Maybe there was some way Woody and I could repeat something over and over again until we were Zen masters of it. But what? Sharpening pencils? Making paper airplanes? Thumb wrestling? And if it took the archery guy six years to get good at shooting an arrow, I had a weird feeling we might need an extension on our project deadline.
Or, you know, we could just totally fake it.
no-mind
There I was on my special Zen rock, the warm rays of the rising sun bathing me in the happy glow of a new dawn. After twenty minutes of zazen, my butt was numb, sure, but the grass was blanketed with a soft inch of new snow, my homework was done, and the girl of my dreams was striding across the white lawn to greet me. I was at peace. I was in the zone. I was Zen Master San. I was—
COLD! With a huge THWACK and then a huge THWUMP, an avalanche of snow fell from the overhanging branches of the big tree, covering me from head to bare toes. I almost jumped up and screamed, but caught myself when I realized Woody was watching, her eyes wide. I smiled in false serenity as a chunk of snow ran down the back of my neck and into my shirt collar.
“Oh, San!” Woody said. “The tree—”
“The tree is lighter now. Its branches have given up their burden.”
“But your back! And your feet! Aren’t you cold?” She started dusting the snow off of me. This was good.
“What is cold? I am having a great morning,” I said. Woody kept dusting. I heard footsteps running away from the base of the tree behind me. HEY! Had someone knocked the snow down onto me purposely? Why would anyone do that? I wanted to turn and see who it was, but didn’t want to ruin the moment.
When Woody and I had gotten me somewhat plowed-off, I hopped down from my perch—definite progress from the day before, when I had been paralyzed after the first ten minutes. As I landed lightly, with the grace of a slightly damp jungle cat, Woody asked me, “So, did you have any breakthrough ideas for our project last night?”
“Not exactly, but I have two great concepts we could start with. One is compassion, which is a huge component of Zen. The other is ‘beginner’s mind.’”
“What’s that?”
“Basically, it means that experts sometimes defeat themselves by thinking too much. So, those who study a Zen art practice the steps involved over and over again until they can do them without thinking at all. When the actions have become totally instinctive, the student has become a master. ‘Beginner’s mind’ also refers to getting rid of preconceptions and seeing everything as though you’re seeing it for the first time.” I bent over, scooped up a handful of clean snow, and said, “How many times have you seen snow before? And you’ll be like, ‘Oh, snow. Whatever,’ instead of thinking about what an amazing thing it is. I used to be like that, but then I spent last winter in Texas, where there’s no snow.” I put a little bit of the snow on my lip and stuck my tongue out to lick it off. “We even forget that snow tastes good.” Woody reached out and gently swooped her finger through the snow in my palm; it tickled. She stuck her finger in her mouth and grinned.
“You’re right, San—it is good!” She bent down and got her own double handful. “There’s something else too. Look at the snow in my hand really, really closely. Closer…closer…”
Our bodies were maybe a foot apart, tops, and my face was so close to her hands that I could feel the cold radiating from the snow to the tip of my nose. I tried to focus my eyes on one individual flake. Woody’s eyes were cast down at the snow she was holding too, and she was looking intently at it. Then her eyes lifted to mine, and she held my gaze for what felt like a whole minute as electric waves shot through my whole body. Was Woody going to kiss me? Right here, three days after I met her, at 7:30 in the morning, twenty steps from the bus line?
The corners of her eyes crinkled up in merriment, and she leaned in even closer. Then she BLEW on the snow, sending a little shower up into my face. She laughed as I wiped my eyes on the scratchy plastic sleeve of my windbreaker. Then I laughed too. I grabbed a handful of snow and flung it at her. She ducked, but I got her hair a little. She made a snowball and flung it at my back. We wound up having a pretty fierce little mini snowball fight. Then we heard the late bell ring. We looked around and noticed everyone but us had already gone inside. She gave me the “uh-oh” look, and we grabbed up our book bags and her guitar. We started giggling, and couldn’t stop all the way into school. The secretary who gave us our late passes asked for a reason, and Woody said, “Avalanche.” We left the office together, and laughed our way to our lockers.
Woody’s homeroom was just down the hall from mine, so I kind of dropped her off there. How slick was that? I had just walked a girl to class! We did the “Uh, see ya,” “Um, okay,” thing for maybe thirty seconds, until her homeroom teacher broke it up by saying, “Miss Long, would you like to join us today?” I strutted away down the hall, flying high. In first period, I hummed my way into my English room, and found the teacher handing out copies of a paperback book with laminated covers. It was called The Tao of Pooh. Oh, geez! It was a book about Asian philosophy. It looked like we were going to do one of those units where the English teacher and the social studies teacher work together. Don’t they know kids hate that? It’s creepy to think of the teachers conspiring with each other. Plus, this was going to ratchet up the Zen pressure; I would have to fool a whole ‘nother class. And a whole ‘nother teacher.
Yikes!
The day got stranger too. In gym, we were doing basketball. I was alone, shooting baskets at this one hoop in the corner that didn’t even have a net; everyone else was either playing three-on-three or watching a game that was going on between three jock guys and three of the gym teachers. The gym teachers were slaying the jocks. Not that I cared.
Even though Peter Jones was one of the jocks involved. And Woody was watching the game. And I was watching Woody. She looked beautiful, even in our school’s dorky brown gym shorts and a Harrisonville Hawks T-shirt. Most of the girls looked kind of clumpy and pale, but Woody was elegant somehow. She just always held her head a little higher than anybody else.
Not that I noticed. I was Zen Hoop Boy. I decided to test out the whole repeat-the-steps-until-your-no-mind-takes-over thing with foul shots. This was a good test, because even though I’m pretty tall, I’ve never been much of a shooter. I concentrated on keeping my breathing even and my feet planted just behind the line. I put my left hand on the side of the ball for stability, bent my knees, pushed with my right hand and straightened my legs with one smooth motion. The shot missed by a mile, and my right sandal flopped off on the follow-through. As I was retrieving the ball, I may or may not have stopped to check out Woody’s legs, but that didn’t interfere with my laserlike concentration.
Right.
I took fifteen or so more shots, remembering that the Zen archery guys never cared about whether their arrows hit the target as long as the form was right. There was this famous story I’d read about a Zen master archer who was in a target-shooting contest with, like, a hundred monks at a Zen monastery on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean in California. The other guys shot all of their rounds, and this great master guy was supposed to shoot last. When it was his turn, he drew an arrow, strung it up on his bow, and, in one smooth motion, shot it straight over the cliff edge and into the sea. When it hit, he said, “Bull’s-eye!” And everyone agreed he was the champion.
Judging from the shots I’d just taken, he was my kind of champion.
After just one more tiny peek at Woody, who was still watching the game, I stopped trying to tune out the gym noise and let it wash over me instead. I stopped trying to ignore the flatness and bald tread of the ball I was using. I even gave myself over to the slightly funky and mildew-enhanced odor of the gym, which was flavored with the sharpness of sweaty rubber. And I stopped counting my shots. Dribble, set, shoot. Dribble, set, shoot. Dribble…set…shoot. The sound of the warning bell snapped me out of my trance, and I looked around. The young-jock-versus-aging-jock Olympiad had ended without m
e noticing, but a glance at the scoreboard got me up to speed: Peter and company had gotten demolished.
That was worth a half smile.
And Woody was behind me, the last girl out of the gym, leaning on the closed-up bleachers and watching my devastating exhibition of no-mind skill. Her perfect ruby lips opened and she said, “Hey, San. Keep that up and you’ll get one in someday soon.”
I looked at her in sudden, abject despair. She smiled, strode over, grabbed the ball from me, and elbowed me aside. Then she drained five straight. I could have cried, but it felt great to be with her, alone, for the second time in one day. She said, “Let me see you shoot again,” and bounce-passed the ball to me. Perfectly.
I did, and missed. Four times. My ears were getting red. My cheeks were getting red. Who am I kidding? My everything was getting red. “One more,” Woody ordered. But this time, as I bent my knees, she reached around from behind me with both hands to correct my arm positioning. I still missed, but her body was pressed to mine as we followed through together. Bull’s-eye, I thought. Then the late bell rang.
the wednesday plan
The week went on, with a boring weekend of Zen reading in there somewhere. Woody visited me every schoolday morning at my rock—sometimes with Peter, sometimes without. She sang “Hard Travelin’” at lunch, looking into my eyes. It was a good song. We brainstormed and rejected ideas in social studies every day: Writing haiku was perfect, writing haiku was boring; making tea for the class was cool, making a stimulant for a bunch of eighth graders was a no-no; Zen basketball was brilliant, if Zen basketball was so brilliant, why was I still shooting three for ten from the free-throw line?
Then on Tuesday, I brought in my Zen garden to see what Woody would think. The groups were spread out all over the room, and we grabbed a nice table in a pool of sun by the window. She loved messing around with the four-pencil rake. I loved being close together, and watching the lines of her thoughts tracing their way between the stones. She did the whole thing playfully, which was exactly perfect. I always stopped to think about making my lines straight, or making the whole image in the garden look relaxing, or whatever. But Woody just raked and giggled.
When she had the garden right—and you could definitely tell, somehow, that it was right—she handed me the rake. My hand was sweaty, but I could tell when I held the pencils that hers wasn’t. Before sliding the garden over to me, she put the lid on and shook it. I opened the lid back up, and she said, “Look! No garden!” Which was perfect too.
I bent to my work, and smelled Woody’s shampoo—something orangey. I felt the warmth of the sun on the backs of my hands. Closing my eyes, I dropped the rocks randomly over the sand. I looked, nudged one over about half an inch to the left, and started raking my lines. I wanted to look cool for Woody, so I was working on a show of nonchalance—which I know is an oxymoron. She smiled; I smiled. We were having a moment! Then, just when I had the garden complete, a strong gust of frigid air blew my sand everywhere. I looked up, and there was Peter—who had just opened the window wide.
I could have sworn I saw a look of triumph flash across his face before he made eye contact with me. “Oh, San, I’m so sorry. I didn’t see your—uh—sandbox there. Did I ruin your work?”
I thought fast, then grinned. “Thank you, Peter. Thank you for teaching me the lesson of impermanence.”
Heh-heh. Woody and I had another moment. And whether he was standing three feet away or not, Peter wasn’t invited.
After Peter walked away muttering, I noticed that Dowd was looking at me kind of funny. Oh, well. I had some sand to clean up. Woody and I tried scooping the sand with the box lid, which worked for a while. When we got down to the fine stuff, though, we had to switch to using the edge of a piece of paper. Woody went up to Dowd’s desk to grab a piece of masking tape so she could get the sand off her sweater. I grabbed Woody’s project assignment sheet, and flipped it over so I could make a crease down the middle for pouring. On the back side, Woody had drawn a whole bunch of red hearts with the capital letters “ELL” in all of them.
There went the freakin’ moment. Who was this ELL person? What kind of stupid initials were ELL anyway? I looked around out of the corner of my eye as I scooped, but there was nobody in the class with a last name that started with “L”—just me and Woody. I glanced at Peter, who was back with his partner, Abby. She was building what looked like a scale model of the Taj Mahal out of those perforated craft sticks social studies teachers love—a pretty impressive model, by the way—while Peter was breaking the sticks as she needed them. I was pleased to note that it looked like he was snapping them with more force than was strictly required by the physics of the situation. But Peter was suddenly unimportant; his initials were P-something-J.
Of course, Woody had other classes in her schedule besides social studies. Maybe this guy was smoothly moving in on her during her first period math class while I was innocently studying English right down the hall. Or maybe he didn’t even go to our school. Maybe he was some disgusting high school pervert who couldn’t get a girl his own age. Oh, God. There were probably tons of high school guys calling Woody at all hours, and I didn’t even have her phone number. What chance did I have with a girl as cool as Woody anyway? Just because I was her flavor of the week right now, that didn’t mean we were, like, destined to be soul mates. Maybe she liked me as a friend because I had fooled her into thinking we shared some interests, or maybe she was just stringing me along until our project was due. And I had fallen for it!
Well, I wasn’t going to just stand by and let this ELL make a fool of me! I wasn’t just going to lie down and surrender the girl of my dreams to some pimply, hairy freshman guy! I would fight back! I would take Woody in my arms and—
Oh, who was I kidding? I would quit, that’s what I’d do. There were plenty of other beautiful, smart, talented girls with excellent foul-shooting skills who would just love to date an authentic, honest, down-to-earth guy like me. Who happened to be a pretend Zen master.
Woody came back with a big ball of tape rolled around her fist, and started brushing her sweater down with it. As she reached up to get a dusting of sand off her shoulder, she noticed the writing on my paper scoop, and tried to snatch it out of my hand. But that made her tape ball catch on her hair.
“Oww!” she cried. Good! What did I care? I was a pretend Zen master. I had no earthly attachments or desires, at least in theory. The Four Noble Truths were right—attachment to desire really sucked.
Woody looked at me. “Can you help me get this untangled, San? I’m stuck.”
I laid the paper down and reached up in a cool and unattached way to separate her hair, strand by strand, from the tape ball. The orange scent enveloped me, and her hair was soft and lovely in my hands. Fortunately I was beyond noticing all that, and had been for a good twenty seconds already.
When we were all sorted out again, Woody went back to getting the last bits of sand off her sweater while I did NOT watch. Then she gently picked the incriminating paper out of my hand, said, “I’ll just throw this out now,” and walked over to the garbage can. While I did NOT watch.
She looked at the paper one more time before she chucked it, and when she came back to our work desk, she was blushing a little. I tried to pretend nothing had happened, which was hard because this girl had a pull on me that would probably have overwhelmed a man of lesser meditation talents. And she plunged into packing up her stuff and copying down the homework as though nothing had happened.
But the scent of orange lingered on my hands for hours.
That night, lying in bed, I realized my dad was going to be calling again after school the next day. I’d pick up the phone, and the prison operator would ask me to accept a collect call from Texas. I’d say yes, knowing that the call would cost us money that my mom didn’t have, money that should have been spent paying down my dad’s legal bills or our credit card debt. I could hear his smooth voice saying, I missed talking with you last week, buddy. Now tell
me everything! So I’d start telling him everything, but I wouldn’t really. I’d only tell him what he wanted to hear: I was fitting in, my grades were good, I was helping my mother in this “difficult time.” Somewhere in the middle, he’d interrupt to tell me his whitewashed story: He was innocent, he was framed, I had to believe in him and everything would be fine in the end.
He was a top-grade liar, and I was his top-grade liar son.
I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t pretend I believed him, or that I didn’t hate every molecule of his vile, manipulative soul, or that everything would be fine. It was bad enough that my mom fell for all his crap. And for all of my crap. Lying to the king liar was somehow the worst thing of all.
So I started looking for an angle: something that would keep me away on Wednesday afternoons, preferably for months on end. Until my dad got the hint and stopped calling. I could get in trouble every Tuesday so I’d have detention every Wednesday—but that wouldn’t go with my Zen image. I could join a sports team that practiced on Wednesdays—except for the whole “San sucks at sports” issue. I could jump off a moderately high cliff every Tuesday so I’d be in the hospital every Wednesday. But with my luck, my mom would be my nurse and my dad would get special permission to fly to Pennsylvania and visit me. Just what I needed: tons of medical bills, my mom having an excuse to stick me full of needles, and my father chained to my bedside between two armed marshals.
So that plan wouldn’t work.
I needed something that wasn’t painful, that played to my strengths, that kept me out of trouble with my mom. Wait! Something that played to my strengths! I HAD IT! I sat bolt upright in bed, banging my head resoundingly on my cheap overhanging reading lamp. But physical pain no longer mattered to me; I was a Zen man with a Zen plan.