Kung Fu High School (13 page)

Neither was brave enough to call me out when there was a very real chance of fighting Melinda instead. So the scores stayed unsettled and then there were five: Blades, Whips, Fists, Runners, and Wolves. It was probably no coincidence that the new numbers of all four of Ridley's families and the Wolves were less than even. Ridley had us outnumbered by four hundred kids. Only a matter of time really.

Jimmy wasn't there when I got home so rather than sit around and be worried about him, I took care of Dad.

"I want to go before you go, Jennifer," Dad said. "I want to go before you go," and he just kept repeating it. He'd been crying all day. I could tell by his voice before I could get close enough to see his red, old, streaky-cheeked face. The same face he used to have when he drank too much but more wrinkled now and less mad than sad.

His room was a wreck. The TV tray had been tipped over and the glass cracked on the floor but not all over the place, just a chunk of the lip. The meds had sucked up what water they could, turning into puffy, deformed-looking worm shapes and leaving brownish orange stains on the carpet. Somehow he managed to use the bed as a toilet too. At least it was just piss and nothing else. Always my least favorite thing to do, but it needed to be cleaned and no one else was going to take care of it.

So I got him up, undressed him, got him into the shower, and perched him on his little bench that Cue had installed the summer before and I was a good girl. When the memory came to me, of my helping him bolt the plastic horizontal to the tile without breaking it into chunky debris, I stayed quiet. Dad didn't need to know. Instead, I took the sheets out to the washer in the garage and started a load, grabbed a sponge, and wiped down the rubber undersheet that protected the mattress, got back to the shower to make sure he hadn't fallen, and soaped/ rinsed him with that two-in-one soap and shampoo stuff that Remo said was so easy on the skin. Would've shaved him but he was fidgeting. Got him out of the shower with difficulty, dried him, and pushed him through the arm, leg, and head holes of clean clothes, sat him down in the chair next to the bed and put new sheets on it. When I got him back in bed he said the same thing but he looked me in the eyes instead of staring off into space this time. "I want to go before you go." I seriously had no idea what to say so I just left the room. That was becoming par for the course.

The bathroom door flopped closed behind me and I ran some hot water in the sink before dipping the washcloth into it and raking it across the torn skin on my jaw. The wound wasn't so bad but it was swollen. I'd gone over it earlier in the school bathroom before lunch but nothing much, just soaped it, rinsed it, dried it. I certainly wasn't stupid enough to put a Band-Aid on it. Band-Aids, bandages, any of that stuff was a sign of weakness at Kung Fu.

You got to just act like it's not there, like it didn't affect you, like you didn't even know it was there even though every time you breathed through your mouth you could feel the air rush through the partially open bone cavity in the back. The tooth was loose enough to move with my tongue and I could feel the weird glutinous consistency of coagulated blood in the socket around the tooth. There was another good thing to come from it though: as I wiggled the tooth, I actually found it comforting to taste my own blood in my mouth instead of Cue's. A coppery warm distraction, but only on the surface: it was a reminder of the real and nothing else. Shit, but it still hurt. I popped a painkiller without bothering to read the bottle and left the bathroom.

But I swear something held my feet from underneath the hallway carpet, hauled me step by step to Cue's closed door, leaned me forward, put my hands on the wood in a groan, and tried but couldn't quite summon the pressure behind those fingers and palms to push it open. I wanted to believe in ghosts right then. That Cue was there and trying to tell me something, that he was moving my limbs, and it wasn't just me, losing control. Jesus, I knew I couldn't even look inside or it'd be over, swimming-in-saltwater over. Still, I had to believe that something under the awful carpet pushed and pushed what it thought was a solid object, but it was only me, sad little hollow Jen, a child weighing approximately as much as skin and hair combined and nothing else, no backbone, no brain, no fuckin' soul.

All day Jimmy and everybody else had seen Cold Fish Jen. What they thought was Warrior Jen, Strong Jen talking with my mouth, moving my arms. The Normal Jen that nothing touched and she was so stupid she didn't even know any better so she kept playing the game without understanding all the rules, kept losing it at the wrong times, kept being a piece for someone else to move, kept being when she shouldn't. Because how much better off would everyone've been if it was Jenny en
la calle
instead? In Cue's place! Jenny as bloody human pizza, all cheap crust and freezing? Papa's
angelita
in a box? Serious.

Just as long as I didn't open the door, that baldheaded brother of mine was alive. Sure. He had to be behind me, finally returning home. He wanted to go practice. I swear he
was
behind me, just out of the kitchen, smelling like a shake, smiling but see-through. Like a real fuckin' ghost. Trying to bear-hug me out onto the back patio but failing miserably because we were different things now, different elements totally. Him, all wind and invisibles. Me, all water and solid at the same time.

There was a knocking at the front door, carried down the hall to me. I figured it was Jimmy, which I shouldn't've because he had a key and really had no need to knock. Took me almost five minutes to undo the grip beneath the carpet, to improvise bones and move, only to see that it was Remo waiting outside and not Jimmy at all.

"Damn, I was gonna ask if you were alright but your
cam
already answered that question for me. I guess I'm just glad you're here." When he said "here" he meant "alive." Remo never went to Kung Fu. He just moved in with his mom when she got sick, but after almost three years, he knew how it operated.

"Looks like you did a good job with those cuts though, just like I taught ya," he said.

"I do need your help. See that tooth?" Normal Jen opened her mouth and pointed at the general area of the pain, barely forming the sounds needed for the words, just flapping her tongue around vacant noises.

"Damn, girl, yeah, I see it." He leaned in close and tipped my head back to the light to get a better look. "I ain't no dentist though."

"Don't worry, my PK kicked in. Just pull it."

I kept my head tilted back and looked up at our brittle skylight that was basically a hole Dad cut in the roof and put glass over. I heard Remo open up his toolbox (of course he brought it) and I heard metal clink against metal. I sat down in the chair but kept looking up at the skylight that held no clouds, birds, or tree branches, just icy sky. When Remo got near to me, he held down my left hand and stepped on my feet and I couldn't help laughing. Normal Jen with her simultaneous mood swing/guilt trip. Cue was still dead. Not allowed to smile or laugh.

But it was a joke even if it was also for Remo's protection. When he pulled a kinfé out of my side once, I kicked him in the
huevos
involuntarily. Not funny at the time but funny ever after. I felt something cold press against my tongue and hold it down, then Remo released my left hand, so I grabbed the table edge and I felt the tooth wrench right out of my head with a tearing sound that my ear heard from the inside out.

"Fuck! Did you pull out a nerve too?" Blood dripped down my chin as I said the words. I felt it, missed a bit from my slurping so some droplets hit the tile floor.

Remo didn't answer me. He was dumping table salt in a glass and running the hottest tap water into it.

"Spit. Rinse. Spit. Rinse," he said, pointing from the sink, to the glass, to the sink, to the glass. I did as I was told. He wiped my blood from the floor. It bled good for about five minutes, then it settled down but I kept rinsing. I grabbed another glass to spit into. I had Remo save the tooth for a keepsake. Now that it was out I could see the crack that ran from the back enamel all the way around the side. Only a matter of time before it shifted and split really.

THE TOOTH

"Yeah, that's definitely best that we pulled that out, better than it sitting and getting infected," Remo said as he held the washed tooth up for me to see. It would not be put under my pillow for the tooth fairy. It was for Melinda.

"I brought some tuna salad for you so you didn't have to cook for a few days, I need the bowl back when you're done though." Remo ducked outside and came back in with a huge plastic yellow bowl—the same bowl he soaked my hands in—of tuna salad. He always made it funny though. He put in mayo
and
mustard as well as pickles. I didn't complain though, I nodded and kept rinsing, spitting.

After cleaning his tools, Remo made seven sandwitches with the tuna salad and some of the thin white slices of generic bread that he found in the breadbox. He put one on a plate in front of me even though he knew I wouldn't be eating any time soon. It was just his way of telling me to eat when I could. The other six sandwitches were placed in two bowls that got squeezed into the refrigerator because there were no clean plates left. Then Remo did the dishes and put them on the dish dryer.

"I gotta take off, Mamá needs her dinner. I'll be back to check on that mouth of yours later," he said, and he closed the door behind himself on the way out.

The sadness had already set in before he left though. Without knowing it, I had sat down in Cue's chair at the table for my tooth surgery. Remo had noticed because he was perceptive like that. I'd gone silent so he went quiet too, out of respect. Didn't even attempt more conversation, just made an excuse and left me to myself. I got up and moved to my chair after the door shut hard but somehow that made it worse because it was empty with no Cue there, so I sat in my brother's chair again, and kept rinsing and spitting. Rinsing clear from the full glass and spitting reddish into the empty one so I didn't have to leave the table, or the warmed seat of his chair.

Jimmy showed up about an hour after Remo took off Though it was better than before, his face still looked bad. The once-open wounds were scabbed up like little congealing bodies of insects, unmoving brown ants trying to pick at a hardened puddle of honey, but the bruises were starting to spread.

"Have you eaten?" I didn't know about him but I was damn hungry. I was finally ready to have a go at the tuna sandwitch. I'd just have to rinse my mouth out when I was done.

"No," he said.

"Well, when you get hungry, there are some sandwitches in the fridge." I said it around a bite. I was extra careful at chewing everything on the left side of my mouth. My own blood had only been a temporary pardon for my tongue as I was back to tasting Cue's blood, slightly metallic, instead of canned tuna. It didn't matter. I ignored it, ate anyway. Asking where Jimmy had been wasn't exactly an option.

"Is it over now?" He sat down at the table in my mom's old chair.

"This isn't the end of anything, Jimmy." I took my plate and moved over to the couch. "This is the beginning of something. Do the math. With Cue gone we were going to get slaughtered and we still might. There's only one family left that's against Ridley now and we're part of it."

I could only see Jimmy's face, not his body, with the little wall between us. He was still sitting at the table.

"Look, I'm not going to ask you to fight. But I don't have a choice now."

"Let's just go, the both of us. Let's go to my mother's." He forced a smile when he said it. Like he was trying to convince me that I was being hardheaded in vain or something. Like he was trying to forget what he saw me do to 'Fredo's corneyes.

"I can't move away. I can't drop out of school. I can't do anything but stay right here."

"What're you going to do after Kung Fu? You can't just go to college and forget it ever happened." His comments surprised me.

The answer was: I had no idea. The future didn't exist at Kung Fu. Especially with no Cue, my world was microscopic. There wasn't even a tomorrow. There was only my next breath. Because the truth is, there were no outs, not college, not community college, not even trade school. Maybe there was the military. But only because those bastards would take anyone. Fuck that.

"This is so much more complicated than you think it is," I said.

"Explain it to me."

"I can't leave Dad."

"Take him with us."

"He wouldn't leave. And even if he would, it would never happen with Dad not being able to work. I can't believe I'm even thinking about this! It goes deeper, Jimmy, much deeper. If I leave, Ridley goes after Melinda and the Wolves faster than if I was here. And she just saved our lives by taking us in, so I owe her." As disgusting as it was, Ridley liked me, if he did and it wasn't an act or some other game, and that could be played to our benefit.

I sat back into the couch and put the sandwitch to my mouth but before I could take another agonizing bite, Jimmy said: "How's that?"