Steven Gould - Jumper:Griffin _s Story

Once he hit a patch of jump rot where I'd been and the paintball exploded, coming back out as high-velocity pieces of plastic film and a mist of spray paint. Another time, I jumped late and the paintball came with me, tumbling through the brush at right angles to its original path, but missing me.

Dad was perplexed. "Wow, I don't think I've ever seen it do that before." Dad had this theory that the jump rot was like, well, like the wake of a ship, the disruption of the water when a vessel passes through. It's like the turbulence or maybe even a hole I leave behind.

When I jump in a hurry, sloppily, there's more of it and I carry more crap with me. When I'm focused, if there is jump rot, it's tiny, and fades away almost instantly.

We continued. When Dad said, "Enough," I had one more paint mark on my right shoulder blade, but he'd gone through seventy paintball rounds. He let me shoot a dozen rounds at a boulder, enough to finish off the last of the Co2 cartridge, and then we went home.

He never said anything about my swearing and I never said anything about him shooting me in the leg. Call it even.

Tuesday and Thursday afternoons I had karate class.

Mum had a doctorate in French literature but she didn't work. She was homeschooling me. She said that I just got too bored in the public education system, but I heard them talking once, when they thought I was asleep.

Dad said, "What can we do about it? He's too young to hold a secret this big all the time. It's not fair to him and it's too dangerous. Maybe later, when he's older."

Mum said, "He's not a kid. No kid ever talked like that- he's a miniature adult. He needs to run up against kid logic and skin his knees where we're not there to pick him up. He needs to make friends."

The compromise was karate class. The homeschooling curriculum required a physical education equivalent so I had to do something.

I think Dad went for it because of the discipline and because he thought, from the class he watched, that the kids never talked to each other. Well, we weren't supposed to talk during class but it was an after-school program at the elementary school two blocks away-all form-one kids. Of course there was talking.

I liked our instructor, Sensei Torres. He didn't play favorites and he was very gentle and he was very careful to keep Paully MacLand in check.

Paully was in fifth grade for the second time and he was almost as tall as Sensei Torres. He'd been doing the karate program since first grade and had a green belt.

And he was mean.

We were doing two-step kumite partner practice. One person would attack with a punch and the other would block and counterpunch. I was working with Paully and he wasn't interested in the exercise. He was interested in hurting.

There was a definite no-contact rule. If you kicked or punched you had to stop short of hitting anybody. It was a firm rule and anyone who broke it had to sit out and could get dropped from the class if he kept doing it. Paully knew that. One of the kids told me Paully was kicked out of the class back in fourth grade for repeated offenses and was only allowed back the next year.

What Paully did instead was turn his blocks into strikes. He'd block so hard, it hurt-it left bruises. Like, perhaps, a paintball round in the thigh, point-blank.

I didn't swear this time, though. I gritted my teeth instead and kept going. To hit so hard, Paully was drawing back, cocking before the block, which required he start almost before I actually punched. Next time it was my turn, I broke my rhythm, stepping in, but delaying the punch slightly. He blocked and missed my arm entirely. My punch stopped just short of his nose.

Sensei Torres laughed and had everybody change partners. Later he said to me privately, "Good eyes, Griff. It was bad karate. In a real fight, you can't block a strike that hasn't even started."

But Paully was waiting when I finished changing for the walk home, just inside the locker room, blocking the door. "So, you limey ass-licker, think you're somethin' with that stutter punch? Think you can make me look bad in front of Sensei?"

Maybe Dad was right about me having trouble keeping my mouth shut. It just came out, unbidden.

"Bollocks. You don't need me to look bad. You do that all by yourself." Right away I was sorry I said it, scared, in fact, but how do you take something like that back, especially when you mean it?

He just charged, rage painted on his face like red paint, his fist cocked back and looking larger than any paintball.

I couldn't help it. Really, I didn't mean to do it, I didn't mean to break the rule, but one second his fist was heading toward my face like a thrown rock and the next I was standing in a cloud of dust in a ravine, next to a paintball-splattered boulder, out in the Empty Quarter.

I'd just broken rules number one and two (don't jump near home and don't jump where someone can see me) and maybe even rule four (don't jump unless I must-if I'm going to get killed or captured).

I was in so much trouble.

So I lied. I jumped back to the school, outside, in the hollow between the stairs and a hedge where I sometimes waited before karate, before the last bell rang. I used to sit in there and watch, invisible, the outsider-the foreign homeschooler- and watch all the kids run off, met by their parents or playing with each other on the playground.

I waited until I saw Paully leave, walking odd, looking back at the school with wide eyes. I exhaled. He looked okay. My worry was that he'd run into the jump rot before it faded.

It only takes five minutes to walk home. I did it in two.

"How was class?" Mum asked when I pounded up the steps and into the kitchen. She glanced at the clock. "Did you run?"

"Uh, yeah. Thirsty." I buried my face in the fridge. I could feel my ears burning. I never lied to Mum. Well, technically it wasn't lying but they'd always been clear about lying by omission.

I came out with the Gatorade. Mum had already pulled a glass from the dishwasher. She gave me a quick squeeze around the shoulders then set the glass on the counter. "Pork pie for supper. Potatoes or rice?"

"Rice."

"Broccoli or green beans?"

I made a face. "Broccoli, if we have to."

She laughed. "Well, there's pudding after."

I nodded and headed for my room, but she snagged me by the collar. "Are you all right?" She put the back of her hand against my forehead.

"What?"

"You didn't ask what kind of pudding. I'm thinkin' some terminal illness, maybe Ebola."

"Ha-ha. Okay, what kind?"

"Raspberry tart."

I said, "Brilliant!" to please her, but the truth was the thought of food made my stomach clench into a hard little knot. "I think I'll just go and try another unit of math, okay?"

She took an exaggerated step back from me. "Or it could be bubonic plague. But go-mine is not to question why. This may not last-it could be a fluke, a temporary aberration. Let's not mess with it."

As I walked back to my room I heard her saying, "And maybe he'll do a science unit and a history unit and maybe a French essay or two. If only we could find this germ, the I'll-go-do-schoolwork germ, we could market it. Mothers everywhere would worship at my feet. Dare I say sainthood? It could hap-"

I shut my bedroom door loudly.

Paully would probably never say anything. I mean, what could he say? He was the kind of boy who didn't like looking stupid, probably because he was stupid. Would he be stupid enough to tell this story? If he just said I scampered like a baby that would be fine. I wouldn't care about that.

I did a unit of long division since I said I would. Actually, I rather liked math. Everything works or it doesn't. There isn't anything gray about it. And every time I stopped working on the math problems, I started thinking about Paully and my jumping. Even drawing, my usual escape, didn't work.