Chapter 1
I storm out of Fergie’s office,
ignoring the stares and snickers from the copy writers. I don’t care what they think. They’re
mindless droids who spend their time ferreting out who’s dating whom and
where’s the best spot to make out and not get caught. Puerile drivel. Isn’t this supposed to be Advanced
Journalism? The only ‘advanced’ I see is
Nick trying to wheedle a date out of Amelia Martinez over a mocha frappuccino.
Speaking of the devil…
“He cut your piece?” Nick keeps pace
with me as I launch myself out the Journalism room.
“It’s a rewrite.”
“I told you so.”
“Can’t you think of anything more
original to say?”
“And therein lies your problem, Eves. Your eternal search for the original. The different. When are you gonna get it through your head
that no one cares?”
I stop abruptly in my tracks and feel
Nick’s nose hit the back of my head. “I
care,” I say. I round on him to glare
with what I think is frightful conviction.
“You and your army of one.”
“Don’t you care?”
“I care only because you’re my best
friend and if I don’t, you’d throw me over your shoulder with one of your fancy
kata moves.”
“You’d be able to counter it if you’d
come to practice more often.”
“Pass, thanks. I have better things to do.”
“Like flirt with Amelia Martinez?” I
can’t keep still. My body needs release from all my pent-up frustration. I start striding down the halls again.
“You jealous?”
“As if.”
Nick, persistent bugger, has dogged
me out the journalism office, down the halls and through the quad. School has been officially over for the past
hour and a half and the campus is empty except for a few diehards who are
putting in extra time on Advanced Placement study sessions. Even the football team has gone home for the
day. I know this, which is why I am heading
straight for the stadium because, even though I never willingly enter jock
territory, right now I feel the need for height and space.
I push past the chain link gate and
bound up the bleachers, my arms and legs pumping in perfect synch until I get
to the top. I hear Nick panting behind
me, trying to keep up, but even that bit of petty payback isn’t enough to swing
me out of my foul mood.
“Lemme read it.”
“No.
It’s trash. Fergie said.”
“I believe he mentioned something
about ‘literary merit’.”
“You eavesdropping again, Tanaka?”
“Only when it suits, Owens.”
Nick is red-faced from the physical
exertion; I’m not even breaking a sweat. I fling my ponytail over my shoulder
and catch a good look at his face.
Drat. Nick always manages to
guilt trip me without even trying. It’s
that woebegone, pity-me-because-I’m-cute-and-you-know-it-look. I hear from other girls that it works like a
charm but I’ve known Nick Tanaka since we heaved plastic sand toys at each
other in first grade and I am immune.
Usually.
He blinks sadly.
Aw, hell. I give up.
“Here. For all it’s worth.”
Nick whistles as he scans the
paper. “Dark,” he says.
“Yeah. But true.”
There is a beat of about two
seconds. Then, “Eves, why do you try so
hard?”
I whip around so swiftly my ponytail
flicks him in the eye. Unmindful of his
yelp of pain, I snarl, “What the hell d’you mean by that?”
Still cradling his right eye, Nick
matches me ire for ire. “Just what I
said. Why do you try so hard? To be deep?
To be all angst-y? I swear, if I
didn’t know better, I’d think you were considering membership into the “We love
Robert Smith” emo club.”
“Thin ice, Tanaka.” If this is my best friend’s way of calming me
down and making me feel better, he shouldn’t have bothered. Better to just stick an ice pick in my back
and be done with it.
“Evie,” Nick says, “I’ve known you
since we heaved plastic sand toys at each other in second grade…”
“First,” I mutter, the journalist in
me needing to set the record straight.
“Whatever. We’ve known each other for a long time. And I remember when you used to be normal,
you know? You liked ponies and pink
things just like any other girl I knew, including my sister. Then we get to high school and you go all world-weary,
uber-jaded, Ms. Snarkypants on me. I
forgave it freshman year; I tolerated it sophomore year. We’re juniors now and although I still
believe that anarchy is the new world order and punk will never die, I think
it’s my duty as your best friend to tell you that it’s getting old.”
I open my mouth to hurl back a
scathing retort, but Nick is no longer looking at me and that does a lot to take
the wind out of my sails. This
sucks. Now he’s giving me time to think
instead of just react and you simply don’t do that to an honors student with a
tendency toward self-absorption.
Have I really devolved into such a
despicable species in the high school social strata that my own best friend is
turning Brutus on me? Have I become
nothing but a caricature, the very stereotype that I often criticize in my
articles? Am I a hypocrite?
I ask myself these questions sans rancor
or self-pity. I’ve often been compared
to a Borg or a ‘droid – that’s big bro Seth geek-speak for ‘unfeeling robot’. Chalk it up to years and years of Mom
inculcating in me and Seth the famous Owens mantra: Think with your head, not
with your heart. This stood all of us in good stead during the height of the
scandal and it’s served me well, or so I thought, throughout my formative
adolescent years. But, according to Nick,
perhaps I’ve taken it a bit too far?
“Evie, what do you really believe
in?”
“Huh?” Left field, much?
“Oh, so articulate, my young
grasshopper.” Nick wags his finger. “I repeat: what do you believe in?”
I realize he’s serious and, because
he is my best and sometimes only friend, I give him the consideration I feel
the question deserves. It’s pretty deep,
for Nick. I look out from our fifty-foot
vantage point, surveying the freshly-cut green and the symmetrical chalk
lines. What do I believe in? I’m assuming he’s not angling for the
religious aspect. He should know me
better than that. Belief. Confidence in the truth. What is truth? What do I believe? A cascade of words rushes
swiftly through my brain and I inhale to let them loose but what comes out is a
strangled gasp instead.
“Whoa! Evie?
You okay?”
It’s the damned headaches again. This one is sharp and stabbing and crippling
me with a lancing fire in my cerebral cortex.
I look down and think how easy it would be to just go limp and fall and
then it would all be over…
Chicken. I silently berate myself for
being all kinds of fatalistic fool, and breathe deep. Beside me, Nick is panicking, but that’s
okay. I can handle Nick. What’s more important right now is that I
ride out the wave of this current pain.
It won’t last long. It never
does.
“Evie? Talk to me!
Should I go get someone?”
“Idiot!” I spit out. “You do realize
that I would’ve been dead in the time it took your infantile ass to react to my
discommodity.” I am right. The pain is now merely a slight pinpricking
behind my eyes.
“Okay. You’re okay.
You’re definitely okay if you can still talk like that.” Nick looks
relieved and I feel a little bad for being so spiteful.
“C’mon. Let’s get outta here. I have a rewrite that needs rewriting.”
“Need a lift?”
“Yes, please. My car’s in the shop
again.”
“Boba run before I drop you off?”
“Deal.”
~
So let me just state for the record
that being a teenager is tough. You’ve
gotta know the right clothes to wear, the right music to listen to, the right
people to hang with, and the right people to avoid. It’s all about choices, and
god knows being decisive is not high on a hormone-riddled high schooler’s
personality resumé.
What complicates matters for me is that
I’m a teenager saddled with at least half a brain and a conscience, a lethal
combo that forces me to actually deconstruct, overanalyze then obsess over the
repercussions of aforementioned choices.
And did I forget to mention that I’m the progeny of Donna Owens? Yeah, that
Donna Owens, infamous for filing a lawsuit against the woman who wrote all
those super popular teen vampire novels for breach of intellectual property, and
for being such a persistent and public pain in the arse that the publishers
decided to settle out of court for an obscene yet undisclosed amount.
How obscene, you ask? Well, let’s just say the settlement pretty
much guarantees our family’s solvency for the rest of our lives and maybe, if
invested wisely, the lives of any future children Seth and I might have. The money is great but it’s the flak that
comes with it that really puts a crimp in both our social lives, even eight
years later. I mean, how would you like it if you bore the scorn and disgust of
every single Jenn Ellison fan worldwide?
I suppose all things considered, my unsolved
mystery – aka crippling headaches that have been plaguing me for a month – is
just par for the course in my life.
I finish my rewrite which I save on
my jump drive and email to myself for extra insurance. Then, on a whim, I Google Mom’s name. I do this sometimes to gauge our notoriety
level; it changes every month depending on how the wind blows or on the current
axial tilt of the planets in relation to the Sun. No, seriously, you’d think eight years is
enough time for things to blow over but, thanks to the power of the Internet,
things can never truly die. There’s
always some smart ass kid who discovers the Vamp
Me series for the first time, does an ISBN search and comes up with two
separate author names for the exact same book.
Then he’ll do a search and there we’ll be in all our infamous glory:
Scheming Hussy is Satan’s Spawn, or something to that effect.
There are pictures in old issues of Entertainment Weekly where my mother is
calmly shaking hands with the publishers who had to strike ‘Jenn Ellison’ from the
novels and replace it with ‘Donna Owens’, one of the more egregious
requirements of the settlement. The
press raked my mom over the coals as some kind of manipulative fraud leeching
off the novels’ success (after all, why did she wait until the fourth and final
one in the series and millions of dollars later to reveal her proof?) and
tweens the world over cried buckets as their beloved author was forced to give
in after a five-month battle, but Mom remained unmoved, thus the whole ‘Satan’s
spawn’ thing.
The Donna Owens story pops up on the
first page of hits. Damn. There must be
some sort of special Scholastic book order sale this month. Well, the good thing about being in high
school is that Scholastic book order opportunities are sketchy at best. I can only hope that no one I know has
literate little sibs or the next few days are gonna be rife with snide side
comments.
I stare blankly at my screen and consider
doing a search for answers to my headache situation – a pastime that has become
a part of my evening routine going on a month now – but I figure I’ve been
rejected enough times today. I log off
my laptop and I amble down the stairs to see what’s cooking with la familia.
Seth is sprawled on the floor of our
enormous family room, drooling over an obscure anime with its requisite big
boobs and bombastic explosions. Once, at
the height of the scandal, Mom had mentioned how close Seth and I had gotten –
Well duh, Mom. Who else would play with
us? – and how we accommodated our age gap
by my growing up too fast and Seth retarding his growth so we could meet each
other halfway. If aforementioned big
boobs and bombastic explosions, magnified ten times over on the 60-inch plasma
that hangs on the wall, is the result of Seth’s personal growth, then I’m
thinking I got the better end of the bargain.
Great. He’s got the surround sound on. I cringe.
“Where’s Dad?” I ask.
“What?”
“Dad?”
“What?”
“Dad!” I shriek over the
incomprehensible Japanese.
Seth does not take his eyes off the
screen but does lower the volume a skosh. “Golf.”
“And Mom?”
He jerks his thumb behind him in the
general vicinity of the back room. I
roll my eyes and sigh. Of course. The Cave.
Where else would Mom be? After
the first of the fat royalty checks came in – another settlement fallout – Mom
gave up her counseling gig for good, and ever since, she’s spent most of her
days holed up in the back room fielding online inquiries about when the next
vampire book is coming out. I really
don’t know if she’s ever going to write one but she sure has a lot of fun
keeping people on tenterhooks.
“D’you think it’s safe to talk to
her?” I ask.
Seth smirks. “I have two words for you: Pete Ellison.”
“Lord.”
Well, it can’t be helped. Pete is Jenn’s older brother and he and Mom
have this love-hate thing – they love to hate each other. A week never goes by that Pete doesn’t email
Mom with some provocative chain letter/magazine article/NPR link that sets Mom
off so much you can hear her clacking away at her keyboard clear across the house
in scathing and lengthy reply. I swear,
for a woman as intelligent and logical as Mom is, she sure lets Pete get under
her skin.
“I’m going to Al’s, then.”
“What about dinner?”
“You’re eighteen. Figure it out.”
Seth rolls over on his back and stares
at the ceiling. “But I’m staaaarving!”
“Lazy bum! Call for pizza.”
“The phone is so far awaaaay!”
“Gah!” If I was any closer, I’d kick
his skinny ribs to kingdom come, he’s so pathetic. Instead, like a good little enabler, I toss
him my cell with the admonition, “I’ll probably be a couple of hours so if you
need me, just call the land line at the dojo.”
“Will do.”
Seth is already busy punching buttons. We both have the Papa John’s Pizza number
memorized; Mom doesn’t do the cooking thing and Dad always “grabs something at
the course”. And before we come off as
this totally dysfunctional family, I have to state emphatically that I LOVE la familia – warts and all – and I will
personally disembowel anyone who dares say otherwise. Besides, as far as dysfunction goes, I think
we got off pretty lightly. Who even sits
down to dinner with the whole family anymore anyway?
I belatedly remember that my car is
in the shop and I have to either bike it or hoof it to the dojo. Knowing that
Al will probably put me through my paces, I opt for the bike. I drag my Klein Q Elite XX from our five-car
garage and speed down the hill to the guard gate. Manny waves me past with a cheeky salute. We have an understanding, Manny and I. I don’t tell on him when I find him sleeping
on the job and he doesn’t tell on me when I sneak out of the community at
ungodly hours to grab a caffeine fix.
Al’s dojo is in a ratty little strip
mall about five miles away. It’s all
downhill to get there, so I coast most of the way, trying to conserve energy
for the pounding I know is sure to come.
I’d skipped our last session this week to work on extra Calculus worksheets,
but I know this isn’t going to cut me slack as far as Al is concerned.
Aloysius Crow – or Al, as I like to
affectionately call him, much to his eternal disgust – is this forty-something,
Eurasian-looking guy who’s skinny as all out.
You wouldn’t be able to tell from looking at him that he knows
practically every martial art in existence.
He’s impossibly tall – well, to my five foot one and a couple of lines,
everyone is impossibly tall – and if he
didn’t have his gi on all the time
and if he cleaned up some, I’d swear he could be a candidate for the front page
of GQ. He’s got a heart-shaped face,
wide-set green eyes, a long, strong nose, and lips almost too full to belong on
a man’s face. His hair – which is so
light, it’s almost silver – is super long, down to his waist last I checked,
but Al manages to avoid looking too feminine because he’s always got it severely
tied up in a topknot reminiscent of old samurai flicks. And no, I’m not crushing on him; I’ve just
got a journalist’s eye for detail. Plus,
when you’ve spent almost half your life working out with someone three days a
week, two hours each day, you tend to notice these things. Acutely.
Al ostensibly teaches judo, but for
the select few who he deems worthy – like me and, for some bizarre reason, Nick
– he offers individualized lessons for a peculiar, mixed form that’s part judo,
part karate, part hapkido, part capoeira and part other things I have yet put a
name to. And believe me, Wikipedia and I
have tried. Nick says he just teaches a
glorified mixed martial arts but from watching Ultimate Fighting on SpikeTV, I
know I learn a helluva lot more than what those guys do.
I spy the familiar black and red
banner before I know it and walk in, bike on my shoulder, just in time to watch
class let out. It’s six o’clock on a
Wednesday – the little kid session.
Al sees me and jerks his head to the
back, all the while talking to a very concerned-looking Korean mother. Her son is tugging at her designer velour
sweat pant leg and she keeps batting the offending beast away without ceasing
her chatter. Al just nods and smiles, and
I wonder at the man’s patience. Then again,
I guess he wouldn’t have chosen this profession if he weren’t so patient.
I stash my bike behind the front desk
then head for my private locker in the back.
As I change into my gear and tie on my white belt, I wonder if I’ll ever
be good enough for Al to promote me to a belt that belongs on an actual color
wheel. If he wasn’t such a tyrannical
perfectionist, I know I’d at least be a brown, if not a black by now. Hell, any other dojo would probably be begging me to teach their classes, I’ve
got such mad skills. And that’s not
hubris either; I didn’t spend years – eight, exactly – coming to Al’s, rain or
shine, for nothing.
But for every kata I perfect, Al
always has an excuse for why I shouldn’t compete or progress any further than I
have. He says he does it to keep me
humble. How much more humble can I get
when five-year-olds are earning yellow belts and I sport a white?
A couple of said five-year-olds
actually snicker when they see me emerge from the back room in my white-belted
glory. I bare my teeth in a fairly
accurate imitation of Scar from The Lion
King, but they just laugh louder, one of them even doing the
palm-up-come-hither-so-I-can-kick-your-ass challenge with his left hand, his
legs in perfectly balanced kiba-dachi. I snarl and am seriously preparing to start a
brawl with a kid less than half my age when Al interposes. He gently herds everyone out, locks the door
behind them and turns the ‘Open’ sign to ‘Closed’. Then he twists the blinds shut and faces me
with a frown on his face.
“What? What?!”
Al does not say a word. He likes to practice economy, not only in
movement, but in speech as well. I think
one of his pleasures in life is playing dumb while I figure things out on my
own, even if it means letting me ramble endlessly for long periods of time
before I come to a conclusion. Al is
Yoda and Socrates and Morpheus from The
Matrix all rolled up in one.
I sigh. “Fine.
I shouldn’t have tried to attack the kid.” Al keeps frowning. I sigh even more deeply. “I shouldn’t even have thought about attacking the kid.” The frown lessens, albeit so
slightly I don’t think his brain registered the muscle contraction. “Okay.
There is no kid. The kid doesn’t
exist. When I’m in the dojo, all that is
real are my mind, my spirit and my center.” Al gives me the approving head
nod. “But, c’mon, Al! The kid had it coming! Did you see what he did to me? You would’ve busted me for less!”
“Evie, is your qi out of alignment?”
“Huh?” I’ve been saying that a lot
lately. Note to self: stop.
“Your qi,” Al repeats, which is a
miracle for him, “is out of alignment.”
Oh, great. When he turns a question into a statement, I
know the question was rhetorical all along.
He raises a perfectly arched eyebrow.
I groan.
“No.
No! Anything but that! I’ve had a really crappy day. Can’t we just
do karate? Or, I know! Tai chi! What about tai chi? I’ll even do Chen style tai chi! Please?
Aw, c’mon!”
Al reaches behind him and throws a
stick at me. Literally. The man can hide a big rig in his gi if he had half a mind to. To my credit, I catch the six-foot projectile
in my right hand and only fumble a little before holding it out in front of me,
waist-high and parallel to the floor.
“Really? Do I have to?” I sound like Seth at his most
whiny.
Al props his tall drink of water-y
self against the front window. He nods
for me to begin then closes his eyes.
He’s not fooling me; one misstep on my part, and he’ll leap up,
panther-like, to stop me in mid-kata without even coming close to getting
clobbered by the stick.
Resigned, I breathe out. Setting my stance low for stability, I begin
the basic tameshigiri patterns while
reciting Al’s bastardized version of the samurai creed.
“I have no power; I make honesty my
power.” The stick whips in a high
vertical cut. My right hand ends level with my shoulder. This is jodan.
“I have no means; I make understanding my
means.” The stick flies into a middle vertical cut, ending level with my
throat. This is chudan.
“I have no body; I make endurance my
body.” The stick whistles to a low vertical cut, ending level with my knee.
This is gedon.
My body recognizes the familiar
rhythms of the kata and urges me to go faster.
I make two successive passes, lightning swift: a falling diagonal cut to
the left – hidari kesa – and a
falling diagonal cut to the right – migi
kesa.
“I have no designs; I make seizing
the opportunity my designs.”
A falling diagonal cut to the right
followed by reverse diagonal cut. This is migi
kesa gyaku kesa.
“I have no principles; I make
adaptability to all circumstances my principles.”
Another falling diagonal cut, this time to the
left, followed by reverse diagonal cut. This is hidari kesa gyaku kesa.
“I have no enemy; I make carelessness
my enemy.”
Al has not opened his eyes. But he
hasn’t stopped me either. Feeling triumphant, I complete the creed and the final
kata: a level horizontal cut going from left to right and then reversing and
cutting from right to left. This is suihei.
“I have no friends; I make my mind my
friend.”
“Again,” Al murmurs.
So I do it again.
And again.
And yet again.
After the fifteenth complete repetition,
I think that the five-year-old could hand me my ass on a platter, I’m that spent. I pause for half a second then the stick –
now feeling like it weighs ten times more than its actual two pounds – falls
from my hand. Before it can clatter to
the floor, Al is there and catches it an inch above the tatami mats. I glance at the clock above the front desk. I’ve only been at this for a solid forty
minutes straight. No biggie. Not.
“You were done after the first
repetition,” Al twirls the stick expertly before leaning it against the wall.
“What do you mean?”
“You worry too much about speed and
force. You should be more concerned about
form. That way, your movements will become
more fluid and will tax your energy less.”
Being chastised is bad enough; being
chastised by an English accent somehow makes it worse. Suddenly, I feel like crying. And I don’t cry. Not since I was eight.
“Al, do you think I’m jaded?”
“I beg your pardon?” See?
Even his version of “Huh?” is off-putting.
“Do I have an ‘eff-the-Man’ attitude? Am I a Ms. Snarkypants?”
“Are you asking me? Or is Nick?”
“No, really, Al. You’ve known me for almost as long as I’ve
been alive. And you never bullshit me ---”
“No cursing.”
“--- so I know you’ll tell me
straight. Am I difficult? Is that why people don’t like me?”
“People like you.”
“I mean, I know I have this enormous
brain ---”
“And the modesty to match.”
“--- and I really don’t mind because
it helps with the GPA and all, but sometimes I think it’s more of a curse than
a blessing, you know? Like, if I was
just some brainless bonehead following the mob mentality, maybe I wouldn’t feel
like…like…”
I look at Al. He waits, impassive. “Like there should be something more,” I
finish helplessly.
Al slides to floor in lotus position
and I follow suit. We are so close, our
knees are touching. Under normal
circumstances, I’d be cringing at the invasion of my personal bubble, but these
are not normal circumstances and this is Al.
He looks at me steadily and his green eyes bore a hole in my skull. “What do you believe, Evie?”
Okay, seriously freaking out here. For a split second, I think he and Nick are
conspiring against me, but there is something in the way Al asks the question
that’s worlds more meaningful than when Nick had asked it earlier. With Nick, I had all the answers. But somehow, I don’t think Al and I are
talking about my personality deficiencies.
And this time, I have no answer. My mind is a blank.
