Chapter 1

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.