcing her to the ground. She crouched down and whispered
something in the girl’s ear. Wendy watched as her face became contorted in
terror. Emily got on the bike and waved Wendy over. She swallowed, and then got
on the back. They sped off down the road back into the mountains.

A couple of miles later, Emily
pulled onto a little dirt road that ended by a creek. She cut the engine and
sat by the water’s edge. Wendy got off the bike and stood a few feet away. Her
heart was pounding in her throat as she tried to regain a little composure.

“Wh-what the hell happened back
there,” she practically shrieked. Emily looked at her calmly, but some sort of
concern was clearly etched across her forehead. Wendy couldn’t quite read her
expression.

“Oh, that,” she said, in mock
non-chalance. “Just taking care of a little unfinished business.”

“Emily, those guys were trying to
kill you! That girl had a gun! Where did they even come from? How do you know
them?”

“We met those guys the other night
outside a pizza joint in Covington. Wayne stumbled into the middle of a fight
and they all turned on him. Danny and Billy helped him chase them all off. I
guess they were still pissed about it.”

“I can’t believe how calm you are.
I was terrified. And how did you even
do
that? You were incredible!” Emily had to shift gears at this point to keep pace
with her friend’s passions.

“Wendy, don’t make a big deal out
of this. In fact, I’d prefer it if we didn’t mention it to anyone else.”

She was a little concerned a fight
like that might attract the wrong sort of attention. The only consolation was
that it happened in Covington. If the wrong people looked into it, they would
probably end up looking in the wrong places.

Of course, Wendy was puzzled by
this last request. She had just discovered a new side to her new friend, who
was now even more mysterious than ever.

“Emily, what are you talking about?
You were amazing back there,” she gushed.

“Wendy, those guys were assholes,
and they got what they deserved. But there’s nothing to brag about in what I
did. I would be happier if they had left well enough alone. Do me a favor and
keep it under your hat.” Wendy could see she was completely serious.

“Okay,” she said reluctantly.

“Great. Now we have a secret,”
Emily teased. “We’re
secret
friends!”

When they got back to Wendy’s
house, her mom met them at the front porch. She was struck by how different
Emily was from the friends her daughter usually brought home. She came down the
steps to meet her.

“Hi, Mom,” Wendy chirped nervously.
“This is my friend, Emily.”

“Hi, Mrs. Williams,” Emily added.
“It’s good to meet you.”

Wendy’s mom stood quietly for a
moment, just taking Emily in. She had the strangest feeling about this girl.
She was beautiful, sure. But the degree of self-assurance... she had never met
anyone quite like her. She got caught in a reverie for a moment and there was
the beginning of an awkward silence.

“It is really good to meet you,
Emily,” she said, recovering herself. “It’s almost dinner time. Would you care
to join us? We’d love to have you.” Emily glanced at Wendy, who nodded
vigorously, grinning wildly.

“I’d like that, Mrs. Williams,” she
replied. “That sounds nice.”

“Do you need to call home?”

“No, I don’t think that’ll be
necessary,” Emily replied. It was just turning dark, and there was a slight
chill in the air.

“Your Dad has the hot tub all set
up. Why don’t you two go join him? Wendy, you must have a suit Emily can wear.
I’ll be out in just a minute, as soon as I get the roast in the oven.”

Wendy hesitated for a moment. She
didn’t want to embarrass her friend. Emily smiled at her and said “Sounds great
to me,” and followed Wendy down to her room. She only had two suits, and one
was a skimpy two-piece her mom got her that she was embarrassed to wear. “I’ll
wear it,” Emily said with an air of indifference. Wendy breathed an audible
sigh of relief. As they changed Wendy gasped when she saw how fit and
well-defined Emily was. She was more than just beautiful. This girl was
in
shape
, long, lean and strong. It was a little easier now to see how she
had been able to handle those guys at the gas station. When they got out to the
hot tub, Wendy’s parents and her brother had similar reactions.

Emily appeared
to be unaware of any of it. She didn’t seem to have any insecurity about her
appearance, no false modesty. If they could have seen into her heart, they would
have been surprised to find that she thought of her body as little more than a
tool, or a weapon, an extension of her mind, the focus of her training, not as
a silvered image in a mirror. Short of that, however, they could only see that
she was quite unselfconscious.

The conversation in the hot tub and
later at dinner ran through the usual topics. Her parents, plans for college,
friends. Emily told them what she could, omitted what seemed too dangerous. Her
new policy was to tell the truth whenever possible, but not to say too much.

Wendy’s parents were surprised to
hear Emily lived on her own, in her own apartment, that her dad was out of the
country, that she didn’t know her mother. They were impressed by her
self-possession. She was at eighteen as independent and focused as most adults.
They couldn’t imagine Wendy managing half so well on her own. They had heard
about her interest in martial arts and asked her about the dojo. She told them
about her friends there, about Sensei and her father.

It turned out Wendy was really the
only friend she had who didn’t train at the dojo, and she was surprised to hear
this. She assumed Emily had friends all over the school. That, at least, was
how it seemed at the football game. “Emily really is a loner,” she thought. But
how can that be? She’s so cool, so tough, so focused. It dawned on her how
little she really understood about her new friend.

After Emily went home, Wendy had a
long talk with her mom about two things: her goth friends and going shopping
for new clothes.

“That Emily is really something,
isn’t she?” her mom said absent-mindedly. “She’s not like any of your other
friends.”

“No, Mom, I can assure you of
that,” Wendy replied. “She is totally one of a kind.”

“Yeah, I mean the vibe coming off
her is like nothing I’ve ever felt before,” her Mom continued.

“
Vibe
, Mom?”

“She is just one cool customer. I
bet nothing fazes her.”

“Mom, you have no idea,” said
Wendy, very satisfied with herself for having a secret she shared with Emily.

Later, as she
was lying in bed, Wendy went back over the events of the day in her mind. The
bike ride, screaming up and down the mountains, the afternoon relaxing on the
ridgeline soaking up the scenery, the encounter with the toughs in the gas
station, and finally the evening in the hot tub with her family. This may have
been the best day of her life. Her mind kept returning to an image of Emily
changing into that bathing suit. It hadn’t ever occurred to her that human
beings could look like that. They were roughly the same dimensions, wore the
same size, but Wendy was pretty sure she didn’t look like
that
. “Sure, she’s beautiful,” Wendy thought, “but it’s more than
that. It’s like she’s made of steel or something.” Wendy fell asleep dreaming
of cyborgs and samurai.

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Chapter 15:
A Familiar Face

Things quieted down for awhile.
Emily heard nothing more about the incident at the gas station. She guessed
that those guys realized they would look ridiculous if they told the police a
girl had beaten them all up. The weeks slid by with no more suspicious
sightings, no one seemed to be following her. She spent Thanksgiving with
Wendy’s family. They were very pleased to have her at their table. Danny and
his Mom visited family in West Virginia for the weekend. Gradually, the work of
the semester wound down as the Christmas break approached. Emily had sent off a
few applications to colleges around the country. So far, she used the name
Emily Kane, since that was the only name her teachers knew her by, and they had
to write letters of recommendation about a student they knew. Fortunately,
Emily had taken the SAT under that name too, and done quite well. Given her
grades and scores, she was likely to be a much sought after student. She would
have to figure out how to solve the problem of her name later.

Emily enjoyed her time in the dojo
more than ever, even though she was beginning to see Sensei less as a teacher
and more as a fellow traveler. He was “one who had gone before,” but now her
own experiences had brought her pretty far down a similar path. She still had
lots to learn from him, but he was beginning to see her as a colleague as well
as a student.

“
Sen
,” he barked at the class. “It means being decisive, taking the
initiative. But it doesn’t mean being reckless. It means controlling the
situation and yourself by taking the initiative away from your opponent. There
are three basic ways to do this: attacking first, attacking at the same time as
your opponent and attacking after your opponent has attacked. In each case, you
deny the initiative to your opponent. None of them is passive. Even in the last
one, you don’t just
wait
for your
opponent to attack. You
watch
for his
attack and take your initiative from within it. That’s called
go no sen
. Those of you who have had the
pleasure of sparring with Emily, I’m sure you know what
go no sen
looks like.”

Emily had heard this speech in one
form or another many times. But this time, it seemed to her that Sensei was
needling her about something. She understood herself primarily in terms of
go no sen
. She found her initiative
within the action of her opponent. It wasn’t just that she was comfortable with
this way of thinking. It seemed to her to reveal a fundamental truth about
herself, about life, about the world. She certainly knew how to take the
initiative in all its forms. She knew how to attack the attack, to punch
through her opponent’s attack or even to meet it head on. She knew equally well
how to provoke her opponent, to attack first so as to force him into an attack
prematurely. This was how her father tended to think. She saw it that night in
the tunnel. But it was also a perfect description of how he would track her in
the woods, moving swiftly and directly to wherever he thought she was hiding,
flushing her out so that she had to fall back to a position chosen in haste.
Sensei called it
sen sen no sen
. It
wasn’t just aggressiveness. In some ways it was no more aggressive than
go no sen
. It also found the initiative
within the opponent’s action. But it sought to deny him the time and space to
take his own initiative freely.

For Emily, all forms of
sen
found their clearest articulation in
go no sen
. They were variations of
it. As she saw it, initiative was fundamentally a matter of recognizing
opportunity. Inopportune initiative was not truly
sen
. It was mere recklessness. To her, that meant even anticipatory
initiative, attacking first, was at its heart a mode of
go no sen
.

But Sensei seemed to be trying to
tell her something more about
sen
.
What exactly was he getting at? Had she misunderstood something? Had she become
passive without realizing it? She certainly took it easy on her classmates in
sparring. Could that be what Sensei was thinking about? She had been involved
in so many fights in earnest over the last few months that the etiquette of
sparring could not help but seem to her like a narrow set of limits on
sen
. Perhaps Sensei wanted her to be
more aggressive in class.

They did
bo
sparring for the
second half of class, using a padded version of the
bo
staff, which was
ordinarily a heavy, six foot long tapered hardwood staff. It is a traditional
martial arts weapon, and the first one Emily mastered. She decided to use this
occasion to go in the direction Sensei seemed to be nudging her, to tilt her
sen
towards
sen sen no sen
. The beneficiary of Emily’s resolve this evening was
Danny. The instant Sensei signaled the beginning of the match, Emily lunged
toward his groin forcing him to block down. She used the force of his down
block to rotate the other end of her
bo
into a strike to the top of his
head. When he raised his
bo
to protect his head, she planted a side kick
in the center of his chest, sending him sprawling backwards. The entire
exchange took less than a second. Danny noticed the difference in her approach
to the match. He tried to seize the initiative first with a lunging strike of
his own. Before he had even fully extended his arms she had already spun
outside his strike, swept his right leg out from under him and landed a strike
across his face and chest. The efficiency of her move was truly impressive.
Everyone in the dojo, even Sensei, stood with their mouths agape. One last
time, Danny tried to initiate a swinging side strike, but it was much too slow.
She had already struck him twice, in the head and groin, before he realized
what had happened. Finally she spun her
bo
between his hands and sent
his staff sailing across the room. Danny smiled at her, put his hands together
and bowed. Everyone in the room laughed. There was nothing else to be said.