Chapter 14

For the second week in a row, I’d managed to end up on an amazing high. Saturday night, when I finished my set, I found out Rhonda had convinced Hanna to keep Jordan occupied for ten minutes, so she could drag me around the side of the building and show me exactly how much she liked my surprise. Somehow I’d gone from a sweet first kiss to making out in a dark corner in just a week. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t particularly proud of myself.

I got a second surprise on Sunday. The day was going amazingly well, with the kitchen staff being really nice to me, until Chef yelled at everyone to get their heads focused on their work. I could see he was proud of me too, which really made me feel great.

The capper was right at the end of the night. Since I had school and was one of the younger people to work in the restaurant, Hanna and I were always the first cut to go home. As I was heading out, some of the audience that had been there last night saw me and shouted out to Willie to let me play some stuff like last night. Willie was nice enough to offer me to come up for a song, and I didn’t have to be asked twice. I ended up playing two songs, but they were the two newest songs from the ones I’d played the night before, and once again, I got a really good reaction from the audience.

Monday, we pulled into the school parking lot and I had to remind myself that the weekend had been a different world. Being on stage, even a small one, had been an ego trip. At Carr, I was still basically a nobody. Worse, a nobody who had a teacher who hated him. The last thing I needed was to have my good mood shattered again by Coach Bryant.

I managed to make it through his class without getting chewed out or ruining my mood. At lunch, I went outside with Rhonda. Part of me, a pretty narcissistic part I wasn’t proud of, wanted to sit and eat lunch with Hanna and Jordan, hoping they’d tell everyone else about my playing at the Blue Ridge and all the attention that would bring, but I was getting a lot more attention from Rhonda than I had previously, and the male half of my brain won out.

While trading glances with Rhonda in between reading the first few pages of The Crucible, I’d decided I’d rather just spend my time with her. We’d been on two dates and Saturday’s had ended hot and heavy. Admittedly, it wasn’t anything more than kissing, but it had been some intense kissing, with her pulling me against her hard, my body smashing hers against the side of the building. I managed to keep my hands still, one against the wall to keep from crushing her and one on her waist, but hers ran freely, under my shirt and over my back. I’m sure some people would still consider it tame, but it was intense for me.

After we finished eating, Rhonda lay across the bleachers and put her head in my lap, looking up at me, and asked me to sing to her. I was still a little embarrassed, because singing on the bleachers was very different from singing on stage with a band, but there wasn’t anyone close to us. I kept my voice low, which probably messed up my tone, but she didn’t mind. I softly sang songs to her while running my hand through her hair, stroking her scalp. I swear I could feel her purring by the time we had to stop and go back to class.

I swear by the end of the day I’d forgotten about all the other problems I had, Coach Bryant, problems with school work, all of it. I got a sharp reminder as I headed out into the parking lot to Hanna’s car.

She must have had to stop and do something, because she wasn’t anywhere around, which wasn’t unprecedented over the last several weeks but was pretty rare. Instead, as I started getting up to her car to wait, I saw Paul Adams, one of Aaron’s little henchmen, making a beeline for me.

I got to the car before him and dropped my backpack and crutches, to get my hands ready, just in case. He saw me tense up and slowed down, stopping just out of arms reach.

“You don’t have any teachers to keep you from getting your ass kicked now,” he said.

While I wasn’t afraid to stick up for myself, I usually tried to keep a cool head. After that first fight, I’d managed to not be the one to throw the first punch or escalate anything the few times I’d run into Aaron. Paul’s problem was that I’d had a great weekend and wasn’t feeling like being the one to back down.

“You don’t have Aaron or any of your other buddies to back you up today. Do you really think you’re enough to kick my ass by yourself?”

“What, you forgot what happened to you last time?”

“You mean the time I managed to drop two of you before the third got me on the ground? No, I haven’t forgotten, but I think you have. If it had just been you that morning, how do you think you would have done? Because I remember dropping your ass in the dirt.”

“I’m not afraid of you,” he said, taking a small step forward.

“You should be. I’ll give you this one chance, walk away now, or I will pound the shit out of you and you’ll have to explain to your friends how you got your ass beat by a guy on crutches. Of course, if you think you can take me, let’s go.”

I was working on remembering the few lessons I’d learned from Chef while ignoring the very first one, that the first rule of fighting is you should try and avoid fighting whenever possible. He’d hammered home that as soon as the first punch was thrown, you had a chance for things to go wrong no matter how much more skilled you were than your opponent. One piece of bad luck for you or good luck for the other guy could make things turn uncontrollably.

Instead of trying to talk Paul out of a fight, I was basically challenging him to throw down right here and now.

I got my stance set, with my bad foot back, to keep it from being a target. Chef said that having a good stance was to make sure you were rooted and didn’t get knocked down easily, but while my foot was messed up, I needed to keep it out of harm’s way. Solid footing but an injured limb where an attacker could get to it was more likely to take me down than poor footing.

I don’t’ know if Paul had fought before and recognized that I was actually getting set up to fight, or if the lizard brain part of him inherently recognized the potential danger and took over, but he backed down.

“You’re lucky the coaches over there can see us,” he said, taking a step back.

I didn’t turn to look, but I had noticed the baseball coaches earlier. They were on the baseball field, which was way the hell on the other side of the track. You could see them from here, but they were far enough away I couldn’t have told you who was who if I’d known them.

It was a lame defense, pretending that they would somehow break up a fight even if they saw us, but Chef’s voice in the back of my head finally broke through.

“Sure. Next time bring some friends,” I said, also backing up.

“Count on it,” he said as he turned and walked away.

I would have been worried that he’d follow up on that, except that a fight with Aaron and his pals had already been building. This incident might only make it happen sooner, since it was almost a certainty by this point.

I got to the Blue Ridge just as it started raining, canceling out any chance of working with the bags again. The weather had been pretty nice the last few weeks, so I wasn’t sure how we were going to handle it or if we were just going to take the day off.

Not that I really wanted a day off, but Chef made it clear a little rain wasn’t going to slow us down when he sent me up to his apartment to wait. I found that he’d moved most of the furniture in his front room back to clear a big open space, which meant we’d be doing it here instead.

When Chef made his way upstairs, I came clean about what happened with Paul that afternoon.

“Charlie, if I’m going to teach you, then you need to listen to me and take what I say seriously. If you can’t, we’ll stop. Am I clear?”

“Yes, Chef.”

“I get it. I was a young man once and I know what it’s like when you’re challenged. There’s a part of you, deep inside, that wants to stand up and prove you’re a man. It’s only natural, but you need to be smart about it. Reputation comes and goes, but your health never does. Every time you get in a fight, you have a chance of getting hurt. While your foot is in that boot, the chance is even higher. Do you want to get it injured worse and spend more time in it than you already have?”

“No, Chef.”

“If you have to fight, you fight to win. You don’t have to back down or run away, but don’t actively make the fight more likely.”

“I know, Chef. I really did think about that. These guys are classic bullies. If there were three of them again, they wouldn’t have hesitated. If it was just Aaron, he would have taken a swing at me, but the other two are pure followers. They won’t do anything when it’s one on one.”

“Maybe, but once you challenge his manhood, he might feel he has no choice but to prove himself. Either way, what’s done is done. What we can do about it is to continue to talk about how to defend yourself. Since it’s raining, instead of working on your punch, we’re going to talk a little defense. Stand here in the center of the room.”

He stood an arm’s reach from me when I got into position.

“Now, I know if you see movies where people are fighting, they stand like this,” he said, arms slightly outstretched with his hands in fists.

“Yeah.”

“Have you ever watched any boxing?”

“A little.”

“Have you noticed they hold their hands up? Can you see the differences?”

“Your hands are closer to each other and your body, kind of in-between your face and the person you’re fighting against.”

“Correct. The reason is that, unlike a movie where you need to see the actors face, a boxer is actually trying to protect himself. When your hands are up here, and an opponent strikes, you’re in a position to deflect the blow with minimal effort.”

“Why use the least amount of effort?”

“It’s not about how much you want to put into a block; it’s about having a very short amount of time to actually do anything. Unless your opponent is really telegraphing every punch, you’ll have less than a second to recognize what’s happening and act. If your hands are out here, that isn’t enough time for your brain to register a punch is coming, send the signal to your hands, and for your hands to get moving.”

He showed me the difference, pantomiming a block using both methods. While I only had vague notions of how a good block actually worked, the difference was still evident. When his hands were up and close together, he only moved them a small amount, sometimes pushing away from his body to the left and sometimes slightly down and to the right.

When his hands were extended, like in TV shows, he had to move a fair bit to get level with where a punch was coming from.

“Now, let’s practice some slow punches, so you can see how it works.”

We started with me slowly throwing a punch. As soon as my hand was close enough, he’d move his forearm out, connecting against my wrist, pushing my fist enough to make it go over his left shoulder. If I punched more inside his body, he did the opposite, pushing my hand off to the right. Sometimes he did this with his right hand pushing the punch over his right shoulder, and sometimes he used his left, pushing the punch down and to the right, past his body. Occasionally, he just put his hands between the punch and his body, absorbing the blow.

He spent the next hour showing me how to deflect punches and when to use which block. As with anything, it would require repetitions to build up muscle memory since, as he pointed out, I wouldn’t usually have enough time to think about how to block a punch. I needed to just do it.

We started slowly, moving through the action, to get used to the motion and understand why to choose a specific block for a given situation. As we practiced, he started speeding up his punches, giving me less time to react. I know he was still far from full speed, but near the end, we were going fast enough I was having trouble reacting fast enough.