Shadowboxer by Tricia Sullivan Read Free Book Online Page B

mister. Malu is an earth-mother type. She keeps plants, and fish, and of course there’s Coltrane the iguana, who she sneaked into the apartment without Irene the super finding out. As she started spritzing the Norfolk pine, she had a disapproving pout on her lips.
    ‘Seriously,’ I said. ‘I can feel it building, you know like an electric charge before a thunderstorm. Probably my biggest yet.’
    ‘What have I been telling you about thinking positive, Jade?’
    ‘I’m not trying to make it happen. It just is. I mean, bad things happen in threes, right? Well, I’ve messed up twice so far, you know? First when I stomped that girl’s head. Second, I lose my temper and knock out the world’s second biggest kung fu movie star. This is definitely an escalating fuckup series.’
    ‘Number three doesn’t have to come,’ Malu said quietly, pulling some dead leaves off a spider plant. ‘This is your chance to stop it. Go to Thailand. Change.’
    I shook my head. ‘You don’t get it. I don’t have a choice. My fuckups never quit until I’m all out of options.’
    ‘How do you think I felt when I went to boarding school with five pairs of Walmart underwear and there were girls there with their own polo ponies? You get used to feeling freaked out all the time. Being freaked is just a sign you’re challenging yourself.’
    ‘For real now?’
    ‘For real. Go with it. So tell me, are you going to that big place where all the Westerners go?’
    ‘Fairtex gym? No. It’s a tiny place. Mr B said they don’t have a website.’
    ‘So it’s authentic. Are you going to be in a little hut somewhere in the forest, picking fruit off the trees?’
    ‘It’s in Bangkok so I don’t think it’s a hut. It better not be a hut. I need a real bathroom. Especially with all that unfamiliar food and my... um... delicate stomach.’
    ‘I’m way ahead of you,’ Malu said. ‘I bought you Imodium AD on my way home. Four boxes. You won’t shit the whole time you’re out there.’

 
    Got Smelly Bottom
     
     
    R AIN DRIPPED THROUGH the leaky roof of the PortaPotty and plopped on my head. I was holding the last three sheets of toilet paper in my hand, trying to save them until I was sure the eruption in my guts had ended. So far that wasn’t happening.
    This kid called Pepsi was banging on the door and calling to me in a piping voice.
    ‘Come out now, Jade!’
    Sweat dripped off my eyebrows as another spasm gripped my intestines. It felt like a bunch of snakes were biting me all up and down my guts, poisonous snakes with fangs who also did that boa-constrictor-type thing that snakes do. At the same time. I just wanted to run away from my insides and leave them to shoot rocket fuel out my butt without me.
    But running away from my own insides was not an option. I opened my eyes. It was about 379 degrees outside and pouring rain in the building site adjacent to the gym. There was no seat, so I was squatting. My legs trembled with exertion and my teeth were chattering with that shivery feeling caused by shitting and hurling almost at the same time.
    ‘Please go away!’ I yelled. Malu had given me a Thai language book to study on the plane, but I’m not good at learning from books. So far I’d been getting by with gestures and English and the bits of Thai I’d learned over the years from Cake.
    ‘Time to eat, Jade,’ the boy sang, knocking again. I knew he was laughing at me; they’d all been laughing at me since the minute I got here. It was like I was some kind of traveling freak show. First I got on the wrong bus from the airport, then I got on another wrong bus to try to fix it. I’d walked about six miles, jetlagged, in the rain, until I found some college students who spoke English. They were so nice I almost cried, especially when one of them helped me buy this incredibly yummy fruit drink with salt in it.
    When I got off the bus I changed my mind about the college students. They must have tricked me. This couldn’t