The Overnight Prodigy

Chapter 11: Sign-Up Sheet

The sign-up sheet for the martial arts club lived on a corkboard outside the gym, wedged between a flyer for the chess club and a lost-and-found notice about a single blue glove that had apparently been sitting there since October. Ethan had walked past that corkboard probably four hundred times in three years of high school and never once looked at it long enough to register what was pinned to it.

He looked at it now for a solid two minutes, pen in hand, not writing anything.

"You gonna sign that or just intimidate it," Jason said, appearing at his shoulder with the specific comedic timing of someone who'd clearly been watching from a distance and decided the moment had marinated long enough.

"I'm thinking."

"You've been thinking since lunch. I watched you not-decide through an entire slice of pizza."

"It's a big decision."

"It's a sign-up sheet, Ethan. It's not a marriage license."

Ethan looked at the sheet again. Eleven names were already on it, most of which he half-recognized from around school kids who did sports, kids who looked like they knew what they were doing with their bodies in a way Ethan had never particularly related to. Marcus Cole's name was near the top, written in handwriting so aggressively confident it looked like it belonged to someone twice his age.

"What if I'm bad at it," Ethan said, which wasn't really the question bothering him but was easier to say out loud than the real one.

"You threw Tyler Griggs across a gym mat like he owed you money. I don't think 'bad at it' is your problem."

"That was luck."

"Was it, though?" Jason raised an eyebrow, and Ethan felt the specific discomfort of a friend getting slightly too close to a truth you hadn't handed over yet. "Because Coach Nguyen doesn't seem like the type of guy who hands out 'you should try out' speeches for luck."

Ethan didn't have a comeback for that, mostly because Jason was right, and mostly because the real answer that it wasn't luck, that something had rewired itself in his head the night of the dream and hadn't stopped rewiring since was still sitting locked away where he'd kept it since day one. He looked at the sheet one more time, thought about Derek Lang's face going red on the sidewalk outside the convenience store, thought about the throw that had put Tyler flat on his back three separate times in one gym class.

He signed his name before he could talk himself out of it again. His handwriting looked small and uncertain next to Marcus Cole's, which felt symbolically appropriate in a way he didn't love.

"There," he said. "Happy?"

"Ecstatic. This is the day. I'm gonna tell people I was there."

"You were the guy who watched me sign a piece of paper."

"Exactly. Front row seat to history." Jason clapped him on the shoulder with more enthusiasm than the moment strictly required and steered them both toward the parking lot, already talking about something else entirely a video game update, a rumor about the cafeteria switching lunch vendors the way conversations with Jason tended to move, fast and sideways and never dwelling anywhere long enough to get uncomfortable.

Ethan let the noise wash over him without really listening, his mind still hovering back at the corkboard, at his own name sitting under eleven others, at the reality that he'd just signed up to show up somewhere three afternoons a week and get thrown around or do the throwing in front of people who actually knew what they were doing.

Part of him, a part he wasn't totally used to hearing from, was nervous about that in the normal way anyone would be nervous walking into a room full of strangers who were better at something than you. But underneath that, quieter and stranger, was something closer to anticipation the memory of the throw connecting clean at Coach Nguyen's demonstration, the half-second dodge that had put Derek Lang off balance without Ethan ever consciously deciding to move. Something in him had reacted to those moments the way you react to the first bite of a meal you didn't know you were hungry for.

He thought about the dream again that night, lying in bed with the ceiling doing its usual nothing above him. Understanding is given freely. Mastery is earned. He hadn't fully understood, when the light said that, what earning it was actually going to feel like the sweat, the getting thrown, the almost-certain embarrassment of walking into a room where Marcus Cole already had a reputation and Ethan had exactly one lucky gym-class throw to his name.

He fell asleep turning the words over anyway, less afraid of the answer than he'd expected to be.

The first practice was Tuesday. He had three days to psych himself up, or psych himself out, whichever won.

He spent most of those three days doing a bad job of not thinking about it. He caught himself watching martial arts clips online between homework assignments, not really studying them on purpose, just letting them play while some part of his brain the part that had apparently been rewired to notice things it never used to bother with quietly cataloged footwork and stance shifts without being asked to. He caught himself doing it at dinner once, staring at nothing while his hands unconsciously mimicked a grip he'd seen that afternoon, and had to cover it by pretending to reach for the salt.

"You're doing the weird hand thing again," his mom said, not looking up from her own plate.

"What weird hand thing?"

"The thing where you move your fingers like you're trying to catch something invisible. You've been doing it for a week."

"I didn't notice."

"Clearly." She smiled at him in the specific way that meant she'd decided not to push, the same patience she'd been extending to him all month, and went back to her food, leaving Ethan quietly grateful that his mother's curiosity tended to come wrapped in patience rather than pressure.

He also spent part of those three days trying to figure out what to actually wear to a practice he had zero context for. He didn't own anything that looked remotely like the athletic gear other kids carried around in gym bags on their way to and from club, and a slightly panicked search of his closet turned up exactly one pair of shorts that weren't embarrassingly old and a shirt without some kind of stain on it. He considered asking his mom to take him shopping, decided that felt like admitting more nervousness than he wanted to admit out loud, and settled for what he already had.

Jason offered, unhelpfully, to lend him a pair of his own gym shorts, which were two sizes too big and covered in a pattern of cartoon flames Ethan declined on sight.

"Your loss," Jason said. "These shorts have never lost a fight."

"They're shorts, Jason. They can't lose a fight."

"That's exactly what a losing pair of shorts would want you to think."

By Tuesday afternoon, Ethan had run through the walk into that gym at least a dozen times in his head, none of the imagined versions especially reassuring, and none of them, as it turned out, particularly close to how it actually went. He stood outside the doors a full ten seconds before making himself push through, telling himself the same thing he'd told himself in front of the sign-up sheet three days earlier that the only way to actually find out what he was capable of now was to walk in and let someone else find out alongside him.