by Sarah Deming
MAKE ME A WORLD is an imprint dedicated to exploring the vast possibilities of contemporary childhood. We strive to imagine a universe in which no young person is invisible, in which no kid’s story is erased, in which no glass ceiling presses down on the dreams of a child. Then we publish books for that world, where kids ask hard questions and we struggle with them together, where dreams stretch from eons ago into the future and we do our best to provide road maps to where these young folks want to be. We make books where the children of today can see themselves and each other. When presented with fences, with borders, with limits, with all the kinds of chains that hobble imaginations and hearts, we proudly say—no.
This book is a work of fiction. Although certain real-life figures, events, and locales are portrayed, they are used fictitiously to give the story a proper realistic context. All other characters and events and locales, however, are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2019 by Sarah Deming
Cover art copyright © 2019 by Malin Fezehai
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Make Me a World, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
Make Me a World and the colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
ISBN 978-0-525-58103-1 — ISBN 978-0-525-58104-8 (lib. bdg.) — ISBN 978-0-525-58105-5 (ebook)
Ebook ISBN 9780525581055
Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Chapter Thirty-eight
Chapter Thirty-nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-one
Chapter Forty-two
Chapter Forty-three
Chapter Forty-four
Chapter Forty-five
Chapter Forty-six
Chapter Forty-seven
Chapter Forty-eight
Chapter Forty-nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-one
Chapter Fifty-two
Acknowledgments
About the Author
In memory of
Trendon “Tray” Franklin Grant (1992–2012)
&
Michael Davon Hayden Jr. (1993–2014)
Dear Reader,
No fighting! Playgrounds and classrooms and school gyms across the world post signs that mark one of the primary injunctions of childhood. Parents and teachers and administrators all join in common chorus.
But there are things worth fighting for, and fights worth having.
Gravity Delgado is a young woman, a fighter, who must discover which fights are the important ones.
It seems sometimes that young adult literature is streaked with heroines. There are underestimated leaders who discover that they have real power. There are observant, unnoticed introverts who discover conspiracies. There is also a disturbing trend of bedridden sleeping beauties who wait for quirky princes to discover them, all the while trading sarcastic bon mots.
Gravity Delgado is none of these. She knows that she is a fighter. She has been fighting since she was born. The question for Gravity, and for so many of us today, is not whether or not to fight, but what is worth fighting for.
Sarah Deming, a writer and Golden Gloves champion who splits her time between writing about boxing and coaching and mentoring young people at the gym in East Flatbush that inspired Gravity’s environs, gives us a new kind of heroine in the landscape of young people’s literature. Gravity can take a punch; she can knock you out. But her biggest fights aren’t in the ring—they are with herself.
Christopher Myers
Because the gym had no address, it was impossible to enter into a GPS. The first time Gravity tried to find it, she got lost in the housing projects in Brownsville. Nobody she asked—the policeman, the boy on the bike smoking weed, the lady with the baby carriage—had heard of a boxing gym called PLASMAFuel Cops ’n Kids.
Brownsville was one of the roughest neighborhoods in Brooklyn, but Gravity was not afraid. She was tall for her age and dressed in jeans and a hoodie, and the good part about being half Dominican and half Jewish was that you could pass for different things in different places. She never quite fit in, but she never stuck out too bad either.
On her second trip, she found a dead-end street that sloped downward to a basement entrance of the projects. Above the door, the brown brick wall was painted over with a mural of smiling cops holding boxing gloves and bald eagles. Because it was the lowest place around, all the Styrofoam clamshells, used condoms, and broken headphones people had tossed out their windows were gathered into a drift before the door.
An electric gate blocked the entrance, and a handwritten sign, duct-taped to the front and wet with rain, read “Gym Closed for Funneral.” Gravity reached out to touch the sign and got zapped with an electric shock that sent her flying backward onto the seat of her jeans. Cans of cat food clattered out of her way, and a feral tabby peeked out from under a nearby dumpster and hissed. Gravity hissed back.
The third time she showed up, one of those Access-A-Ride vans was pulled up at the end of the street. An old man rolled off, pulled a dustpan and broom off the back of his wheelchair, and cleared away the rubbish that had accumulated before the gate.
Gravity hurried down the street so she could help him, but he was done before she got there. She watched as he replaced the broom and dustpan in his saddlebags and pulled out several cans of gourmet cat food, which he opened with trembling hands and set down on the sidewalk.
She cleared her throat. “Mr. Thomas? I’m Gravity Delgado. I want to learn to box.”
<
br /> Because Gravity recognized him now. The wheelchair had thrown her off, but the huge hands, callused over the knuckles and gnarled like roots, were unmistakable. She had first seen them in an internet video on how to wrap hands, and she had fallen into a kind of rapture as she watched them wind strips of gauze around a young boy’s knuckles. She had searched the comment thread until she learned that the coach’s name was Jefferson H. Thomas III. When she’d googled him, she had found an article in the Daily News that named this gym and, incredibly, said it was free to train.
He ignored her, fishing a boxing glove keychain out of his fanny pack and raising the electric gate. Gravity wondered if he might be hard of hearing until he grunted over his shoulder, “Careful with the gate. It electrocutes you when it rains.”
Gravity stood in the dark entryway of the long, rectangular space awhile, waiting for him to tell her what to do. The basement air was thick with sweat and leather. It reminded her of the smell of the karate dojo where she used to train as a little girl. She remembered the rush of breaking her first board, the thrill of making her first sparring partner quit.
As Jefferson H. Thomas III zipped around the gym, turning on the flickering overhead fluorescents, details of the room within emerged slowly: fight posters, newspaper clippings, and champions—everywhere, photos of champions. A polished mirror at one end reflected the nine heavy bags stretching in neat rows between the two raised rings.
The old man grunted and pointed to a little table beside the door, which held—alongside a jumble of used mouthpieces and half-empty PLASMAFuel bottles—a logbook with neat columns for boxers’ names, weights, and the times they arrived and left the gym.
Over the logbook hung a sign:
Cops ’N Kids Gym Rules
All Boxer’s Must Sign In, No Exceptions!
No Sagging!!!
No Spitting
No Horse Play
No Cussing
No Kissing
No Kicking The Bag’s
No Loitering, If Your Here, You Must Train!
Mouthpiece And Head Gear Must Be Worn At All Times When Sparring
Flush Commode After Use
These rules were like the Jewish holidays: observed by only a small fraction of the population. Gravity bent to sign her name, noting as she did that the previous day’s page had been filled out in a chaotic fashion. Some entries were complete, like “Kimani Browne, 230 pounds, 3:10–5:30 PM,” which was written in the neatest handwriting Gravity had ever seen, and some kid called Lefty (aka $outhpaw) signed his name in Gothic lettering with one of those art markers that write in liquid silver. Others kids left things blank or scrawled in a way that was totally incomprehensible. Someone had written “THE GREATEST” in huge letters across a whole line.
“Come here,” barked the old man. “Bring that stool.”
Gravity picked up the wooden stool next to the door and walked across the gym to the old man’s wheelchair. She was expecting him to ask her if she had boxed before (she hadn’t, but she would have been a black belt in karate by now if her mom hadn’t been too cheap to pay the testing fees) or why he should train her (she had taken a photo of all the trophies she had won in different sports), but instead he just pointed to a high shelf where a round timer sat, flashing its green work light and counting down from 4:00.
“Change that bullshit to a three-minute round,” he commanded. “Boca don’t know shit about boxing. Tell me how you train boxers to a four-minute clock when they only fight threes?” He shook his head. “That makes slow starters.”
Gravity didn’t understand what he meant or why he was so angry, but he did not seem to require any comment from her. As she climbed up onto the stool and reached for the buttons on the bell, he launched into a long list of this Boca person’s bad qualities, including never cleaning the bathroom, never refilling the watercoolers, hoarding gauze, stealing other people’s boxers, playing annoying Mexican music, and—alarmingly—leaving floaters in the toilet that were “bigger than Butterbean.”
The last image made Gravity so uncomfortable that she wobbled on the stool and had to reach out to steady herself against the wall, but it was papered three-deep in advertisements for PLASMAFuel, which slipped off, sending her careening backward onto the dirty cement floor. The stool clattered into the nearest ring post, shattering.
She bounced back up, ignoring the pain in her tailbone, and stared at the broken stool. Her mother’s voice, high and harsh, echoed in her imagination: calling her a klutz, saying she could not be trusted with nice things. Gravity closed her eyes, trying to banish the shame.
Gravity broke everything sooner or later: letters on keyboards, zippers on jeans, countless pieces of Auntie Rosa’s pottery. She’d had to quit orchestra after she sat on her viola, and she got suspended from fourth grade for breaking a boy’s nose.
She opened her eyes at the unexpected touch of the old man’s hand on hers.
“It’s not how many times you go down,” he said. “It’s how many times you get up.”
His teaching rippled through her mind, and her mother’s voice went away. She committed the words to memory. She would think about them later when she meditated.
She had started meditating in the anger management classes Auntie Rosa paid for after she broke that boy’s nose. Even after the course was over, she had kept meditating, because it made her feel more calm. It wasn’t enough to train your body: a warrior’s most powerful weapon was her mind.
When the old man pulled the dustpan off his wheelchair again and started pushing in the broken stool, Gravity tried to help, but he shook her off with a look so fierce that she backed away.
“How old are you?” he demanded.
“Twelve.”
“Hmm. Tall for twelve. Long arms, too. What do you weigh?”
“The last time I went to the doctor, I was a hundred and six pounds, but I think I grew since then.”
He squinted at her as he dumped the shards of wood in the trash can. Then he rolled over and reached out to grab her arm. She held still and waited to see what he would do.
Up close, he looked even older. His USA Boxing cap hid the hair on his head, but his eyebrows were like fat white caterpillars, and he had little white hairs coming out of his nose and ears. Rivers of wrinkles flowed through his deep brown skin from the corners of his eyes and mouth, disappearing into the folds of his neck. His thick lips were fixed in a perpetual scowl, but it was not a mean scowl, like the ones on the faces of Gravity’s schoolteachers. It was the kind of scowl you make when you have been concentrating very hard for a very long time on something you love.
“How tall are your parents?” he asked.
“Mom says she’s five six, but I think she’s really five three.”
He did not ask about her father, just looked at her sadly for a moment and then nodded. He felt the bones of her wrist. He examined her feet. He poked her in the ribs, making her cough.
At last he said, “You’ll most likely be a lightweight when you’re grown.”
He pulled something out of his fanny pack that Gravity had only seen before in YouTube videos. It was called a cassette tape, and it was the way they played music in the old days. The old man slid the cassette tape into an ancient boom box that sat on one of the ring aprons, and James Brown began to holler.
Before Gravity could ask him what “lightweight” meant, a boy about her age blew in on a bicycle. He was small, dark, and handsome. Gravity recognized him as the boy from the internet video whose hands the old man had been wrapping, but there was something special about him in person that no camera could capture. Narrowly missing the tips of Gravity’s sneakers, he did a wheelie around one of the heavy bags and bounced back down with a whoop in front of Coach Thomas’s wheelchair.
The old man yelled, “No sagging!” and cuffed the boy across the forehead,
knocking off his Steelers cap.
The boy didn’t seem to mind. In fact, Gravity got the feeling that he enjoyed the attention. He slid off the bike and made a show of hitching up his jeans, but they immediately rode down again. As he bent to retrieve his cap, Gravity tried not to look at his boxer shorts, which were printed all over with little hearts, or the smooth inch of warm brown skin just above.
He caught her looking, winked, and said, “Hey, shorty. They call me D-Minus ’cause I’m all you need.”
“Hah!” the old man scoffed. “We call him D-Minus ’cause he’s as lazy as the day is long. Talent like that, it’s a goddamn shame.”
D-Minus adjusted the Steelers cap atop his fade with elaborate care.
“Hi,” she said, extending a hand. “I’m Gravity.”
He gazed at her hand, his deep brown eyes unreadable. Then he looked her over, from her frizzy brown hair to her scuffed Nikes and back up again. Gravity felt herself blush. She let her hand drop to her side, where it clenched into a fist.
“You wanna be a fighter?” he asked.
Was it her imagination that he leaned into the word “you”? As though he was amused by the thought of her wanting to box. As though she didn’t belong in his gym. Gravity felt a flare of anger go off inside her, the way it did sometimes before she broke things on purpose.
