Chapter Eight

Part 3

“Point, Sharpe! Match, Sharpe!”

The referee grabbed my wrist and pulled it into the air, declaring me the winner of the penultimate fight in the match. I grinned as I fought for breath, but instead of the round of cheers and applause I was expecting, I was accosted by shouts, jeers and boos. Apparently the Hereford and Coakley Academy karate fans had yet to be ushered into the twenty-first century. Girls weren’t supposed to beat guys twice their size. To them, it was unfathomable.

I glanced at my opponent and he bowed to me quickly, but I could tell he was abased. He ran back to the bench, head down, and I knew he felt that by losing to me he had been permanently cast in a pejorative light. Guys have such frail egos.

Oh, well. I thought he was an adroit and nimble fighter. If that wasn’t enough for him, that was his problem.

I headed back to the bench, and Marshall reached out to slap hands with me as he got up to take the mat. It was an unexpected gesture and it buoyed me a bit as I took a seat next to my teammates. The crowd exploded with shouts of adulation as Marshall readied himself for his fight.

“Nice work,” Curtis said. He held a washcloth against a laceration over his eyebrow, but still managed to grin as he congratulated me.

“Is it any better?” I asked him. He’d suffered the injury in the first round and had been bleeding ever since.

“Eh. It’ll be fine,” Curtis said. “I almost hope it scars. Girls think scars are sexy.”

“If you say so,” I replied with a laugh. At least someone around here still knew how to laugh. Between Cheryl, Danielle, Jon, Marshall and the ever sober faculty, I’d been starting to think there was some kind of mystical pall over this school making everyone miserable.

The whistle blew, and down on the mat, Marshall assailed his opponent with a series of deft blows. The guy retreated right out of the circle and Marshall was awarded a point.

“This should take about five seconds,” Curtis said under his breath.

But it wasn’t over so quickly. After the first setback, Marshall’s opponent retaliated with frenzied and strong blows, raining slices, chops and kicks on Marshall like a man possessed. Marshall balked at a few, but took the brunt of most of them. Everyone in the crowd recoiled every time Marshall got hit, and Curtis appeared to be baffled by his friend’s lackluster performance. Clearly this was not Marshall’s finest hour.

Still, after about ten minutes the points were even. Marshall still had a shot, but he appeared to be winded. He even made the mistake of bracing his hands on his knees during a quick timeout. If there was one thing I knew was a bad idea, it was showing your weakness. I was taught to do everything I could to appear at the pinnacle of strength, even if I felt like I was about to keel over.

The whistle blew again and Marshall met his man in the middle of the circle. I gasped as I saw the uppercut coming, but Marshall was looking the other way. The guy’s hand collided with Marshall’s chin, and there was a resounding crack as Marshall was taken off his feet. He slammed into the ground and the ref called the fight. Marshall was down—points to Leffers. Match, Leffers.

From the reaction on the Hereford side of the bleachers as the ref raised this Leffers kid’s arm into the air, you’d think Marshall’s loss was a calamity. There was booing, the ref was cursed out of the gym and half the school was clamoring to see whether Marshall was okay. This guy really was like a deity around here.

Marshall waved off his concerned citizens, and gradually the spectators began to disperse. Some of them crowded around the bench to congratulate us. (Even with Marshall’s loss, we had won the match.) I saw Marshall heading for the locker room and excused myself from the crowd, wanting to keep an eye on him.

I climbed the bleachers, trying not to be too conspicuous, and pretended to busy myself with packing up my bag. It wasn’t as if I expected him to do anything right at that moment, but I figured I should watch him when I had the chance. Just before he got to the locker-room door, David Rand broke away from a crowd that was hanging out beneath the raised basketball net and walked over to Marshall.

I froze. I couldn’t help it. I thought David hated Marshall, but the two of them bent their heads together in dialogue as if they had something pressing and quite secret to talk about.

Then—and I know I didn’t imagine this—the two guys slapped hands and in the process, Marshall passed a few bills over to David, and David quickly pocketed them. Then David strolled back to his friends as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

Suddenly I felt as if I had hit the nadir of my existence. What did this mean? Was Marshall buying drugs from David? How else could a circumspect transaction like that be construed? If only I’d had more time to study that list on David’s computer. I couldn’t recall whether Marshall’s name had been on it or not.

Okay, David has a list of students with dollar amounts next to them and now Marshall is paying him off. This obviously looks very bad for David.

So did this mean Jon was innocent? And if so, what was that box he was so careful to conceal in the post office? Plus Jon and Marshall had had a clandestine meeting the other night, and Marshall had been tense when I asked him about it. Was Marshall somehow the linchpin in all this? Were all three of the suspects involved?

I sat down hard on the bleachers, my mind oscillating from one guy to the next. Each second I was convinced another one of them was guilty. One thing was for sure, though—I was dealing with three equally mendacious people. How was I ever going to get to the truth if I couldn’t trust anything any of them said?

“Come on, Ronnie, get your stuff and let’s go,” I heard a woman’s voice behind me. “I told Donny we’d call him and let him know how you did.”

I glanced over my shoulder and instantly recognized Mrs. Burke, the mother of Donny Burke, a karate badass who’d taken the trophy in his division in every championship I’d been to in the last three years. I had never met her, but we all knew who she was. She was infamous for fighting with officials and coaches—a total stage mom. She was talking to a freshman who had to be Donny’s little brother. My heart dropped into my sneakers. Had she seen me fight? Had she recognized me?

I saw David break away from the group again and head in my direction. I shoved my feet into my sneakers and stood up without tying them. If Mrs. Burke talked to me while David was there, I was dead.

“Hey!” David said as I half-tripped down the stairs. “Nice match! If I ever need a bodyguard I’m calling you.”

“Great. I’m there,” I said, my heart pounding. I refused to look behind me. “I’m starved. How about another grilled cheese?” I asked, grabbing his arm and spinning him toward the door.

“You okay?” David asked as we hustled across the gym.

“Yeah, just really hungry,” I said.

A group of kids from Coakley were gabbing in the doorway, blocking our progress. Didn’t they know this was a matter of life or death?

“Excuse me!” I said, trying to wedge my way out of the gym. “Coming through!”

I tried to step over someone’s leg and my sneaker got caught and came off. Before I could stop myself I went flying forward and sprawled out on the floor of the hallway. My knee exploded with pain. All the Coakley kids cracked up laughing as they finally moved on from the door.

“Kim! Are you okay?” David asked, dropping down at my side.

At that moment Mrs. Burke and her son Ronnie stepped through the door and noticed me. Mrs. Burke did a double-take. I closed my eyes and moaned. I was done for.

“Oh . . . hello,” she said. She still looked confused, like she couldn’t place me. If I could just get out of here before she figured it out . . . . I struggled to my feet, my knee protesting with freshly bruised pain.

“Uh, hi. I gotta go put some ice on this.” I started to turn away.

“I’m sorry, but you just look so familiar to me,” Mrs. Burke said, stopping me in my tracks. My stomach turned. “Have I seen you compete before?”

David was supporting me with one arm, looking back and forth between me and Mrs. Burke with interest. I wanted to hurl. This scenario could be devastating.

“I don’t think so. I just moved here from California,” I said.

“Really?” The woman wasn’t about to give up so easily. “I was at the county finals last year with my elder son, Donny Burke? He’s at UConn now, but I could have sworn I saw you fight there.”

“Mom? Can we go?” Ronnie semi-whined at her side.

Yes! Thank you, Ronnie! Get the hell out of here!

“There were a few girls who participated,” the woman continued. “Ronald, doesn’t this girl look like the one from the county championships last year?”

Ronald glanced at me. “I don’t know, Ma. I wasn’t there, remember? I was getting my braces.”

“Well, it wasn’t me,” I said. “There are a lot of girls in the martial arts these days. It must’ve just been someone who looks like me.”

I had to concentrate to keep from looking at David to see if he was digesting all of this. Of all people to question my identity in front of, it had to be the most suspicious guy in the Western Hemisphere.

“I suppose you’re right,” the woman said. “I wasn’t wearing my glasses that day . . . .”

“See? There you go!” I said, adjusting the strap of my bag on my shoulder. “Well, nice meeting you!”

Then I turned around, grabbed David’s arm and steered him around the corner.