The Bubble Wrap Boy Page 3

  It hurt.

  I hated that stupid gate.

  So while we’re on the subject of extreme physical pain, let me tell you about the walk of shame.

  Every school has its own variation, whether it’s having your head held down a flushing toilet or being buried to the neck in an ant-infested long jump pit, but ours is just that bit special. In the true spirit of the digital age, it’s got that special flash-mob feel to it.

  I knew I’d be doing the walk after the play debacle. It was inevitable. I’d done it for far less in the past. What I didn’t know was when.

  There have been times when they’ve toyed with me, let a few days pass, enough to plant a seed of hope that maybe, for once, they’d forgotten. They never did, though. Once that shoot popped its head tentatively out of the ground, that was when they took the most delight in stamping on it, on me.

  Cell phones don’t help. Neither does Facebook. Once a post goes up, notifying people that a walk is taking place, it only takes minutes for word to get around. No one ever “likes” the post or dares to comment; that would only give the teachers the evidence needed to step in and bust heads.

  Instead, students simply pass the word along and show up, even if it’s to watch rather than participate.

  The walk isn’t a complicated form of torture: you don’t need a pair of pliers or an electrical outlet nearby; in fact, you don’t even need a big number of bodies to inflict it. I’ve done the walk with only four people involved. Doesn’t mean it hurts any less. The shorter the tunnel, the harder they tend to kick.

  You know when the walk’s upon you. And not just because of the people lining up: you can sense it, smell the anticipation. I’ve always imagined it’s like in Roman times with the gladiators. Except then, the crowd was seeing a spectacle, a competition. If they wanted to lend me a whip or spear, then maybe we could make the comparison, but as it stands, forget it. The walk makes David versus Goliath look like a fair fight.

  Once the buzz hits you, you know what’s coming. Bodies step forward from all sides, forming a corridor about double your width. Wide enough to walk down, narrow enough to be threatening. They pace inward in unison, with almost military intent, adding to the menace.

  And that’s it—once the corridor is in place, all you have to do is walk down it. Simple enough until the legs start to fly and you’re leaping like the hero in some crappy 1980s video game.

  People will try to tell you that there are strategies for surviving the walk unscathed, but I can tell you, as its most experienced subject, that they don’t work.

  I’ve tried them all. Sprinting, jumping, hopping—I’ve even considered cartwheeling in a moment of sheer panic. All of them (except the last one) sound fine in theory, but I can guarantee you that at some point a flailing leg is going to catch you. And once it does? Game over. Cover your vitals, stay on your feet, and get through it the best you can. Oh, and never show them you’re hurt. Weep on the inside only.

  I’ve seen it ruin kids. Reduce heroes to puddles in the space of ten pairs of legs. But not me: they can kick as hard and as long as they want, but they’ll never break me. I won’t give them the satisfaction. I feed off it, store up every bit of energy they’re wasting for my own means.

  Because once I find that thing? That elusive thing that separates me from them? Well, they’ll know about it. I’ll be so superior to them that I won’t need to kick down in their direction. I’ll be flying so high, I’d never be able to reach. And more importantly, they won’t reach me.

  “Special Fried Nice,” I sighed into the phone, trying to sound friendly, even though the phrase made me want to hack out my own tongue with a splintered chopstick.

  It’s bad enough fulfilling every racial stereotype possible by being a Chinese kid who lives above a takeout place, without the takeout having the lamest name known to man.

  I had no idea what was wrong with the Blue Lotus, as it was called when Dad bought it, but Mom had been insistent, thinking we had to stamp our own identity on the place.

  She said that the old owners had been a laughingstock, known for everything being battered within an inch of its life, regardless of whether it was edible.

  So when she saw a salon off Newland Ave called Curl Up and Dye, she thought we should copy their idea, find a clever play on words, something people would remember every time they felt hungry.

  Special Fried Nice was the final choice. It was a toss-up between that and Wokever You Want. Both sounded lame to me, but hey, I was just their goggle-wearing, fireworks-starved delivery boy of a son. What did I know?

  It was all right for Mom. She wasn’t the one picking up the phone every night, listening to the snickers as I took the orders, wondering if the dumb name was enough to see me doing the walk by nine a.m. the next day. I never ruled it out.

  Mom spent as little time in the takeout as possible. It’s not like she thought it was beneath her; it was just too chaotic, a health and safety nightmare that she couldn’t bear to stand by and watch. Instead, for as long as I could remember, her focus in life had been night school and a multitude of new, exciting, and frankly often bizarre courses.

  Mom was addicted to further education, you see. It almost didn’t matter what the course was, she’d give it a whirl.

  Flower arranging.

  Basket weaving.

  Pottery.

  Carpentry.

  Bricklaying.

  Origami.

  There was no topic too macho or girly, no subject too laborious for her to try. She’d done them all, but the weird thing was she had nothing to show for it, no certificates or diplomas, and even more weirdly, no examples of what she’d made. In all the years she’d been going, she had never brought home so much as a papier-mâché ashtray.

  I found it strange; of course I did. I wanted to find a way of asking her why without looking smug or snarky, but she was so passionate about each of her courses, never missing a single night of lessons, that I never did. It seemed cruel.

  Maybe she just wasn’t good at them, too embarrassed to bring anything home. And anyway, her being out three nights a week suited me. I could get away with more when Dad was at work, even if the kitchen remained out of bounds. (All those knives and hot oil? Dad’s life was barely worth living as it was. If she came home and found even a scratch on me, he’d be in the next batch of frozen chow mein.)

  Taking orders over the phone, armed with a TV that could pick up only the origami channel, had a shelf life.

  An hour a night was all I could take. Any period longer than that and I had folded everything in sight into a paper swan. Menus, newspapers, customers if they stood still long enough. It was at moments like that that I thanked the heavens for the one victory I’d scored over Mom in all her years of fussing.

  It was a small triumph, but one I celebrated wildly. It was my equivalent of winning the World Cup and Nobel Peace Prize combined.

  Two years ago, after months of nagging, pleading, and spectacular crocodile-tearing, I’d finally convinced her to let me make home deliveries for Special Fried Nice. And even better than that, I’d persuaded her to buy me a vehicle to make them on.

  This was monumental news. Bikes had been off-limits for years after I’d fallen off mine at age six, taking an inch of skin off my knee in the process.

  After a lengthy spell waiting in the emergency room, where the doctors first laughed, then shouted when she refused to leave without an X-ray, the bike had been stashed in the shed behind a dozen broken deep-fat fryers, never to be ridden again.

  As a result, the day when my new bike arrived should’ve been better than any Christmas Day EVER.

  In the history of humankind.

  Unfortunately, it became the sort of day you want to erase from your head with a concrete block.

  Instead of a gleaming, sleek mountain bike, with a lightweight aluminum frame and Shimano gears, I was faced with a 1970s lead-framed TRIKE, complete with basket and littered with more lights than an airport runway. />
  Mom mistook my tears for happiness, pulling me into her as I shook with the pain of the humiliation ahead.

  As if that weren’t enough, she pulled the bonus presents out too. A wide array of fluorescent clothing that had been rescued from a five-hundred-pound crossing guard, and a horse-riding helmet with a flashlight taped to the top of it.

  I died inside.

  She beamed with pride as I stood before her like the most luminous, ridiculous star in the sky.

  “Now, there are rules to this delivery business. You only deliver in the hours of daylight. Any orders taken after seven p.m. will be handled by someone else.”

  “But it doesn’t get dark until nine!”

  “It’s seven or nothing.”

  “But I’ve got all these lights.”

  “And you’ll use them all, and your safety gear, on every delivery you make.”

  “What?”

  “EVERY delivery, Charlie.”

  “But I’ll blind every motorist in town,” I pleaded. “People will stop and stare. They’ll ridicule me. They’ll take photos thinking I’m a low-flying UFO.”

  “You’ll be safe. That’s my only concern and my final word.”

  I shot Dad a pleading look that he deflected with his standard She’s your mom look. I made a note to think up some kind of revenge, then grimaced as the riding helmet was wedged onto my skull.

  “Well, go on, then. Give it a whirl.”

  “Maybe later, Mom. It’ll be dark in four hours. Maybe I shouldn’t risk it.”

  “A quick run will be fine, I’m sure.” Her face, though, said otherwise.

  I pulled my leg over the crossbar, placed my feet on the pedals, and pushed.

  Nothing.

  I tried again, and again, but nothing moved. It wasn’t until I stood on the pedals and strained like a herniated hippo that the chain finally gave and I shunted forward, the three wheels turning a whole revolution before stopping again.

  A group of small children on the other side of the road had laughed and pointed. It felt like the first step toward the ultimate embarrassment, and it was courtesy of my own flesh and blood.

  Turns out I was right too. And wrong at the same time.

  Because the Trike of Doom did eventually, after two years of mental and physical pain, actually lead me down a road other than Humiliation Street.

  It was an exciting road. Different from the cul-de-sacs I usually wheeled down. This road was exciting and unexpected. A superhighway with only one signpost, which read simply POPULARITY, THIS WAY.

  There aren’t many noteworthy things about the town where I live, but every time I get on the trike to deliver pork balls to the obese guy at 59 Bellfield Drive, I thank every lucky star there is for the flat surface in front of me.

  I’d adjusted to the trike after a few painful, cramp- inducing months, but it was never going to be a speedy ride.

  My thigh muscles might now be as muscly as Popeye’s arms, but it didn’t make a difference—the steel rhino (as I’d named it) refused to ever move quicker than a crawl.

  It had been especially mortifying in the early days. Five-year-olds with training wheels on their bikes would speed past me, laughing as they went. A bird even landed on my handlebars one day, thinking I was a branch waving gently in the coastal breeze. At one point it was considering building a nest and moving its family in.

  It was the biggest nightmare ever, and time, no matter what they tell you, is a lousy healer.

  Here I was, a pimped-up, luminous UFO heaving my way along Carr Lane, the SPEEDY SPECIAL FRIED NICE sign on my basket, reminding everyone that it was me, the tiny Charlie Han on board.

  I was too busy dealing with the humiliation to realize that everything was about to change….

  It was my final delivery of the day (even though the sun was still burning the back of my neck) and I heard a rumbling behind me, growing ever louder.

  I braced myself, expecting the usual harassment from a gang of savage SpongeBob fans, when a boy about my age shot past on a skateboard. And man, he was traveling.

  I felt his wake swish past me, and maybe it was the fact that he neither noticed nor abused me, but it was without a doubt the coolest thing I had ever seen. It was like he was floating as he weaved along the road.

  Instantly, I forgot all about the delicacies in my basket, stood on my pedals, and fought with all my might; I had to keep him in sight, see exactly what he was up to. Fortunately, he stopped by a bench a hundred feet ahead.

  I pedaled closer, trying to look cool despite sweating furiously. He still wasn’t the slightest bit interested in me, and he hadn’t stopped to rest on the bench. Instead, he was skating at it, full tilt.

  It was terrifying, the sort of clumsy, idiotic thing I normally did, and for a second I thought I’d discovered a long-lost brother. It was excruciating to watch, but I couldn’t help myself. Here I was, seeing myself through other people’s eyes….

  But then something strange happened. Strange and wonderful and utterly, utterly cool.

  Just as the kid reached the bench, just as he was about to hospitalize himself, he jumped.

  And you know what? The board jumped with him. It stuck to his feet like glue, sliding him and it effortlessly along the bench, sliding, sliding, sliding until…whack! The wheels landed back on the pavement—and on he skated.

  I did two things when that happened. First, I picked my jaw up off the ground, and second, I clapped. Like a crazy person. Even though he didn’t hear me, even though I was being watched suspiciously by an elderly couple on the other side of the road.

  I saw the old man make a spiraling motion to his temple with a finger, but I didn’t care. I’d just seen the greatest thing EVER. And I had to see more.

  Looking up, I saw the kid turn left onto Well Lane and guessed where he was going: the park.

  With new energy I screamed forward at half a mile an hour, not daring to stop until the kid on the flying board came back into view.

  It didn’t take me long to find him and twenty others.

  They were grouped by the old unused kiddie pool. Some of them skating, others sitting on their boards talking excitedly to each other.

  The kiddie pool had been empty for years. Parents stopped using it when a kid contracted some weird disease that hadn’t been seen since the seventeenth century. It had sat sad and drained until the BMX-ers found it, and eventually, alongside the riders, came the skaters.

  There was something brand-new in the middle of it now, though. A wooden ramp, U-shaped and towering. It was so huge I couldn’t believe I hadn’t noticed it before. Had it been made of brick, Sinus would have stared at it for a month.

  It loomed above the skaters, three times their height, with a ledge at each end wide enough for them to stand and gently steady themselves at the drop.

  I left the rhino grazing beside a tree, unlocked (hoping someone would be crazy enough to steal it), before sitting cross-legged a short distance from the pool.

  It. Was. Amazing.

  One after another they launched themselves off the ledge, hurtling to the bottom at breakneck speed before whipping skyward again. And when they reached the top they flew, the wheels spinning under their feet, backs arched as they grabbed the board and twisted, just in time for the wheels to hit the ground again.

  My mouth was set in a “WOW” shape for fifteen minutes. I was utterly, utterly transfixed.

  And do you know what the best thing was?

  Sometimes, quite a few times even, they fell off their boards. And when they did, they looked awkward and clumsy.

  But no one laughed at them. They’d help each other up, with a slap on their back and a high five before trying again.

  That was when I knew this was my chance. I’d found something where it didn’t matter if I was a bit clumsy. That was part of it. I could feel the pats on my spine already, my heart racing, excitement building. THIS WAS IT!

  Until my phone rang and Dad whispered into my ear.

>   “Have you had a flat tire, son? Number 59 are screaming for their food.”

  I felt my dream deflate quicker than a tire.

  There I was, dreaming of skateboarding fame, and all I had was a steel rhino. It couldn’t have been any more useless, and I knew I had to do something about it.

  But how could I afford my own board? And more importantly, how could I ever get this new, dangerous love past Mom?

  Sinus didn’t break his gaze from the school brickwork to answer my question. He was so close to the wall, all it would take was one sneeze to decorate the whole thing.

  “Skateboarding? Don’t know much about it. But tell me if you do take it up, because I’ll need to save for a funeral suit.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” I laughed. “It’s not that dangerous. And anyway, I’ve watched them down at the half-pipe. It’s no big deal if they fall off. It’s all part of it.”

  Two eyes flicked my way, joined by a pair of raised eyebrows. The head shook with pity.

  Maybe Sinus wasn’t the right person to talk to, but I didn’t really have any option. There was no way I was going to ask Mom for money for a board, and Dad was so under her thumb that he’d probably blab if I asked him.

  So that left me with Sinus.

  I’d thought of nothing else since my first trip to the ramp a week ago. Had visited every page on skating that existed, and the more I saw, the more obsessed I became. I’d found footage of this guy Tony Hawk, who they said was the daddy of all skaters, and he did things that defied logic and gravity. I looked hard for the wires that held him up, or signs of CGI trickery, but there were none. The guy was a legend.

  I devoured every clip, every interview there was, and they all told me the same thing: that I was destined to do this, that this would be the thing that lifted me out of the gutter.

  Affording the board, though, was a real problem. New ones were way out of my league, especially as my cash box contained five quarters, two dimes, a penny from 1975, and a Justin Bieber button. Don’t ask me how that got there. I had no clue, but I suspected foul play of the Sinus kind.