You little," he spat, abandoning any pretense of control. He lunged. It was an ugly, desperate charge, his heavy arms swinging in wide, chaotic arcs. He threw a massive right cross, putting all 200 lb of his suburban rage behind the glove. Holland watched the punch materialize.
The dropped shoulder, the flared elbow. The telegraph was so loud it was practically screaming. She didn't block it. Blocking a 200-pound teenager when you weigh 95 pounds is bad physics. Instead, she slipped inside the punch.
The rough leather of his glove grazed the hair on the back of her neck as it sailed harmlessly over her shoulder. Now she was entirely inside his guard. The smell of spearmint gum and stale perspiration was suffocatingly thick. Trent's momentum carried him forward, his ribs completely exposed. Holland planted her heels, grounding herself onto the concrete subfloor beneath the cheap foam mats.
She fired a short, compact left hook directly upward, driving her knuckles deep into the soft tissue just below his right rib cage, the liver. It wasn't a punch designed to break bone. It was a strike designed to shut down organs. The fist sank into his abdomen with a muffled thud. Holland felt the resistance of his abdominal wall cave.
She immediately followed it with a right elbow, snapping the joint upward in a tight vertical arc, catching the underside of Trent's jaw. His teeth clicked together audibly. Trent's body simply stopped functioning. The liver shot drained the oxygen from his blood, causing a systemic, involuntary shutdown of his nervous system. His hands dropped to his sides.
His eyes rolled up slightly, showing a crescent of white, and his knees folded like cheap card tables. He collapsed straight down. He hit the mat with a heavy, unceremonious thud, curling immediately into a tight fetal position. He wasn't screaming. He couldn't.
He was paralyzed by a deep radiating agony, his mouth open in a desperate, silent attempt to draw air into lungs that refused to expand. Holland stood over him. She didn't feel like a champion. She didn't feel a surge of heroic vindication. She just felt deeply, profoundly tired.
Her knuckles ached, the side of her ear still burned from his earlier cheap shot. She looked down at Trent, watching the sweat bead on his forehead as he gasped for air, his embroidered black belt twisted uselessly around his waist. A sharp, ugly spike of self-loathing pierced her chest. She had let him drag her down. She had let a loud-mouthed amateur break her discipline, provoked by a fragile ego and a bad day.
Her old instructor back home would have made her do knuckle push-ups on raw hardwood until her hands bled for losing her temper outside a tournament setting. "Hey, hey. " Graham's voice finally shattered the silence. The instructor was sprinting across the mats, his bad knee forgotten. He skidded to a halt next to Trent, dropping his clipboard. It clattered loudly against the vinyl.
"What did you do? " Graham yelled, looking from Trent's agonizing curled form to Holland's blank, pale face. "What the hell did you just do? " The other students finally broke their paralysis, crowding around, their faces a mixture of horror and bewildered awe. Miller, the gangly black belt, who had been mocking her earlier, stared at Holland as if she had just grown a second head. He rushed her. One of the blue belts muttered from the back, his voice small.
He tried to hit her real hard and she just she just stepped inside. "Call an ambulance. " Someone else whispered. "He just got the wind knocked out of him," Holland said. Her voice sounded strange in her own ears. Dry, raspy.
"It's a liver shot. He'll breathe in about 20 seconds. Give him space. " Graham looked up at her, his face flushed with panic and indignation. You're a white belt. You're 14.
How do you know that? Are you crazy? I could call the cops for assault. He hit me first. Sensei, Holland stated, pointing a single bruised finger at her red, swollen ear.
During a drill, you were watching your phone. Graham opened his mouth to argue, but the words died in his throat. He looked at the heavy bags, at the peeling mats, at Trent, who was finally beginning to draw shallow, ragged, weeping breaths. His face pressed against the damp vinyl. Holland didn't wait for a dismissal.
The air in the room was suddenly unbearable, choked with the smell of cheap cleaner and panicked sweat. She reached down to the stiff, lopsided knot of her white belt. She untied it with a single pull. The stiff cotton fell away. She uncrossed the oversized lapels of the loaner gi top, slipping it off her shoulders.
Underneath, she wore a simple faded gray t-shirt. She let the heavy white canvas drop to the floor right next to Trent's head. "I won't be coming back on Tuesdays," Holland said quietly. She turned and walked away. The sea of black and blue belts parted for her without a word, stepping back to avoid her path.
She didn't look at the mirrors. She didn't look back at the instructor trying to coax his star pupil off the floor. She pushed through the heavy glass double doors of the dojo and stepped out into the evening air. The transition was jarring. The suffocating heat of the gym vanished, replaced by the cool, damp breeze of an impending coastal storm.
The parking lot smelled of wet asphalt and fast food exhaust from the drive-thru next door. Her mother's dented silver sedan was idling by the curb. The passenger window was rolled down. Her mother sat in the driver's seat smoking a cigarette. Her eyes red rimmed behind large sunglasses despite the fading light.
Holland pulled open the heavy car door and slid into the passenger seat, the cheap fabric scratching against her bare arms. Her mother took a long drag of her cigarette, not turning her head. "Well, did you hit something? Do you feel better? " Holland looked out the window, watching a stray plastic bag skitter across the cracked asphalt. Her knuckles throbbed.
Her ear was hot to the touch. The knot in her stomach, the one that had been tightening since they packed their lives into cardboard boxes, hadn't disappeared, but it had shifted. It felt different now.
Yeah, Holland murmured, leaning her head against the cool glass of the window, letting her eyes slide shut. I feel a little better. The car shifted into gear, pulling away from the strip mall, leaving the buzzing fluorescent lights and the stale vinyl far behind in the rear view mirror.