He’d been steering the 52-year-old toward the beginners’ class for three weeks. Then he hit her hard enough in a light drill to make a point in front of everyone.
The shot landed clean under her ribs and Fern Adisa went down on one knee.
Nobody in the circle stepped in. Fourteen adults in training gear looked at the mat or at the ceiling or at the clock.
It was supposed to be a light drill. Fifty percent. He’d said fifty percent himself, ninety seconds earlier.
Fern stayed down for two seconds. Then she put a glove on the mat, stood up, reset her feet and put her hands back where they’d been.
She did not rub her ribs. That was deliberate and it cost her something.
Kade Merrin turned to the room.
“Upstairs class is for beginners. That’s you.”
It was the third week.
Week one he’d walked over mid-class and physically repositioned her guard without asking, in front of everyone, and said “there you go” like she’d been struggling. She hadn’t been struggling.
Week two he’d suggested twice — once privately, once not — that the fundamentals class on Tuesdays “might suit her better.”
Week three was tonight.
Fern was fifty-two, five foot three, and she had been on a mat in one form or another since she was nineteen.
“Again,” she said.
Kade blinked. “What?”
“Again. Fifty percent this time.”
A couple of people laughed, and it was not a nice laugh, and it was not aimed at her.
Kade’s jaw set. He stepped in.
Dana Reike came out of the office door and stopped at the edge of the mat.
“Kade.”
“We’re mid-drill.”
“She’s your examiner.”
The gym did the thing gyms do — the ambient noise stays, the heavy bag keeps swinging somewhere, and every human being goes still.
Kade lowered his hands. “My what.”
“Federation. Level 3 renewal.” Dana didn’t raise her voice at all. “Fern Adisa. She observes from inside the class. That’s the whole method — coaches behave differently when they know they’re being watched, so she doesn’t tell you.”
Kade looked at the small woman in the grey rash guard who had just got up off his mat.
“You’re—”
“I’m a student in your intermediate class,” Fern said. “That’s exactly what I am for another eleven minutes. Then I’m something else.”
She pulled her gloves off with her teeth, one at a time.
“Finish the round,” she said. “With someone else.”
What happened after
She could have failed him. The form has a box for it.
What she wrote instead was a ninety-day deferral, which is a real consequence — he couldn’t coach unsupervised in that window, the gym had to reassign two of his classes, and everyone knew — but it isn’t the end of anything.
The written rationale was four sentences. The one people quoted afterward was: A coach who cannot read the body in front of him is a hazard, and this one is twenty-eight and coachable.
Kade re-sat the assessment in February. He passed it. He was, by all accounts, better.
He wrote to her once, through the federation, and it wasn’t an apology exactly — it was a page about what he’d been trying to prove and to whom, and it was more honest than an apology would have been. Fern wrote back four lines. She kept his letter.
Her ribs were purple for a fortnight and then yellow for another one. She didn’t put the strike in the report, because the strike was the one thing that would have ended him, and she’d decided within about four seconds of standing back up that ending him wasn’t the point.
She told her husband she’d caught an elbow in class. Which was, she reasoned, near enough.
Read the rest of the series in The Mosaic Stories.
More from the series: She Wore Scrubs, So He Called Security — The Man Behind Her Was Auditing His Branch · She Held Up The Whole Line For An Old Man Counting Coins — Then Someone Explained Why
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