Chaos Theory Read online

  “Good.” Sensei calls out. “It’s about time you were pushed, Kami. Do it again, face-to-face.”

  The room goes quiet and the sound of the air rushing in and out of my chest is all I hear. Sensei can’t be serious. Yes, we practice routines like that—the katas becoming a duet dance, each a mirror image of the other, but never with someone new to class. When every movement is meant to maim and kill, it isn’t something you do without a ton of trust. Trust Drug Guy? No way.

  This drug creep threatened me when I was alone. If he wants to have an accidental misjudgment of distance or timing—well, say knockout. Only the look of terror that flashes across the guy’s face eases my worry. My breath is a steam engine; my movements can easily go astray. If I drop one on him, no one will question if it’s on purpose or not.

  “Now.” Sensei barks. He begins the rhythm and it isn’t any slower than before. We bow and fall into the routine with caution. As we progress, mirroring each other’s movements, the deadly strikes flow inches from each other’s faces and bodies. I think we both feel exhilarated. I am. My old sparring partner moved to Colorado last spring. It’s been months since my body’s been pushed this hard. It feels good, really good.

  When it’s over, with chest heaving and legs quivering, I bow to Drug Guy and grin at Sensei. Sparring matches with this guy won’t be fun, but there’s no question that he’ll be my unwilling partner. He’ll push me. He’ll make me better.

  I shower fast, throw on my school clothes, and dash for my car. An unpredicted light snow drifts down. Crap. I never leave town if it’s going to snow; Mom and Dad will be freaking.

  In the parking lot, Drug Guy is standing next to a tank-shaped man who looks like a comic book heavy, complete with no neck and red beefy hands. Tank’s loading up elementary kids into his silver minivan, scrawny Dōgi pant legs sticking out beneath parkas. Once the kids are tucked in, my new sparring partner shakes the guy’s hand, palming a piece of paper into his. The minivan takes off, while Drug Guy heads for a red Ford Mustang—classic model. As he opens the door, he scans the parking lot, sees me, and freezes.

  We stand like that, each with our hands on car door-handles. Like heaven’s sending a warning, the light snow converts to giant clumps. Through the lacy curtain, I nod. In unison, we each open our car door and get in. Hands shaking, I insert my key and rev her up. Drug Guy starts his car too and pulls in behind me. Exiting the interstate and stressed out over the snow and the creep at my back, I monitor my rearview mirror as he tails me through the city streets. I park in my driveway—my home. He knows where it is now. The falling snow has dumped four inches or more.

  ***

  After that workout, sleeping like the dead should have been easy; instead, life bounces at me. First, Drug Guy threatened me—again? Second, Chaos experiment—logic brain says, scrap it. I’d scoured the Internet all week for a formula to interpret the data—none, nada, zip. All that work this fall is useless.

  When the alarm goes off, I grab the first thing in the closet, make a NASCAR pit stop in the bathroom, and head down to breakfast.

  “You look tired. Everything okay?” Mom radar is incredible. That would make a great science project, but there’s probably not a formula for that either.

  “Things are weird right now.”

  Behind his propped-up computer tablet, Dad reads one of his journals. I love the smell of his coffee. Mornings aren’t mornings without the bitter aroma. “Weird how?”

  I chew on eggs and organize my thoughts. Exactly which weird do I share, Drug Guy or my going-nowhere science project? Snap decision. “I blew my science project. It’s not going to work.”

  “Why not?” Dad keeps reading.

  “There’s no formula to plug my data into.”

  Dad leaves his tablet to eye me. He waits for me to elaborate, sipping his coffee.

  “It’s Chaos Theory in a five-by-one-by-one-foot box.”

  Dad snorts and coffee almost blows out his nose cause he coughs and wipes at it. Mom stops behind me.

  “A locker?” he asks and laughs so deep in his chest that I swear the table shakes.

  Behind me, I hear Mom set the frying pan on the stove. “You’re working on chaos theory in a locker?”

  “Not anymore. If I can’t plug the data into a formula, it’s over.”

  Dad stops laughing. He looks over my head at Mom, sharing the parent look. Mom’s irritating birdsong clock chirps. She sits down in the chair next to me with her tea. Mom likes her tea hot or not. She sips it all day long as the huge traveling mug cools. Maybe I can do a science project on taste buds and scent. That’s cool. Why do some people like coffee and others tea? How fast can I collect the data?

  Dad doesn’t stick his head back into his tablet or drink his coffee. “Just because an experiment fails doesn’t mean you throw it out. You worked on this all fall?” He pauses before “fall” like the time frame means something.

  “Yeah, but the judges will laugh like Sandy does.” I mimic what they might say: “Did you see the wacky girl’s messy locker experiment?”

  Dad pushes. “People laughed all through history at scientists, but they risked more than ridicule. Scientists have been ostracized, harassed, and killed pursuing their ideas.”

  “Dad, I’m not Galileo or Kepler. If the science isn’t out there, it’s not going to work!”

  Dad backs off and Mom steps in, playing parent tag. She’s the real scientist. Mom’s an astronomer; Dad’s in social science—the head kind of social science. “Formulas come from someone. They are discovered.”

  Boxed in, which is their intent, I carry my empty plate to the sink. “Not by a high school student. If great minds are stymied after years of work, there’s no chance I’m going to solve chaos theory before the competition.”

  Mom strikes like a cobra. “Well, it’s about time you pushed yourself, Kami. You’ve always gone the easy route. Collecting data and inserting it into someone else’s work isn’t breaking new ground, it just confirms theirs.”

  Arghhh! First Sensei and now Mom telling me I don’t push myself hard enough! “It works! I win. Last year, I won regionals. Remember? Locker chaos is going to be a big freaking zero. MIT doesn’t give scholarships for zeros.”

  Dad handles me when I get hot. “The school money is there. Your grandmother’s will left…”

  I slam the washed plate onto the counter. “It’s not about what Grandma left.” Reeling in my anger, I say with a lot less heat, “It’s not about the money. It’s about being noticed by the right schools!”

  Dad lets out one of his infinitely patient sighs, but he doesn’t bring up Grandma again, which is wise. I still don’t handle Grandma’s death well. “We’ve had this discussion before. Do what you want to do with your project, but don’t toss it out because you fear failure.”

  Mom jumps in again, boxing me once more. “Research is for research’s sake. You’ve no idea what you will discover if you never try.”

  I look out the kitchen window, dry my plate, and slip it into the cabinet with the others, thinking and thus ends the lesson. That’s what the minister says after reading the gospel; that’s her exclamation mark on what we’re supposed to learn—my chaos locker study won’t be an exclamation mark. It’ll be a dot, dot, dot. As in…

  Outside, unpredicted snow falls again, but this time the little snowflakes are sparkly ice crystals. My thoughts bounce: Daniel pushing my body to keep up and then following me home, a damn locker filled with crap, and chaos theory’s premise that a tiny flutter of butterfly wings in Brazil can cause a tornado in Texas.

  ***

  Super early, I pull EB into a front school parking space and grab my backpack, stuffing empty garbage bags into my jeans’ back pocket. The bags hang out like guts from a disemboweled carcass, mirroring my feelings exactly. I head straight for locker 224, drop my backpack, and stand there.

 
; Finally, I yank out a plastic bag and open the locker. Honeysuckle and sage blast memories into me. I absorb them, letting them pinball rocket through my mind.

  As they fade, I stare into the locker. It has an odd symmetry. To anyone else it looks ugly; to me it’s a gold mine. Several times, I reach in to shove stuff into the garbage bag. Each time, my hand comes out empty, smelling of Grandma and bringing memories—driving her to chemo and radiation treatments, hours of reading to her, trips to the bathroom for her to barf, trips to the ER, and...

  I stick the garbage bag back into my jeans pocket and grab my smartphone, swiping through images of my locker’s creation. There’s no rotting food in there. The only smells are those hit-me-in-the-chest flower scents. Only worthy things have been added. Somewhere in there is last fall’s band concert program. 3J (Joker Jimmy Johnson) had knocked over his music stand during the 1812 Overture when the little cannon fired. He’d gotten detention. There are two ticket stubs from the musical West Side Story. It had rocked, and so had my date, Trevor Christian, until I caught him sneaking out for a kiss and a cigarette with Deidra Hall—both were inexcusable.

  There are two football tickets from the playoffs. We lost, but Allan Ricks dropped a quick and clumsy kiss on me after halftime. In my locker are graded school assignments and notes from friends. This locker has a majesty no one can understand, but it all has meaning. It is chaos at its best.

  Students fill the halls now, but I just stand with black bags trailing from my jeans pocket.

  “Okay. This is not good.” Sandy says from beside me.

  “What’s not good?”

  “You.” She flutters her hands like butterfly wings. “This. And you’re wearing your comfort clothes.”

  My reply is an intelligent, “Huh?”

  “Your comfort clothes!!! Those jeans are so worn they’ll split if you lean over. And you’re wearing that t-shirt!”

  I look down at the rust and black relic, a vintage Grateful Dead hand-me-down from Mom. It’s faded, comfortable, and too thin. My boobs pop out like raccoons in storm drains after a flood.

  “The guys will eat you up in that.” She reaches in her locker and pulls out her favorite jean jacket with sequins she’d glued all over it. “I’m all for letting the apes ogle you, but when you need comfort, you don’t want to draw male testosterone.”

  I slip on the jacket. “It’s over, Sandy.”

  The smile on her face fades. “What’s over?”

  “My whole damn locker experiment. I have to scrap it and start something new or I’ll never get noticed by MIT.”

  “Ahhhh. That explains the garbage bags? You’re going to chuck the experiment?”

  I nod again.

  She doesn’t whoop with joy, and that surprises me. Instead, she says, “Life isn’t always about scholarships or being noticed by college recruiters.”

  “Now you sound like Mom and Dad.”

  “Well, they’re smart. What did they say?”

  I answer in a boring monotone separated by meaningful pauses. “They say you don’t abandon something because you can’t see the end result.”

  She looks at the locker with the same intensity as me. “And you HATE not seeing the end result, don’t you? How long have you been staring into the abyss?”

  I puff air, blowing my bangs out of my eyes. I didn’t brush my hair this morning. I must look a mess. “Over an hour.”

  “An hour of just staring at it???”

  She puts her hands on her hips and taps one of her new pointed cowboy boots on the floor. Telling her I like them crosses my mind, but I’m too tied up in my failed project.

  She says, “You know what that means, right?” She reaches into her locker and tears a narrow extra-long sheet from a Post-it pad. With a black marker she writes something on it in big block letters, slams my locker shut, spins the combo, and sticks the Post-it on the outside.

  It reads, “Know Your Locker.” She’s right. The mess is staying. Winning isn’t as important as studying that damn chaos locker. “You know, I needed a book out of there.”

  We laugh like fools. The scents of honeysuckle and sage remain undisturbed and buried away.

  Three

  Friday after school, the hallway is a jumble of people, laughter, and talk. Lockers crack open and slam closed. The com system squawks out weekend activity reminders. Sandy has to shout in my ear, “See you at BeeVee’s tonight for food or at pep band?” There’s a home game.

  Someone bumps me and my shoulder hits my locker door. The guy mouths, “Sorry.” The press of people carries him down the hall.

  “Pep band. I’m going to the college library first.”

  Sandy nods and disappears into the crowd. I head for EB. It’s snowing again, but my trusty ride hugs the road like a trooper. Trying not to slide through the turns, it’s like Grandma’s sitting beside me. When I took her to chemo treatments last winter, she’d grip the hand rest and say, “I trust your driving, but go easy on the curves.” Most times, she’d trusted me so much that she’d slam an imaginary brake. I miss her.

  Near the college, students—snow or not—plow across the roads, ignoring traffic. They’d be heading home for Friday night pub crawls. The library will be a ghost town. Even better, the nearby parking spaces would be empty.

  As I inch to the library intersection, his red Mustang passes me on the right and then cuts back in front of me. Damn it, Drug Guy in my private space again?

  Surprisingly, he doesn’t turn toward the library, but continues straight. Making a snap decision, I follow him. There are two cars between us. Cemetery Hill is a dangerous slide down toward the town center. I peer through the crystal snow with windshield wipers sweeping and count three cars now separating us. The drug-dealer-who-killed-his-half-sister passes under the railroad viaduct and turns left into the city park and then into an immediate T-intersection. He takes another left and pulls into a parking space. Turning in the opposite direction, I find the farthest parking spot possible, slide down in the seat, and peek at the rearview mirror. He pulls out a skateboard from his trunk and climbs the slight rise to cross Sixth Street, heading for the covered skateboard park.

  Why spy on Drug Guy? I get out of the car and hike through six-inch-deep snow, glad for my boots. Rejecting his straight path, I head for the bike path that runs along the river’s edge. Opposite the railroad viaduct, it passes under the Sixth Street Bridge and curves back toward the skate park. Fifty yards from the concrete dome, I cut into the heavily scented pine trees.

  The skate park is known as Broken Bone. On its official opening day, no less than twelve bones were broken. Shocked, the city leaders hastily set a rule requiring users to wear knee, wrist, elbow pads, and helmets. The rules are frequently ignored, as are the ones forbidding smoking. On summer evenings, there’s usually the sweet smell of weed. Today, it’s freezing. The skateboarders, a mixture of high school, college, and dropouts, grouped together inside, near the heating pillars.

  Drug Guy strips his coat off, hops on his board—without pads—and begins sweeping the skate bowls. After some easy moves, he shifts to complex ones. Boarders stop to watch him and nod approval. Isolated from the others, three guys glower on the sidelines. I don’t recognize their ugly mugs.

  Shivering in the cold, I watch Drug Guy finish his run. He scoops up his board with a practiced hit of his foot and it flies into his arms. He nods slightly toward the three brutes.

  Like it was choreographed, Drug Guy puts on his coat and joins them. Together, they head toward my hiding place near Joint Row. I scramble back into the pine trees. If they come far enough along the path, they’ll see my footprint trail. Luckily, they stop, but only ten feet from my present position. I freeze.

  Goon One pokes his finger into Drug Guy’s chest, who doesn’t back down. Daniel talks, but Goon isn’t listening. Then Daniel reaches into his pocket and pulls out a sma
ll baggie. Goon gets angrier.

  Surprise. Surprise. Drug Guy’s dealing drugs. Without warning, the creeps jump him. Three on one, but they’re slow and awkward. Drug Guy has his martial arts training. He drops the baggie and his skateboard, lifts his arms into a defensive position, settles back on his left foot—and slides on the snow, falling forward. His arms flail and Goons Two and Three punch his stomach as he goes down.

  The hit crew is practiced. They’ve done this before. Daniel doubles over and collapses into the snow as Goon Two lands a hard kick into his rib cage causing him to scream and curl up as boots drill into him like jackhammers.

  Think. Think. Think. There has to be a way to stop this.

  I yell to an imaginary pack of friends, “Come on! It’s this way,” following it with a long laugh. It works. The goons race for the skate park.

  The whole attack took seconds—the longest seconds of my life. As soon as they are out of sight, I run to his side. He’s in a fetal ball, clutching his sides. Blood pours from his nose.

  “Oh God, Daniel.”

  He opens an eye. “What are you doing here?” A groan chokes off his words.

  “Saving your butt. How bad is it?”

  “Not good.” With a grunt and a heave, he tries to get up, but wouldn’t have made it if he hadn’t grabbed my arm. He staggers to his feet.

  “Idiot! Lie back down. If you have a broken rib, it can punch a hole in your lung. I’ll call an ambulance.”

  “No!” He death-grips my arm. “No ambulance. I’m not dying.”

  “Bullshit.”

  Then he adds the most gut-wrenching plea. “Please.”

  “Don’t be stupid.” But his agonized plea does it. Somewhere along the line something has switched and Drug Guy is now Daniel.

  “It’s important, Kami. Just get me to the ER.”

  God, what am I doing? He’s a drug dealer. But he’s hurt. “Okay. My car’s by the river. It’s faster to go by the skate park instead of around and under the bridge.”