Foil

 Kieran throws his foil down in disgust. “I don’t know what I’m doing wrong!”

A few other teens titter in amusement until Mrs. Markoulis fixes them with a look. They pretend to busy themselves with their drills again, affecting the saintly innocence of young people. She really hates teaching children.

Kieran is an especially difficult student. She cannot fault him for effort; he is more dutiful to the lessons than many people in her adult classes. He stands at attention like a soldier when she gives orders. He seems to think he is training for war. Most 14 year olds do not consider fencing a sacred art. Most of them are dropped off at the studio by their parents, who want their child to learn discipline but are too precious to throw them into karate with the unwashed masses. Kieran takes an hour long bus chain from Providence to Brigham City every Saturday just to get here.

He pays in cash, money he has spent the better part of a year amassing, and he makes no bones about this. Sarge, he has explained to her, and by this she can only assume the boy is referring to his father, would shoot himself in the head before paying for him to come and ‘play with swords.’

So she understands, she really does, why Kieran may have more roadblocks than his classmates.

In spite of all his effort, he always gives up the touche.

“Bench,” she says. Kieran’s face falls, and then rises again with fury. “Now.”

He kicks the blade on his way over, hard enough to send it flying. It twangs against the ground. She watches him to make sure he doesn’t throw anything, knock anything over, or otherwise deface studio property. He does not. The foil is his, and he can kick it if he pleases. He goes to his cubby and grabs his sweatshirt, with which he hides his face when he tucks himself into the bench.

She continues the lesson, though thankfully it’s only another 20 minutes in this block, her last of the day. When she dismisses the class, Kieran wobbles to his feet, until she tells him to sit back down. They need to have a discussion.

Kieran is a hunched up hedgehog, sitting painfully still and waiting for the predators to lose interest. His buzzed head pokes out, only adding to the image of him as a strange, pathetic animal. She stands in front of him with her arms crossed. At last, the room clears and the door shuts, and they are alone.

“Why do you think I had you sit out today?”

Kieran says something miserable, but it’s buried in his sweatshirt. Mrs. Markoulis snaps her fingers and demands he speak up.

His face is splotchy from restraining tears. “Because I was bad.”

A childish sentiment. But he’s so distraught, she has to believe he means it.

“Kieran, if your behavior was bad enough that I needed you to leave the lesson, I wouldn’t have allowed you to stay in my classroom. Do you understand?”

She’s not sure if he does, but he just mumbles, “Yes ma’am.”

“I needed you to cool off,” she goes on to say, “so you would be ready to train individually.”

His big, dark eyes fix on her, red-rimmed and unreadable. “I can’t afford private lessons.”

Against her better judgment, she thinks her heart breaks. “We’ll put it on credit for now.”

“I don’t have credit. I’m 14.”

“Kieran. I don’t think you’re listening to me.”

His brow pinches.

Delicately, she says, “You don’t need to worry about payment for the moment. We’ll come to an agreement.”

“Oh. Okay.” He has that cagey street urchin look he sometimes gets, like he expects to have this snatched away as soon as he accepts it. She doesn’t entertain his anxieties. She claps her hands and tells him to grab his foil and show her his en garde.

His form is fine, she supposes. Stiff. She barks a few commands, appraises the results. He follows her instructions to the letter, but he doesn’t know what he’s doing. He has seen the way she moves, the way his classmates move, studied them until he thinks he can copy them. He cannot.

His blade swings too wide, his feet almost trip over themselves when he lunges. His actions read loudly even to his fellow novices, unable to disguise their honesty. In some ways, this is her fault for not pulling him aside sooner. Months’ worth of frustration pushes him to move sharper, suddener, but it makes him wasteful.

“Slow down,” she tells him at last. He doesn’t understand, but this one at least is common enough to correct easily. “Speed is not about how quickly you move. It is about how efficiently you move. We’re going to squeeze this hastiness out of you if it kills us both.”

They have to start at the beginning again with basic exercises. They’ll start slowly and build back up, without even using his blade. He doesn’t protest out loud, though he scowls and huffs and sets his foil down a little too roughly. Neither does she say anything aloud about his attitude. The look in her eyes is more than enough to cow him. Kieran stretches, squats, lunges, at a speed which allows him to feel the movement in his body rather than moving blind.

At the end of the lesson, Mrs. Markoulis realizes the real source of his hesitation. She closes up the studio for the evening, and with the keys in her hand, walks to her car. Kieran is sitting in the parking lot beneath an unlit spotlight. His eyes are glued to the street, where cars race by in the twilight, sending up thin clouds of scrubland dust.

“Kieran, what are you still doing here? Is your mother coming to pick you up?” she calls. She can’t very well leave until all the students are safely off the premises.

He just stares at her. “The last bus to Logan was like, an hour ago.”

That’s a no, then. She sighs. “You live in Providence, don’t you? It’ll be faster to take you there myself.”

In her passenger seat, occasionally mumbling directions back to his house, he’s awfully small. He pulls his knees up to make himself smaller. The sight of his shoes on her upholstery makes a muscle twitch in her neck, but he has had a long day, and she can tell him to keep his shoes on the floor next time.

Kieran’s progress is slow and painfully won. He struggles especially during the main class, when eyes are on him. He tries to apply the lessons from his private sessions, but she catches him hastening, moving oddly, and has to come and correct him just as often.

He misses a lesson one week, and returns the next with a bright red, freshly healed wound on his lip. The stitches haven’t even fallen out. That day, he’s utterly quiet, unfocused. He hardly even tries. His arm is limp.

“We should stop doing this,” he says after the other students have files out the door. “There’s no point.”

She looks him over. His dull eyes fix to the wall over her shoulder. Her stomach turns, knowing how little she can do for this boy. Clearing her throat, she asks, “You’re giving up, then?”

Kieran shrugs. “I’m a bad fencer.”

“You love fencing.”

“But I’m no good at it. Why am I bothering with anything when I’m not any good?” In an instant, his eyes go from too dull to too shiny, as he blinks away tears. Kieran knows better than anyone that men don’t cry.

Mrs. Markoulis takes hold of him, both hands digging into his shoulders. He’s almost as tall as her, but still so thin that the little bones in his arms dig into her in turn.

“Kieran, look at me. Look.” It’s like pulling teeth, but he drags his gaze to hers. “You are good. You are. Do you think I would waste my time if I didn’t see any potential in you?”

It spills over in lines of shame down his cheeks. She allows him to look away. His modesty is all he has.

“You have the core skills comfortably in your arsenal, but you struggle to apply them because you are focused on comparing yourself to the rest of the class. This is unacceptable as a fencer. You need to build your foundations, your technique, to best suit you. Not just in body, but in mind.

“You are not a stupid boy. You are not unresponsive and your reflexes are more than adequate. But you are slower on the piste because you spend too much time thinking about your opponent. Watch the others when you are judging them for weakness, for strategy. Do not watch them with envy. You do not exist beyond the end of your blade. Do you understand?”

He doesn’t. But she trusts he will someday.

Bit by bit, Kieran leaves his anger at the door. Out there, for all she knows, he’s still burning himself up, spitting and biting and throwing things at anyone who crosses his path. At war with the world. But in the studio, he is his body, and he is his arm, and he is the sword in his hand. He ripostes. He lands more hits. He begins to feint, and soon his second intention is as natural as breathing.

He doesn’t need private lessons anymore, but they are both creatures of routine. By the time he’s nearly 18, they spend most of their extra hour on Saturday evenings simply dueling. Sometimes, he talks. There are very few adults in his life with open ears. He can lecture for tens of minutes at a time on obscure historical notes and bladecraft. It’s honestly extremely dull, but she can tolerate it.

Too soon, Kieran graduates high school. As a college student, on the pre-med track no less, he will no longer have time for fencing. But he thanks her, and shakes her hand. And Kieran disappears.

-----

One Saturday evening in September, cleaning up after her youth foil lesson, she startles to find a stranger standing in her office.

He’s taller, and his hair is long and bleached blonde, with roots only faintly showing. His hands, buried in his jacket pockets, fiddle with something. It’s much too warm to be wearing that heavy bomber jacket, but he’d always dressed a little unseasonably. He looks at the pictures on her wall, framed certifications and awards and photos of herself with her students. Kieran is not on her wall; he didn’t like having his picture taken.

He looks back at her. There is metal in his face, piercings. He’s not smiling, not in a way she can recognize, but there is a lightness to his eyes. The soldier is gone. She does not know what he is now, but it suits him better.

“Hello ma’am.”

“Kieran.” She can’t identify her own tone as it comes out. To his credit, it doesn’t make him flinch. “I see you didn’t become a doctor.”

He runs a hand through his hair. “Is it that obvious?”

“What are you doing here?”

“My sister is having a baby shower. Since I’m in town, I figured I would see how everything is, uh,” he gestures vaguely, “going.”

The studio hasn’t changed in the ten years since he first became her student. She has not changed, excepting inevitable wrinkles and grey hairs.

“Everything is fine. Have you kept up with your fencing?”

“I haven’t really had the opportunity to practice. I mean, I try, but I’ve been busy. And, speaking of being busy.”

Kieran pulls his hand out of his pocket, and it is stuffed with a thick wad of cash. Mrs. Markoulis raises an eyebrow.

“What, pray tell, is that?”

“Well. Three years of private lessons, around 25 a year, give or take, that’s 75 lessons, around an hour long apiece. Adding in pain and suffering, I would say that comes to about $4000.”

“Pain and suffering,” she repeats, tearing her eyes from the sheaf of hundred dollar bills in his hand.

“I came into some money recently,” he says by way of explanation, because the inner workings of Kieran’s mind are as obvious and as mysterious as ever. “Legally. It’s not, I mean. It’s good money.”

“I appreciate the gesture, but I’m not interested.” As if she would have kept a child in her debt.

He doesn’t budge. “If I leave this here, what will you do? Throw it out?”

“You’re forgetting that I know where your family lives. They have a mailbox, don’t they?”

That finally gets him, and he grimaces. “You could at least give it to someone who deserves it.”

“Kieran, either you earned that money, in which case that is your desserts, or you obtained it by some illicit means, in which case I will not be laundering it for you.”

“Do you really think I would be caught up in some shit like that?”

No, she admits to herself. Unless there have been some bigger changes than she realizes, fastidious young Kieran would not have ended up a petty thief or a drug dealer. Even if he does sort of look like some kind of gang member, with the hair and the piercings and the… eyeliner? He looks like a certain brand of apostate, she amends, which is almost as much trouble in a place like Brigham City, if not for her then at least for himself.

“I’ll take your money if you can win a bout against me.”

Kieran juts out his chin. “Best two of three?”

She agrees.

He borrows a foil. He doesn’t have his own anymore. She allows him a short time to warm up, get limber and get his blood flowing. Kieran slides out of his jacket and tosses it onto the bench, revealing trashy cut-off sleeves, fraying halfway down his ribcage, and a tattoo on his shoulder. A dragon, iridescent copper-green, entangled with a knight in armor, aiming a spear to its heart even as the dragon threatens to crush him. His shirt has a picture of a cartoon duck.

Since he doesn’t have the right shoes with him, Kieran elects to duel in his socks. To make it even, Mrs. Markoulis takes off her own shoes.

He cuts a few experimental arcs with his foil, testing out the new-old limb. He hops on his toes and shakes the tension out of his shoulders with a little full-body wiggle.

“Alright. I think I’m good.”

They take their masks and their places, on opposite sides of the piste. He settles in with his knees bent. His spare arm curls to his side. For being out of practice, his posture is still balanced. Kieran has never been graceful for as long as she has known him- he has never moved like a dancer, like a swan, and it would be unfair to expect it of him- but he has never been more utterly purposeful.

He must be studying her as well. Looking her over, weighing the way she shifts, the way she breathes, holds her foil, tenses her muscles.

“Allez!”

With her first steps, she pushes in aggressively. Testing. He retreats and bats her off. Foils clash as he moves, backsteps heel-toe-heel-toe, her advancing, until he’s nearly at the back line and shoots his arm out in a well-calculated lunge. She’s over-extended herself, chasing him to the edge of the field. The tip catches her in the shoulder.

They both back away, taking a moment to breathe and return to their places. She has to wonder what he looks like under the mask. Is he surprised to have taken a point?

“Allez!”

An even trade of blows. She attacks, then he attacks, only managing a step apiece as they deflect one another’s blades and search for the opening. He’s hungry for it. He took the first bout, it would be so quick, so simple to finish it here.

His blade grazes her chest, but it comes a moment too late. She’s already got him. His shirt catches on her foil; he rubs the spot after, and of course, he’s only wearing that flimsy thing so it’s bound to hurt. Or perhaps this is a psychological tactic. Lowering her guard with his pain. If she wants to win, she must be willing to hurt him.

This Kieran knows things about the world which adults can’t express and children cannot understand. She couldn’t have taught him that.

“Allez!”

A foil finds its mark. Touche.

They both unmask. She smiles at him for the first time in years.

“I can see you’ve learned a lot.”