Week 6 / Tuesday

The next day, Larissa met Julian at their favourite Uni café, where they were going to have a drink prior to Taekwondo. When they got the front of the line, the server recognised them. “Stop!” he said loudly. He walked around the counter and called out in a loud voice, “Everyone, Stop! I just want to point out that we have Julian and Larissa here. Please, everyone, help me give them three cheers.” Everyone did; today, they were absolutely famous on site. The university newspaper and social media had carried the story, and it was running hot around the campus, and the university students had uniformly treated the column as an attack on science, the university, the world, and the students personally. They couldn’t be getting stronger support at all. Amazing, and Julian thanked everyone for their support.

“So how’s it going?” Julian asked her when they sat down.

“You just saw,” Larissa said. “It’s been like that all day, all my classes.” She shrugged. “It’ll blow over soon, but for today, amazing. What about you?”

“Oh. We made our plans, spent all day working on them. Are you happy to come to the studio after uni tomorrow and do a chat with Layna about it for our response video?”

“Of course!”

“Sweet. I think it’s going to hang together, and we’re super motivated on this one. The whole team, like never before. But something really surprising happened today. You know this nuttercase guy?” Larissa laughed, that’s what Steph had started calling him, and now they all were. “Well, he has kids.” No! “Yep. Teenagers. They’re fans of ours. Patreon fans, even. And they were incensed at him. When he got home from meetings yesterday, they had a screaming argument with him, and then they walked out.” Wow, Larissa said. “And then they took to twitter, ripping into him, doing a Claudia Conway.”

“Who?”

“Kelly-Ann Conway’s daughter, had a massive fight with her famous mum on twitter?” No, didn’t ring a bell for Larissa. “Doesn’t matter. Anyway, then they reached out to us, could we interview them? So they’re coming to the studio tomorrow as well, which will be ... interesting. They’re still steaming mad.”

“Oh. They’re minors?” Julian nodded. “Is that a good idea is it?”

“Layna has a plan.” Of course, Layna would have a plan. Well, she’d find out.

Then Isabella and Mason met them, getting ready to go to their first Taekwondo. How were they going? Great. Their new place was working out really well for them, Isabella was finding university exciting, and meeting people who didn’t know her background, just her name, and she might be real friends with them, and Mason was settling in, and his studio was set up, and yes, they were happy. Happy with a big wink, that is, so Larissa grinned at her.

Then they walked over to the gym, and Larissa said hello to Eliza, who she hadn’t seen since just before Christmas, and got a lovely hug from her. All happy on the Eliza front, that was clear. The club wasn’t that big this year – going to take time to recover from the covid surge, the secretary said, so Johnny-Boy, who was the lead, said they’d all start in a circle and welcome the new members. There were ten of them, and Johnny-Boy asked each of them to give them a name, and a three-sentence background.

Isabella was characteristically forthright. “Hi, my name’s Isabella, and I’m actually a step-something-sister to Larissa, and I chose to come to this university because then I can do Taekwondo with Larissa, because she’s awesome! Well, and Julian too. I’m super excited, and also a total beginner, so I know nothing.” Johnny-boy welcomed her, and said that he was sorry she was Larissa’s step-something sister, but he’d probably take all year to figure out which of them he was sorry for, which got good laughs.

Mason’s turn, and he said, “Hi, My name’s Mason, and I’m Isabella’s boyfriend, and I’m a musician. I signed up for a single subject at this uni specifically so I could be here on Tuesday nights with Julian and Larissa. Only I thought it was a fan club, not a Taekwondo club, am I in the right place?” When the laughing stopped, he said, “no, seriously, I’ve been doing Taekwondo with Julian all through the summer break, but I still count as a rank beginner, so I’m looking forward to learning, thank you all.”

When they’d got around the group, and the instructors had been introduced, Johnny-Boy started Taekwondo as they usually did, asking if any of the students had confrontations or got involved in a fight since they last trained. Two students raised their hands, Larissa and one other. Johnny-Boy rolled his eyes at her with a grin, and asked the other student. He’d run into a fight outside a nightclub. Initially, he’d not gotten involved but one party got on top of the other and started doing real damage. He’d pulled the offending party off and laid him on the ground, and when the other party thought about continuing it, he offered to lay him out cold. That was enough to calm both of them, and he’d let the guilty party go once they were far enough apart.

“Ok, Larissa, what do you have to report?”

“Well, two incidents. A confrontation and a fight.” She described the confrontation, the big guy standing over her, and why, that she had the authority to put his dog down against his will, and why she needed to do that.

“What was your plan if it came to violence?”

She explained – knock him down and run for her van and call the cops. Johnny-boy grinned for that. “Good plan. What actually happened?”

“I pointed out to him he was out a crossroads. He could go and sit on the grass outside, and cool down, and get some time with his buddy before I put him down, or he could assault me, an authorised officer of the law, and have the book thrown at him. Jail for sure. Which did he want? Well, he chose to cool down, and we parted pretty good friends, actually. I did tell him I would’ve kicked his butt if it came to it, and he saw the humour in that.”

“Great. A good outcome, but you could’ve taken a different path, right?”

“Maybe. I could’ve folded, and not done the right thing. What would you have done?”

“Different for me, I’m a cop, I would’ve arrested his ass. OK, everyone, lessons from that?”

When they were done talking about the lessons, Johnny-Boy asked Larissa to tell them about the other incident. She told them about running in Alice by chance, what Alice had done, and what she did in the encounter, and waiting for the police.

“Very well done, Larissa. Everyone, there’s no chance to talk an incident like that down, it’s pretty much always going to end in violence. Sounds like it was by the book once it started.”

“It was,” Julian said, “I was in there a few seconds after. Very calm, very clinical.”

“Great. Lessons?” Well, the obvious lesson: follow the book and stay calm.

“Do any instructors have anything to report?” Johnny-boy asked with a grin. Lots of grins for this one, every single one of them had watched Julian’s confrontation, so they talked about that. The main question: why didn’t Julian walk away? And his reasoning for that, they understood. Some agreed, some didn’t.

Then it was time for actual Taekwondo. Their usual practice was to rotate instructors, so Julian got hands on time with both Isabella and Mason. After the end of normal practice, Larissa and Julian stayed for extra work – sparring with each other, and Larissa went back to her weights. Rather shocking to see how much tone she’d lost over the break and she was determined to get her core back.

Finally, she was done, and she walked to change room with Eliza, a couple of other girls, and Isabella. They walked into the girls change rooms and stopped in surprise. It had all been redone, the same basic design, but new, and shiny, and the doors and curtains were all fixed. Larissa looked at Eliza and got a look back: no games this year. Oh well, that was fine with Larissa.

She was sitting in the car while Julian was driving home when she got a message on their chat with Lucy and Sarah. They’d started sending daily kissing photos as they drifted up the NSW coast. So far, they were kissing with some coast scene behind them.