Avery had been sent away to school at the age of eleven and might as well have been consigned to purgatory. He had been horribly bullied. He had been small, puny, golden haired, blue eyed, meek, gentle, cringing, and terrified. And he had known nothing would change, for his nurse had once explained feet to him—the sort of feet that were attached to the ends of one’s legs and had five toes apiece. The size of a boy’s feet, she had said, was a sure predictor of the size of his person when one grew up. Avery’s feet had been small, dainty, and slender.
He had been beaten up quite badly by a boy a year younger than himself on the playing fields one day when he had tried to catch a ball but had slapped his hands together instead while the ball bounced off one of his small feet and made him hop in pain. He had escaped sexual assault from the prefect to whose service he had been assigned only after he had burst into tears and the older boy had looked at him in disgust and complained that he was ugly when he cried, not to mention ungrateful and cowardly and girly. Both incidents had happened during his first week at school.
By the end of the second week he had learned very little from his books and his masters and tutors, but he had learned a number of other things, most notably that if he could do nothing to change his prospective height and body type and hair and eye color, he could change everything else, including his attitude. He joined the boxing club and the fencing club and the archery club and the rowing club and the athletics club and every other club that offered the chance of building his body and honing it and making of it something less pathetic.
It did not work well at the beginning, of course. In his very first bout in the boxing ring he pranced about on his little feet, his small fists at the ready, and was put down and out by the only punch thrown by his opponent. That opponent had, of course, been chosen deliberately to provide maximum enjoyment to the spectators who had gathered around in larger-than-usual numbers. The fencing instructor told him after his first lesson that if his foil was too heavy for him to hold aloft for longer than a minute at a stretch, he was wasting everyone’s time by continuing—perhaps he ought to join a knitting club instead. The rowing instructor told him he would be a champion if only a race required rowing in a circle because he needed both hands to wield one oar. At his first footrace, every other runner, even the one dubbed Fat Frank, had crossed the finish line almost before he had left the starting line.
He had persisted with a dogged determination and endless additional practice time until he turned some invisible corner early in his second year by winning another of what he had privately dubbed the amusement rounds in boxing by knocking down an opponent two years older and a foot taller and several stone heavier than he in the second round. Admittedly it had happened when the boy was striking a pose for his friends and grinning like an idiot, but it had happened nevertheless. The boy had even had to be carried off to the infirmary, where he had watched stars from dazed eyes for the next few hours.
The great change, though, had come when Avery was in his next-to-senior year. He was walking back to school from some unremembered errand and had taken an unfamiliar route for some variety. He had found himself walking past an open plot of waste ground between two old, shabby buildings and witnessing the strange sight of an old man in loose white trousers and tunic moving about barefoot in the middle of the lot with exaggerated steps and arm gestures, all of which were strangely graceful and slow, rather as if time itself were moving at less than half its usual speed. The man was about Avery’s own height and build. He was also Chinese, a relatively unusual sight.
After many minutes the movements had ended and the old man had stood looking at Avery, seemingly quite aware that he had been there for a while but unembarrassed at having been observed behaving in such a peculiar manner. Avery had stared back. He was the one who had broken the silence. He doubted the old man ever would have.
“What were you doing?” he had asked.
“Why do you wish to know, young man?” the Chinese gentleman had asked in return—and he had waited for an answer.
Just curious, Avery had been about to say with a shrug. But there had been something about the man’s stillness, about his eyes, about the very air surrounding him that had impelled Avery to search his mind for a truthful answer. Two, even three minutes might have passed, during which neither of them moved or looked away from each other’s eyes.
The answer when it came was a simple one—and a life-changing one.
“I want to do it too,” Avery had said.
“Then you will,” the man had said.