Shinzo Thornstep's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Shinzo Thornstep had three weeks left to learn how to fight, and he was already bleeding from the knuckles. He drilled his forms in the strip of dirt behind the school shed, on a thin padded square he carried in his backpack every morning. He set it down in the same spot each afternoon. Punch. Step. Block. The bully who ran the front lawn did not know Shinzo trained. That was the only advantage Shinzo had left, and he meant to keep it until he could use it. The bully held court on a wide competition mat dragged out under the oak each lunch. It was black and yellow, stitched at the edges, big enough for two grown men to wrestle on. Younger kids paid him a snack to cross it. Older kids paid him quiet. Last week he had grabbed a sixth grader by the collar and snapped his glasses in half on his knee. Shinzo had picked up the cracked lenses afterward and put them in his jacket pocket. He still carried them. He touched them sometimes, the way other kids touched a lucky coin. Today he meant to walk onto that mat and call the bully out. He had told himself he was ready. He had told himself respect only came face to face, and the bully only respected what got proven in front of him. He tested it first behind the shed. He ran his front kick combination at half speed and it was clean. He ran it at full speed and his back foot slid. His elbow dropped. His knee wobbled on the landing. He did it again. Worse. His hands shook from the grip work he had done before homeroom. The padded square under his feet felt smaller than it had that morning. He punched the air four more times and his shoulder gave a small, wrong pop. He stopped. He sat down. He took the broken glasses out of his pocket and looked at the cracks in the lenses and pictured his own face in them, on that yellow mat, in front of the whole school. He would lose. Not bravely. Not in a way that earned anything. He would be folded up and laughed at, and after that there would be no quiet training behind the shed, because the bully would know to look for him. Shinzo packed the mat into his bag and walked past the oak without stopping. He went straight to the dojo. The wide wooden doors were open and the inside smelled like floor wax and sweat. A shirtless wrestler was inside bragging to no one in particular about an avalanche he was going to drop on somebody. Shinzo waited for him to finish a sentence and stepped past him. He found his sensei at the back wall and bowed low and said the thing he had promised himself he would handle alone. He said there was a boy at school, and he needed help.