Music Girl

Come to think of it, it was in Boston where I learned all my “bad habits.” Stealing, hacking, hot wiring, Aikido, fighting, making fake ID’s…

Yeup, it was all thanks to two people.

Alexander Slate and Jacoby Crane.

I met them in the evening of my first day in Boston. Jacoby was of medium height and a strong build. He had short black hair except for the flop of it that fell over his left eye, nearly down to his chin. Alexander, on the other hand, was tall and lanky, had blonde hair with a tint of read, and rectangular glasses. I bonded first with Jacoby, and by the end of the week, I was invited on a night out. I was eating dinner over that night. My mom had cooked us some pasta before running off to her job at a diner. Mama K was out with the mysterious boy “Nic,” I had yet to meet. Mama K apparently ran a sort of underground theatre and wrote her own scripts under a male pen name. So tonight, it was just Miryah, Jacoby, Alexander, and myself, eating in a slightly awkward silence.

“So, um, Jacoby… where’re we going tonight?” I asked, trying to be casual and not sound nervous.

“Eh, I figured I’d take you to my uh…well, you could call it a job,” he answered.

CLANK

Over at the sink, Miryah had dropped her utensils in the sink. “No,” she stated firmly. “You are not taking her there.” Jacoby rolled his eyes.

“Why not Rhy? She’ll be fine, she’s with me.”

“Yeah, and that’s the problem. You shouldn’t be there anyways, and then taking a kid there!”

“I’m not a kid! And where?” I asked, irritated.

“Sam, for this kind of thing, you are. None of us should ever be going there,” Miryah huffed.

“What, to the fight club?” Alexander asked, softly and suddenly. I jumped. I had never heard him speak before.

“Yes, there.” Miryah spat the words like they were poison.

“Miryah, it’s not dangerous, nothing bad happens,” Jacoby reassured her, leaning back in his chair.

“Yeah, like dangerous isn’t getting your nose demolished.” Miryah’s voice was getting more heated. “Dangerous isn’t cracking your wrist or breaking your leg!”

“That was over a year ago!”

“You broke your nose just last month!”

“Miryah, I’ll go with them. Everyone knows they don’t mess with me,” said Alexander, sliding her his plate. Miryah bit her lip, obviously caught up in thought.

“Alex, we’re only kids,” she finally said, a bit in defeat. He raised his eyebrows.

“Well, technically, Jacoby and I aren’t. We’re eighteen, yes?” When she didn’t answer,
Alexander said, “Point made. Let’s go.”

Out on the streets, Jacoby was practically glowing. “Alex, you are the man!” he whooped, slapping Alexander on the shoulder.

“I didn’t particularly do this for you, I actually have business to attend to at the club tonight. Plus, you are honestly the most irresponsible person within a hundred miles. You really think I’m going to trust you to keep track of a middle-schooler? By the way Sam,” he said, now turning to look down at me, “you don’t have to come if you don’t want to. Rhy was actually kind of right, the club really isn’t the place for you.” This was a surprise. Get him practically alone and Alexander was quite talkative.

“No, I want to come,” I assured him perhaps a little too quickly.

He laughed and replied, “Well kid, you’re a terrible liar, but you’ve got guts, I’ll give you that.”

And so we began our journey to the mysterious fight club.

We walked through the crumby neighborhood of Boston in the dying light. Give it an hour or two and the street lights would begin to flicker on. I took in the sights of the houses around me. They were very different from the neighborhood I had grown up in. These houses were down-trodden with junk and weeds in the lawns. Mutts lay in the yards and stray kittens mewed. It was a depressing sight that made me want to help. Just help these people, living in such poor conditions. It was disheartening.

The club ended up only being about ten blocks away. The house had boarded up windows, a broken fence, and dead grass. Jacoby glanced around quickly before ducking inside through the door hanging in its’ frame by one hinge. Alexander nudged me in before him, and I entered the house.

The first thing I noticed was the dust that clung to absolutely everything, even the air itself. It tickled my nose but I held in my sneeze, both because I was scared and because it felt like sneezing would make me seem younger. So I resisted and moved on, eager for the next challenge.

We turned a corner and into the kitchen, and I nearly jumped in fright to see another person there. This room seemed to be the only clean one in the house, which made the man sitting at the table so nonchalantly stand out even more. He was filthy, read a two day old, crinkled newspaper, and drank black coffee out of a slightly cracked mug. He hadn’t shaved in days, or washed himself or his cloths. But when he looked up with his slightly bloodshot eyes, he grinned a holey grin.

“Jacoby and Alex! Wondering when you two would come back!” he croaked, setting down his paper and mug.

“Sorry Dan, had to let my nose heal up first,” said Jacoby, a crooked smile on his face.

“Well, you’ll be able to get some payback tonight, Longwell’s here,” Dan said, looking excited. His eyes kept darting between Jacoby, Alex, and the large pantry door, totally ignoring me.

But I couldn’t help but think, There’s a fight club in the PANTRY?

“Good. It’s about time I taught that bastard a lesson,” Jacoby growled. “See you down there Dan.”

“I’ll be rooting for you!” Dan called after us as we walked right into the pantry.

To my surprise, there wasn’t anything but a set of stairs going down into a lit and rather noisy basement. The noise grew to a dim roar as we reached the bottom of the stairs, and we found ourselves in a packed and sweaty crowd. Alexander roughly grabbed my shoulder and steered me trough the crowd after Jacoby. I felt sick from the wave of cigarette smoke and stench of alcohol that hit me like a bus. There was a bright light in the center of the room that focused on a roped off area where no one stood. That one square of light seemed more dreadful than the dark crowd around it.

Jacoby disappeared off into the crowd somewhere. I was pushed to the front row of the spectators, half my face in the bright light. Everything was a sort of blur of noise and awful smells, but everything eventually quieted down to a thick tension. Then a voice sounded over our heads.

“Hello ladies and gentlemen of the Boston North Side Fight Club! It’s Sunday night, so you know what that means!”

“MMA Night!” the crowd shouted back, cheering with excitement.

“That’s right! So our competitors tonight, come on out! In the red corner, we have our defending champion, master of Ken Po and Karate, Steven Longwell!” Everyone went wild as a burly man with carrot orange hair and beard climbed into the ring, a smirk plastered across his face. I got jostled a few times, but Alexander kept me mostly in place. He had gone very stony faced as Longwell clambered into his corner. “And now our challenger, who’s coming back for more, the underdog of the green corner, Jacoby Crane!” I didn’t dare cheer amongst the heavy boos as Jacoby jumped the rope and into the green corner of the ring.

A man whom I guess was reffing stepped into the middle of the ring and called for silence. “Alright, you know the rules. Anything goes, two minute rounds until one of you is unconscious. Ready? …Fight!”

With a cry, Longwell launched himself at Jacoby fist drawn back. As he sent his fist straight for Jacoby’s nose, Jacoby tilted his head and Longwell’s fist barely brushed his ear. A knee went towards Jacoby’s middle, but he swatted that aside, grabbed Longwell’s shoulder as if to hug him, and pushed him to the ground as easily as someone would push over a chair. Longwell’s face was of shocked anger, and Jacoby’s, smirking amusement. Then Longwell was back on his feet, throwing every attack possible at Jacoby with impressive speed. But all Jacoby did was duck and dodge, occasionally tossing Longwell to the ground with a thud. After he had been thrown a third time, Longwell got up screaming.

“Is that all you got coward? Come on, hit me!”

But Jacoby just grinned and said, “You first.” Longwell let out a sort of crazy war cry before launching a roundhouse kick at Jacoby’s chest. Without a blink of an eye, he pushed Longwell’s foot along its’ current path, causing Longwell to spin out of control. When he was fully dizzy, Jacoby smashed his elbow into Longwell’s face. With a crunch, Longwell’s nose shattered and he dropped to the ground, unconscious, with blood gushing out of his nose and mouth. Jacoby merely nodded his head and walked back to his corner to get ride of the blood on his elbow. I was in shock. The match hadn’t even lasted an entire round.

The crowd was silent as the ref climbed back into the ring to check on Longwell. I didn’t see what he did as he kneeled, but when he stood, he was a sobering look on his face.

“Longwell’s out. Crane wins.”

There was a hesitant clapping at first, but then it soon turned into a roar of cheers while people chanted, “Crane! Crane! Crane!”

“And Jacoby Crane had beaten our reining champion! Who would’a thought the underdog would be our new champion?” announced the ceiling voice enthusiastically.

-

We finally left what seemed like hours later. Alexander had mysteriously disappeared right after the fight, and it was he whom Jacoby and I waited on upstairs in the hose. Dan was slapping Jacoby on the back. “I knew you could do it. Amazing style man. What in the world was that called?”

“Kokikai Aikido,” Jacoby responded. “It’s an interesting martial art that involves taking balance.”

“Come on Karate Kid, let’s get home before Mama K skins us alive,” Alexander said, coming up the pantry stairs with a wad of money in his hand. He handed a few bills to Dan, and then a third of the stack to Jacoby. “Your winnings,” Alexander said plainly. We said our goodbyes and left for the humid dark night.

“Jacoby,” I started once outside, “I want to learn how to fight.” He looked at me blankly for a moment, absentmindedly thumbing his cash, then grinned.

“Sure thing, Sam. We start tomorrow.”