38)

My second day of school started off with a run with my Uncle Dave who kept staring at my dog as she kept ahead of us. “Your dog is just not right.”

I drifted off the running path to give Saku some scratches and praised her for being a good girl while my uncle looked on. Then we began running again. "She's just special."

He grunted at me. A resigned but still disapproving one.

After getting cleaned up and eating, me, Ami, and Aran headed out to the bus with just my Mom this time. She explained, "Your Dad headed over to his school early, he wants to finish up getting it painted today so it has time to dry when he opens it up on Friday.”

I made a point to sit next to Nicole to symbolize that I didn’t hold anything against her, but we chose to ride in silence at first since I wasn’t ready to talk, and she was respecting that.

At first.

“Your Grandfather….?”

The old man was standing outside his front gate in what had to be a brand new black tuxedo, waving and tipping his top hat as we drove by. The bus driver called back. “Somebody get his picture.” my little sister called back that she had “Got him!”

Nicole had half stood up as she turned to keep looking at Grandpa, as she sat back down she gave me a wide eyed look. “Is he going to do that every morning?”

I shook my head. “Oh no. He’ll skip a day every now and then to give me hope that he'd stopped, and then he might later on drop it for an entire week. Then he'll do something even more elaborate, or he'll start doing it across the street from the school, even if he has to buy the property.

Turning my head to let her see the horror in my eyes, I told her that. “He’ll keep it up for years. He won’t stop, nothing and no one will convince him otherwise.”

She looked back again. “I wish I was that close to my grandparents. I only get to see them a few times a year.”

I slowly nodded. “Yeah, he’s frustrating. But it nice to have gotten to know him.”

My school day passed by with several people asking questions about the Dad's Dojo or the trip to the games in Chicago, but all I could do was tell people to check out the Dojo when it opened on Friday.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

That and admit I didn’t even know where the place was. I had yet to see it myself.

It took me and Ryan a good ten minutes to convince Austin that I wasn't going to spar with him in the gym. But I did show the two of them some Basic Katas to practice along with some breath control.

“But really the best thing to practice is running, the more endurance you have, the longer you can practice and make the most of the time you have with an instructor.”

But then werewolves have a lot of endurance. By the end of the Gym, they had talked me into showing them how to work in some good blocks against the strike I had shown them. And with them being boys I just knew they would be hitting each other by the end of the day. And Ryan at least, would probably end up with a bloody nose.

At least as a werewolf, it would be healed up in minutes.

After school, I made an announcement at the gym covering the same information I had given everyone else over the day and got to play an actual game of basketball.

Girls versus Boys. Del's ideal. I think she is avoiding any situation where we would be on opposite sides. Not because she's worried about me beating her at something, but because she doesn't want teenage drama to turn us being up against each other somehow mean something.

Which is disappointing since Del has more athletic ability than anyone else I've seen playing.

Ryan is pretty good too. He's small, but he's more aware of his surroundings than just about anyone else. Aside from Neal who seems to be holding back all the time.

I was going to have to get him on a court with just him and me sometime and make him play me seriously. Not right now, since that could be seen as a date, but sometime.

Since I had mentioned several times that I didn’t even know where my Dad had set up his Dojo, I was surprised when Neal offered to walk me over to it after school. “You’ll miss the bus, but I’ll get my Mom to drive you home if your Dad already left for the day.”

It was about a twenty minute walk from the school to the old fire station Neal finally pointed out to me. "The county station was close enough after it was built that we didn't need the old one anymore. They turned it into a community playhouse, but it was never a good fit. They just use the school's now.”

No one responded to me knocking so I began to tap on the lock, a flow of my Chi flowing into it with each tap. I already knew how to pick a lock, so I could picture how to use magic to replace the tools I didn’t have on me.

And I could now check for the presence of wards, at least ones that weren't hidden.

I turned the knob and pushed open the door to the smell of fresh paint and the sounds of fans.

Neal followed me in, blinking rapidly. “Did you just pick a lock with your finger?”

Giving him a grin, I blow on my fingertip. “Learned it from my Grandma. She tried me on knitting too, but I can’t sit still long enough to learn.”

We stepped into the middle of what must have been the garage, the bare cement had been painted over in a light blue fairly recently and had a stack of familiar looking, stained, old gym mats. Along with a much patched punching bag and some beat up exercise equipment that had also been sitting in my Grandfather’s basement.

One of the walls had been more recently been painted a dark red color. Rather ominously the same color as fresh blood. The rest had a new coat of plain old white.

I had gotten Ominous from the word of the day email my Grandfather had signed him, me, and my mom up for. We tried to use the words each day at least once around each other.

It’s nice to do things as a family. The impression that something bad or unpleasant is about to happen by the way.

Neal was staring at the red wall. “Why is only the one wall red?”

I took a long look at the big open room. "There are windows and things on the wall on the other sides of the room. I think my Dad wants people to get thrown that way since it’s safer. It's red so people know it's the danger wall so they don't stand in front of it. He’ll probably mount padding on it later.”

There I came up with a nice reason for it to be red.

Which is why it was so frustrating when my Dad came in and announced. “It’s red so the blood doesn't show.”