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“Those fucking assholes--those damn fucking assholes!” The table shuddered and Bahorel’s coffee actually sloshed over the rim of the mug as Joly threw himself into the seat on the opposite side of the booth.
“Expansionists?” Bahorel guessed.
Joly, still muttering and seething, shook his head.
“Extrafauna dealers?”
“Quollo players.”
Joly spat out the words with such bitter emphasis and Bahorel couldn’t even laugh. He looked around for something suitable to address the situation with, then slid the remaining half of his triple-chocolate fudge brownie across the table. “I’m sorry.”
“Thanks,” Joly said through a mouthful of fudge. He took another bite of the brownie and sighed. “It’s fine,” he mumbled, though his slumped shoulders told Bahorel it was anything but fine. When Joly had made the quollo team, there’d been an extra spring in his step for weeks . Now he buried his face in his arms, muttering into his padded uniform sleeves. “It’s just the same old shit. People will be jerks, and sometimes you can’t do anything about it.”
Bahorel had an exam at 8th bell the next morning, but he could tell this was a more pressing issue that required his full attention. He closed his copy of Intermediate Principles of Intersystem Commercial Agreements and folded his hands on the table. “What are they doing?”
Joly shrugged. “Nothing horrible,” he told the tabletop. “Just the same shit as always. Roughousing. ‘Pass the Joly.’ Whatever.”
Bahorel waited.
“It just makes me mad,” Joly continued, raising his head, “that when I object, they don’t take me seriously. I--I got really mad today, and kind of . . . freaked out. I mean, I was yelling and I punched Kurtz in the face, and I tried to kick him. Like, I wasn’t playing, I was actually trying to fight back.”
“They just laughed.” Now Joly looked like he was about to burst into tears. “They were all dying; it was like it was the best joke they’d heard all year.”
“Man, that sucks,” Bahorel said. “I’m sorry.”
“I went to the coaches,” Joly said. “I mean, I was really. Mad. Y’know what they said? ‘Don’t take it so seriously,’ ‘Boys will be boys,’ all that shit.”
“ So not okay.”
Sighing heavily, Joly crammed the rest of the brownie into his mouth, leaving a smear of icing at the corner of his lips. “I guess I’d better get used to it.”
“How d’you figure that?” Bahorel asked.
“I mean, look at me,” Joly said, waving vaguely at himself. “I’m just barely five feet tall, and not even a hundred pounds. Maybe this is just gonna be my life, and I’ve just got to get used to it. I’m never going to be taken seriously. I’ve gotta get into all that politicking and manipulation and shit if I ever want to have any real influence with people.”
Privately, Bahorel thought that Joly, with his absolutely transparent face and his usually unquenchable cheerfulness, was even less well suited to manipulation than to physical intimidation, but he kept that to himself. Instead, he said, “Don’t give up so fast. A, when you’re dealing with actual adults , which will be most of your life, your size is going to be irrelevant.”
Joly snorted. “Ideally, but let’s be real.”
“--and B,” Bahorel continued, “there is stuff that you can do to be taken more seriously.” When Joly’s half-hearted smile came out more like a grimace, Bahorel added, “like actualy physical pain-causing maneuvers that a five-foot featherweight can do.”
Joly’s eyes lit up. “Show me.”
Remembering what his aunt had taught him when he was just a little runt of a kid, the smallest cousin of his whole very large family, Bahorel showed Joly how to use his weight, rather than strength, to twist out of a tormentor’s grasp.
“Now, your main asset is your knobbly little knees,” he pointed out after Joly had performed the maneuver six times in a row. “Built-in clubs, is what you’ve got. You know the classic knee to the crotch, of course--but what they don’t tell you is that you’ve got to put in some prep work first. Most guys are aware enough of that area, subconsciously, that you’re going to have to do something to distract them in order to get them to leave themselves open. Something like--” He dropped half his weight into his left knee, knocking Joly’s own knee forward and catching him by the shoulders as he was forced off balance. “Try that one.”
“You’re going easy on me!” Joly accused, as his knee to the back of the leg toppled Bahorel.
“Swear to god, I’m not,” Bahorel said. “It’s physics. Force and angles and shit; I don’t know exactly, you’d have to ask Feuilly why it works. But it does. My four-year-old cousin once knocked her six-foot-four tank of a brother down with this kind of thing.”
“Let me try it again,” Joly said, his eyes eager.
After being knocked down several times, Bahorel opted to stay on the floor for a minute. “See, it’s not how big or small you are that matters,” he said to the ceiling. “It’s what you do with what you’ve got.”
“Is that a piece of ancient martial arts wisdom, or a dick joke?”
“Both,” Bahorel said serenely. Somewhere above him, Joly sniggered, and Bahorel smiled. All was again right with the world.