Total Knockout Read online

  “I bet if you kissed your elbow, you’d turn into a boy for a day. You should try it,” Cooper continued. I flipped through the channels on the TV, past shows I might normally watch but today didn’t care about. “Look, it really wasn’t as bad as you think. I mean, it wasn’t bad at all. Loosh? You okay?”

  “I’m fine,” I said. Ever since that stupid assembly, I’d wondered how the student body could ever take me seriously if I went off like a lunatic during my big speech. I reminded myself of that clip of Howard Dean I once saw on YouTube. When Lori Anne Overton, the yearbook photographer, snapped my picture as I cast my vote after the assembly, I smiled as if I had already won. But really, I was worried that everyone thought I was a crazy has-been, and that someone more fun and fresh—like Melanie—might be just the thing to make them really care about what the student council did.

  One of the reasons winning in my final year was so important was because of the plaques. Each year, the graduating student council held a fund-raiser for something that the school needed. It varied every year and was dictated to the council by the PTA. Last year’s eighth-grade president, Mandy Donath, held a craft fair to raise money for new art supplies. In the art studio there was a plaque that had the year Mandy and her student council graduated and said, Our new equipment has been generously donated by the student council, Mandy Donath, President. These plaques go as far back as the 1970s. They left an indelible impression on the school for generations to come.

  I wanted my name on one.

  The PTA didn’t decide what deserved the student council’s fund-raising efforts until about a month into the school year. They wanted the money raised by winter break so that whatever it was being used for could actually be utilized during the school year. I didn’t know what we’d be raising money for, or how I would conduct my fund-raising (although I had some ideas), but I knew that this final year of council was definitely the most important, in more ways than one.

  As I flipped through channels, Cooper continued telling me about the day he turned into a girl and how it made him act super bossy and crave chocolate. I ignored these female clichés. He’d been telling me these silly little lies since we were seven and I lied about ruining his signed Nolan Ryan baseball card.

  I know. I’m awful.

  It was his birthday, and he’d come down to my house to show off the signed card, which was in pristine condition. I’d heard of Nolan Ryan but didn’t know anything other than he was some old baseball player who used to pitch for the Texas Rangers. Cooper was visibly bummed when I barely gave it a once-over, so I started acting interested.

  “Here, let me see it.” Cooper had handed me the card, watching closely as if I were holding a newborn. “Yeah, that’s pretty cool, Coop. I bet this is worth a lot of money.”

  “He’s a living legend,” he said proudly.

  After a few minutes I put the card on my desk and suggested we watch a movie in the living room. I didn’t realize he’d left it behind until the next morning when I spilled orange juice all over it.

  The doorbell rang while I was wiping up the sopping mess, and I heard my mom say hi to Cooper. A moment later, he showed up in the doorway.

  “Hey, Loosh. I left my . . . what happened?” He looked stricken when he saw his card in the puddle of juice.

  “Henry,” I cowardly said. I couldn’t look Cooper in the eye and see the devastation I’d caused. “He was in here playing even though he’s not supposed to, and when I came back from the kitchen I found this.”

  “My card,” Cooper said mournfully, peeling it carefully off my desk.

  A couple of days later, Cooper said he was sure Henry felt awful about what had happened and told him it was okay and he wasn’t mad. Henry was only four at the time, but he was smart enough to proclaim his innocence. When Cooper confronted me, I felt so ashamed—not just because of the lying, but for blaming it on my little brother. Once Cooper accepted my groveling apology, he began teasing me about my trying to make a blameless child take the fall.

  Since then, he’s always coming up with extravagant stories to show me how ridiculous I’d been. The first was when he told me his mom was letting him change his middle name to Gravy because he loved the stuff so much. I dared him to drink it from the gravy boat one night when I had dinner at his place, and he did—half the boat, which is a lot of gravy. He’d long since forgiven me, but he still loved making up stories.

  “So when you were a girl,” I asked Cooper, still flipping through channels, “did you wear a dress and play with dolls?”

  “About as much as you ever did,” he said.

  I smiled and tossed the remote control aside and said, “Know what I want to do? Go down to your house and box.”

  I was the one who got Cooper into boxing. Actually, I don’t know if he’s really into it or if he does it just for me. Either way, he never turns down a fight with me, and his form has gotten really good over the last year. I taught Coop everything he knows about boxing, just like my dad taught me.

  Dad was the Golden Gloves Junior Middleweight champion of North Texas for two straight years. This was way before I was born, even before he married Mom. Those fighting days, he says, were the best of his life. And I believe him, too. When Dad talked about his days in Teddy KO’s Gym in Arlington, his eyes lit up with a fiery intensity that made you want to listen.

  He’d tell about the dingy gym that he loved so much—the smells of sweat, blood, and raw determination; the sounds of leather on flesh, of grunting, of jump ropes smacking the cement floors. He talked about fights when he literally didn’t think he could raise his arm for one more punch but willed himself to keep going until he got that knockout. “Just goes to show,” he’d say, “that there’s always a little more in you than you think.”

  Dad was boxing when he met Mom. She fell for the whole brute-contender thing, but when they got serious, Dad realized he needed a real job. He got his CPA license, they got married, and he kept fighting bouts. But when Mom got pregnant with me, she told him she was worried that it was too dangerous, so he quit competing. He kept boxing in the evenings at the gym and did some friendly sparring, too. Once I came home from the hospital, Mom said it wasn’t fair that he got to go out four nights a week to the gym while she stayed home with me. So Dad cut it to just one night a week and early Sunday mornings. That worked for a long time—basically until this summer, when Dad got canned from his job and stopped doing pretty much anything. I guess you could say he’d given up the fight.

  The afternoon of the election, as we boxed in Cooper’s garage even though we were still pretty beat from that morning, I kept seeing Melanie flinging those pirate pencil toppers into the crowd. Every time I pictured the faces of the ecstatic, rejuvenated students grabbing that loot, I threw my upper body into hooks and jabs. And maybe I hit Cooper a little harder than we normally allowed, but he didn’t say anything. He didn’t even call quit when I could see he was dying for a break, sweating and panting, his face as red as his gloves. I needed a break too, but I think I was too jacked on adrenaline to stop—my body simply kept going.

  When our automatic buzzer signaled the end of an intense second round, I looked at Cooper panting in his corner of the garage and asked, “You want to stop, Gravy?”

  “No,” he said. “Looks like you need it.”

  “I’ll slow it down.”

  He nodded, and when the buzzer signaled the end of the thirty-second break, he put his gloves back up to his face and blocked my punches.

  When I got back home, I put my boxing bag in my closet and hit the shower, taking my time like I usually did. I was running low on my eucalyptus-and-ginger body scrub and needed to ask Mom for more. When I got out I put on some stretchy pants and a T-shirt. I felt better about the elections—Cooper assured me that I would still win and asked for the millionth time if I was mad at Melanie. “Mad about what?” I’d kept asking as visions of pirates swirled in my head.

  I was trying to do some homework but really just obs
essing about what happened at the assembly, when Melanie called on my cell. I hesitated, and felt horrible even as I hit the reject button.

  I went in search of life in our house. Henry wasn’t in his room, although his backpack sat next to his desk, and Mom’s car still wasn’t in the driveway, even though it was almost seven o’clock.

  Back in the office, I found Dad at the computer. He wore an undershirt and old running shorts, no shoes. He looked over the monitor at me and smiled. “Hey, honey. You have fun at the Nixons’?”

  I nodded. I wondered if he’d left home all day, and if he’d gone back to bed after we’d all left the house that morning. I wondered if he was going to make dinner, or if Henry and I would just get something on our own, like we were doing more and more often these days.

  “What are you working on?” I asked, trying to be hopeful. I’m not sure any of us knew what he did all day—what he’d been doing for two months—but I still held out hope that even if he’d given up the thing he loved most, meaning boxing, he hadn’t given up the thing he needed most, meaning a job.

  Dad smiled at me in his don’t-rat-me-out kind of way and turned the monitor toward me. He’d been playing solitaire.

  “Oh,” I said, overcome with disappointment. Usually when he gave me that look it was because he’d had an actual fight at the gym instead of just working out. “Where’s Henry?”

  “At Simon’s, working on a science project.”

  “When’s Mom coming home?”

  He leaned back in his chair. “Probably in an hour or so. Want to help me get dinner started?”

  “I have homework,” I said, even though I was starving and intended to sneak into the kitchen for some peanut butter and apple slices. He hadn’t even asked about the assembly. Two years ago, on the morning of my first assembly speech, he’d gotten up early and made me whole wheat pancakes for good luck.

  “Well, y’all holler if you need anything. Okay, honey?”

  He smiled at me, that smile that used to tell me there was nothing to worry about.

  I went back to my room, shut the door, and clutched Paddy.

  The next morning I waited for Melanie at the usual corner. Butterflies raced through my stomach, wondering how the elections would play out. If I was honest with myself, I knew that, way deep down, I would probably still win. But with Melanie’s exciting performance, and the general lack of enthusiasm for the council in general, I had some major doubts.

  At least Melanie was treating the day the same as always—she trotted out of her house just as the school bus pulled up, wearing a brown men’s derby with a small pink flower she had plucked from her yard tucked into the band. Seeing her look so pretty, fresh, and relaxed put a smile on my face. As she took her breezy time walking to the bus, I realized how immature I’d been last night by screening her call.

  “So,” Melanie began, “you okay about yesterday?” We sat in our usual seat near the front. “I tried to call you last night. Did you get my message?” I could tell she was eyeing me closely, trying to gauge my mood. When I didn’t get Ms. Jenkins’s approval last year to eliminate home ec in lieu of sex ed, I got so red-faced angry that Melanie literally backed out of my room and walked a path around me for two days.

  Before I could answer Melanie, something pelted me in the back of the head. We turned around to see Robbie Cordova with the most blatantly innocent look on his face as he concentrated on staring out the window. Melanie reached under the seat, and when she opened up her palm, she asked, “Oh, hey. Did you get one?”

  The dreaded pirate pencil topper.

  Melanie and I looked at each other, and I could feel my pulse quicken. She readjusted her derby hat, then turned back to Robbie and said, “Why do you even have one of these? It’s not like you know how to write.” But he only howled with laughter.

  “Anyway.” Melanie sighed. “I totally thought Mrs. P was going to start foaming at the mouth or something at the assembly.”

  As she went on to tell me how she’d gotten the freebies (her dad, a marketing guy, had them left over from an event and Melanie called his secretary to bring them in), I tried to think of her as I hadn’t yesterday—as an opponent. I knew that, just like in boxing, you should never underestimate your opponent. I started to wonder if I had underestimated Melanie. It’s not like I was her only friend. There were a couple of girls she hung out with at least as much as me. I guess I had wanted to think of her as my comrade in arms, but the truth was, Melanie worked in her own world, one that was fun and friendly and open. I wondered, not for the first time, if the students could accept me for being so serious all the time. But just like Melanie’s breezy attitude made her who she was, my studious ways made me who I was.

  At least, that’s what my mom always said.

  I didn’t want to be mad at Melanie because she had only done what I asked—more or less. I knew that I was a little jealous—no, envious—of her ability to be spontaneous and laugh things off. I figured it was something she’d worked pretty hard to learn to do since her mom passed away.

  Melanie’s mom died when we were in fourth grade, before she and I became friends. Cooper and I had never known anyone who died, or anyone who knew anyone who’d died. We wanted to stare at Melanie in the halls and in class to see what a person who had lost a parent looked like. Would she break down and cry at any moment? Was she bitter, and would she soon turn into a bad girl? Could you tell just by looking at her that she didn’t have a mom anymore? The truth was, there weren’t any signs written on her face. She was out of school for a week and came back the next Monday. Maybe we did all stare at her too much, because by Wednesday she was gone again for the rest of the week. After that she came back again, wearing a pink camouflage military hat pulled low over her eyes, but she was smiling. I even saw her laughing between classes with her sister, Beverly.

  I didn’t become friends with her until last year, even though we lived so close to each other. Melanie and her sister, Beverly, who was two years older, were always close, but after their mom died, they became inseparable. No one at our school could get through their force field. They walked to class together and sat alone together at lunch. Last year, though, Beverly moved on to high school, leaving Melanie behind. Melanie had other friends, like Rose Andreas, who was in my homeroom (along with Robbie Cordova), but I wasn’t really friends with them. Rose didn’t ride the bus, and with Beverly in high school, Mel sat alone. One morning I asked if she wanted to sit with me. I wouldn’t have thought we’d become such good friends—Melanie is the type of girl who always says yes, whereas I liked to think of the pros and cons of things, but I think that her willingness is part of what I liked about her. Still do, actually.

  We were almost at school when I took a deep breath and asked her the question that’d been nagging me. “Hey, Mel? Do you want to be president?”

  For a moment I thought she was going to say yes—something about the way she darted her eyes at me. But she said, “God, no! It seems totally boring. No offense,” she added. “Besides, I feel like I’m already so swamped with school that I wouldn’t have time anyway.”

  “Well, do you want to be vice president?” I didn’t want her to want what I wanted, but I wanted her to at least want what she wanted—even if I did sort of orchestrate the whole thing. If that makes sense.

  “Oh, sure,” she said. “Being the veep sounds like fun. Plus there’s no, like, real responsibilities, right?”

  “There are some responsibilities,” I said. “It’s not a total cake thing.”

  She waved her hand and said, “It’ll be fun.”

  As the bus pulled into school, I had a sinking feeling that maybe, just maybe, things weren’t going to turn out the way I’d planned.

  In first-period algebra, everyone seemed like they were having a grand ol’ time working out their quadratic equations—probably because everyone’s pencils were topped with a pirate. Even Lily Schmidt, who had apparently gained some confidence from her six-word speech yesterday
(“I’m Lily Schmidt. Vote for me.”), turned around and told me, “I nabbed an extra if you want one.”

  In homeroom, I thought about how I should react, both if I won and if I didn’t. Gracious, either way. I figured I would smile if I didn’t win, maybe even shrug in a sort of, What can you do? kind of way. And if I won, maybe I should put my hand to my chest, bow my head, and mouth, Thank you.

  When our principal finally came on the speaker, my heart pounded—I was more nervous than I thought I would be. I realized at that moment that I did care whether or not I won—a lot. I wanted to win. I had to win. Who was I if I didn’t win?

  “Attention all Blue Jays,” Ms. Jenkins began. “I have the student council election results I know you’ve all been waiting for.” I looked around the room and saw Rose Andreas giggle and roll her eyes. I wondered what Melanie had said to her about running for vice president, and if maybe Rose told her she was wasting her time.

  “Let me just begin by saying that this year’s election was the closest presidential election in the entire history of our student council. I believe that all our candidates deserve our thanks for giving us such a rousing election this year.” I kept my face forward and tried to hold what I thought was a pleasant, slightly curious expression on my face.

  “Let’s not delay another moment,” Ms. Jenkins continued. “Here are this year’s student council officers! Beginning with treasurer—Jared Hensley!”

  “Ah, yeah.” Robbie laughed. “He’s going to party away the money.”

  “Student council secretary belongs to . . .” Ms. Jenkins paused for effect, like she was naming the top ten in the Miss America pageant. “Cooper Nixon!”

  I wanted to burst out clapping for my best friend, but managed to hold back. I knew people would vote for Coop, and I was so excited to get to work with him on council. This was going to be the best year yet. If I won, I had to remind myself.