Eliza Bing Is (NOT) a Big, Fat Quitter

by Carmella Van Vleet

  “We’re here!” Cookie sang out.

  My head snapped up. Madison was looking at me like she was confused about something. I shut the handbook and gave it back to her.

  “Madison,” Cookie said. “Don’t forget. Your father is expecting you later tonight so no dillydallying after class.”

  Something about the way Cookie said the word father made me realize Madison’s parents were divorced. And it made me feel sorry for her all over again.

  ALL WET

  For once Mom had a day off on the same day Dad did. And we’d finally gotten his car back from the mechanic. We celebrated by hitting the pool on Friday. It wasn’t exactly the whole-day-alone-with-Mom thing I wanted, but it was close enough.

  It was a million degrees, and the pool was packed. Sam threw down his stuff and ran off to join friends. I spread my towel on the grassy patch Mom and Dad found.

  “There’s a ton of kids here this afternoon,” Mom said, laying her towel between me and Dad. “Anyone you know?”

  Earlier in the week, she’d been oh-so-casually asking about kids from school and suggesting I call someone to see if they wanted to come with me to the new student orientation. I’d thought about calling Annie, but that would mean having to explain why I wasn’t at Tony’s party.

  “Nope,” I told Mom.

  I lay down, threw an arm over my eyes, and practiced kicho il bo in my head. I made it through about three times before I started wondering if armpits could get sunburned.

  “Can you help me out here, hon?” I heard my dad say.

  Peeking under my arm, I saw my mom slathering sun-screen on my dad’s back.

  June’s moon.

  I mumbled something about being hot and booked it out of there before they could start making googly eyes at each other.

  I cannonballed off the diving board. When I came up, I went under the deep-end rope and leaned against the pool wall in the shallower end. Sam was playing water basketball with a bunch of guys at the opposite end of the pool. I scanned the rest of the place.

  And that’s when I noticed them.

  Madison and a group of about eight girls were spread out on a large quilt near the back fence. I recognized most of them from school. They were the ones who wore matching CHEER CAMP T-shirts the last week of fifth grade. They were all laughing, passing around bags of Cheetos, and poking each other with orange fingers. Madison shrieked when someone reached for her shoulder and then laughed even harder.

  I dunked under and swam along the bottom of the pool until my lungs felt like they were going to burst. When I came up, the stinging in my eyes wasn’t just from the chlorine.

  I wasn’t in the mood to swim anymore, so I headed back to get my towel. Mom grabbed her wallet when she saw me. “Here,” she said, handing me a five. “Will you go get me a bottled water? You can get yourself something, too.”

  “Sure,” I told her. I had nothing else to do.

  I decided on a raspberry Sno-Cone. (Why is raspberry flavor blue? Shouldn’t it be red?) I was trying to balance the Sno-Cone in one hand and Mom’s water and the change I’d gotten back in the other hand, when the speaker crackled on. It was time for the hourly break. Everyone but grown-ups had to clear the pool. Suddenly the deck filled with dripping, shivering kids, and there was a mad dash for the concession stand.

  I took the long way around to try and avoid the stampede, but that meant walking near Madison and her friends.

  My plan was to keep my head down and pretend to be concentrating on not dropping anything. But I accidentally peeked as I went by.

  Madison caught my eye. She put her hand up. She didn’t move it or anything, but I knew it was a hello. I gave what I hoped was a friendly nod and kept on moving. It took me a few seconds to remember to exhale.

  THE BIG “NO BIG DEAL”

  After class on Saturday, Madison called me over. When I got to her, she leaned over and pulled something out of her bag. “I brought something for you,” she said, handing me a folder.

  I looked down at what she’d put in my hand. It was a taekwondo handbook.

  “Th-thanks,” I managed.

  “No big deal. You needed one.”

  “How did you get it?”

  Madison got a mischievous grin. “I used my mom’s copier. She’s a realtor so she has one in her office at home. I’m not supposed to be in there, but . . .” She shrugged.

  “Won’t you get in trouble?”

  Madison grabbed her stuff off the floor and headed toward the door. “Not now,” she said over her shoulder. “She didn’t catch me.”

  COUNTDOWN: FOURTEEN DAYS

  The first thing I did when I got home was clear off everything and put the handbook on top of my desk. Smack in the middle.

  The second thing I did was to make a paper chain. I had exactly fourteen days until the belt test, so I made a chain with thirteen white links and one yellow one. Master Kim told us to visualize our goals. The yellow was in honor of my new belt color.

  I hung the paper chain on my bulletin board. And then I sat at my desk, opened the handbook, and made twenty flash cards with all the words and phrases I had to know.

  The flash cards were yellow, too.

  SWEET CAROLINE WOULD UNDERSTAND

  By lunchtime on Monday, I had memorized about half of the flash cards. There were some I still couldn’t pronounce. Like the words for riding-horse stance with a punch: juchum-seogi jireugi. In my head, I could hear it, but I just couldn’t get my mouth to make the right sounds. I hoped Master Kim would count it right if we got close enough.

  I needed to practice my push kick. I got only three tries to break the board at my test. If I couldn’t break it, I failed. Too bad, so sad. Try again in another three months. Dad and I drove by a garage sale on our way to the grocery store, but we didn’t see any kicking bags. Just treadmills and stationary bikes.

  I went to our basement and climbed into the crawl space to look for something I could use to make my own bag. I found the pile of boxes with GIVE AWAY scrawled on the sides. It was mostly clothes, but I hoped there might be something useful.

  And . . . bingo!

  In the third box, I found Sam’s old comforter. It still had plenty of puffiness. I dragged it out of the dusty crawl space and shook it in case any spiders had taken up residence. All folded up tight, it made a good-size rectangle. I got the duct tape off Dad’s workbench. It took me half an hour to wrap the blanket up. When it was done, it looked just a little smaller than the kicking shields Master Kim brought to class.

  I tore off another strip of duct tape, folded it in half lengthwise, and attached it to the top of the shield to create a handle. One end of a rope tied to the handle and the other end tied to one of the basement rafters and ta-da! My very own kicking bag.

  I got into fighting stance and threw a push kick. My homemade bag went flying. It was hard to tell if I was standing the right distance away and if I had the right amount of strength to actually break a board. But Master Kim said successful board breaks were more about getting the right technique than having a lot of strength. I hoped he was right. Plus, at test time, someone would be holding my board and so it wouldn’t give as much. I stopped the bag from swinging and kept practicing.

  Bear came downstairs. She cocked her head and whined the way she does when she needs to go out.

  “Okay, girl,” I told her. “I could use a break anyway.”

  When the two of us got upstairs, Sam was in the kitchen, warming something in the microwave. “Where’ve you been?” he asked.

  “Practicing,” I said.

  “I thought you called the TV all day. If you’re not going to watch it, I’m going to.”

  Crispy fried eggs!

  I’d completely forgotten that Sweet Caroline Cakes was the Monday marathon on channel thirteen.

  Oh well. Sweet Caroline would just have to understand.

  TEN DAYS AND COUNTING

  I think every student showed up for taekwondo class.

 
“I’ve never seen it so crowded,” I said to Mark.

  “This always happens right before a test,” he said. “Everyone tries to get in all the last-minute practice they can.”

  Master Kim seemed to be trying to get in all the last-minute teaching he could, too.

  We ran through the basic motions. The only ones I mixed up were front kick and side kick. Ap chagi and yup chagi. They sounded so much alike! Okay, I thought. Ap sounds like op and that’s short for operation and when SWAT teams do sting operations they kick open front doors. And when one of the SWAT guys asks the captain if he needs help, the captain says, “Yup, go kick in the side door.”

  Next we paired up and practiced escapes. I tried to move the second I felt Rosa grab my arm (like the black belt told me), but I still could escape only about half of the time. I’d have to keep working on that.

  I got a chance to practice my push kick on a real kicking paddle. That went better than my escape. I nailed it every time. Pulled my leg in tightly, snapped out my foot, and pow!

  The last thing we practiced was forms. And a strange thing happened.

  I was standing in my row. Master Kim called out, “Choonbi.” As I moved into the ready position, I could feel my heart pick up speed. My brain clicked off, like a television, and all I got was a blank screen. Oh man. What was the first move of kicho il bo?

  Think. Think. Think.

  Master Kim looked around the room slowly. “Shijak!” Begin.

  My brain stayed locked but—Holy Toledo!—my arms and legs moved on their own.

  Lower block. Punch. Punch. Punch. “Hup!”

  I was doing it!

  I just kept moving, trusting my arms and legs to go where they were supposed to. It was kind of like this one time my grandparents took me to the water park, and I got swept up in the wave pool. But in a good way.

  Before I knew it, I was done with my form. And hadn’t missed a single block, punch, or kihap.

  Afterward I sat down against the wall to watch the other students go through their forms. My cheeks hurt from grinning so hard.

  Maybe that’s what Master Kim had meant when he talked about doing something with no mind.

  AT THE END OF CLASS I TURNED IN MY APPLICATION

  Are you ready?” Dad asked when I met him in the hall.

  “I’m ready,” I told him.

  And it was the truth.

  MESSES

  On Friday my pill and water weren’t on the counter. That happened sometimes when Mom was running late for her shift. I’d have to remember to ask Dad to get it for me when he came in from pulling weeds. I couldn’t miss it. That afternoon was sixth-grade orientation, and I wanted to make a good impression.

  I toasted a couple of Wild! Berry Pop-Tarts and plopped down at the computer. I flipped on the TV in the background while I played Penny’s Pet Groomer on the computer. Since I already had a gazillion good-groomer stars, I got a little crazy. I started giving the dogs orange mohawks and shaved smiley faces into the cats. I liked when the customers came into the virtual shop with speech bubbles of pretend cursing over their heads.

  Right after the first four contestants on The Price Is Right were told to “Come on down!” Dad popped in, filled his water bottle, and grabbed his keys.

  “I’ll be right back. I gotta get some gas for the lawn mower,” he said. “Think you can stay out of trouble for a while?”

  “Do monkeys have tails?” I asked.

  Dad grinned. “That’s my girl!”

  I quit my game, grabbed the remote, and surfed through about a hundred stations. Nothing looked all that interesting. I decided to paint my nails. Each one a different color.

  Sam came down in the middle of me trying to clean up the nail-polish remover I accidentally knocked over on the kitchen floor. He shook his head and laughed. “You’re gonna be in so much trouble.”

  He was right. I was supposed to put down newspaper if I painted my nails on the wood floor. I scowled as hard as I could at him. “Go away.”

  “Whatever,” Sam said as he headed down the hall.

  It took seven paper towels, but the floor didn’t look too bad when I was done. Of course, then I had another problem. The paper towels stunk from here to next year. If I threw them away in the trash can, Mom was going to notice. And then she’d know I’d broken the rules.

  Dad was going to be home any second, too. I wadded up all the evidence and headed for the bathroom. In a movie once, I’d seen a bad guy flush some incriminating papers down the toilet, so I threw in the towels and pushed the handle.

  The paper towels were all going down! Yes! It had worked!

  But then, ever so slowly, the water began rising. And rising. And rising.

  Stop, I begged. Please stop.

  But the water kept right on rising and began spilling over the edge of the toilet and onto the floor.

  I thought I heard the garage door opening. Oh no. Dad was home!

  I ran up the stairs, taking them two at a time, yanked open the linen closet, and grabbed some bath towels.

  I came back down as quickly as I could, but I wasn’t going to be fast enough. Desperate times call for desperate measures so I jumped the last five stairs. When I landed, my feet slipped out from underneath me.

  I sat down.

  Hard.

  A sharp pain traveled up my spine and rattled my teeth. I wanted to call for help, but I couldn’t breathe.

  WHAT HURTS?

  The thud got Sam’s attention. “Eliza?” he called. When I didn’t answer, he came looking for me.

  I heard his footsteps in the living room and then in the kitchen. I opened my mouth, but I still couldn’t breathe. Tears stung my eyes. It seemed like forever until he found me.

  At first he was smirking, but then he saw me sitting on the floor at the bottom of the stairs with my legs straight out in front of me.

  Sam knelt down and put a hand gently on my shoulder. “E, what happened?” he asked.

  I tried inhaling again and this time, thankfully, I managed to squeeze some air into my lungs.

  “Fell,” I told him.

  “Down the stairs?” The color drained from Sam’s face. “Is anything broken?”

  I didn’t like the panic in his voice and now that I had my breath back, I started to cry for real.

  Sam squeezed my shoulder. “It’s okay. You’re okay,” he said. “Just tell me what hurts.”

  I swallowed a sob. Only one thing really, really hurt.

  “Don’t laugh,” I told him.

  “I won’t laugh,” Sam said. “I swear.”

  “My butt.”

  Sam got a funny look on his face, but he didn’t laugh. “Should I call nine-one-one?”

  I shook my head. I wanted Mom, but she was at work. “Get Dad,” I said.

  But it turned out Dad wasn’t home yet. I’d only heard a truck rumbling by. Sam pulled out his cell phone and dialed. Dad insisted on talking to me himself.

  “Are you okay?” he asked. He voice was tight.

  “Yes,” I told him. “But can you please come home?”

  “I’m already on my way.”

  After I hung up and handed the phone back to Sam, I started crying again. “I need to blow my nose,” I said.

  “I’ll get you some toilet paper.”

  Sam came back a few seconds later. “Boy,” he said with a tiny tease in his voice. “You sure made a mess.”

  He was right.

  AT THE ER

  My dad’s a Nervous Nelly when it comes to me or Sam getting hurt. This is why I ended up in one of the exam rooms of Mom’s ER, holding an ice pack against my backside. Dad kept asking me if I wanted to get on the gurney, but the last thing I wanted to do was sit. On the drive over, Dad let me break the seat-belt rule and lie across the backseat of the Jeep.

  “You’re going to be fine,” Mom told me as she stroked my hair. “I think you bruised your tailbone.”

  “Is that bad?” I asked.

  “Mostly just uncomfort
able,” Mom said. “But since you’re already here, we’re going to have one of the emergency-room physicians take a look.”

  It was so embarrassing. Beyond embarrassing. (Thank the stars Mom suggested Dad step out of the room and go call Sam.) The doctor had to pull down my shorts a bit, and then she pressed her fingers around the bottom of my spine. Which, is, well, you know where it is. And even though Mom had given me some ibuprofen when I first arrived, I squeezed her hand the whole time to fight the pain. She kept reminding me to breathe.

  Then I had to get X rays.

  Of. My. Butt!

  There was pain when I walked. Pain when I sat down. And my stomach was growling since it was a couple of hours past lunchtime. Mom snuck down to the nurses’ lounge and swiped a slice of pizza for me. Dad went to the vending machine and got some pop and a couple of bags of chips. When he came back, he looked at me seriously. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I just realized I forgot to put your pill out this morning.”

  “It’s okay,” I told him. “I could have asked Sam. So it’s kind of my fault, too.”

  I suddenly remembered something. “Oh no!” I said.

  “What is it, honey?” Mom asked.

  “I’m missing orientation!”

  “Oh, don’t worry about that,” Dad said. “I’m sure we can pick up your schedule and get your locker combination later.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Positive,” Dad said.

  “Positive,” Mom agreed, wrapping her arm around me.

  The three of us went back to our weird, everyone-standing picnic. Just as we finished up, the doctor came back in. “Well, good news,” she said. “No fracture or dislocation. It’s a slight contusion of the coccyx.”

  Mom’s shoulders relaxed. “See, I told you.”

  A contusion? Of the what? Those sounded serious.

  I must have looked confused because Dad said, “Your coccyx is your tailbone.”