Straight Punch (2 page)

Chapter Two

Miss Lebrun eyed the clock over the classroom door. “It's eight fifteen—time to get started. For those of you who were with me last year, welcome back. It's nice to see you. I hope you didn't get into too much trouble over the summer.”

Jasmine and a couple of other students sitting at the back snickered.

Pretty Boy turned his head so that he was facing me. His eyebrows (one of them was pierced) lifted in surprise when he saw me. “You!” he said, mouthing the word so Miss Lebrun wouldn't hear.

“I also want to welcome a new student, Tessa McPhail.” Miss Lebrun turned to me. “Tessa, it's good to have you with us. We hope our school will be a great experience for you, that it'll take you in new—”

Miss Lebrun paused—for effect, I figured—and Pretty Boy finished her sentence. “Directions,” he muttered.
He reminded me of the dormouse in
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
. He'd probably been up late tagging. I remembered his drawing of the butterfly with the old man's face.

The multicolored caterpillar I'd noticed on one of the lockers downstairs made sense now. It was Pretty Boy's.

“That's right, Percy. New directions. Like all of you, Tessa is here because she's journeying in a new direction.”

My face got hot as I felt six pairs of eyes on me, sizing me up. They were trying to figure out what
journey
had landed me here. I knew that because I was wondering the same thing about them.

“Let's start with a quick review of the basic rules. Percy, I'm not interrupting your morning nap, am I?”

Without lifting his head from his desk, Pretty Boy met Miss Lebrun's eyes. “I haven't missed a word you said, Miss L. But can't you call me Pretty Boy this year?”

“It says Percy on this list from the Ministry of Education,” Miss Lebrun said, waving her attendance sheet in the air. “So that's the name we'll be using in this classroom.”

Pretty Boy sighed. I felt bad for him. Imagine getting saddled with a name like Percy.

“We call him a lot of names besides Percy,” the guy who'd been smoking on the porch called from the back of the room. He had a raspy voice.

“I'm sure you do, William. All right, then, let's talk about rules. As most of you already know, punctuality matters at New Directions. I expect you to get to class on time and I expect your assignments to be turned in on time too. No bathroom breaks during class except in case of emergency, phones off, no texting, nothing of that sort. Most of all, I expect all of you to be respectful, to me and to one another.” Miss Lebrun looked around the classroom, her gaze falling on each of us individually. “I have a sheet for attendance, a sheet for grades and another sheet for recording any cases of misbehavior. If you misbehave more than twice, you know the consequences.”

“No training for a week,” said a deep voice at the back of the classroom.

I hadn't heard Randy come in. His soapy smell traveled to the front of the room.

“That's right, Randall.”

I didn't say what I was thinking—s
o what if I don't get to train for a week?

For me, that would be a reward, not a punishment.

Miss Lebrun made each of us say our name. I knew she did the exercise for my benefit, since the others already knew each other.
Don't make us say what brought us here
, I prayed, and she didn't.

I really hoped New Directions wasn't going to be some sort of group therapy for troubled teens.

Miss Lebrun reached into a cardboard box beside her desk and took out a stack of notebooks. They were the kind you get at the dollar store, with black speckled covers. “Say hello to your new journal,” she said as she walked to the back of the classroom and began handing them out.

A couple of students groaned.

“This journal thing must be her latest experiment,” Pretty Boy whispered to me. “Consider yourself a guinea pig.”

Miss Lebrun smiled when she handed me my journal. Then she went back to her desk. “I took a great online course this summer about journaling,” she said—and when I turned to look at Pretty Boy, he whispered, “Told you so”—“and so this year, I've decided we'll begin every morning with journal time. Sometimes we'll do what's called
free writing
. Other times, like today, I'll assign a subject. I have two subjects for you today. First, I want you to write a greeting to your journal.”

“You gotta be kidding,” Jasmine said.

“Let's get this straight—you want us to
greet
a book?” William asked.

“I'm not kidding. I just want you to take a few minutes to say hello to your journal. After all, the two of you are going to be spending a lot of time together this year.”

Miss Lebrun took a black speckled notebook for herself too. She sat at her desk, writing her own greeting. I wondered what she was writing—
Lord, give me strength to deal with this gang of delinquents
?

I didn't know what to write. As I was thinking that, Miss Lebrun looked up from her notebook and said, “It doesn't matter what you write as long as it's honest. By the way,” she added, “I should have explained that you won't have to share what you write in your journal with me or with the class. Unless, of course, you'd like to.”

That helped. I picked up my pen and started writing.

Greetings, speckled notebook. I can't think of anything else to say. Well, okay, here's one thing. I really don't feel like I belong here with these kids. And here's another: I just want to get this school year over with. And here's another: I really hope I don't get the shit beaten out of me by one of these demented boxers.

I figured swearing was allowed if I was the only one who'd be reading my journal.

When I ran out of ideas, I looked over at Pretty Boy. He must have felt me watching him because he slid his notebook over to the edge of his desk so I could see it. Only he hadn't written a single word. Instead, he was making a drawing. A drawing of me—with butterfly wings. The drawing freaked me out. It isn't every day a person sees herself with wings sprouting from her shoulders. But I had to admit, he'd gotten my expression right. Pretty Boy's butterfly girl looked lost and confused, as if she couldn't decide if she was a butterfly or a girl.

Miss Lebrun wanted us to try one more exercise before starting math. “William, do you mind lending me your baseball cap?”

“You need my baseball cap for a writing exercise, Miss? Is that something you learned online too?” William asked, but he had already whipped off his cap and was bringing it over to Miss Lebrun.

Pretty Boy looked up from the drawing he was still working on. “You gonna pull a rabbit out of that sweaty cap?” he asked.

Miss Lebrun dropped some folded-up bits of paper into the cap. “We are going to pull something out of William's cap. Only it's not a rabbit.” Then she circulated between the desks and we each had to take one of the folded-up bits. Mine had the number eleven on it.

“I'm really excited about this exercise. We'll begin with our journals closed,” Miss Lebrun said, which surprised me. “Eyes closed too.” Which surprised me even more. Whoever heard of writing with your eyes closed?

“Take a couple of deep breaths in and out. Like this.” She demonstrated. I didn't close my eyes right away. But Miss Lebrun's eyes were shut, making her look even younger. A couple of students at the back giggled, but I could hear the others breathing in and out, so I did too, even if it seemed like the weirdest writing exercise. Ever.

Miss Lebrun's voice was softer now. She didn't sound like the Miss Lebrun who just minutes before had been waving her Ministry of Education attendance sheet at us. “
Writers commonly draw on their own memories for inspiration. This exercise we're about to do is meant to help us retrieve an old memory so we'll be able to write about it. We each chose a number from the cap and we're going to write about a memory associated with that age. I need to warn you, this exercise can have a powerful effect. Only go as deep into the memory as you're comfortable going. If it gets to be too much for you, you can stop at any point. All right then, let's begin. I want all of you to try and remember what it felt like to be the age that's on your slip of paper.”

Of all the numbers I could have picked from that baseball cap, why did I have to choose eleven?

“Let your mind land on some memory from when you were that age, a memory…” Miss Lebrun continued.

I wondered if she was trying to hypnotize us, repeating the word
memory
like that.

“Any memory that comes to you will do. Just let the memory land. Don't fight it.”

Fight it
? Did she have to say that? If there was one thing in my life I wanted to forget, it was the fight I'd witnessed when I was eleven. It was April 2008—the night of the Montreal Canadiens' seventh-game win over the Boston Bruins. Who would have guessed that a party—a giant party with thousands of fans celebrating that their team had advanced in the playoffs—would turn violent?

Miss Lebrun was speaking again. “Look around in your memory. What do you see? Is it bright or dark? Are you alone or are there others with you?”

I tried remembering something else. I tried remembering my eleventh birthday—the cake with pink frosting, me blowing out the candles while my friends clapped and Mom snapped pictures.

But my mind wouldn't let me land there. It was taking me back to the riot. I was the one who'd talked Mom into going for dinner at our favorite chicken-and-ribs place downtown. “I don't know, Tessa. There's a big game tonight—we might have trouble parking.”

Parking turned out to be the least of our problems.

Is it bright or dark?
It was both. Dark by the time we left the restaurant. Bright because of the fires.

I could still see the orange flames.

The streets were thick with people celebrating—laughing, cheering, tipping beer into their mouths. Whose idea was it to set fire to a police car? And then, like the orange flames, the idea spread.

Are there other people with you?
There was Mom, but mostly there was the mob. More people than I'd ever seen all at once, shoving in every direction. Some wanting to get closer to the burning cars, some to the storefronts on Ste-Catherine Street, where they were smashing windows, helping themselves to whatever was inside. Some wanting to get away or, like me and Mom, back to their cars.

“Add sound,” Miss Lebrun's voice urged. “What sounds do you hear? Someone laughing or maybe someone crying—or shouting?”

Shouting, yes, over the shattered glass. Angry, drunken shouting coming closer.

“Go back to Boston, you asshole!” In my memory, I heard a man's voice slurring his words. Then someone shouting back, “Leave me alone! I got the right to root for my team!”

Then my mom's voice. “Whatever you do, Tessa,” she was saying, “don't let go of my hand.” It was the first time I'd ever heard her sound afraid. Which scared the shit out of me.

“Add touch,” Miss Lebrun told us. “Reach back into your memory and touch something—what does it feel like?”

I thought about making myself stop, the way Miss Lebrun had said we could, but the memory was begging to be remembered.

Two men were punching each other. People tried to get out of their way, but there was no room. I felt my mother squeezing my hand…but then I couldn't feel her anymore. More punching—louder, harder. I wanted to cry out, tell them to stop, but my voice didn't work. I wanted to move, even just an inch, but my legs didn't work either.

“Stop it!” other people called from the crowd.

The two guys didn't stop. More punches, then screaming.

One man fell, crashing into me and knocking me down to the pavement. As if that wasn't bad enough, he tripped, landing on top of me. He must have weighed two hundred pounds. I could hardly breathe. I was drowning in a sea of feet and legs.

“What do you feel?” Miss Lebrun asked. “The rough bark of a tree trunk or perhaps someone's hand, soft and powdery?”

Mom's hand. Where was she? I tried feeling for her fingers, but all I felt was the man's weight—and then the rough sole of someone's boot pressing down on my hand.

The mob was a monster. The only part of me that wasn't trapped underneath the man was my elbow. I tried to use it to push the man away, but it was no use. Was he dead?

“A kid's getting trampled!” someone yelled.

No one heard—or if they did, they paid no attention.

“Tessa!” My mom's voice. Then, “Please! Help me find my daughter!” Mom's voice was coming closer. Somehow, I managed to turn my head so I could see a little.

Mom was elbowing her way toward me. She'd seen me too. “My daughter's under there!” Her voice was hoarse.

“What do you think you're doing, shoving me like that?” a man called out.

Sounds of a scuffle. Then a woman—
Don't let it be Mom
—crying out in pain. The crunch of glass somewhere nearby. I moved my hands closer to my sides. If it was a beer bottle that had broken, I didn't want to get cut. But it wasn't a beer bottle. It was a pair of wire-rimmed glasses. One lens was cracked down the middle; the other was in shards.

Those were my mom's glasses. She was practically blind without them. But now she was on the ground too, trying to pull me out from underneath the drunk man. I gasped when I saw her face. A jagged gash under one eye. Blood dripping down her face, over her lips, onto her chin.

“It's okay, Tessa,” she kept saying. “Everything's going to be okay.”