Kaya's Story

New story. This one just came to me while I was bored and I already completed it. It is more of a short story than a novel or anything and some people might argue that it isn't even a story. Say what you want. It is a bit long so bear with me. If you get bored feel free to ignore it. It is my personal opinion that if you get bored reading something it wasn't really worth reading in the first place. Stories are meant to be interesting. Look at me rambling. Anyway, here is the story.

I once knew a girl named Kaya. During summer, her usual routine was wake up at five. Go for an hour long run along the harbor until she reached the dojo where she studied Tae Kwon Do. There, after quickly eating a granola bar, she would proceed to do strengthening exercises for the next two hours followed by three hours of technique training. Then, she would stop for lunch. She usually spent her afternoons either at competitions or sparring with the other members of the dojo, usually men who stood at least a foot taller than her and had arms like pythons. She brought them down in one kick. On the weekends she went to the boxing gym instead, where she studied both boxing and kickboxing. In the evenings, she would hang out with her gang. Not the gang she was in but her gang. Some of the boys there called her Queen, some called her Boss, some just called her Kaya but always with respect. One person called her Honey.  Her gang was a nice gang. Just a group of misfits who had banded together to escape from the not-so-nice gangs. Mostly, they didn’t do drugs and none of them did anything worse than smoke. They didn’t vandalize and actually kept the parking lot that they hung out in pretty clean. Every once in a while they would get involved in an unavoidable scuffle with another gang but they never went searching for them and when they did get involved, they tried to keep the injuries to a minimum. Though Kaya’s capabilities greatly outweighed the abilities of everyone else, they still were all pretty decent in a fight, having been picked on a bullied for the longest time. When they had met Kaya, it had not been with the intention of creating a gang but to learn some simple martial arts to defend themselves. Even now, she would often give them tips and teach them moves from time to time. Every one of them was skilled enough that they usually didn’t even need weapons like broken bottles and bats to defend themselves, even if the other gang did. When they beat a gang they usually didn’t come back to bother them, though some were persistent. Kaya usually hung out with her gang until 10. Since she woke up so early, she had to go to bed relatively early as well. She would then go to her boyfriend’s house. They lived together. Though she was only 16, her boyfriend was 18 and living on his own in a small apartment. During the day, he would work very hard to pay it off. Kaya would undress and shower and come out wearing nothing but some underpants and a large t-shirt that she wore to sleep in. Her boyfriend, his name was James, had learned to control his erections a while back and though he was most definitely turned on by her, he didn’t want to have sex with her. Why? Well, first of all, she didn’t want to have sex with him quite yet. Though she sometimes seemed like a slutty boss woman, she was still pretty innocent. The other reasons were that he didn’t want a child, though he knew condoms could solve that but there were always accidents and also, he wasn’t quite sure that he was ready either. A lot of people assumed that a good-looking guy like him had already had sex at age 18 but that was not how he had been raised by his Christian parents. Though he had dropped most of their customs when he moved out and his belief long before that, the ideals that he had been following all his life still remained. So every night they lay in bed in each others arms. It had taken them both a while to get over their nervousness enough to actually fall asleep at first but now they were almost like a married couple. The guys in the gang were all under the strong impression that that was how all relationships should work. Most people who didn’t know the couple well, wondered if they were crazy. That was only because they always got the wrong impressing about the young couple. After all, Kaya was actually pretty enough. Her face was cute. She had a button nose and large brown eyes with crazy long lashes and a child’s smile that reached all the way to her eyes. Her hair was a soft brown color and it fell in smooth waves to just past her shoulders. Still, she wouldn’t have been more than cute if not for her body. Constant working out and a pretty healthy diet had given her a beautiful body. She had a flat stomach, decorated with the soft lines of a girl’s six pack. Since she often ran outside and even fought outside, she every inch of her body was tanned with the exception of where her shorts and her sports bra hid her skin. All over her body there was not even a hint of extra fat. Not only that but her grandmother had passed a relatively big chest to her. She was a C cup. Not too big but for most girls with a thin body like hers, B was the best they could manage. No guy failed to notice her body. At the same time they never failed to notice the guy on her arm. Kaya was 5”4’. About the perfect height for a fighter in her opinion but James was 6’2”.  This put a full 10 inches between their heights. Not only that but James was a boxer as well. He had broad shoulders and rippling muscles in his arms. He was one of the nicest people you would ever meet, if you allowed yourself to get close to him because no matter how you looked at him, he was a scary guy at first sight. So imagine you’re walking down the street and you see them together. A pretty girl with that over confident expression that only martial artist and gang leader can get and a big, kind of scary, guy next to her. As a couple, they were intimidating and they looked like they had rough sex every night. What very few people outside the gang knew what that they honestly and truly loved each other. They weren’t together for power or because they just needed a lot of sex and the other person was always willing or any other reason that most people assumed. They actually truly cared. Anyway. In Baltimore, the city where all of this happened, Kaya was known as a gang leader by street kids, an amazing martial artist by the sports community and by any other adult who knew her, a delinquent child who had been kicked out by her rich parents. Kaya had been born into relatively rich family but because of her refusal to follow in the family business, her parents had cut her off, which was why she was living with her boyfriend. But I didn’t get to know that side of her until much later on because at school she was a totally different person. You see, while her parents cut her off and refused to see her, they still had hopes that she might follow in the family business because otherwise they might have to give it off to someone else. You see, Kaya had one younger sister but Carolina was not quite as bright as her older sister. Yes, she had a charisma that would make people flock towards her, which was important as a business leader but when it came to actual intellectual stuff and learning, her sister was not quite up to snuff. No, Carolina’s talents lay in getting people to love her. She was kind, happy, and always helping others. She wasn’t quite as pretty as her sister but she also had the same cuteness about her. At school, she was always everyone’s favorite mascot and everyone wanted to be friends with her. Both their parents knew that if the sisters worked together they could very quickly lead an empire in business but, while Kaya could have led a small empire on her own, Carolina would need just a little help in the actual business department. So all in all, Kaya’s parents still had hopes that she would lead that empire that they had left behind for her so they sent her off to boarding school. That was where I knew her. At boarding school everything from her personality to her interests were different. She hid everything about the real her, shedding of her gang leading-martial artist skin the moment she stepped on campus. I understand that she wanted to hide her gang life. After all, the school we went to, while not quite as strict and pompous as other private boarding schools, was still a private boarding school where students were expected to have a certain amount of decorum. Plus, Kaya understood what her parents wanted from her and while she refused to give up martial arts and take over the empire, she did understand the benefits of a good education so she always did her best to not get kicked out. And she was very good at it. Kaya was a genius. She took relatively difficult classes and somehow, without studying, was able to pass them all with A’s or high B’s. In her book, anything below an 80 was a failing grade while plenty of other students would have been happy with a 70. Her PSAT scores were just below 200. Everyone who knew her, had to admire her mind because it was sharp as a knife. Most people would have approached her a become friends with her, even if it was just to siphon off her intelligence but unlike in Baltimore, where she led a gang and had a boyfriend as well as multiple friends at the dojo and boxing gym, at school she was quite unapproachable. That was what happened when you hid an entire chunk of your life, you stopped trusting people, or more like you stopped trusting yourself to shut up about it. You also keep people at arm’s length so that they aren’t able to even catch a glimpse of that life by accident. So at school, she had a couple friends but even so it was not strange to see her sitting alone in her room on a Saturday evening. These friends, while they like Kaya had also resigned themselves to the fact that they wouldn’t really be seeing much of her all the time. For Kaya, who was not an unsociable person, this could be torture sometimes which was why she got into reading manga, usually the ones centered around martial arts and trying to see if they were actually physically possible. Some were, most were not in any way possible but she enjoyed reading them none the less. At school she also avoided guys like the plague but if you didn’t know about her other lifestyle, you probably would not have known. You see, in Baltimore, most of her friends were guys. All of the members of her gang were male and most of the people at the dojo and the boxing gym were male as well and she seemed to get along better with guys anyway. At boarding school she had a couple guy friends but considering how much she was surrounded by guys in Baltimore, having so few guys around really annoyed her sometimes. Still she was determined to not let that other side of her life show. To do this she sometimes when to extremes. So that people would not ask why she was so fit, she always wore baggy clothes under which she could have been thin as hell or relatively chubby. She let people assume what they wanted but nudged them in the chubby direction by avoiding sports. She did not run and whenever she was expected to lift something that was a little heavy, she would feign weakness, though she was most likely a lot stronger than most of the guys in her grade. During yoga, which she was required to do if she wasn’t doing a sport, she would do as little as she had to so that she would appear a little lazy and not very strong. She was also required to do one team sport a year so she did Ultimate Frisbee in the Spring, keeping a watchful eye out for everyone else to see when they got tired so that she could feign it as well. Some people who were sharp enough to realize became aware of the fact that her body was actually quite athletic with long legs and slightly broad shoulders but she always denied any sports activity at all and lazed around all day to strengthen those assumptions. By the end of the year no one who knew her would have ever mistaken her for a sporty person. I was one of her few guy friends. We talked from time to time but I never really thought about her as more than a friend because I was superficial and thought that I only liked girls with pretty bodies, (little did I know). That was until I discovered her secret. One day, Kaya disappeared on one of her random I’m-not-going-to-be-sociable-anymore moments. We always assumed that at these times she was in her room but I discovered that day that she wasn’t and that she spent her sports free afternoons doing other things. Now this happened in March of our Junior year. Kaya had already been fooling us for two and a half years about what she really was. Anyway, I just happened to find her by chance. You see in the afternoons, when everyone else was doing clubs and sports, we had assumed that Kaya was just lazing around but we had been wrong. Everyday while we were sweating our asses off, she was doing the same. She would go down to this section of the woods between the lower fields and the river and work her ass off. For a martial artist, getting out of shape is the worst thing ever and the food at school was not really healthy enough for her to stay in shape simply by lazing around so every day she would go out into the woods and work out.  She found a nice tree there and tied rope and cloth around it to use as a kicking and punching post. She used low branches on a tree to do curl up and pull ups and she would run around the forests for at least half an hour to get her cardio going. Everyone wondered why her hair was always a mess and the answer was because she was always working out in the afternoons but she couldn’t shower before dinner without seeming weird and so her hair was always a mess. Anyway, I happened to find her completely by accident. You see I’m on the crew team and so the path down to the boat house runs alongside the woods where she practiced. Me and some friends were waiting for our crew race to start one day and were throwing a baseball around. One of them threw it a little hard and it flew into the woods behind me. I was sent after it. I used to wonder everyday what would have happened if it had been one of the other guys who discovered her but I found out after a while that I was not the only person on campus who she had sworn to secrecy. Anyway, I ran after the ball and saw her there kicking a tree wrapped in rope over and over again. She was dressed only in shorts and a sports bra and I was able to see the strong muscles in her stomach, shoulder and arms. As she kicked the post, her legs muscles flexed and created strong lines all up and down her calves and thighs. A bead of sweat dripped down her head. “Kaya?” I said, not really sure whether to believe what I was seeing. Kaya turned on me so suddenly that I was afraid that I would become her new kicking post. “Shit, Daniel, what the hell are you doing here?” “Getting my ball,” I replied. I was a little scared of her at the present moment so the idea of giving her my usual snappy reply didn’t even come to my mind. I saw her eyes drift to the ball in my hand and then back to my probably incredulous face. “Whatever,” she said and proceeded to continue kicking the post. I didn’t move an inch. “Get out,” she said, “and if you tell a single person what you saw I will kill you.” I heard the threat in her voice. Though there was no killing intent, I understood that if I told anyone, I would get myself into serious shit. “Why not?” I asked once again fearing for my health. Kaya stopped kicking her tree and turned to face me. “No one needs to know okay? Just leave it at that.” I didn’t know what to say so I left and I knew even before I was fully aware of it that I would keep her secret and not just because she threatened me. In her last sentence, I had heard something. If it had been anyone but Kaya I would have called it pleading or desperate but she was Kaya and neither of those words fit into her personality. For her, people finding out about this secret would not be a good thing, so being the gentleman that I am, I kept my lips sealed. Since that day I tried to get her alone as much as possible so that I could question her on why she was choosing to hide that side of her and I began to realize something. Though she never told me anything other than to please shut up, I noticed a change in her when we were alone. It seemed that the moment I had learned about the martial arts, I got to see the whole other side of her. She was harsher than usual but also more sociable. When I was with the gang leader Kaya there was never an awkward silence. There were silences sometimes but that was usually because she told me to shut up. Though she was not as sweet or soft or kind as the Kaya I knew, she was still nice enough in more of a street way. She was more confident and stronger when she was gang Kaya and I grew to like gang leader Kaya more than the one she pretended to be around others. “Why do you completely change your personality around when you are around others? Like, I understand the martial arts a little bit and maybe why you hide them but I don’t see why you have to completely act like a different person.” She looked at me from below in a way that makes you feel like you should shut up really soon or you’ll get a fist in the face and I expected her to tell me to shut up again but instead she actually gave me a real answer. “It’s hard for me to show this side and not everything. Plus, the way I act around them is still a part of my personality. You know those really big, bad guys who are punks all the time and they are harsh all the time but then you show them a kitten and they act totally different? Well, I’m like that I guess and you people are my kittens.” I wasn’t sure how to answer to that so I didn’t. None of her other friends noticed the small changes in Kaya. She could have been an actress and I actually recommended that to her. “Yeah, you could be like an actress in an action movie and you could do your own stunts and everything. It would be totally awesome.” After I said this she looked at me with such a strong are-you-kidding-me face that I actually stopped believing it for a second. Still, that thought she would have been an amazing actress after all the practice that she got at school. That was something that I didn’t understand at the time. She wasn’t really acting. What she had told me had been completely true but I think I can explain it better than a big man and a kitten. Think about how you act with your friends, your parents, your siblings, your teachers, or with strangers. The answer to all of these is different. Just like you automatically act differently around your teacher and your friends, Kaya automatically acted different around her friends here and the people who knew about her martial arts background. But still throughout most of the rest of my junior year, I didn’t understand why she hid it. Finally, just a week from the end of school, she told me. “I’m actually a gang leader.” For the rest of the week she told me most of what you see here and the rest I deduced on my own. You see for her, martial arts and gang life were incredibly connected. She was in a gang because of martial arts, she had taught the people in her gang martial arts, her boyfriend was a martial artist and every day after practicing martial arts she would head out to the gang. The reason she didn’t tell anyone about martial arts had nothing to do with the martial arts but with the gang. After all she might have been asked to leave the school and it might have ruined her chances of getting into college if they had found out about her gang. So she kept quiet and she kept her gang/martial arts personality away from everyone and became the perfect student. I know that there were a couple other people at school who knew about her martial arts but of those I think I may have been the only one she ended up telling about her gang life. So I’m  writing this down. No one has to read it really. In a way, I don’t think anyone should read this because this is her secret. All the same, I needed someone to know now that she’s dead. For the past 63 years I have been keeping this secret and I know I’m not the only one who knew it but I think I’m the only one who will tell it. In the end, Kaya did what she wanted. She became a top tier MMA fighter and opened up her own dojo after getting a degree in business at Yale. She never did end up taking over her father’s company but Carolina married a very proficient young business man who agreed to keep the family name going so that problem was solved. Kaya did end up marrying James and they lived together in Baltimore for their whole lives. I realize now that I am writing up this story that I was in love with Kaya at the time but I didn’t notice maybe because some part of me knew full well that I was not ever going to get her. Anyway, this is her story. Do with it what you want but make sure that everyone learns about her because I don’t want Kaya to be forgotten.