Shadowboxer Read Free

a lot bigger than me. ‘Mr. Zhang doesn’t want to be disturbed.’
    ‘Mr. Zhang already is disturbed if he abuses animals.’ I feinted moving left and then shot to the right, around the driver. He tried to grab me but he was slow and let’s face it, I’m really fast. I’ve had a lot of practice at avoiding being grabbed. I saw the door of the gym open, but it was only Eva sticking her head out to get a better phone signal.
    I went up to Tommy Zhang and said, ‘What kind of man are you? Don’t you have enough money or you got to pick on some poor animal to make you feel all hard?’
    ‘Get this trash away from me,’ Tommy Zhang said to his driver, stepping back as if I had a disease. He held his lit cigarette poised like he was thinking about shoving it in my face.
    ‘No,’ I said. ‘ You get away from me , bitch.’
    Or something like that. The truth is, I never exactly remember what I say or do when a fight kicks off. I can only approximate. Like, for example, I can’t remember exactly what he said to me next, or whether he made the first move, or whether the driver did. I don’t know. I do know that one minute the hottest martial arts action star in Hollywood was acting like a cat-hating jerk-off and the next his nose was all splattered across his face and he was doubled over against the back door of Mattress World. Judging by the blood on my knee, I’m guessing I maybe left-hooked him first, because nobody ever sees my left hook coming. I must’ve grabbed his head and pulled it down and banged him in the face with my knee maybe two, three, eighteen times? The main thing is, his nose was good and broken and then he was one stunned cat-hating movie star.
    I felt good.
    All of a sudden there were bodyguards trying to grab me and people were yelling—Eva was videoing us with her phone—and I had to run before somebody creamed me.
    I ran right into Khari’s arms.
    ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa,’ he said. ‘This is not good.’
    There you go. Khari’s always real astute at pointing out the obvious.

 
    I Let My Ass Do the Talking
     
     
    S O ME AND Eva got hustled into Mr. B’s office behind the door with the white sparkly star and the name Bernard Jumsai stencilled under it. No biggie for me. I was used to being chewed out, detained, made to stand in line-ups. For Eva, though? Girl started to sweat and fan herself. She was worried.
    ‘It’s so stuffy in here,’ she said, edging away from me. There wasn’t much room in Mr. Big’s office. Most of it was taken up by the desk, a cheap metal thing piled with papers and coffee cups and somewhere under it all, a keyboard and mouse. Mr. Big had a screen that showed him the CCTV views of the gym, and of course there was his special two-way mirror. He watched us train while he was wheeling and dealing on Skype, talking with promoters all over the world for hours at a time. The office had a back entrance, too, so you were never really sure whether he was in or out—or who was with him. Mr. Big liked to keep everybody guessing.
    Behind the desk was Mr. B’s shrine. In contrast to the rest of the office, the shrine was immaculate. Today there were fresh flowers and a pile of peanut M&Ms. A pair of Rangers tickets. I could never be sure whether Mr. B took his Buddhism as seriously as he seemed to, or whether he was just one of those people who want to cover all the bases. Either way, he never failed with the offerings.
    There were dusty marks on the walls where pictures of Linda and the kids used to be. She’d left him two months ago for a carpet-cleaning franchise owner from Pearl River. Mr. B was upset. When I’m upset, I pound the bag until I can’t move, then eat a whole carton of cookie dough ice cream, and then get over it. But Mr. B, he bought himself a consolation Humvee.
    Seemed like we were waiting forever. I went behind the desk and pulled up one of the CCTV screens. The media people were standing out front, talking on their phones.
    ‘Jade, what are