Chương 24: Just Breathe

Monday morning dawned bright and early with the returned use of my right hand and my first training session on the agenda. The night before I'd gone to bed straight at nine o'clock in an attempt to get a full night's sleep, only to lie awake for hours because my brain synapses kept messaging each other. Now my body was in that limbo of tiredness that made you almost hyper- the second you stopped moving, stopped feeling jittery, you'd immediately conk out on the floor.

So today would require lots of sugar and caffeine as I battled the perils of high school, waiting for my first real lesson with Mr. Cheng to begin. Then again, maybe I could just use the time to try to catch up on my sleep. Something about my peer's voices often made me narcoleptic. When I got to school, the halls were alive with the sound of gossip.

"Did you hear Mark Stinson died at the party on Saturday? I'm absolutely heartbroken!" Nayrina's voice had a coating of sympathy, but the sparkle in her eyes left her words hollow.

"We were so close- like best friends! I'm really going to miss him."

"What?" Tony DePaulo rolled his blood-shot, half-lidded eyes.

"That dude isn't dead. He took some joy and had a bad trip. I feel worse for Jen; Mark freaked out, started grunting and bit her shoulder. It wasn't in the fun way either, dude really went to town. Bro can't handle his joy. They both had to go to the hospital. Really killed my buzz." Danielle Park patted her back.

"Yeah Nayrina you could go visit them in the hospital. Since you know, you two are so close."

"Ohhhh… no…" Nayrina's face fell at the news.

"He probably needs time to recover. I'm super glad he's OK though. I'm going to make a post about how much it affected me so everyone can know." I kept walking down the hall. See what I mean? Sleep was the only escape. There were sixty-two days left of school and my brain had thrown a party as each day passed. Soon I wouldn't have to walk these hallways anymore, seeing the rolling of eyes or the drooping of pants, hearing the sounds of burping or the whispers of false concern.

For the first time in my life, freedom was almost staring back at me. People like Brandon and Nayrina could stay trapped here forever in this psycho social experiment known as high-school, but I was getting out. The original plan was to get a day job while attending night school at the community college. Pick something in vocational training so that I could be out and working in just two years- a paralegal or a court typist, maybe.

Even an electrician could have been on the table because I'd spend more time with wires than people. There had been no wish of finding a dream career one day. The only wish I'd had was of getting out of school and away from these monsters. But now, there was a whole new life waiting for me in the future and that required a new plan. During the day, some kind of job would be necessary. A cleaning business like I'd done with the neighbors would be simple enough, and the bonus was it left your brain free to think.

Tutoring was also an option now that I had experience with it and I could keep it to subjects that were interesting. At night, I would roam the streets using my powers to help people. Growing stronger with every crime I stopped. I really wasn't asking for much from life. It would be enough to just be able to do the things I cared about most on my own terms. —--- It might have been the Super Burger's breakfast plate I'd bought for Gran and me as a treat because of the vast swathes of cash I had now.

It might have been that on the subway, I didn't get rained on by the spittle of a crazy person even once. But by the time I stepped off of that silver locomotive- I was pumped. This was it. Finally time to learn the ultra secret moves that would make me a true super hero. If he asked me to do five-hundred kicks, or two-hundred punches, or a thousand strikes- I was ready. My feet ran the entire way there from the station.

The people I passed probably thought I was either a mugger or muggee, but I was doing what my teacher had instructed me to do. I ran to and from school now too, always arriving with red cheeks and hoarse lungs. Mr. Cheng had told me to go straight to the back of his building when I got there. He walked me to a sliding door and we stepped outside to a small plot of grass with brown trees, still bare from winter, surrounding it.

"When the weather is right, I bring my customers out here to do acupuncture. Nature is always the best environment for achieving health and peace." The weather was not exactly right in my opinion: it was forty-four degrees with a chill breeze winding its way through the fibers of my hoodie. Still, a mild sun was peeking though the clouds and he was going to give me exercises that would have me whirling around like a human tornado, so that would warm me up.

"For your first task, I want you to sit here on the ground and breathe deeply." Okay, not what I expected for the beginning of my first self-defense class, but I'd take it. I plopped down on the damp dead grass, squeezing my eyes shut, and filled up my lungs with as much air as I could. There was a mix of the fresh scent of the wet wood coming from the trees and the acidic black smoke rising from a car parts factory not far from here. The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

Not exactly paradise, but better than the usual smells coming off my street.

"You are straining, not calming. Try to block out everything. The sounds of the city. The smell of the city. Make your heart as slow as it can be." I relaxed my face and shoulders, no longer scrunching my eyes, and felt the small staccato bomp-bomp emanating from my chest. My hand reached over to cover it, and I counted the beats against my fingers. Ten seconds of filling my lungs with air extended to twelve then fifteen and all the while the beat of my heart slowed and somehow warmed.

Keeping my hand on my chest, certain that I had just opened all of the necessary chakras and achieved inner peace, I opened my eyes.

"Alright, I think I'm ready." Mr. Cheng snorted as he watered a plant.

"No, you are not! I am the one to tell you when you are ready, and you still need to sit here breathing for fifty more minutes." Inner peace scrambled into chaos and my eyes popped wide.

"You want me to just sit here for an hour? My fingers already feel like icicles!" He nodded.

"Good. One more distraction for you to ignore." I stared at him.

"You've already informed me that I'm too skinny, yet you expect me to sit on the wet grass in this weather and not get hypothermia?"

"You might sometimes have to fight while experiencing hypothermia, no? So best to practice now." Mr. Cheng continued to go from plant to plant, waving an arm in my direction in dismissal. My eyes snapped close as I blew the air out of my lungs. Inhale, exhale, repeat. I must have given it a solid five minutes.

But my fingers were numb, my shoulders couldn't stop shaking, the sound of cars honking from the rush hour traffic on the streets and the smell of tar-like smoke in the air converged down around me until I finally opened my eyes.

"I can't do it," I admitted, slumping forward. He walked over and crouched down in front of me.

"Let me guess, you have probably spent a lot of your life wishing that you were somewhere else. Especially as a teenager, huh? So, that's all you need to do now. Imagine feeling warm, like on a hot day in summer. Or maybe you are holding a cup of tea in your hands. When your mind imagines it, your body will believe it, too." Laushu stood up and walked back to his garden. I swallowed and closed my eyes again. Gran was pretty solid with her hot chocolate making because you can't burn water heated up in the microwave.

Still, it was always piping hot when she gave it to me and I'd just let the mug sit in my hands while I waited for it to cool down. My tongue would get slightly burnt on the first attempt because I couldn't wait that long, and the heat from the liquid would scorch down my throat and into my belly after I swallowed it. But I was certainly never cold after. So I felt that chipped navy and orange Bears mug in my shivering hands now, steam curling from the top.

My fingers could press against the hot ceramic, almost burning them, and yet dissolving any vestiges of cold from them. I sat with it for a long time, holding different parts of my hand to it until both felt like they'd stepped out of a sauna. Then I held it up and drank, heat spreading out through every limb, and I did it again and again. Taking deep breaths in between, counting the beats of my heart, until I could no longer feel the chilly Chicago weather around me. When I opened my eyes, Mr.

Cheng was smiling at me. Then he shook his head.

"Close your eyes and start again. Let the feeling of being warm sink deeper inside you and just breathe. The world is full of distraction, but our art requires absolute focus." Gran's hot chocolate was made a second time, but after about ten minutes, even imaginary drinks go cold. People walked past on the street, talking and laughing. The building blocked my position so they couldn't see me unless they looked through the small space between structures.

I couldn't take trying to meditate while passerbys remarked on 'statue girl'. The sliding door slid open and closed, meaning Mr. Cheng went inside and left me to breathe and die out here from frostbite. Was he going inside to take a nap and I'd end up sitting here for hours? Maybe I'd gotten the whole arrangement wrong and he was just wasting my time to make me leave. What if this was a test and I had to sit here through the night until the sun rose in the morning to prove myself?

The last one sounded the most like a Kung Fu movie plot so that had to be it. No matter how long it took, I would prove myself. He would see that Cassandra Keene could sit around doing nothing with the best of them. Ten years passed and Mr. Cheng finally returned, the sliding door smacking open again. I had been squirming around, eyes dutifully closed, trying to find a place on the ground for my numb butt that wasn't uncomfortable, but my body froze in place now.

It wasn't exactly the picture of calm and focused meditation he was probably hoping for. His sandaled feet padded closer and then nothing. I opened my eyes to see he had taken a seat cross-legged in front of me. His back was straight and his breathing was slow and even. The silence was deafening, I couldn't take it anymore.

"How many hours am I going to have to sit here showing you that I know how to breathe?" Mr. Cheng cracked an eye open and smiled.

"It has only been forty-five minutes. You still have another fifteen to go." I looked around, seeing how the sun had barely moved. Clearly my time powers had spontaneously activated for several hours and trapped me in this boring limbo. That was the only logical explanation. Fifteen minutes dragged by like fifteen eons, but eventually Mr. Cheng rose to his feet. He stood gracefully like a crane rising out of the water. I stumbled and pushed myself to my feet again like a sick baby giraffe.

Both of my legs had fallen asleep. His eyes looked me over, nodding to himself.

"You are not very good." My mouth hung open. I was ready to try my own rudimentary Kung Fu on him.

"I did exactly what you said! I sat there and breathed. I even thought about my Gran's hot chocolate to feel warm, which worked for a few minutes. How am I bad?"

"The breath is everything. You cannot control your heart or your liver, but your lungs always listen. They are how you take in chi to feed the meridians in your body. And your breath is bad." My face grew red, shoving my hands into my pockets.

"You could have told me that forty minutes ago."

"A focused mind has focused breath. Your breath was full of sighs and huffs. It's bad. Focus is key and you don't have it. Maybe you should go home." Okay, it was a test and I had failed, but I wouldn't fail this one. My hands raised, palms up.

"No, I can do better. I will try harder next time."

"You should try harder every time. Everything I teach you has purpose. Breath is very important. Don't forget."

"I won't, I promise."

"Good, now follow me. We will have some tea and then I will teach you balance."