Knockout Games (2 page)

He'd planned it so we'd arrive just before sunset because that was the perfect moment—Magic Hour. But by the time we got there, we found out the thing was closed due to renovations. Mom was pissed he hadn't checked online. We had a silent dinner, then they decided to head all the way home rather than spend the night in a hotel.

That was the last trip we took together.

“We could go up in the Arch,” I said as we drove by it now.

She didn't even look at it.

We stood in front of our new “home.”

“Wow, a brick house,” I said. If there's one thing I knew about St. Louis, it's that everything was made out of bricks. Every house was brick. Even some of the streets were brick.

“Matches your hair,” she said. A joke.

If the house didn't look abandoned, I might have laughed.

Our area was called Tower Grove. Most of it was filled with these stately old buildings and majestic parks filled with grand old trees. It's just that our street looked like it had missed the parade.

“Do we really have to stay here?” I asked, hoping we could upgrade.

“It was cheap. Right now, that's important.”

We were right in the middle of the city, but you couldn't tell by standing on this block. A lot of the houses had been torn down and the wild grass had taken over the empty lots around it again. Some of the other houses that remained were boarded up, standing alone like random tombstones in an abandoned cemetery.

“Can't Dad pay more? Doesn't he owe us?”

She nodded. “Problem is, he owes the IRS more. If he hadn't . . . spent it, believe me, we wouldn't be staying here.”

By “spent,” she meant gambled away. And not just on football games. I guessed home wreckers too.

We didn't even get the whole house. It was divided up, so we were crammed up in the attic rooms. When we got inside, it smelled musty, like an old museum.

We dragged our stuff inside, piled up the boxes and ate some OK Chinese food. After I set up the blow-up mattress, I locked myself into the extra bedroom and listened to Mom pacing the floor until I fell asleep.

Welcome to St. Louis.

3

It was October. The air was harsh, the streets littered with orange leaves piling up in the gutters. I'd missed the first five weeks of school. From the outside, Truman High looked like one of those Ivy League places—brick towers and stone columns, green grass and big knotty trees surrounding it. Inside had a warm glow to it, the sound of students bouncing off the wood floors and through its creaky hallways.

The metal detector should've been a warning, though.

“Hey, Red!” some girl hissed at me as she passed through security. She gave me a look that said
Good luck with that
—“that” being my whole appearance. She raised her hands in the air and turned around for the security guard. “Ain't you gonna frisk me?” she asked him. The guard ignored her like he'd heard that every morning of his life.

The school was almost all black kids. So not only did my red hair stand out, I felt I was the freak show coming to town. And that was before I had to put on that dumb school uniform. I refused to wear the dress, but the tan pants and white shirt didn't do me any favors.

The metal detector beeped and I had to stand there in front of everyone spread-eagled while that tired old security guy waved his wand over me. It beeped when he passed it over my butt several times. He raised his eyebrows, and I reached into my back pocket where my phone was.

“Can't use your phone in school,” he said.

“It's my first day,” I pleaded. “My mom might need to call me.”

“No calls,” he said. “That's the rule. Make sure it's off or we'll confiscate it.”

“Can I just call my mom to tell her I made it?”

He gave me a look like he was ready to take it right there.

“It's alright,” said a sharply dressed man standing in the middle of the hallway. He acted like he owned the place—dark-skinned, shaved head, goatee. He smiled and shook my hand. “A new face. Welcome to Truman. I'm Principal Evans. Miss . . .?” He waited for me to answer.

“Asher. Erica.”

“Oh, yes,” he said, like he'd been warned. He looked me over, still holding my hand. I could see him calculating in his head as to whether I would be trouble or not. He made up his mind quickly. “Erica. You'll have to play some catch-up here. We've already been in session five weeks now.”

“I know. It wasn't my fault,” I said, looking at the floor.

“Nobody said it was,” he answered. “I'd like you to go see Mr. Jamison during your free period. He'll give you the low-down on what to expect here. Me, I'll tell you what I tell everyone here:
Success onto you
. Reach high, respect yourself, and respect the other students, and we'll get on just fine.”

He told me where my assigned homeroom was and on the way, I nearly ran into a big white giant of a man, standing in the middle of a traffic jam of students. He reminded me of a guard post—towering over everyone else, and had a wall eye which gave him the appearance of looking at two things at once. He had one big eye trained on me, while his other scanned the hallway for trouble. The ID card around his neck said
Mr. Jamison
.

He knew who I was. “I'll be seeing you later,” he barked.

I sat in homeroom, trying to block out all the kids' stares. There was one other white girl in class, but she ignored me for some reason. The teacher pointed to the one empty seat and I thought she said, “There's your destiny.” Then I realized she'd said, “There, next to Destiny,” who was a big girl herself with chestnut skin and a tiny Band-Aid over one eyebrow, like a boxer. She rolled her eyes when she saw me coming her way. When I sat down, she put her hands over my head like she was feeling for heat. She whispered to her friends, “Ooh, this girl on fire!”

Funny.

A couple hours later, I sat in Mr. Jamison's office. It was immaculate—everything in its place, even his perfect crew cut. On his wall was a poster for something called “the Matrix.” It wasn't a movie poster. It showed the different levels of discipline here at the school.

He leaned back in his chair; he was going to tell me a story. “When I came here three years ago, this school was a nightmare. In fact, it was the worst school in the city.” He pointed to a framed newspaper clipping on the wall that said so. “The building was falling apart too—bad lighting and plumbing, overcrowded classrooms, and the bathrooms—they were a noman's-land. Kids were getting bladder infections because they refused go in there for fear of getting jumped.” He leaned forward and smacked a fly that happened to have landed on his desk. “That was before I was brought in.” He picked up the dead fly and dropped it in the trash, then cleaned his hands with hand sanitizer. “I'm what you might call the
bad cop
—though Principal Evans doesn't like the idea of having cops stationed here.”

“
Are
you a cop?” I asked.

He trained one eye on me while the other seemed to wander away. “I'm a specialist. The Discipline Specialist. And hopefully, this'll be the last conversation we'll have. If you find yourself sitting in this chair again, it'll mean you are one step away from being sent to one of the alternative schools.”

I figured
alternative
did not mean groovy liberal arts school.

He was looking over my records from Little Rock. He noticed my grades had dropped a lot in the last two years, so I decided to cut him off. “My parents are getting divorced,” I said, hoping it would explain everything.

He grunted. “This school is filled with single-parent kids,” he said, making clear that was not an excuse. His one eye zeroed in on me. “So what's your story then?”

“Um...”

He was checking out my red hair. “You'll stand out here, but I'm guessing you already figured that one out. If you get bullied, you can see Alice Lee, next door. She's the art teacher, but because we cut so much of the art programs, she's now also the Safe Haven coordinator. She's the good cop. You get picked on, you see her.”

He stood up suddenly, his fists leaning on the table. “But if you act out or get into fights with the other girls, you'll be mine. You act up in this neighborhood, I'll find you. You break the law outside of that, you'll
wish
you had me to deal with. Consider yourself warned,” he said.

I nodded. I already didn't want to see him again.

We had art once a week. That was the first time I met Mrs. Lee. She was always on the move, her long graying hair floating behind her, her big round glasses making her eyes appear like an owl's—bright and laser-focused. But she was no school marm. There was an edge to her. She wore funky self-painted T-shirts with eyes or ears and sometimes mouths on them. She was all about the senses.

She already had her class divided into groups. I quickly found myself standing alone. Three white kids huddled in one corner around their art supplies. I walked over, but they closed ranks and made sure to ignore me. The black kids made up the rest of the groups and I knew I wasn't joining them.

That one black girl from my homeroom, Destiny Jones, had untied her hair and it kind of frizzed out. I couldn't help but gawk. She gave me all kinds of attitude just because I was looking at her. “You got something to say?”

“No.”

“Well maybe you should take a picture. It'll last longer.”

They busted up like that was the first time someone ever said that. I felt I needed to say something back, so I chose “Why don't you?” as my official awesome comeback.

She gave me the stink eye and when Mrs. Lee wasn't looking, pulled out her phone and snapped a picture of me. “That's going on my Facebook page,” she said all snarky, posting it right there. “There's a red giant in my class . . .” she said as she typed.

I looked to Mrs. Lee, who finally caught on and followed my eyes back to Destiny and her phone. “You know the rules: no phones in class. Give it.”

She confiscated the phone and took it back to her desk.

Destiny shook her head at me. “You are so dead.”