Straight Punch (6 page)

Chapter Eight

“There's something I've always wanted to know,” Whisky called from the back of the classroom when I got up from my seat. “How come girls go to the bathroom in packs?”

Jasmine had rushed out after Di without asking for Miss Lebrun's permission. I guess this qualified as an emergency.

“I'm not in a pack. I need to pee,” I told Whisky. Then I turned to Miss Lebrun. “Desperately. If you don't let me go, I'll have to pee on the floor.”

Pretty Boy turned to look at me from between his elbows, where he was resting his head after coming back to class. “Not a good idea,” he said. “Besides, we've had sufficient exposure to bodily fluids for one day.”

Di and Jasmine must have been talking, but they stopped when I walked into the bathroom. Di was standing in front of the mirror in her bra, reapplying her eyeliner.

Jasmine was scrubbing Di's blouse in the sink, soaping it up, then scrubbing some more.

I couldn't help peeking at Lady Di's belly. It looked as flat as mine. I wondered how far along she was.

“Sorry,” I told them. “I really need to pee.”

“Well go ahead and pee then,” Jasmine muttered, without looking up from the sink.

“I think I got it all out,” I heard her tell Di when I was inside the stall. “It just needs to dry out a little.”

“I need a cigarette. Bad,” Di said.

“You shouldn't smoke,” I said from the stall. “It's bad for the baby.”

“You should mind your own business, Tessa Something-or-Other. Besides, Di's not even sure she's going to keep it,” Jasmine said.

“Wanna hang out with us for a bit?” Di asked when I was washing my hands. The bathroom still smelled like vomit.

Jasmine rolled her eyes. “I can't believe you asked her that,” she said, as if I wasn't right there.

“You mean hang out
here
?” I asked.

“Why not?” Di and Jasmine had planted themselves on the steel counter by the sink. Jasmine had hung Di's blouse over one of the stall doors. Now Di lit up a cigarette and began puffing away. I figured it was best not to offer any more warnings—or to remind her of the no-smoking rule at New Directions.

Di passed the cigarette to Jasmine, who took a puff, then offered it to me.

“Thanks,” I said. “I don't smoke.”

“Why am I not surprised?” Di said. “I suppose you don't have unprotected sex either.” She slid over on the counter to make room for me.

“You're right,” I said, squeezing into the spot. “I don't. How come you did?”

“My boyfriend. He hates condoms. He said he'd make sure I wouldn't get pregnant. But I'm getting used to the idea—sort of.” Di looked down at her belly. Then she patted it.

“He's not your boyfriend,” Jasmine said.

“He is too my boyfriend.”

“Is it Randy?” I asked.

That cracked them up. I started to laugh too, not because it was so funny, but because I needed to laugh.

“Lady Di is dumb,” Jasmine said, “but not
that
dumb. Randy's got too many girlfriends to count.”

“My boyfriend doesn't go here. Sal's older.” Di sounded proud.

Jasmine plucked the cigarette from between Di's lips. “Old enough to know better. So”—she turned to look at me—“you got a thing for Randy?”

“Uh…no,” I said. “Of course not. I've got a boyfriend. Sort of. He does photography. One of his photos was even in an exhibit.”

“If he's so great, how come he's only
sort of
your boyfriend?” Di seemed glad to change the subject.

“I don't know. It's hard to explain. He gets kind of jealous.”

“Do you give him reason to get jealous?” Jasmine asked.

It was a good question. “No,” I told her. “I don't.”

“Well then that sucks,” Jasmine said.

“It's not just that. We're different. Sometimes he makes me feel like I'm wasting my life. Like I don't have focus.”

“
Focus
? Maybe that's because he's a photographer.” Jasmine guffawed at her own joke.

I didn't know why I was telling them all this. Maybe it had something to do with being together in such a small space, with the air gray from cigarette smoke. It felt like we were in another world.

“
You
wasting your life? I'd hate to know what he'd say about
my
life,” Di said.

Jasmine rolled her eyes. She did that a lot. “Who cares what he'd say? You don't even know the guy.”

Instead of answering Jasmine, Di turned back to me. “Where d'you know Pretty Boy from, anyhow?”

“From tagging.”

“You're a tagger?” Di seemed impressed.

“I used to be. I promised my mom I'd stop.”

“She promised her mom she'd stop,” Jasmine said in a nasal imitation of me.

Di nudged my elbow. “Don't mind her,” she said. “She wishes she still had a mom.”

Jasmine's eyes narrowed. “I have an aunt. That's like having a mom.”

“Not with your aunt, it isn't,” Di said.

Jasmine took a long drag on the cigarette. “Did you know Pretty Boy's been in juvie?” she asked me.

“For tagging?”

“No, not for tagging. For breaking and entering. B and E's are his specialty,” Jasmine said.

His specialty
. No wonder Pretty Boy had been able to get into the school this morning.

“He was the runt in the family. He's got three older brothers—all big guys. Because he was so puny, they used to look for houses where the windows were a bit open, then make him slip inside. Next thing you knew,
voilà!
He'd be opening the front door and letting them in. You know what I heard? That they never even gave him a cut of what they stole—just paid him in weed.”

“Where are Pretty Boy's brothers now?” I asked.

“Two are out. One's still in university,” Di said.

“In university?” So the story had a happy ending. “What's he studying?” I asked.

Jasmine shook her head. “Not that kind of university, dumbass.” She wasn't talking about McGill or Concordia or the University of Toronto. She meant prison.

Someone was rapping on the bathroom door.

“Big Ron,” Jasmine said, stubbing out the cigarette in the sink, then running the water so the butt disappeared down the drain.

“I hate to interrupt your morning meeting, ladies”—Big Ron's voice boomed through the door—“but you're wanted upstairs. And open the window in there, will ya? I don't know what's worse—the puke or the cigarettes.”

I had to stand on the counter to open the window.

There was nowhere to look but up, so I found myself staring into the angry face of the woman next door. She had just stepped out on her upstairs balcony. Her frizzy hair was tied back in a bun. A plastic clothes hamper was propped between her arms, and she had a clothespin between her lips. She noticed me at the same moment I noticed her. She took the clothespin from her mouth. “You're smoking in there, aren't you?” she shouted. “I can smell it from here. Your school's a no-smoking facility, you know!”

“Tell that bitch to mind her own business!” Jasmine said loudly.

“Stop it, Jasmine! You'll only make things worse!” Di said.

I was tempted to shut the window, but I didn't. Instead, I looked out at the dried-up backyard and the rusted-out basketball hoop. Something seemed to be missing, though at first I wasn't sure what.

Then it occurred to me. The sunflowers. Where was the row of giant sunflowers that had been lined up by the fence?

“What happened to your sunflowers?” I called out.

If the woman's face had been made of stone, I swear it would have cracked. “What do you think happened to them?” she shouted. “One of you delinquents destroyed them!” She turned and went back into her house, slamming the door behind her.

Pretty Boy wasn't the only one on the block with anger-management issues. Still, I couldn't help feeling a little sorry for the woman. I missed the sunflowers too. Looking at them had made me forget what a crappy neighborhood we were in. Maybe they'd had the same effect on her and that was why she missed them so much.

When we left the bathroom, Big Ron was back in the gym, hitting one of the punching bags. I didn't know he still trained. He'd left the door to the gym open. He kept punching as we walked by. “Hey, Lady Di,” he called out, without breaking the rhythm of his punches. “If you decide to keep the baby—and, of course, that's your call—but if you do, you won't be going in the ring for a while. We don't want to risk you getting injured or injuring the baby. But you can keep doing the warm-ups with the rest of the group till your seventh month. Jabbin' Jasmine, you'll need someone new to spar with. Which means that you, Tessa Something-or-Other, just got yourself enrolled in my accelerated program.”

Chapter Nine

Big Ron wasn't kidding about his accelerated boxing program. Every afternoon, when our class had boxing, he spent half an hour training me on my own. After straight punches, I learned uppercuts. Then Big Ron added in legwork. “Small steps,” he'd bellow from his lawn chair as I practiced my punches while moving forward and backward. He threw his arms up into the air. “What'd I tell you about keeping your back foot in position?”

By the time we were into the second week of the accelerated program, I was starting to feel frustrated. I was hoping to have improved more by then. School subjects had always come easily to me, and I didn't like the feeling of being a slow learner. I noticed that sometimes I messed up even more after Big Ron had corrected me. Now, when I stopped to readjust my back foot, I forgot to keep punching. Then it was hard to get my rhythm back. What if I never got the hang of it?

“You're thinking too much, Tessa Something-or-Other. That's your problem!” Big Ron said, shaking his head.

“I can't help it!” I told him.

That only made Big Ron more frustrated with me. “Of course you can help it! Now try again—without thinking so much!”

Every training session ended at the punching bag. By then I was drained, and the muscles in my arms and legs were achier than when I had the flu. All I wanted to do was plant myself on a bench at the side of the gym. Sometimes I imagined collapsing on the floor and lying spread-eagled beside the punching bag. Man, that would feel good!

But Big Ron would never have let me. “All right, Tessa Something-or-Other,” he'd say when I got to the punching bag, “show me what you've got left.”

Once I tried telling him I had nothing left, but that just made him laugh. “Don't you think boxers feel like that in the ring too—like they've got nothing left? That's when it really counts, Tessa Something-or-Other—when you've got nothing left and you still keep fighting. That's what boxing's all about.”

So I'd punch that bag even when I swore I couldn't. Sometimes I'd get a second wind. It helped to think about stuff that made me mad—the way Cyrus's parents wouldn't
call New Directions by its name, homophobes like the one who'd tried to beat up Pretty Boy. Sometimes I even thought about the night of the hockey riot and about Rachel. There was nothing I could have done to help Mom the night of the hockey riot, but I knew I should have tried to help Rachel. And I hadn't. I'd been too scared…and too busy looking out for myself.

I'd smash the front of the beat-up boxing gloves into the punching bag and let it all out. “That's my girl!” Big Ron would say, high-fiving me when I was done.

“I'll be honest with you,” he said to me one day. “You're not a natural, but you've got something I can't teach.”

“What's that?” I knew I wasn't a natural, but it still smarted to hear Big Ron say so.

He nodded his head and looked at me with something like respect. “You're a fighter, Tessa Something-or-Other. I'll give you that.”

I don't think I'd ever had a better compliment.

I wasn't ready to spar, but watching the others take each other on in the ring was part of learning to box. Sometimes I still winced when I heard the sounds of punching or watched the sparring, but not as much as before.

Sometimes I caught myself analyzing the sparring sessions. I noticed how Pretty Boy was good at keeping up his guard, how deft Randy's footwork was. Noticing these things gave me a little distance from my old feelings—the fear and panic I'd always had when I was confronted by any kind of violence. I hoped that meant I was getting stronger in ways that had nothing to do with muscle mass.

Randy and Whisky were dancing around each other in the ring. They were both wearing headgear—soft, padded leather helmets that made them look like gladiators. When Whisky opened his mouth, I could see his red plastic mouthguard.

Big Ron was standing outside the ring, supervising from the ropes. His eyes darted back and forth between his fighters. The rest of us watched from the other side. Two girls—both in miniskirts and wedge sneakers—were visiting from some other school. “Randy's groupies. There's plenty more where those two came from,” Jasmine had said.

I was standing next to Jasmine and Di. Jasmine's eyes moved almost as quickly as Big Ron's; Di's hands were crossed over her belly. I wondered if that meant she was planning to keep the baby.

“Nice move!” Big Ron said when Whisky ducked, narrowly escaping Randy's right hook.

“Looking good!” Big Ron added when Randy came back with another punch.

Randy's groupies squealed. If he noticed, he didn't show it.

Watching the sparring made me realize that there were all kinds of boxers. Whisky moved his head a lot when he boxed.
Randy was nimble on his feet—
That boy dances on his toes
, Big Ron liked to say about him.

Whisky didn't have Randy's speed. I wondered if Whisky's bad habits had something to do with that. When I'd passed him on the front porch of the school that morning, the alcohol fumes were so strong I'd had to hold my breath.

“How come Whisky drinks so much?” I whispered to Jasmine.

She answered without lifting her eyes from the action inside the ring. “It's in his genes. The dad drinks. The grandma drinks. I once heard Whisky say drinking killed his mom. Cirrhosis of the liver.” She said it as factually as if she were doing an oral presentation in our classroom upstairs.

I shook my head. “That's horrible.”

“Can you quit yakking and let me watch this?”

Whisky and Randy both must have been protecting themselves, because they'd gotten into a clinch. They were holding on to each other so tightly, neither of them could break loose.

Big Ron moved in closer to the ropes. “Break and step back!” he shouted to the two fighters.

Randy muttered something to Whisky. I wasn't sure, but I thought I heard the words
useless
and
drunk
.

That's when Whisky gave Randy a shot in the face and said, “Deal with that, you fuckin' retard.”

“Oh my god,” one of the groupies said.

“Are you okay, Randy?” the other one asked.

I felt Jasmine tense up next to me. “Uh-oh,” she whispered. “Randy doesn't like being reminded he's
LD
.”

“
LD
?” I asked. I'd never heard the term before.

Di nudged my arm. “Learning disabled. Couldn't you tell?”

Now that I thought about it, I realized that Randy took longer than anyone else to copy Miss Lebrun's notes from the blackboard. And he was the only one in our class Miss Lebrun never called on to read out loud.

Big Ron's face was so red, it looked like an overripe tomato. “Hey, hey!” he said.

Randy's eyes flashed as he whacked Whisky back.

“Stop it! Now!” Big Ron bellowed. Only they didn't.

Pretty Boy, who also should have known better, was leaning over the ropes, egging them on. “Get him, Randy!” he shouted, and then, “Way to go, Whisky!”

Part of me didn't want to look. Another part couldn't look away.

Big Ron panted as he hoisted himself over the ropes and into the ring. It was like watching a bear come out of hibernation. He got in between Whisky and Randy and, with his elbows, pushed them both back into the ropes. He might be overweight, but Big Ron was strong.

All three of them were panting now.

Sweat from Big Ron's forehead dribbled down to the rubber floor mat. “You're here to help each other,” he shouted. “Not destroy each other! You got that?”

Then he looked over at Whisky. “I'm the coach in this gym, and when I say something, you listen. I told you to step back.”

Whisky's eyes were bloodshot. “He called me a drunk.”

“So what if he called you a drunk? You
are
a drunk! And you still gotta listen to what I say. You got that, Whisky?”

Whisky looked down at the floor. “Got it.”

Then Big Ron turned to Randy. “You know you shouldn't have hit him back. You gotta let me take care of things around here. Understood?”

“Understood,” Randy said, spitting out the word.

Big Ron shook his head. “I'm not even going to talk about the name-calling. You know why?” He glared at both of them. “Because this place is a high school. Not some friggin' day care.”

Pretty Boy was the one who noticed the signs on our way home that afternoon. One was on a telephone pole; others were stapled to tree trunks. “Can you believe this shit?” Pretty Boy said as he tore the first sign off and tossed it into a garbage can. We walked a little farther and there was another one and then another. Those things were popping up like weeds.

There was a grainy photo of our school on the sign. Underneath, in giant black letters, were two questions:

Did you know that students at the New Directions Academy spend half the day boxing?

Are you going to let violent juvenile delinquents take over our neighborhood?

In smaller letters, there was a notice about an upcoming meeting—8:00
PM
the following Thursday at the local community center.

“D'you think she put up the signs?” I asked Pretty Boy.

He knew who I meant—the woman who lived next door to the school.

“I'd bet my gay ass she did.”

“Did you tear down her sunflowers?” I asked him. I was almost sure he had.

Pretty Boy grinned. “Now why would a nature lover like me do something like that?”

“We can't just keep tearing down the signs,” I told him.

“I don't see why not.” He tore down another one.

“She'll just put more up.”

Pretty Boy made a growling sound. “What if she gets all her loser friends to sign her petition and they shut our school? Then what?”

I don't think Pretty Boy knew he was shouting, and if he did, he didn't care.

“I guess they'd have to move New Directions someplace else.”

“You just don't get, it, do you, Tessa? If this shithole neighborhood doesn't want us, you think some other neighborhood will? The school board shuts down this place, we got nowhere to go. Do you hear me? Nowhere! Not all of us have cushy lives like you do, Tessa, with a mommy who packs her lunch in an insulated bag.”

I did have an insulated lunch bag. And sometimes, when I was in a hurry, my mom packed my lunch for me. Now I wondered if there were other things about me Pretty Boy had been noticing—and holding against me.

He was still ranting. “For some of us, having nowhere to go doesn't just mean we won't get out of high school.
It means trouble. Big trouble.” Now he sounded more worried than angry. Was he worried that if he wasn't in school, his older brothers would pressure him to do more B & E's?

“In that case,” I said, “we need a plan to save New Directions.”

From the way Pretty Boy looked at me, I could tell he was surprised.

“I thought you hated New Directions…you said it was a hellhole.”

“It is a hellhole,” I said, bumping my elbow into his. “But hey, it's our hellhole. And like you said, where would you guys be without it?”

Pretty Boy walked over to a pole with another poster on it. He was about to tear it down, but he stopped himself. “You don't happen to have a better plan in mind, do you?”

It just so happened that a better plan was beginning to hatch in my head. Thinking too much might be a problem in boxing, but in other situations, it can come in handy. “How about we organize our own public meeting? At New Directions. So the neighbors can see what we're really like.”

Pretty Boy whooped. “What we're
really
like? That, Tessa Something-or-Other, might not be such a good idea!”