The Big Kahuna (Fox and O'Hare #6)(56)
Everything changed in freshman year. I’d always been a skinny kid, but I was pretty strong and flexible, and during tryouts Coach Johnson saw something in me. Natural ability, you could say. He put me on the wrestling team. There were fifteen of us across five weight classes, and already ranked second in the county even before I joined. What appealed to me about wrestling was the simplicity of it—you didn’t kick a ball or use a racket or wear elaborate gear, and you didn’t depend on someone else to help you score a point. You relied only on yourself, on your own ability. I fell in love with wrestling. Unless I was sitting in class or taking care of my dogs, I was training at the gym.
Coach Johnson taught me a lot, maybe more than anyone has ever taught me before or since. “Remember,” he would say, “what you practice on the mat has to be practiced off the mat. Focus. Speed. Opportunity. FSO. You’ve got to be watchful, quick, and seize any chance you get, because life will rarely give you a second shot.” We won all our matches that season, and got a statewide ranking for the first time in our school’s history. Between my training, my diet, and the fact that I grew a foot during that year, I looked amazing. It sounds conceited to say it, but I don’t know how else to put it: I looked amazing.
By the time I started sophomore year, it was the girls who tried to impress me, by decorating my locker or making playlists for my training runs. One day in biology, Mrs. Barron asked us to split into small groups for a new project she had for us, an illustrated booklet on cellular respiration. I hated group projects because of that awkward moment when everyone chose their friends and I was left scrambling for a partner. But right away someone tapped my shoulder. It was Neil Gilbert, a lame kid with oozing acne on his face. My secret nickname for him was Crater Face. “Wanna do the booklet together, A.J.?” he asked.
“I’m already doing it with Stacey,” I said, and turned back and winked at Stacey Briggs. That was another thing about being on the wrestling team: it had given me some confidence.
“Yeah, we’re working together,” Stacey said, flashing me a smile. She wasn’t quite as pretty as Maddie Clarke, the girl everyone had a crush on, but she had a great personality and was always up for anything. I used to call her Energizer Stacey. She lived up to it, too, because she did all the writing for the project. She made up a cast of characters for the story, like Hermione the Human, Petunia the Plant, Ginny the Glucose, Moaning Myrtle the Mitochondria, and I penciled all the illustrations and inked them in full color. It took me a week, but our project booklet looked like a graphic novel.
I spent a lot of time at Stacey’s apartment because her parents were out of the picture and her brother Lee didn’t mind that she brought me home. He liked that I was on the wrestling team, said that wrestling was part of Greek and Roman culture. “It’s a civilized sport,” he said as he stretched his legs on the coffee table, “not like some of that savage stuff you see nowadays.” He was watching Falling Down on television. It was an early scene, when Michael Douglas walks into a convenience store to ask for change so he can make a phone call to his daughter, but the Korean clerk wants him to buy something first.
“Why doesn’t that guy just give him the change?” Stacey asked as she sat down on the couch next to her brother.
“Because all they care about is money,” Lee told her. “You kids want some popcorn?”
“Not me,” I said.
“Oh, right. You can’t eat junk food.” And he went to the fridge and found me some carrots to munch on while we watched the movie.
It was nice to be around an adult who wasn’t in AARP for a change, someone who didn’t mind doing fun things with me. Sometimes, Lee would take us to concerts in Palm Springs or Riverside or even farther than that, in Orange County. Stacey and I broke up during senior year, but Lee Briggs and I remained friendly. He’d teach me things about Western culture, things I didn’t learn in school, which was pretty neat. When I got to college in Fullerton, I even considered majoring in Classics, but the school closed down the department because of the state’s budget cuts. It was a bullshit excuse, of course, because they didn’t cut Asian-American studies or African-American studies or even Chicano studies. So I ended up majoring in business administration.
It worked out well, in the end, because I started my own business in Irvine. I would have stayed there for good if things had been different, but my mom had Parkinson’s disease and, even though I tried to visit every Sunday, I knew the time would come when I would have to move back home. Her tremors were getting worse; she needed someone to help her with basic things like cooking and cleaning. And my dad, too, he needed help with his business, because he didn’t have as many people working for him anymore. I was married by then and it wasn’t easy convincing Annette to live in the middle of the desert. But that’s what we do for family.
Moving back was a big adjustment. If you liked hiking and rock climbing, or if you were into weird art installations that popped up in the middle of nowhere, then this place was fine. But for someone like me, there were no driving ranges or department stores or even a decent multiplex. After a long day of work at the bowling alley, I still had energy I wanted to burn, and there were no wrestling gyms in town. There was so little to do, really. Which was why I was so surprised to see Nora Guerraoui here. Growing up in this place, all any of us ever wanted was to leave, and yet we both ended up coming back. I would never have guessed it.