There’s an art to getting your butt kicked. You can see it about halfway through any kung fu movie. It’s the big fight that shows you how outclassed the main character is, where a dozen goons come beat him up, and he barely escapes with his life and has to recover while learning the skills to come back and kick butt later. Ideally, if you’re following the kung fu formula, you stay stoic throughout the fight, bleed dramatically from somewhere on your face, and above all, never stay down when they knock you down.

That’s not as easy to follow in real life. Especially when one of the goons punches you in the back of the head as you’re walking to your car after school.

I hit the asphalt hard, skinning my palms and chin and dumping pens and junk out of the pocket on my backpack that never stays shut. That didn’t bother me as much as almost biting my tongue in half, though. Blood flooded into my mouth.

“Get him, Blaise!”

“Show that loser what’s up!”

Blaise kicked my backpack, and the momentum turned me over to face him and the crowd of kids from our high school who’re always following him around.

“What happened to kicking my ass, Grody?” Blaise sneered. “When does the beat down begin? I’m ready when you are. Or was that all just talk?”

Actually, it had been about ninety percent talk.

Earlier that day, during third block Anatomy-Physiology, we’d been dissecting frogs. By some unlucky trick of the draw, I got paired up with Blaise. Cool rich guy, good at all the important sports, liked by all the girls and friends with all the other jerks in our class.

Except today Blaise hadn’t looked very cool after Mr. Meighan plopped our frog down in the dissection tray. Blaise had looked like he was about to barf up his lunch. His face didn’t get better when Mr. Meighan told us to use the pins to stick our frogs to the trays as shown on the smartboard. So, I opened my big fat mouth.

“I’ll do all the hands-on stuff if it makes you sick,” I said.

For the record, I wasn’t trying to be a jerk, I was just offering. It didn’t occur to me that what I’d said could be misconstrued as making fun of Blaise until I heard Hannah giggle in the seat behind us.

“Are you seriously going to puke, Blaise?” She and her partner Isobel did that girl-laugh thing together, and Blaise’s face went from green to red faster than a string of color-changing Christmas LEDs. Hannah held her frog up by the back leg. “It’s just a little dead amphibian.”

“I don’t give a crap if it’s dead or alive,” Blaise said. “I’d chop this thing up into little pieces, no sweat, if I hadn’t been partnered up with the trailer trash pitstain over here. His stench is making me sick. Do they not put showers in single wides, Grody Flake?”

One, my grandpa’s trailer is a double wide. Two, I didn’t stink, Blaise was just being a douche to take the attention off looking like a wuss. And three, I should’ve punched him right there in class.

But when I get mad, my mouth starts running.

“It’s Grady Hake.” I started pinning down our frog’s limbs like I didn’t even care enough to look Blaise’s way. “If you can’t remember my name, it’s probably because you’ve got brain damage from all the drugs your mom did while she was pregnant with you. Drugs my dad sold her. Not for money, though. Probably why you suck so hard. It runs in the family.”

That’s the thing about getting mad, I’ll take myself down along with whoever’s ticking me off. A rich jerk like Blaise has way farther to fall than I do, anyway.

His right fist twitched back like he wanted to knock my teeth out right there in front Mr. Meighan and the school’s security cameras. But guys like Blaise don’t stay at the top of the food chain by being stupid.

“You better get a police escort back to the trailer park tonight, pitstain,” he growled.

I shrugged. “I can kick your butt without their help.”

That turned out to be a lie. By the time I climbed back to my feet and picked the biggest pieces of parking lot gravel out of my palms, I’d already figured out I was going down. Blaise had been taking tae kwon do at the Y since middle school, and he wouldn’t shut up about all the tournaments he’d won. I’d never been to a martial arts class in my life, just tried to pick up what I could from movies and YouTube.

Besides, nobody brings an audience if they think it’s going to be a close fight.

I let my backpack drop and put my hands up. It hurt the road rash on my palms to make a fist, but it’d be better than breaking my fingers.

His buddies went crazy. They really wanted to see me get stomped. Which made sense, considering I’d insulted every one of them at one point or another. You get pretty good at verbal defense when you’re the only kid in the school whose dad’s in prison.

Blaise grinned and bounced around with his hands down, coming at me with little jabs, then bouncing away. I took most of them on my forearms, keeping my fists in a high guard. The blows weren’t heavy. I would’ve thought he’d hit harder than that, but they barely stung.

Then suddenly, I saw my shot. Blaise threw a body shot combo. I ate both punches, and while I was in close, swung my elbow like an axe. His nose crunched, and blood shot out everywhere. He stumbled back, holding his face.

Somebody watching yelled, “Holy crap!” in one of those ecstatic voices.

I should’ve gone in for a kick to the shin, go ahead and chop the tree down, like the muay thai guys would say, but I was as surprised as Blaise that I’d hit him. This was my first fight with another person, and it wasn’t going like the movies at all.

Blaise let out a yell like some kind of berserker and tackled me. All the air shot out of my lungs, and I slammed into the side of my junky Oldsmobile. The metal dented, and the horn started honking. Not the car alarm sound that came from the cars of kids whose parents had bought their vehicles for them. Just one long, endless blare that meant the wadded-up piece of cardboard I’d stuck in the crack of the steering wheel to keep the horn from going off continuously had fallen out again.

I tried slamming elbows down on Blaise’s back and throwing knees into his chest, but it wasn’t doing any good. He kept me pinned to the car, pummeling my ribs with his fists. No more controlled shots that barely stung; these were serious I’m-gonna-kill-you punches that felt like shotgun blasts to the side. The only time he backed off was to smash his shoulder into me again. I doubled over, the strength going out of my arms and legs at the same time.

Blaise let me drop.

“Yeah!” he screamed, throwing his hands up like the crowd was going wild. “Mess with the best, die like the rest!”

I swallowed and tried to get up. My ribs didn’t like the idea. Felt like something was broken in there.

“Want some more, pitstain? Huh? You want some more?” Blaise kicked me in the ear.

I folded over, grabbing my head. The ear was still connected, but it’d felt like his kick had ripped it off.

“Eat it, loser!” Blaise crowed.

Now that he was back on top, his dumb friends were all yelling and shoving each other around like he’d just KOed Connor McGreggor. Isobel was there, too. She looked a little freaked out by all the blood, but her and Hannah were cheering Blaise on anyway.

“That’s right!” Blaise yelled. “Don’t come at me unless you want all your teeth knocked out!”

This was the part where I was supposed to get back up no matter how many times he knocked me down. Except when I started to get up, he planted his foot on my collarbone and pinned me to my car. I tried squirming out from under his shoe, but I couldn’t get loose.

“What’s that, Grody Flake?” Blaise leaned down with his hand cupping his ear like he was some kind of pro-wrestler selling his crap to the cheap seats. “You want your mommy?”

That set his buddies off again.

“No.” I swallowed some bloody spit. “I want yours.”

If you’ve never been punched in the head while it’s pressed up against a metal car door, I don’t recommend it. The next thing I saw was black.