Left-Handed Victory

It Wasn’t Luck, I Was Just Better Than you

It was the four of us: Mark, Anthony, David, and myself.
I think David’s mom had found the class,
but we would head to fencing lessons together for about a year.

David’s mom and Mark’s mom would take turns driving us.
We always liked it a bit better when Mark’s mom drove—
because we’d get to stop at Wendy’s for dinner afterward.
I always got the spicy chicken sandwich—
it was fairly new at the time.

Out of the group, David was maybe the best of us.
Certainly the skinniest and fastest, which helped.

The instructor constantly had us working on footwork.
Crab stances and lunges killed me.

Both David and I were left-handed,
and we were the only left-handed kids in the group of around 10–15.

Any time he and I were paired together for a sparring match,
I would inevitably win.
He hated that.
He would complain it was because I was left-handed.

He’d point out he could spar and win against any of the other kids.
He’d point out I rarely won in my other sparring matches.

He missed the point—
that I just didn’t care.
I only ever really tried to win when I was sparring with him.

He missed the fact that I didn’t want to be better than anyone else.
I just wanted to be better than he was.
And I was.

David was an arrogant prick.
His mom was the one who gave my mom the idea for the hellish brainwashing camp I ended up in.
Not just that—
he would terrorize one of the other kids in school for being gay.
That pissed me off.

But he was part of the forced group of “approved” friends.
This was a new requirement by my mother:
my friends had to have her approval.

She said I was bad at picking friends.
Everyone I wanted to hang out with was a bad influence, she’d say.
They’d either be “trashy” because they lived in a trailer,
or “creepy,” which I’d deciphered as her code for gay.
Which described most of my real friends—
the ones in drama and debate club.

I liked Mark and Anthony though.
We all didn’t care much for David.

Sometimes we’d get to hang out at Mark’s grandma’s house after fencing.
She lived in a townhouse.

Mark’s family was from New York,
and his grandma had this thick Long Island Jewish accent.
I loved listening to her tell stories.

We got to do a few sleepovers there.
She’d take us to Blockbuster so we could rent a PlayStation and play Virtua Fighter.

One Halloween, we got to have a sleepover.
It was fantastic—
we stayed up all night,
watched horror movies,
and played pranks on David.