Eliza Bing Is (NOT) a Big, Fat Quitter

by Carmella Van Vleet

  As hard as I tried not to, I thought of something else, too.

  I thought about one night, a few weeks after Dad lost his job. By then he’d decided to go back to college. I couldn’t turn my brain off, so I went downstairs to get some water and to warm my blanket in the dryer.

  “What are you doing up so late?” Mom asked me. “Couldn’t sleep?”

  I nodded and plopped down on the couch in between her and Dad.

  Dad had his laptop perched on the armrest. “Whatcha working on?” I asked.

  “My college-application essay.”

  I laid my head down on Mom’s lap and let her stroke my hair while I watched the late-night talk show on TV.

  I don’t know how long I laid there before my eyelids got heavy. I was only half awake when Mom nudged me.

  Then I heard her tell my dad, “You need to go to bed, too. You’re exhausted.”

  “Can’t,” he said. “You know the saying, ‘Losers quit when they’re tired. Winners quit when they’ve won.’ ”

  Mom chuckled. Then she helped me upstairs and tucked me in.

  Losers quit. Dad said so. And Mom had laughed.

  Did that mean they thought I was a loser?

  I stayed in my room until Mom called me downstairs and asked me to clear the table for dinner.

  The whole time I did this, I tried not to look at Mom and Dad. But they weren’t even paying attention to the fact that I wasn’t speaking to them.

  And when it came time to eat, I kept my eyes on my plate. We had spaghetti, no meat, store-brand sauce, and garlic bread made out of old hamburger buns. Again. But that wasn’t the reason I wasn’t eating.

  It’s hard to swallow when there’s a big lump in your throat.

  THE PART WHERE I WAS HIT BY LIGHTNING

  The next day, Mom had the day off. She went grocery shopping early. Sometimes I went with her, but I was still upset about being called a quitter and didn’t go.

  I was sitting in the living room, reading, when I heard the garage door rumble open. Dad walked through on his way to help unload.

  “Eliza,” he said, “please make space for the groceries.”

  I gathered up some old mail and moved it onto the kitchen island, which Dad called the Holding Pen and Mom called the Bermuda Triangle. As I laid the stuff down, I noticed the community-center summer brochure.

  Maybe I’ll tear it into a million pieces, I thought. Or maybe I’ll just crumple it or shove it in the trash and then dump old scrambled eggs on top of it.

  But instead of doing any of these things, I opened the brochure to the Cakes with Caroline page. I guess I just wanted to torture myself one last time by reading the class description:

  Bring those aprons and spatulas and join “Sweet” Caroline McKinny from the hit television show Sweet Caroline Cakes in this basic cake class! We’ll learn how to create scrumptious cakes from scratch and how to decorate them.

  I couldn’t go on reading. It made me too sad.

  But here’s the thing. My eyes jumped to the dates and times and room number of the class and that’s when I noticed something way at the bottom, in parentheses:

  This class will be held again in the fall.

  There was another class!

  Standing there in the kitchen, I got hit with a lightning-bolt idea.

  It was the perfect way to get into the fall cake class with Sweet Caroline and to prove to Mom and Dad I wasn’t a quitter.

  I STRIKE A DEAL

  That night I found Mom and Dad sitting on the deck in Adirondack Chairs.

  “Hey kiddo,” Dad said, popping open a soda. “Nice night, huh?”

  “Yep,” I agreed. And it really was. It was just getting dark and a few fireflies blinked Morse code. Catch-me. Catch-me.

  I settled on the bench across from them and began digging at a splinter in my big toe.

  Mom started to get out of her chair.

  “I got it,” I told her. “It’s just a little one.”

  Mom didn’t move. “Those are the worst kind. Are you sure you don’t need help?”

  I hated the way she treated me like a baby sometimes. “I said I got it,” I told her.

  Mom lowered herself back down. “Make sure you wash your hands and put some antibacterial cream on that after you get it out,” she said. “You wouldn’t believe how many nasty infections we see at the hospital.”

  Here was my opening, the perfect spot to put my plan in motion.

  “What’s the weirdest case you saw today?” I asked Mom.

  “Well, we had this one toddler,” Mom said. She paused then chuckled. “The poor little guy got his hand stuck inside the gum-ball machine at a grocery store. The EMTs couldn’t get his hand out, so they just loaded up the boy and the gum machine and transported them together!”

  “That sounds like something out of a bad movie,” Dad said.

  “Or a really good one,” I said.

  Mom and Dad laughed.

  Then I went for it. “I bet you’ve seen it all, huh, Mom?”

  “Just about,” Mom agreed.

  “I bet you’ve never seen a cake-decorating injury, though,” I said.

  Mom didn’t lose her grin, but her eyes narrowed a bit. “Are you still on that kick?”

  “It’s not a kick,” I told her. “I really want to take the class.”

  Dad spoke up. “Eliza. I’m sorry. We just can’t afford it.”

  Mom jumped in on the act. “You know we had to use savings to pay for Dad’s tuition and—”

  “I heard you,” I blurted out. “When you were in the kitchen last night. You guys said it was because you thought I just wanted to meet Sweet Caroline and that I’d quit like always.”

  Mom and Dad looked at each other.

  Mom sighed and then turned toward me. “I’m sorry you overheard that. And no one said, ‘Like always,’ ” she said gently. “But you have to admit, your track record isn’t great.”

  “What if I proved I wasn’t a quitter?”

  “We don’t think you’re a quitter,” Mom said, “It’s just—”

  Dad interrupted. “Wait. How would you do that?”

  Sweet taffy! I had him!

  “There’s another class in the fall. What if I take Sam’s place in the taekwondo class all summer? And don’t quit. Then will you let me take the next session?”

  Mom studied me a moment. “I don’t know. . . .”

  “But the class is already paid for,” I reminded her. “It wouldn’t cost you a thing! In fact, it’d be like I was saving you money.” (That last part I came up with at the spur of the moment.)

  “Do you really think you’d want to do that?” Dad asked.

  I shrugged. “Sure. It sounds kind of fun.”

  Mom threw up her hands in defeat. “Okay,” she said. “Deal.”

  I blinked a few times. Mom never gives a green light that quickly.

  I jumped up and ran inside before she could change her mind. “Deal!” I called over my shoulder.

  This was great. All I had to do was stick out taekwondo for the summer. How hard could it be? Kick, punch, and yell hi-ya! every once in a while? Things could go back to the way they were supposed to be.

  And Mom and Dad wouldn’t think I was a quitter.

  STUPID

  After I got back inside, I grabbed the phone and dialed Tony’s number.

  “I’m sorry I called you a jerk,” I told him.

  “It’s all right,” Tony said. “Sorry I hung up on you.”

  “Guess what. I think I might be able to take the fall class.” I told him my plan and then asked,“Why don’t you wait? That way we can take it together.”

  “Nah,” he said. “I wanna take it over the summer.”

  Sometimes my mouth works faster than my brain. What happened next was one of those times.

  “You’re stupid!” I said.

  And for the second time that week, Tony hung up on me.

  WAR, BUT NOT THE BAD KIND

  On Friday I f
ound Mom straightening up the kitchen. When she saw me, she held out a pair of scissors.

  “Eliza, honey. Can you please put these away?”

  “Sure.” I told her.

  I pulled open the junk drawer. There was a deck of cards near the front.

  “Hey, Mom. How about a game of War?”

  Mom finished wiping some crumbs off the table and grinned. “Okay! Why not?”

  It’d been a long time since Mom and I had played War. We used to do it all the time before she had to go back to work. It was kind of our thing, and we’d always end up laughing and talking. Mom called it our “kitchen sink” time cause we discussed everything but the kitchen sink.

  Mom shuffled and dealt. Right away I lost a king when we had a war of threes and she pulled an ace.

  “So,” Mom said after a couple of rounds. “Are you looking forward to taekwondo tomorrow?”

  I considered her question. “Yeah. I guess,” I told her. “I liked The Karate Kid.”

  Mom laughed. “Things are never like they are in the movies!”

  I figured she was probably right, but it still kind of annoyed me that she laughed.

  After I won back my king and took the rest of the cards, Mom suggested we make popcorn.

  I wrinkled my nose.

  “Since when do you not like popcorn?” Mom asked.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t like popcorn. But for the last few months, we’d given up the pop-in-the-bag microwave kind and had been making it in brown paper bags instead. Which still, technically, was microwave popcorn since we put it in the microwave to cook. But it wasn’t the same. It was too plain. And weird: No other families I knew made popcorn that way. Mom said it was cheaper, though.

  “I think we’re out of paper bags,” I said. (It could’ve been true.)

  “Then I’ll show you how to make it the old-fashioned way,” Mom said. “I need the popcorn and vegetable oil.”

  It turned out that the old-fashioned way meant putting oil and popcorn in a lidded pot and shaking it over a lit hot-stove burner.

  I was skeptical, but sure enough a few minutes into shaking the pot, I heard the ping ping ping of kernels popping. It smelled heavenly! After Mom dumped the fluffy white popcorn into a bowl, she melted some margarine in the hot pan.

  “This is how me and my friends used to make popcorn when we had sleepovers,” Mom said.

  I tried to imagine what it was like to have a sleepover.

  I had a few friends. Or at least people who were nice to me. But I didn’t have any sleepover friends. There was this one girl when I was in third grade. Naomi. She was in my Jitter Lunch Bunch. She had ADHD, too. The rest of the kids called us the Double Trouble Twins to our faces, but we didn’t care. She gave me half of a best-friends heart necklace. But Naomi’s family moved the following the year, and that was that. Adios muchachos.

  After Tony and I did our Tasty Pastry project, people started talking to me more. Some of the girls even asked me to sit with them at lunch. But I had no idea what was going to happen once I started middle school.

  What if no one liked me? A bigger school could just mean more people who thought I was weird. The teachers could be mean or not give me more time for tests or not let me take a break when I needed to get up and walk around. And the middle school was huge. We had a field trip there once to see a play. It was two stories and had tons of rooms.

  I swallowed hard. “Um,” I said, “so do you think I’ll be invited to sleepovers next year?” I tried to sound like it was no big deal if I was or wasn’t.

  Mom smiled. “Sure! And I’ll make my famous stove-top popcorn,” she said, waving the bowl of warm, buttery popcorn under my nose.

  “I don’t know. . . .”

  “You’ll see,” Mom said, sounding like a chirpy mother on one of those Hallmark Channel shows where everything works out. “Middle school will be great.”

  I tried to smile back.

  Mom said movies weren’t like real life. I wondered if she knew real life wasn’t like the movies, either.

  MY FIRST TAEKWONDO CLASS, OR WHEN I FOUND OUT MASTER KIM HAD NINJA POWERS

  It was Saturday, and I was standing in the back of the room, wiggling my toes and wondering if I should switch to orange nail polish since pink is so pink. Someone walked over and parked his feet in front of mine. I knew the feet were a man’s because the toes were long and kind of hairy.

  I looked up.

  “You must be my new student,” the man said. “Welcome. I am Master Kim.” He put out his hand.

  Master Kim was around my dad’s age. He wasn’t short or super tall; but his shoulders were wide, and he had big hands that looked like they could crush a brick. His eyes were dark, and he had a long, black ponytail. His uniform was white and crisp. But his belt was frayed and more gray than black. I wondered why he didn’t just get a new one.

  I opened my mouth to reply, but then I noticed a boy with an orange belt standing several feet behind Master Kim. He was pointing at Master Kim and bowing. I ignored it because of the try-to-focus speech Dad had given me on the ride over.

  I looked Master Kim in the eye. This is a trick Mom taught me to do when I needed to give someone my full attention.

  “Nice to meet you. I’m Eliza Bing,” I said, shaking his hand. (In my head, I added, Bing. Like the cherry.)

  “And you, as well, Eliza,” Master Kim said. “Please ask your father to find me after class so we can arrange to get you a dobok and a belt.”

  I figured dobok meant “uniform.” But I didn’t know how Master Kim knew my dad was the person who brought me. I nodded anyway. It’s the polite thing to do, after all.

  Master Kim leaned in closer. “By the way,” he said, “what the young man behind me is trying to tell you is that it is proper martial-arts etiquette to bow whenever you greet a black belt.”

  My brain screeched to a halt.

  How did Master Kim know what the boy behind him was doing? Did taekwondo masters have some kind of super-ninja power?

  “A good martial artist is always aware of his or her environment,” Master Kim said.

  Speechless, I nodded like a bobble-head. Master Kim turned and strode to the front of the class. He seemed to fill up the whole room.

  “Jong yul!” he called. “Class, line up!”

  There were about twenty students, and they began to move themselves around like they were setting up an invisible chessboard. I don’t know if the class was really “ages seven to seventeen” like the brochure said, but Sam was right. It was mostly kids my age or younger. Some of the students had orange or yellow or gold belts tied around their waists. They lined up in the front of the class. Almost everyone else had on white belts. They stood in the back rows. There were two teenagers wearing black belts. They stood behind everyone else. One of them, the girl, smiled at me and pointed to an open spot on the carpet.

  I hurried to where she was motioning and stood at attention, proud I’d done it so quickly. It wasn’t until I was there for a few seconds that I remembered the rule about bowing to black belts.

  THINGS THAT WERE HARD

  1. Remembering to say, “Yes sir,” and bow. And there’s a lot of bowing.

  2. Remembering to kihap (that means “yell”) when you kick or punch.

  3. Counting to ten in Korean. (I tried to follow along in my head but got confused around number five, and then the rest of the class left me behind.)

  4. Having the instructor stand and watch your every move and never smile.

  AND THE OTHER THING

  During class Master Kim had us form two lines. I got in the line with the black-belt helper. She bowed to Master Kim, and he bowed back and handed her a black rectangular pad. Then he picked up his own pad and said, “We’re going to work on our board breaks.”

  The boy behind me gave a little moan. When I looked over my shoulder, he whispered, “I got jump front kick. It’s hard.”

  I nodded in sympathy. I didn’t know what a jump front kick was. But the
boy had a patch on his dobok sleeve that said BEST KICKING. If he thought it was hard, I was in trouble.

  Each person took a turn kicking the pad and then ran to the back of the line. When it was my turn, I just stood there, waiting.

  “Oh!” the black belt said. “That’s right. You’re new. The white belt break is push kick.”

  She motioned to the boy behind me. “Please demonstrate, Mark.” I was supposed to stand in fighting stance, with my fists up, and then move my back leg up and pull my knee as tight as I could to my body.

  “Now fire out your leg,” the black belt said. “And hit the target with the ball of your foot.”

  “Make sure you don’t point your toes,” Mark said. “Or you might break one.”

  Great. Broken toes were not fun. I knew that from experience. When I was nine, I jumped off the couch, broke my big toe, and had to wear a stupid-looking boot-slipper thing for a month.

  I tried to do what Mark had done, but when my foot shot out, it barely hit the pad.

  “Not bad,” the black belt said with a smile. But her “not bad” didn’t sound all that good.

  I went to the back of the line. I got to practice a few more times. Each time something went wrong. My kick was too wide. Or too short. I forgot to kihap.

  At one point, Master Kim handed his kicking pad over to another black belt and came over to watch me.

  “You’re not following through,” he said. “Don’t kick at it. Kick past it.”

  “Yes sir,” I said.

  But I had no idea what he meant. How could you kick something if you were aiming past it?

  Master Kim sounded like Yoda. And not in a good way.

  THERE’S GONNA BE A TEST?!