Chapter 11

I was still upset that afternoon when Hanna drove me to the Blue Ridge for my daily training with Chef. She picked up on my bad mood and let me vent to her the whole way up until we parked, talking about Rhonda and my frustration with the two versions of her.

It wasn’t that I didn’t get what Rhonda was doing. Everyone adjusts their behavior a little bit to fit in with the people around them, it’s a natural way people socialize. It was how stark the contrast was and how she would hide what she thought or did to be accepted, and worse, how she let what others thought dictate how she acted even when they weren’t around.

“Didn’t Jordan warn you about that before you got involved with Rhonda?” She asked as we sat in the parking lot, waiting to go in.

“Yes, and I get it, I didn’t listen. The thing is; one on one, Rhonda’s really great.”

“Charlie, everyone you ever date will have something; no one’s perfect. Sure, some people’s things are worse than others, but it’s always there. They may drink too much, they could be a pothead, they could be over-ambitious. Whatever it is, you always face the same choice. Is it worth it? You have to either accept that side of them and learn to deal with it or break it off.”

“That simple, huh?”

“I didn’t say it was simple. Dealing with other people is hard. I’m no expert, hell Marcus is the first person I’ve gone out within over a year, and I haven’t found out what his thing is yet, but at some point, I’ll find it and will have to decide if it’s worth dealing with. That’s if we go beyond a couple of dates. You have to make the same decision about Rhonda.”

“That’s not the advice I was looking for.”

“I know, but it’s what you need to hear. The sooner you realize that any relationship is about accepting people as they are, instead of hoping they become someone else, the happier you’ll be. Look, I’m not all that much older than you, but I had some really screwed up relationships a few years ago that messed me up and taught me some hard lessons. This was one of them. You don’t have to listen to me, but you’ll save yourself some pain in the long run if you do.”

“Okay,” I said, noncommittally as we got out of the car and I headed in to do my training.

Chef could tell I wasn’t focused and worked me twice as hard to ‘motivate’ me. I left feeling like a wrung-out noodle. He promised if I came back with my head not in the right place, he’d up the workout yet again.

Surprisingly, it actually did help. I’d been wallowing a bit, both about Rhonda and Coach Bryant. Chef worked me out to the point where, for a little while, I forgot about both and cleared my head.

While that didn’t help me with the Coach Bryant situation, since there wasn’t much I could do there besides try and avoid situations where he could lash out, it did give me some time to think about Rhonda. Specifically, if I was willing to put up with her desire to fit in dictating how she treated herself and me.

I managed to avoid any confrontations with Coach Bryant the next day, thankfully. While his class wasn’t exactly fun, I at least got graded based on my performance on the work that day and not on something I had no control over.

On the way to the cafeteria after English, I grabbed Rhonda lightly on the wrist, stopping her before we could go inside.

“Can we take our lunches outside by the bleachers today?”

The night before, after my training, I’d ended up at Hanna’s house to eat dinner. For whatever reason, Mrs. Philips had decided to take it upon herself to make sure I was well fed. It had started last week when she had me start eating at their house after I finished training with Chef on weekdays. This morning when I made it over to their house to go to school, Hanna handed me a lunch her mom had packed. I felt a little guilty about it all, but I also hadn’t eaten this well in as long as I could remember.

Between this and eating at the Blue Ridge on weekends, while I was working, I was actually putting on weight. It was too early to really see serious results from the workouts chef was putting me through, but I think I could see some hints that those gains were becoming muscle. Enough so Mom had made a comment on it when I left for school. I didn’t tell her about Mrs. Phillips feeding me, though, since Mom was very much anti-charity and would feel like we’d need to make a big gesture in return.

It was during dinner the night before that Hanna mentioned the area of picnic tables outside the part of the cafeteria closest to the track and practice fields. She also mentioned that kids were allowed to sit on the bleachers and eat too, as long as they picked up after themselves.

I had made up my mind the night before what to do about Rhonda, and I didn’t want to have the conversation in front of her friends. Rhonda seemed confused but allowed me to redirect her.

“What’s up?” she said as we went outside and headed towards the bleachers.

“It’s nice out, so I thought it’d be fun to eat out here.”

“Ohh, okay,” she said, her tone changing from one of worry.

We sat on the bleachers, and both pulled out our lunches. I found Mrs. Philips packed me a peanut butter & jelly sandwich, a bag of chips, an apple, banana, and, best of all, a homemade brownie. While I felt bad about taking advantage of her generosity, I could definitely get used to this kind of treatment.

I procrastinated talking to Rhonda, choosing to listen to her talk about her classes and some drama that had happened at cheer practice the day before. While I was confident I was making the right choice, there was no guarantee that this conversation would go over well. If this was going to be my last lunch with Rhonda, I wanted to enjoy it for as long as I could.

After finishing my brownie, which I split with her once I saw her eyeing it, I put my trash back into the brown paper bag and decided to get down to it.

“So ... umm ... there was another reason I wanted to come out here, actually.”

“I thought there might be.”

“I wanted you to know that sometimes I will keep eating lunch with you, and sometimes I’m going to go back and eat with Hanna and those guys.”

“Why? I mean, you can eat with who you want, but why don’t you want to sit with me?”

“I do want to sit with you. What I don’t love is how your friends treat you and how you let them do it.”

“What do you mean?” she said, starting to get a little heated.

“I mean this. How did you like our date the other night?”

“I liked it.”

“Me too. You liked the bowling and eating there and everything, right?”

“You know I did. It was probably the most thoughtful date I’ve been on in a long time. I liked that you found out something I’d really want to do.”

“When you were telling your friends about it, you completely omitted what we did; you realize that, don’t you?”

“I didn’t. I mean, I may not have said we went bowling, but I talked about our date.”

“Think about it honestly, Rhonda. Why’d you really not say anything specific about where we went? It’s more than that, though. When Camille started talking about her date, you let her get in your head. I could see the confident, funny, sarcastic girl I like shrivel up and try and hide. Do you really think that her going to a frat party was a better date than ours?”

“I didn’t compare them,” she said, annoyed.

“You did. Think about your reaction. You shut down basically, for the rest of lunch. Look, I don’t want to argue about this. I still want to spend time with you, and I’m not saying I’m not going to sit with you ever again. I’m not saying I don’t still want to go out with you. I do want to go out again, and I will sometimes sit with you and your friends. What I’m not going to do is subject myself to watching them tear you down or taking shots at me, which you know they’ve also been doing. It’s up to you if that’s a deal-breaker.”

“I don’t think you’re giving them a fair chance.”

“Maybe. I think I have, but maybe you’re right, but I’ve made a decision. I’ll leave the ball in your court about what you want to do next.”

“Do I have to sit with my sister and her friends?”

“No. You can if you want, and I promise I’ll make sure they treat you right, but you don’t have to. You can decide what you want to do. How about this. Most of the week, I’ll sit with them, but I’ll sit with you and your friends at least once a week. Maybe we can even sit, just the two of us, out here and eat once a week if the weather’s nice.”

She was quiet for a minute, and I thought maybe I’d gone too far. Not that I was going to backtrack. Hanna had been right. I needed to decide what was best for me. I’d offered a compromise, and if Rhonda wasn’t willing to meet me partway, then this wasn’t meant to be.

Finally, she said, “Okay, I can live with that.”

“Good! On the subject of going out again, can we go out again on Saturday?”

“Yeah, although after this week games start, so Fridays and Saturdays will be kind of tough.”

“We can figure that out then. We could find time during the week or maybe even after games. We’ll deal with that when it comes to it. Actually, I don’t know how many Saturday’s I can manage to get off. I just started working at the Blue Ridge, and I don’t want to start asking off every Saturday. That could be a problem.”

“Will they let you get off work this Saturday?”

“Maybe. I need to check. If not, I’ll find another day this week we can go out. I’ll talk to them today and see what I can work out.”

“Good.”

I leaned down and gave her a peck on the lips before we started gathering up our stuff. All in all that had gone better than I’d expected it to.

I told Hanna about my conversation with Rhonda, and she agreed I’d probably handled it the best I could if I wanted to keep going out with her. I’m sure in hindsight I’d find better ways to deal with it, but I was happy with the outcome and was out of the funk I’d been in the day before.

That was a good thing because Chef had a surprise for me. When I went out back, I saw a large metal contraption with wheels on the back and currently held down by a bunch of sandbags. On one side of it hung a large punching bag, and on the other, near the top, was a smaller roundish punching bag.

“You’ve done good with the conditioning so far, but I think it’s time to take things to the next level,” Chef said by way of greeting as he sat me down on a bench and started wrapping up my hands in some kind of tape. “A lot of fighting is muscle memory. In a fight, you don’t have a lot of time to think. You must react on instinct and muscle memory. You have to make the right move without thinking about it. You have to just do it. This is the first step on the road to that. I know we’re limited on your mobility, but we can start working on your upper body and hand work, at least. Also, don’t think this will get you out of conditioning. That will be happening today as well.”

“I was pretty sure you were going to say that.”

“Good. Now, you know what this is?”