Set patterns, incapable of adaptability, of pliability, only offer a better cage. Truth is outside of all patterns.
—BRUCE LEE
With a battered metal fork, I pulled a long gray-green strand of something that had once been spinach from the school cafeteria lasagna and let it drop onto the brown plastic tray. Somehow the spinach managed to be both stringy and gaggingly soft.
I was sitting by myself. Three or four schools ago, I’d decided there was no point in making friends if you were only going to move away again. You could promise you were going to still text or Snapchat, insist you’d keep in touch on Instagram, but it was never the same. Pretty soon people who used to be your friends were as distant online as they were in real life.
I was pretending to read my Bruce Lee book, but really eavesdropping on the conversation at the next table.
“It’s just so scary!” Alice’s voice slid on the last word. She sounded delighted.
“What is?” Latoya asked as she set down her tray.
“Courtney said some dude in an old blue car was following her this morning.” Preston popped a baby carrot into his mouth.
I shivered. For the past couple of months, rumors had bounced around school about a driver trailing girls on their way to or from school. The car was never the same, though. One time it had been a black Oldsmobile, dented and boxy. Another day it had been a beat-up brown pickup with an aluminum cover over the bed. But no matter what kind of vehicle, they all had three things in common. The windows were always fogged up. The vehicles were always old and dirty, down to mud-smeared license plates. And, according to the stories, the driver was always careful to hang back about a block, drifting forward about the same speed as the girls walked.
Latoya shrugged. “It was probably just somebody looking for a house number. Pure coincidence. You know Courtney. She’s always convinced that it’s about her.”
“But there was that girl in Beaverton who disappeared from Island Tan, like, a year ago,” Preston said. Beaverton was the next town over.
“I heard that she just ran off with the bank deposit,” Latoya said. “That that was missing too.”
“Then why’d she leave her car behind?” Alice asked. Her gaze suddenly sharpened. I realized she was looking straight at me. Crud. My face got hot. She had caught me staring. Even though I immediately looked away, it was pretty obvious that I’d been eavesdropping. Time to leave. Careful not to look in her direction, I got to my feet and then picked up my book and tray.
As I was scraping the remains of my sad lasagna into the gray rubber garbage can dedicated to compostable food scraps—very Portland—someone behind me said my name.
“Hey, Savannah.”
I turned. It was Daniel Diaz. We knew each other from kung fu. In class, it was hard to keep my eyes off him. I told myself it was because he had such perfect form. He could do a spinning hook kick that made him look like a human helicopter. He was a senior, so we didn’t have any classes at Wilson together. But almost all the other kung fu students were adults, which gave us a kind of bond. At least I was always hoping it did.
“Oh, hi.” I felt my face flush again, but for a different reason.
In kung fu, I was just an orange belt, one up from white. Daniel was a green belt, only two ranks below black. He had been taking kung fu for five years. Some martial arts schools routinely promoted students every few months, without really making them prove themselves. But our school prided itself on not being a belt factory. There were adults in our classes who had been going for longer than Daniel but who weren’t much higher in rank than me.
“So you’re reading about Mo Si Ting?” Daniel asked as he scraped his plate into the bin.
“What?”
With his fork, he pointed at my library book. “That was Bruce Lee’s nickname when he was a kid. It means Never Sit Still.”
“Oh, yeah.” Did my responses sound as stilted to him as they did to me? “Everyone always says he was the best. I was hoping I could pick up some new techniques.”
Daniel tilted his head, making his thick black hair fall over one eye. “And have you?”
“So far, it’s mostly been a lot of sayings,” I admitted, setting my tray on the rubber motorized belt.
Daniel set his tray next to mine. “That might make sense, actually. Bruce Lee wasn’t a big believer in memorized techniques. He thought martial arts had become too stylized, so that they weren’t practical anymore and wouldn’t work in a real fight. For him, any technique was good as long as it was flexible and fast, without a single wasted motion. He called it ‘the style of no style.’”
This was the longest conversation I had ever had with Daniel. “The style of no style,” I repeated, secretly blessing the Multnomah County Library. “I like that.”
People were stacking up behind us. I saw a few of them noticing Daniel noticing me. By unspoken agreement, we moved into an empty corner.
“Which of Bruce Lee’s movies is your favorite?” Daniel asked. “Mine is Enter the Dragon. That scene where the bad guy escapes into the hall of mirrors and Lee has to deal with all those reflections of himself. It’s epic!”
“I actually haven’t seen any of them all the way through,” I admitted. “Just the bits and pieces you can watch for free on YouTube.” I simultaneously winced and smiled. “Like that one scene where he’s fighting Chuck Norris and he yanks out his chest hair and then blows it off his hand.” I mimed Bruce Lee’s actions as I spoke.
“Way of the Dragon,” Daniel said immediately. “Which is good, but not as good as Enter the Dragon or Fist of Fury.” He grinned. “If that scene had been in Fist of Fury, I guess they could have called it Fist of Furry.”
“Ouch!” I groaned at his pun.
“I’ve seen every Bruce Lee movie ever made. When I first saw Way of the Dragon, I thought maybe that body hair was fake, because when Chuck Norris turned around there were even big clumps on his shoulder blades. But when I googled it, it said it was real. It must have been cooler to be hairy in the seventies.”
The bell rang, and everyone started making for the doors.
“See you at class tonight?” Daniel asked.
Nodding, I tried to respond with a modest smile. But despite my best efforts, it stretched into a grin.