Kung Fu High School (32 page)

I go to North High across town now, started in the fall semester. Remo helps me with my homework. The school board buses me to the new school. They changed the zoning after everything happened. I can wear dresses if I want to, but I never do. I stick to my flannels. They hide a lot of what's wrong with me. Auntie Marin trimmed up some of Cue's so I can wear them. She takes better care of Dad than I ever did, and he's improving, walking on his own more now, painting often. I want to graduate and move away to somewhere real sunny. Somewhere that doesn't make my joints feel like they're being squeezed every time I take a step or try and pick up the phone.

All in all, it's okay but sometimes, I can't feel things. Not just in my arm or my head or anywhere else but deep down. Like I don't have many feelings. Like my cousin pushed my numbness into me and I'm not so much cold anymore, just numb from the inside out. Still have all my ice though, frozen solid, going nowhere. If Jimmy was here to talk to, face to face, I'd ask him if he had ever learned anything about fighting damaging not only your body but your soul too. You know, just to see if they taught him anything like that in Hong Kong. Or maybe if what we did had anything to do with it. I guess I figured that the priests would talk to him about stuff like that, rules of life or something. How to stay pure in matters of karma, I don't know. I can't put that kind of stuff to him in letters either. It just looks wrong and stupid when I scratch it into the paper, so I don't. I'm pretty sure he'd never write back anyway.

I think about Cue's ghost though. My psychiatrist—nearly everyone has an appointed psychiatrist since that day, it's paid for by the victims' fund—says it was a hallucination, a product of extreme stress and shock because of my getting shot. I don't listen to her. Even though I can't explain it, I'm sure it was real. That it was his good-bye. I haven't told anyone else about it, especially not Dad or even Auntie Marin.

The Good Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King High School, a.k.a. Kung Fu High School, got closed down. They tried to clean it all up but it just didn't work. So it was bulldozed and the city built a community center on the old foundation. Sometimes, I walk by just to see the old place, even though it's weird as hell to see kids playing there. My new school is so much different. It actually matters how you look at North, just like it matters what car you drive and who you're going out with. I don't know. Seems to me that it was so much more simple at Kung Fu. At least there I didn't have to remind myself on a daily basis that I'm "not allowed" to clock that blond bitch for staring at me, for calling me a poor, retarded Mexican when she thinks I can't hear her. She's got the impression my brain doesn't work because I get dizzy spells and my hands are funny looking. I still want to use them, though. To hit her. Right in her pretty little nose that leads to the brain that thinks anyone who speaks a little Español is Mexican. If I could make a real fist, I would. I'm not half anything to her. I'm certainly not white. I'm all different.

My psychiatrist says I'm still trying to figure a lot of things out. Find comfort in new, safer boundaries, she says. She also goes on about how I have reentry stress from the "real world." I don't know much about that, but I do know one thing. I know what happened to the little girl now. That little girl once captured by the Sand Witch. I figure Cue would've wanted me to finish the story for us, so here goes:

See, one day, the Sand Witch said, "All that I own is now yours. It is time for me to pass on." So she packed a small bag and took two very important possessions, her diary and her pillow, kissed the little girl on her cheek, and flew away into the clouds. For some time, the little girl was very lonely in the big temple and she tried very hard to be the new Sand Witch, but she couldn't do it with a clear conscience. She couldn't continue to eat the little boys that traveled along the road at dusk. It just didn't appeal to her. So she climbed down from the corrupted temple and she left everything behind: the spell books and the cauldrons, the potions and the magic recipes. The only thing the little girl took was a picture of the Sand Witch, who had been like a mother to her. When the little girl got to a city, she found a simple job, started a simple life, and blended in with the people that lived there. It was what she had convinced herself she'd always wanted. And though she gazed out the window sometimes, at the hills to the east where the corrupted temple was almost certainly being buried by the great sandstorms of the region now that no one was there casting spells to protect it, she did not miss her old home. In fact, she didn't miss flying ever again. Yet this knowledge did nothing to damage the little girl's persistent and reluctant craving for the sky. To her mind, it was a different matter altogether.

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and

James Michael Davis