Chapter Text
The things you get stuck on end up defining you, I think. The things you can’t get over or let go of become who you are. So make sure you choose well, I guess. Try not to get snagged on some bullshit that’s not worth the whole rest of your life.
I only knew where he lived because Ali showed me one time, on a golf cart tour of her neighborhood. My mom, you know, her car barely ran. Had to get a running start. But the Mills had three, and because there was room in that massive garage leftover, they went ahead and got a personal golf cart too. The Hills were a different world. Me pedaling up those streets on my two-speed, it felt more like science fiction than reality.
But I couldn’t think of anywhere else to go.
I could feel the black eye coming up, too fresh to bruise properly, so far just hot, tight, swollen skin. I could feel tears caught in the back of my throat like a gnarled fist. And I could feel, same as any physical thing, how mad Mr. Miyagi would be at me, if he found out. Probably exactly how mad I was at him. He didn’t understand anything about honor, didn’t want me to defend my title, wanted me to just sit back and let the whole Valley think I was a coward and a loser and a quitter. He didn’t understand that I didn’t have anything else. Karate was the only thing I was . Karate and the bonsai shop, I guess, and I couldn’t face both being a bust. It made me feel like I had no future.
So I got in bed with the devil. Or whatever name Terry was going by. It was terrifying: victory at any cost. Violent , in a way Miyagi-do karate never was. And it was wonderful. No more holding back, pre-emptive strikes so devastating the rejoinder never came. Terry was nothing like John Kreese. I never saw anybody move like he did. He was beautiful. It wasn’t that I didn’t know how to get away, it was that I didn’t know how to want to. His training made me bruise and bleed, but it seemed worth it, if it would turn me into him. Sleek and strong and handsome, free to do whatever he wanted, a teacher. A champion.
I only knew one other person who’d gone into Cobra Kai and come back out again.
So that night after practice, my first week or so at the snake dojo, bruised to oblivion and knuckles bleeding under the tape, I went there.
I went to see Johnny.
*
A lady in an apron answered the door. At first I thought it must be Johnny’s mom, started to call her Mrs. Lawrence , before I realized she was wearing a uniform, before I realized Johnny was so rich they had staff to answer the door. I wondered what else they paid other people to do for them. Water the plants? Cut the lawn? Cook the meals? Drive them around? Wipe their asses? The entryway she let me into, it was grand like you wouldn’t believe. Marble, gold paneling on the walls, mirrors stretching around the whole top half of the room, a chandelier and glowing wall-sconces every few feet. Pillars with precariously perched statues and inscrutable art were everywhere, and against the wall were low glass tables heaped with bowls of fresh flowers. The kind of thing that grows for free in fields, but you just knew cost hundreds of dollars a week to fill a house with. It was beautiful, I guess. Like being punched in the gut with beauty. I couldn’t imagine living in a place like this.
“Sweetheart, you’re shaking,” the housekeeper tutted over me, her voice lilting with a soft accent. “Sit down, sit down. In here. I will get Master Lawrence for you.”
The room she led me to was even more opulent than the foyer. I didn’t know what to call it—a parlor? A sitting room? The apartment me and my mom used to share, it was two bedrooms and a living space with a galley kitchen stuck to the side. Seven hundred square feet on a good day. Johnny’s house had whole rooms whose purpose and name I couldn’t say. I sat on the edge of a white silk settee, hoping my pants wouldn’t leave dirt on it. Everything in that room looked like it would stain.
I don’t know what I was expecting. Figured Johnny would throw me out without letting me explain, most likely. We didn’t have the best history. Worst case scenario, he beat me even worse than his dojo just did, and I hobbled home dragging my bike after me, all bruises and shame. At the same time I knew he was the only person who could possibly understand. Why I had to do this, no matter what Silver asked of me. Why I liked doing it, no matter what it was.
What I didn’t expect was Johnny Lawrence, hair longer than last time I saw him, jeans and a t-shirt for some metal band, one earring, and a walkman, to come into the room and stop dead at the sight of me. To say, “Holy shit, Daniel, are you okay?” To rush to my side. To grab my chin and tilt my head from side to side, studying my days-old layers of bruises upon fresh bruises. To say angrily, “No one beats your ass but me. Who did this? I’ll kill ‘em.”
It was the first time he’d ever called me by my first name.
I only knew I was smiling ‘cause it hurt , my split lips tearing a little, my jaw aching right up into my brain. “I need to win the All-Valley,” I told him, “so I found myself a school where defeat isn’t an option.”
Johnny took a step back, his face draining of color. “Tell me you didn’t, man.”
I nodded, still smiling that terrible, painful smile. There were tears in my eyes, maybe, or else one of the cuts on my brow was oozing again. Hopelessly, my voice hoarse from days of screaming no mercy , I told him the truth. “I’ve been training with Cobra Kai.”
*
Johnny took me upstairs to his room, “before you bleed all over my mom’s furniture,” and every bit of the house I saw was gauzy and gold and mother-of-pearl, until I got to his bedroom. It had high ceilings and thick carpet but that was all you could tell, really, because the walls were covered in posters and plaster holes and paint, every inch of the big room covered in clothes, books, guitars, karate weapons, Playboy magazines, junk . Johnny was a total pack rat, the eye of a hurricane. I never owned so much stuff in my life as he had just on his bedroom floor that day.
He told me to sit—I gave him a look like where? , because every surface was covered in clutter. “I know, it’s a sty in here,” he said, wrinkling his nose. “I’m packing, so. Just sit anywhere. Shove shit on the floor if you have to.”
“Packing for what?”
“For none of your business,” he sneered. Then he left me there, alone in Johnny Lawrence’s bedroom, and it made me blush just being there, remembering all the fantasizing I used to do about being in this exact spot. I imagined it less of a dump, though. Instead of sitting I wandered through his room, tracing my fingers over his things—a soft sweatshirt, a fingerprint-stained copy of a Salinger novel, stacks of doodles of the Cobra Kai logo and different karate stances and misshapen guitars. I breathed him in. After a few minutes I started to worry he was like, calling security or something, getting ready to throw me out, but then he was back with rubbing alcohol, cotton swabs, and an ice pack wrapped in a cloth.
“Sit, I said,” he grunted.
“What if I want to stand?” Arguing with him, pushing back, was second nature. I couldn’t even do something simple without giving him a hard time.
Johnny rolled his eyes. He stalked up to me, jewel cases for tapes crunching beneath his feat, and tucked the ice in the crook of his arm so he had a free hand. He used it to shove me onto his bed. I stumbled backwards over a baseball glove and landed on my back on his mattress.
Johnny walked over and sat beside me like I wasn’t breathing hard, waiting to see what he’d do next. “I’m taking care of you,” he said matter-of-factly. “Now shut your dumb mouth so I can clean out that head wound.”
*
We didn’t talk much that day. Wasn’t much to say. He patched me up, made me hold ice over my eye, elevated my bruised legs on a stack of pillows. For a couple hours we watched cable on the TV in his room. He sprawled on his messy bed like it was no big deal and I sat like I had a stick up my ass, trying to think about anything but how I was on Johnny Lawrence’s sheets. When the sun started to set, it was time for me to go, so we nodded goodbyes and I left. I pedaled home through settling dusk and tried not to think of anything.
I knew already I’d go back the next day.