Straight Punch (3 page)

I knew it wasn't true. How could it be when she was bleeding like that? And I knew something else too—it was my fault. I should never have let go of her hand.

Miss Lebrun was speaking again. “Let's add smell next. Of all the senses, smell is the most powerful trigger of memory. What does your memory smell like? If you can, follow the smell deeper into your memory.”

I coughed. The metallic smell of blood was in my nose, stuck in the little hairs inside.

“Let's open our notebooks now,” Miss Lebrun was saying. “We're going to write down all the details that came back to us. For once, I don't want you to worry about making proper sentences. Just get the details down.”

That was when I heard a loud crash. Someone had thrown a desk against the wall.

Jasmine.

She was rushing out of the classroom.

“Jasmine? Come back! Jasmine!” Miss Lebrun called after her.

Jasmine was already out the front door of the school. Through the window, I saw her flying down the street, her black hair flapping against one side of her face.

Chapter Three

By the end of our first break, Jasmine had come back.

Pretty Boy had predicted it. “It isn't like she has anyone to go to,” he told me when Miss Lebrun went to the front porch to call after Jasmine. “She's an orphan.”

“An orphan? You're kidding.” I'd only read about orphans. Anne of Green Gables, Harry Potter and the Baudelaire siblings were all orphans. I'd never met one in real life.

“Yup,” Pretty Boy said. “Both her parents died in a car wreck. She was fourteen when it happened. I bet Miss Lebrun wishes she'd left that particular number out of the cap.”

“So who does Jasmine live with?”

“Her aunt Melinda. But let's just say Aunt Melinda isn't exactly a model citizen. Even by my standards, which are admittedly low.”

I felt guilty for ever thinking I had it rough, being raised by just my mom—especially since mine was, as she liked to remind me, the sort of mom who counted as two parents.

We could stay in during the breaks between classes or hang out in the little yard behind the house. I opted for out. The word
yard
was an exaggeration. It was a rectangle of grass in sorrier condition than the grass in front of the school. There
was a rusted-out basketball hoop on an even rustier stand.

The only pretty thing about the yard was the bed of giant sunflowers on the other side of the chain-link fence separating school property from the house next door. The flowers' hairy stalks were as thick as kitchen pipes. They leaned in toward the fence as if curious to know what was going on at New Directions.

Randy and Pretty Boy were shooting hoops. Pretty Boy's turquoise feather boa dragged on the ground when he dribbled. William was there too. Except for Miss Lebrun, everybody called him Whisky, for obvious reasons. He was sitting on the stoop next to Jasmine. Her eyes were red and puffy.

“Everything all right?” I asked her.

“Allergies,” she said, but I knew she was lying.

Randy's phone rang, but he didn't bother answering it.

“What if it's one of your lady friends looking for a little company?” Pretty Boy said with a grin.

Randy jumped into the air and slid the ball into the hoop before he answered. “She can always leave a message,” he said.

Pretty Boy had the ball now. “That's your secret, isn't it? Ignore 'em—and they come back for more.”

A woman next door was hanging out laundry. Her frizzy brown hair made her look like a walking dandelion. She was arranging everything on her clothesline by size. At the far end were towels and jeans, then T-shirts, the clothes pegs under the armpits. Now she was hanging socks, each one with its matched partner. White gym socks last. I wondered if, when she took the clothes off the line, they smelled of car and truck exhaust.

Pretty Boy made a basket and celebrated by doing a chicken dance, flapping his arms and clucking loudly. We laughed, but the woman next door shook her head, and Pretty Boy gave her the finger. “Too bad they don't teach you manners in there,” the woman said as she took her laundry basket and retreated into her house.

Jasmine rolled her eyes. “What's your problem, Pretty Boy?”

Pretty Boy threw another hoop. “Anger management,” he said, without lifting his eyes from the basketball. “What's yours?”

When we got back from our break, a middle-aged bald guy was sitting on Miss Lebrun's desk, spinning his thumbs in a way that made me wonder if he had
ADD
.

“Who's he?” I whispered to Pretty Boy.

“That's Mr. Turner, the principal. Not to worry though—he doesn't come around much.” Pretty Boy explained that Mr. Turner was also the principal of a school for kids with disabilities and an adult-ed facility in the city's west end. “It's the new economy,” he said. “One man, three jobs.”

I noticed that Mr. Turner's forehead was furrowed with lines, undoubtedly caused by years of dealing with difficult students.

Miss Lebrun had rounded up the grade tens too. Because there weren't enough desks for all of us, they had to sit on the windowsills.

“I came by to wish you all a good year,” Mr. Turner said after Miss Lebrun signaled him that we were all there. “I also
want to show my support for Miss Lebrun. You're lucky to have a teacher as engaged and committed as she is.”

“You're engaged, Miss L? How come you didn't tell us?” Whisky called out.

Miss Lebrun blushed.

“By engaged,” Mr. Turner said, “I mean enthusiastic. I'm expecting you to give Miss Lebrun your full cooperation. I don't have to remind you that if any of you don't make it here at New Directions…well, you won't have too many other options. And as I'm sure you know, your lives are going to be a lot more difficult without that high school leaving certificate. We want to help you—but you're also going to need to help yourselves…and each other.”

Under his desk, Pretty Boy's fingers were opening and closing like a duck's beak. I gathered he didn't have a high opinion of Mr. Turner.

“There's something else I need to discuss with you. When I arrived at New Directions today, the phone rang and I took the call. It was one of our neighbors, and she wasn't too happy.” Mr. Turner looked at his shoes—they were brown and scuffed. Maybe men with three jobs didn't have time to polish their shoes.

He looked back up at us. “I'm going to be straight with you. This neighbor isn't too pleased about having us next door.” Something about the way Mr. Turner used the word
us
sounded phony. I had a feeling the neighbor didn't mind having Mr. Turner next door. It was the dozen juvenile delinquents she was worried about.

Then came the kicker.

“What she's most upset about is that you're learning to box.”

Randy groaned. Jasmine shook her head. Whisky burped. Even Pretty Boy lifted his head off his desk and said, “What the fuck?” Then, before Miss Lebrun or Mr. Turner could reprimand him, he put his hand over his mouth and did it for them. “Language, Percy!”

Mr. Turner gave us a tight smile. “I assured this woman that none of you pose a threat to her safety or the safety of this community, but let's just say she wasn't convinced. She's talking about starting a petition.” He looked down at his shoes, then up again. “She wants the school board to close down New Directions. Miss Lebrun and I debated whether I should tell you this, but in the end we decided it was best to make you aware of the situation. Now, of course, you'll understand why it's absolutely essential for you to be on your very best behavior—not just inside this school, but outside too.”
Mr. Turner looked around the classroom. “Are you reading me?”

“We're reading you, sir,” Whisky called out. “Best behavior—inside and out.” If Whisky hadn't belched at just that moment, I might have thought he meant it.

After Mr. Turner left, we did math exercises. Miss Lebrun walked between the desks, supervising. “This is math, Percy,” she said, tapping Pretty Boy's desk. “Not art class.” When she eyed the row of calculations in my notebook, she nodded. “Randall,” I heard her say when she got to the back of the room, “do you want me to look over your answers with you now or should we wait until later?”

When Miss Lebrun wasn't looking, Percy checked the time on his phone—twice. And when I looked to the back of the room where Jasmine was sitting, she was punching the air in front of her.

At Tyndale, there'd been kids (not that I was ever one of them) who liked math. At New Directions, math seemed to mean only one thing—it was the last class before boxing.

When I walked into the gym, somebody barked.

At first, I thought maybe one of the guys was teasing me. Not a very nice way to greet a new student.

I didn't expect to see a brindled pit bull lying on his stomach at the side of the room. “Yikes,” I said, taking a step back. “What's he doing here?”

“You allergic?” a girl called out. She had bleached-blond hair and eyes rimmed with thick black liner. She was wearing a loose-fitting peasant blouse, faded jeans and a pair of seriously cool silver cowboy boots.

“No. But aren't pit bulls…you know…dangerous?”

The girl laughed. “Ruger? Dangerous? No way. This dog's a pussycat. Come over and say hi to him. I'm Di, though Big Ron likes to call me Lady Di. Not that I'm much of a princess. Wanna cracker?” She extended her arm so slowly it felt like slow motion and offered me a box of soda crackers.

Ruger wagged his long whiplike tail. “Why'd you name him Ruger?” I asked.

Di scratched the dog behind his ears. She did that slowly too, and Ruger wagged his tail some more. “A Ruger's a gun. My brother got shot two years ago. The gun that killed him was a Ruger.”

I knew from the way Di was watching my face that she wanted to shock me, so I tried not to react. I just nodded like I was used to meeting kids whose siblings had been murdered. But afterward, when we were in the girls' locker room, changing into our workout clothes, I told Di I was sorry about her brother. “I don't get why you named your dog after the gun that killed him though. Isn't that the sort of thing you'd want to forget?”

“Not me.” Di tapped her chest. “I'm into remembering. Even the rough stuff. Especially the rough stuff.”

Big Ron started us off with half an hour of warm-ups. Everything from calf raises to lunges, followed by stretching. The guy was a drill sergeant. He also wasn't too good with numbers. “Forty jumping jacks!” he bellowed.

I knew I'd done forty because I was counting them in my head, hoping to get them over with
ASAP
, but when I stopped, Big Ron glared at me and told me I still had ten left to do.

“But I counted them!” I protested. I wiped the sweat from my forehead—some of it dripped and made my eyes burn.

“Who's the coach here—me or you?”

I figured it was easier to keep jumping than to argue with Big Ron. But man, those jumping jacks—especially the extra ten—were torture. Even the backs of my knees were sweating. There were a couple of ceiling fans in the gym, but all they did was stir around the hot air.

“How come he doesn't open the windows?” I asked Di when Big Ron wasn't looking.

“The neighbors,” she said. “The sound of punching bothers them.”

I didn't tell her I knew how they felt.

“You'll need these.” After our warm-up, Big Ron tossed me a pair of rolled-up black hand wraps. “You owe me six bucks for those, Tessa Something-or-Other. Don't forget to pay me back. No interest if it's within a week.”

“Thanks,” I said as I tore off the packaging and began unrolling the wraps. They were longer than I'd expected, with Velcro fasteners at both ends.

The others were putting on their own hand wraps, winding them over their wrists, then across their knuckles. Though it seemed complicated to me, they made it look easy.

“No rings!” Big Ron said when he spotted the ring on my middle finger. It was a thin gold band shaped like a curved paintbrush. When Cyrus had given it to me for my birthday, he'd shown me the stamp that said
14 karat gold
inside. I loved that ring, even if a spray can would have been more my style than a paintbrush.

“Even with boxing gloves on, you could cut yourself pretty bad or injure your opponent,” Big Ron said, “if you box with a ring on.”

Not wearing the ring made me feel strange. I didn't even take it off to shower or when I went to sleep. It had started to feel like part of me. Because I didn't know where else to leave it, I put it on the floor by Big Ron's chair. That way, I'd be able to keep an eye on it during the lesson.

I tried putting on my wraps, but I got them tangled up, and I hadn't made them as tight as I needed to.

“Let me help you,” Big Ron offered.

He still hadn't gotten out of his chair. I'd have liked to see
him
do fifty jumping jacks.

I let him put on the wraps for me. “Now, watch how I do it,” he said. “First, you got to spread your fingers apart.
Then you wrap your wrist a few times. Like this. Nice and snug.” Big Ron's hands were as big as bear paws. I watched how he wrapped my right hand, then my left. Wrist, knuckles, thumb, then back to my wrist and knuckles. How would
I ever remember all that?

Except for Pretty Boy, who was working on his focus by hitting the speed ball, the others were working in pairs. I'd never heard so much grunting and groaning. Randy and Whisky were shadowboxing at opposite ends of the ring, and Di and Jasmine were alternating on the punching bag. I could see that Di took her time with things, setting herself up in front of the bag and pausing between punches. Jasmine was a speed demon. It wasn't hard to tell why Ron called her Jabbin' Jasmine—she threw one quick punch after another without breaking a sweat.

Big Ron was still in his chair. “The first thing you need to learn,” he told me, “is proper fighting stance. In boxing, proper fighting stance is like the trunk of a tree. Without the trunk, you got nothing.” He made a zero with his fingers.

Then he got up from his lawn chair and waddled over to demonstrate.

I didn't want Big Ron to catch me staring at him, so I looked away. That's when my eyes landed on some photographs mounted over the wall of mirrors in front of me. Some of the photos were black-and-white, so I figured they'd been taken a long time ago. They were photos of boxers—all of them men. How come, I wondered, there were no women on Big Ron's wall?

It took me a moment to realize that one of the buff young boxers in the photos was Big Ron before he got big. I recognized the eyes, the crooked smile and the square jawline. The photo must have been taken after a bout, because Big Ron was holding a trophy, his face sweaty.