The next day I call Dawn Michelle and there is no answer. I wait two more days. I watch the Dream, team massacre Lithuania and Puerto Rico. I watch Shannon Miller get the silver medal and become America’s sweetheart. Kim Zmeskal is compeltely forgotten.I have decided that I want to be in the Olympics in four years.

During at evening run we meet at the golf course with only five of us showing up.  We do the course. I rip, The first mile 5:01. Coach looks at me like I am out of control. I am salivating. I am hungry. It feels like the harder I run the more I can keep Kim Zmeskal from falling off the balance beam of life.

I decimate the workout, Coach is looking at me like I am possessed. He says something about not wanting to peak to early, especially since our first official race isn’t until three weeks away.

“Coach this is the third time I have run today.”

Coach looks back at me with furrowed brow and says the word what followed by a visible question mark. I respond to his query by spitting before taking a deep breath.

I ran five miles this morning than I did hill work in Bradley park this afternoon. This is just a cool down.

Coach seems impressed. He tells me that my body is still growing. He tells me that I am pushing myself to hard.

“Go home and rest, take tomorrow off. When you come back Monday, we’ll talk about a training regime.”

Coach states I shouldn’t be running more than twice daily at this point in the preseason.

I say goodbye to my teammates; I run home, but not before running down Moss avenue, cutting through Bradley campus, doing a two minute sprint down Main and tramping across the hills of Bradley park.  It is late dusk.  It looks like I am viewing the glades through the vernal hue of a dirty 7UP bottle. I run past the Columbus statue.   I do three hill loops. Corn stock is doing a performance of Guys and Dolls.  I run past the chines bridge and the wanna be hipsters carelessly flinging plastic discs at a metallic fountain.

When I arrive home I realize that I have logged close to thirty miles during the day.

I walk in through the doorway where I kissed Dawn all of 78 hours ago.

I don’t hurt at all.

I cut out a picture of Kim Zmeskal from Newsweek and tape it over the desk in my bedroom. I pay no attention to the nylon silhouettes floating across the frame of the window next door. I turn on Depeche Mode. I think about Dawn’s lips.

  I reach the phone and bleep out her number using only my thumb.

There still is no answer.

She is nowhere to be found.

                                                                                          ***

As I sit on my desk performing post-callisthenic stretches a curled shard of paper plops off the side like dropping a petrified piece of confetti down a well.

As I open I realize it is Tina’s number.

Like Stacia she made a little heart steaming from the top of her eyes like a smoke signal on Valentine’s day.

I can’t understand why Dawn Michelle has completely blown me off. I wonder if maybe she was offended that we kissed. That she thought I was trying to cajole her into something else.

I am tempted to call Tina. To see what she is doing. To see if she just wants to hang out and watch a movie or something.

Instead I take my shirt off. I go outside and run one final cool down mile.

The season starts in less than a month.

There still is a long ways to go.

I want to be ready when it convenes.

                                                                                 ***

The next morning I run six miles after my route even though I swore to my coach that I would take it easy. The first two miles I feel like I am competing in the Olympics via the geriatric ward. I start wondering why Dawn hasn’t called or won’t return any of my messages.  I wonder what I did to irk her. I wonder if I crossed some sort of vicarious boundary by kissing her in my front doorway .

I call Patrick up. He says that he just got a new twelve speed and that maybe we can go for a ride later this week.  When I get a hold of Hale all he wants to know is how Dawn’s doing. When I talk to David Best all he wants to talk about is how the Dream Team is the coolest thing since Band camp.

“By the way, I talked with Renae. She really wants you to call her. She really thinks you are funny.”

“Ho-kah,” I say, “What’s her number."

Best gives me her seven digits. I stipulate that this is really weird and all, calling somehow that my best friend aptly named David Best used to go out with.

“You don’t get it man. We’re no longer going out. We’re just friends.”

When I call her number the line is busy. It sounds like patient in a coma just went off life support.

I go back into my room. I perform my stretches. It has been over 100 hours since I last heard form Dawn I pick up the phone and punch out her digits.  There are three listless rings and then a feminine voice picks up.

“Dawn?”

It is her mom. She informs me that Dawn is in class.

"Ho-kay," I say, as I hang up the phone without revealing the syllables of my name.

                                                                             ***

“I was hoping you would stop by.” Tina is smiling. She is looking at me. She is playing with hair, forming a loop with her index finger. She smells like the sun. Her bikini top is a different color then it was the night before. She is wearing gnawed jeans.

She thanks me for stopping by before wielding the screen door open and inviting me inside. The entire house is dank, like old tint. There is a thick waft of Newport cigarettes dangling in chandelier wisps overhead.

“I just need to grab something real quick then we can go out by the pool.”

She reaches into what look like a hollowed out pear-contoured Buddha and grabs a ziplock bag and some sort of pinkie-sized chrome pipe. We walk out back to the pool.

"This is a really nice pool." It is an in ground pool. It is shaped like a lima bean.

“Yeah, me and Celeste pretty much just live out here in the summer.”

I intuit that Celeste was her friend with the black hair who was giggling the first time I saw Tina on the couch. I am looing for a socializing ice breaker to melt. Tina takes a drag out of whatever it is she is smoking, She passes it in my direction. I hold my palms out and refrain.

"You don't get high?"

"I'm sort of an athlete in training."


She takes another drag. She asks me what sport.

"Cross-country. Running is kind of my life. I'm hoping I can be in the Olympics in four years time."

Tina nods and says that I sound ambitious. She takes another hit. Tendrils of pungent smoke kick through her lips. I am still not sure what to say. Tina smells like chlorine and sun tan lotion mingled with the sweltering douse of early August sun.  I am looking down at my shoes because I don't want her to think I am intentionally ogling her cleavage.

I am still looking for words to say.


"I really like your mom. I'm really glad I have he on my route."

Tina looks back startled.

“Oh I’m sorry. Marge is my actually my stepmom. "

"Oh," I inquire about her dad since all I really ever see is Marge. Tina says that they are still married and it’s a long story .

Tina sits down. Her bare feet are thoroughly manicured. They look nothing like Dawn Michelle's bare feet.

"Are you excited about School starting in a couple of weeks. I guess I'll see you around the hallways at Manual."

"I don't go to Manual," She says, taking another hit of whatever it is she is smoking. I ask her if she goes to Notre Dame. She laughs again in a little hiccup."

"No. I go to Central."

       “If you live here why do you go to Central. Why not just go to Manual. You live in Manual's district. Did you get a waiver or something."”

Tina laughs at the word waiver

  “How is it you end up going to Central then?” I ask, in an almost innocuous fashion.

 “I just use my grandmothers address.” Tina says,


   “Oh,” I say, looking down into the laces of my running shoes. Either sweat r dollops of sun tan lotion ski down the precipice of her neck like a limp comet.

"You'd rather go to Central than Manual?" I ask


Tina makes a face that looks like someone just poured vinegar and wet concrete through her marijuana-snickering lips.
    
“Are you kidding?” Tina says, “There’s no way my real mom would let me go there. All the gangs and everything. She's afraid I'd get shot."

"I tell her that It's not that bad. She asks me what year I am. I lie. I say I am a junior. She says that is her same year."

"You must know Jason Sexton then."

I lie and say I do. Tina says its a shame what happened to him. I have no clue what she is talking about. I continue to nod my head and concur.

We talk for fifteen minutes.  We sit on the lip of the pools and kick with our bare feet. I tell her that I'll come back later this week with my bathing suit and we can go swimming.",       

"You don't need a bathing suit," She says. She then laughs. She tells me that she is really glad that I stopped by. She tells me that she want to see me soon.      

As I am walking out the door her friend Celeste  walks in with a beach towel and a boom box. She is next to a kid with a flat top.

"This is Earl," She says. WE shae hands. Earl is African Amercan. He has the whitest smile I have ever seen.

"We're glad you stopped by, you should stay and go swimming." celeste notes, taking a drag off the chrome pipe Tina has handed her.

I tell her that I can't. I tell her I have to meet my friend Tim from down the street.

 

"But we’re your friends now.” Tina is saying. From behind the screen door I can make out her navel. The top of her bikini is two blonde scoops busheled together, knotted in a generous bow behind her back. Her towel is tucked underneath her belly button. When she smiles I see dimples. From behind the screen door, the scent of lotion leaks up and hits my nose


                                                                                              ***

As I leave I saunter into Tim. He has his DC RPG box tucked under his arm as if it were ticking and could go off

"Tim this is crazy, there's like girls everywhere all of a sudden."

Tim looks like he is just entering freshman year even though he is three years older than me.  Last summer I introduced him to Pat and to role-playing and somehow, Pat and Tim has been insufferable ever since even though Tim mostly torches Pat’s character’s in his campaign.

I mean, as I was trying to tell Best, who keeps on insisting that somehow his ex-girlfriend who admittedly is really hot is my soul mate. 

Tim nods his head.

“Plus there’s Dawn Michelle whom I met while I was doing Music man and who is candidly the most well-rad and intelligent human being I have ever met. Half the time I don’t even know what she is saying

Tim is looking at me like he is an old testament prophet.

“What about these other girls?”

 

“Well, there’s this girl named Renae Holiday who goes to Limestone whose my buddy Dave Best ex-girlfriend. She ‘s beautiful as shit It was weird. Dave Best has three way calling and I used to tell Bwest something witty and he would convey to her what I said and then he would click back and state that Renae is laughing out of control even thought I would never hear her voice.”

“So have you met her,” Tim says, stating the words tete-a-tete, which he mispronounces tit-uh-tit.

 “Just once, at the fireworks at Glen oak park. She was wearing a black top and white shorts and sun glasses. She was really hot.”

 Tim shrugs his shoulders and says so. He is wearing sunglasses which make him look like Robocop.

 “Then out of the blue there is this really cute girl who is on my paper route.  She goes to Central but she is using her step moms address or something. She’s hot  as shit. Blonde hair. Always laying out in the sun all day so she smells brand new.”

 "It’ s weird all I was collecting and she just gave me her number out of the blue and when I went over there she seemed excited to see me. "

Tim seems quirt as if he is ruminating. As if he is a Hindi llama and I came to him for sage theosophical advice.

 "But it's mainly about Dawn. I mean I really like that girl. We've gone on two dates now and we've just sort've walked around. She's probably the most intelligent person I have ever met in my life. I really like her. A lot."

Tim says that he knows Dawn from Washington gifted back in Junior high. I refrain from telling Tim that Dawn informed me that, due to his Ritalin.  Tim asks me where Dawn is now.

"I think she's at Bradley, along with everyone else I seem to meet in my life these days she's attending a poetry workshop class." 

Tim says we should walk in that direction. For inexplicable reasons Tim always sounds like a Jedi Knight. We cross Western at the Koffee Shoppe and walk down Moss Avenue, in the direction of Bradley University, away from the bruised mango flares of the setting sun.

                                                                        ***

  When  arrive on Bradley quad I see her seated in a group, outdoors not far from the library.

Her creative writing class is seated in a what looks like a Mayan calendar oval. I walk towards her. She is wearing glasses.  The instructor of the class has auburn hair that is medium length and sprints into her shoulders .

There is a statue on Bradley Campus in front of the library known as the silver vagina, partly because it looks like a vagina, partly because some drunken frat boy got his tongue stuck to it early last November  I walk towards dawn with my glasses off, It feels like I am walking in slow motion . As I get towards the group the instructor with the short shoulder length hair flagellates her arm at me as if she is throwing an invisible boomerang, insinuating that I should shoo.

I walk back towards Tim.

“I think she is in class right now.”

I look back. There books are on their laps.  Even with my glasses off I can swear I see Dawn flashing me a smile.

On second perusal she just looks pee-owed.

                                                                              ***

When I get home I go for a run. An hour later my sister tells me that there is a phone call and that I need to take it upstairs. It is Dawn.

I am expecting her to be pissed only she isn't.

"Hey, she says, "Sorry I've been so elusive. I've been really busy with the poetry class and with speech."

I tell her I'm sorry. I didn't me to be intrusive.

"Listen," She says, "How about we meet tomorrow, for lunch. My treat. campus town."

It has been almost a week since we last circled the loops of Bradley park and Dawn dared me to put my glasses on.

"Yes, " I tell her, "Tomorrow will be fine."

BRADLEY PARK.....summmer 1992 ....prelude to a date Dawn Michelle (b.)

I am attired in my purple shirt for our second date, walking down the arteries of the West Bluff, spending more time in front of the vanity frame than I would like to admit, wearing sneakers, blue jeans, taking my glasses off and stowing them comfortably in my side pocket, walking down the same avenues and side streets I traipsed during the accelerated heat of early June, after arriving back from Madame Breton’s French class, thinking of Andrea, mentally drooling over Anastasia, ferrying my moss-colored MUSIC MAN script in front of me, working on the memorization of my lines, slicing my way down Heading avenue with a slight bob to my gait and nod to my head, trying to decipher the cadence sway and rhythm of the text I am to perform, now, the last week of July, I have turned fifteen, my first official girlfriend is seventeen, she will be eighteen in December. She has her own vehicle. She listens to music I have never heard of before. She has made it to the state speech finals the last three years, and I can think about kissing her-wading in the pond of her maraschino cherry lips;  I think about how we held hands  while walking around the cardboard contours of the mall as she slurped Mt. Dew and before she left we found our appendages buckled around each others' waistline, my lips finding the blithe pasture of her forehead, unable to somehow let go.

I am walking.

It is the last week of July. I have orbited the nearest solar bulb deemed in our grunting vernacular as the sun just over fifteen consecutive elliptical laps. With my glasses off I can still make out the vernal tuft of the upper park.  Near the cross walk there is a sticker plastered on the lamp post endorsing Ross Perot for president in 92.

 Briefly I debate stopping at the flower store on Heading avenue thinking I should buy her a rose, yet I refrain, I continue to walk. The cement peninsula on the corner of Heading and Main splurges into a rivulet of bumpers. There is the pharmacy and the college store where girls purchase sweatshirts with Greek emblems etched onto their center with a Frisbee golf Kiosk.

I am thinking about Dawn in her station wagon. I am thinking about what she thinks about at night. I am thinking about the books she burrows her blond subtle blond tresses inside of every night before succumbing to a nocturnal moat of sleep. I am wondering if her burgeoning senior year correlates to the senior year of the cast and Co. of 90210. I am wondering if her ex-boyfriend has sideburns. I have already been in Bradley park earlier this morning, after my paper route, when I ran through the arteries and avenues of the West Bluff, past the brick Kiln of Calvin Coolidge grade school, my elbows thrusting triangles taking a hard right on Swords, clambering down the hill in meted stokes with the lower hemisphere of my body , free falling into another hard right, descending the bluff 300 ft, running next to Dry run Creek, past Jimmy’s Bar and the billiard hall where kids with mullets and Metallica t-shirts always go outside to smoke, running over the graffiti Louvre of the Flumes, entering the park in an all out sprint, thinking about the Freshman record my cousin set another lifetime ago, wondering if I will christen it in my first official meet vs. Woodruff in the season opener come six weeks time.

As I enter the park I pass the playground with the orange equipment leftover from the late seventies that looks like a sting-ray stranded in mid-pirouette.  Since I have already sprinted past the Columbus statue earlier in the day I take the antipodal path, down the lolling hill, near the sandpaper playground and the pavilion.  Ahead is the Japanese bridge and stranded in the center I spot a fleeting image with blonde hair.

 It is like she is being swept across the creek in a early spring breeze.

It is like she is lost.

It is almost like she is waiting just for me.

                                                             




                                                                                  ***
After clawing her way back she falls down. She is flying. She is skidding. She is oscillating her petite frame through evaporating wisps of time. She is sprinting. She is launching. She is taking off. She is levitating above the earth of the mat as if with feathers. As if she is flying. As if after foundering in the first round she has found her wings. She is returning to the caliber of competition she knows she can compete at. She is contorting her body into floating musical notes. She is focused. She is ascending into the stratosphere. She is floating to an aerie nest seen only to the oscillating frame of her peripheral vision.

She has risen.

She is above.

And then it is gone.

She steps out of bounce on a landing.  There is another audible gasp from the audience. She is being deducted points . She is staying in routine even though she is falling behind. She continues to launch her anatomy even though she knows she has no chance to medal. She continues to perform her routine with pulchritude and poise even though she is all alone.

She has been on the cover of Time. The cover of Newsweek. The cover of TV Guide.

After all the hype she will go home with no hardware.

She will go home alone.

                                                                           ***

We meet in the center of the bridge looking out over a creek that is mainly arid and reeks of dead fish.  We give each other a hug that is more of a squeeze in a fabric softener commercial.  I ask her how her poetry class is going. I ask her if she is anticipating big time senior year.  Still fearing the wrath of parental authority I accent again that it is probably best if I call her and not vice versca. Dawn  laughs. There is something overtly British in her chin. Making out with the pomegranate hue of Anasatia Blake seems like it transpired sometime during the Carter administration.  I haven’t thought about Karen Christmas and her trip to France the entire summer. The fleshy apertures between our opposing right and left finger tips find each other. We squeeze. We let go. Ahead there is a chain fountain with a par digit above used for Frisbee golf outlining.  I make the perfunctory small talk. I think about our first date. I ask how many Mt. Dew’s she has ingested today. I ask her if she enjoyed the Freddie Mercury CD I bought her.

She smiles and says 12 (as in Mt Dews), her lips crooked, looking down, blushing, stating again that she is an addict. She then thanks me again for the Freddie Mercury CD. Telling me that I didn't have to do that.

“Well did you like it?”  I ask her with a little shrug of my shoulders. Dawn looks down as if she is receiving some sort scholastic accolade. There is something in the way in which she looks down reminiscent of the method Karen Christmas looked down when she accepted the larger Young Columbus plaque.

“Actually I didn't realize until I got home that I don’t have a CD player.”

I look at her nonplussed. I say what with visible stemming exclamatory branches. Dawn presses her arm into my chest and tells me hey, its not your fault. She states that she was so elated when she saw the rare out of print Freddie Mercury CD that she forgot her stereo doesn't have the required equipment to properly assess its sound.
“No, but one of the Dawn’s has a CD player and I can dub it on a cassette. I’m sure I’ll get a CD player shortly.”

Dawn thanks me again.

Next to the Chinese Bridge there is a one-story Pagoda. Dawn doffs her sandals and holds them in one hand. As we sit on the bench inside the Pagoda I call her Cinderella and grab her feet and begin to massage.

“I hate my feet,” Dawn says, “They look like battered planks of fish served up at Long John Silvers. I feel that my ankles are Hush Puppies half the time.”

I tell her good analogy. I continue to massage her feet. In my right pocket Dawn sees my glasses. There is the sound intermittent ping of plastic saucers being flung into metallic fountains. There is always the pungent waft of cheap weed and the reverse echoing ‘pock’ sounds of neon balls bartering over a knee-sized net in a caged concrete arena. There are picnic tables and the woods where people meet to perform efficient and quick sex acts on their lunch breaks.  Dawn is holding three poetry books as a bride might a mock bouquet during a wedding rehearsal. 

I ask Dawn what the books are. She smiles.


"These are the books for the poetry class I am taking."

“Poe-hehts?” I say. Dawn smiles. There is a white book and a beige book she defines as being Ariel by somebody which sounds like Sylvia Plate and the Beige one is the Wasteland by someone named BS Eliot. There is a small book that looks like lit was just smuggled out of prison with the words HOWL on the cover that is the size of a coaster and looks like it was smuggled out of a prison house

.

“What’s the large one,” In inquire, still rubbing the peninsulas of flesh that is Dawn Michelle’s left foot.

 

“This is Walt Whitman,” She says, “This is Leaves of Grass.”

I pick up the poetry. When I ask the title of the one I keep on thinking in by Sylvia Plate  I ask if it was influenced from the protagonist of the Little Mermaid. Dawn isn’t laughing.

“I’m surprised you don’t like poetry,” She says to me again.  I pick up Leaves of Grass and randomly begin to flip.

"This is the female form. A divine nimbus from it from head to foot."

I try to be witty. I ask Dawn if that is her divine nimbus or if she is just happy to see me. She doesn't laugh.

"Here," She says, yanking the book from my grip. She then reads a poem on the same page. There is no locked rhythm to the stanzas. It doesn't seem like a poem really, it seems like more of a life mission statement where the poet is talking about all that really matters in this terse time pixel of existence is being surrounded by men and women and the curious odor of them and the love and acceptance and plurality that beneath the mask of the southern-genitals or the subtle hue of pigmentation of skin somehow we are all intrinsically one and that is enough and it pleases the soul well.


When Dawn is completed reading the poem there is a silence. I look down on stretch of light casting what looks like flaring octagons on the welcome mat of the grass. 

Dawn looks at me and says the word so. She then squeezes my hand with her knuckles.

     "That was beautiful," I say, as an amen.

                                                                    *** 

Coach informs me that I am working too hard. He mandates that I cut back to running twice a day during the week and once a day on the weekend and take Sunday off.

“Your body is still developing. Your limbs are still growing. You need to time to rest.”

I want to tell  coach that now I am chasing Kim Zemeskal. I want to tell coach that I am in a hurry. That I have been chasing the elusive finishing line my entire life.

I want to tell Coach that no matter how much I hurt I am not going to refrain from running every day. From pushing myself.

"You just don't want to burn yourself out to early." Coach says.

I smile. I tell Coach that in order to shine you have to burn.

                                                                  *** 

 

“I’ve had something I’ve been meaning to inquire about for a long time but every time I broach the subject you become elusive.”

 I volley back a squeeze into linoleum of Dawn’s palm. Mentally I remind myself why I like this girl. Because she is three years older and uses the words “broach” and “elusive.”

Mentally I remind myself to look up the words broach and elusive in the big beige dictionary we have on the shelf once I return home. 

“You always seem so reserved about your glasses. “ I ask her what she means.  She points to my side pocket. “I mean, your glasses. They are just glasses. I don’t comprehend why you don’t want to be seen wearing them. I mean, it’s really no big deal.”

I look back at Dawn again and shrug. Above the hill the Columbus statue is behind us only it is out of view.  We continue to walk a loop around the lower level of par six Frisbee golf. Dawn alludes that she is only on break from class and has to get back soon. She says that she can drive me home. I am petrified to think what my parents' would think if they knew I was driving around with a senior from the opposite side of town.

As I clank shut the wing to her mid-eighties economy sized station wagon Dawn looks at me again.

"So, back to your glasses."

“I don’t know.” I tell Dawn  “People just started noticing me when I take my glasses off. I always wore them. I just started taking them off around the time of the play, right before I met you."

“Put them  on for me,” Dawn demands, as if daring me to whip out my cock with a classroom protractor in one hand.

“No,” I tell her, stating that, with the exception of when I am in class, no one sees me with my glasses on.  

Dawn shrugs. It’s like we have verbal joust.

“Nobody sees me with my glasses on.” I tell Dawn saying the word no one again.  Dawn's keys offer a spastic jangle in the ignition only the car feels like it is hibernating. I try to change the subject. I don’t want to tell her that I was teased relentlessly. I don’t want to tell her how I went to a so-called Christian grade school and how Mario Rutherford and Aron Bowman somehow found a shit-stained jock strap, forced me on the ground and placed in on my head like a crown of thorns before a home game. I don’t want to tell her how all my fellow teammates left when I had flecks of someone else’s fucking feces wedged in between my glasses and my eyes, drips of shit raining on my cheek bones every time I blink and how, for some inexplicable reason, I still had my pride and refused to tell on them, not that, looking back, the teachers would have done anything anyway since the principal sort of kow towed to players on the varsity elite.

.

Dawn swivels her right arm so that the car goes into park. Dawn’s wrist then performs a dyslexic twist and she plucks the keys from the ignition in a subtle jingle.

“See, I can wait.” She says, as if daring me. The center of my body is becoming tight, the center of my loins are sprouting like a Nintendo joy stick, making my christening my testicles with the standard appreciated BA control pad buttons. We wait for a minute. Dawn’s smile has relented into an intransigent hyphen of flesh. Next to her I see the stereo. Behind her I can see the back side of her hair in the reflection of the rear view mirror blonde commas dripping off the back of her scalp as well as the wooden playground that looks as if it is made out of sandpaper they will demolish come three years time after yuppie adults claim that it isn’t safe because some kids keep getting splinters.

 Dawn looks at me again and says that she can wait all die. My glasses are folded in my right side pocket, saluting like a GI Joe.

“Kay,” I yield, reaching down into the side of my jean, fishing out my glasses, taking them apart like trying to assemble a set of gymnastic uneven bars before sliding them up the slope of the road.

Through the thick magnified lenses I can make out Dawn’s almost uppity British chin. There is still an almost stern looked glued to her face.  Using both hands, the was my 4^th-grade optometrist mandated I place both fingers on each temple I peel them down folding them up again and placing them back in my pocket.

My erection has waned.

Dawn has said nothing about my magnified countenance.

A jingle reverberates as the keys wedge into the ignition and the mid-eighties station wagon she inherited via some older sibling default rule of hierarchy rumples into life, before she coasts free from the parking lot, past the Japanese bridge, into the beginning of all chartered chaos that is time.

                                                                                 

                                                                     ***

                                 

 That night as I drift into a nocturnal raft of sleep I See Kim Zmeskal on the mat and she is crying. She is in pain. Tears are splintering out from the side of her eyes in calculated blinks leaving a saltine rivulet of tears skiing down the side of her face.She is on her bottom, tautly draped in her white TEAM USA uniform. Her ankles are thoroughly taped. She is all alone. She is in pain. She is whimpering. She is crying. The lambent limbs that drilled her across the apparatus sting.

There are giant stalactite shadows above her and when I look at her again I notice that it is the La Sagrada Familia.

She is crying and the moment I step on the mat to carry her across the mat met morphs into an ocean  I am one side of the arena in Peoria and she is hurting on the other side beneath the palatal penumbras of La Sagrada Familia almost exactly straight east in Barcelona, Spain, 3000 miles away  

I take off and run.

In June I avg. 300 miles., thrashing my limbs at various speeds around the West Bluff raking in a little over 70 miles a week. At that pace it should take 43 weeks to arrive.   

I doff my shoes, ready to run across the Atlantic.  I feel a yank and find myself falling into my shadow, into the inky swill of currents gnawing at my feet. If she can fly over a gymnastic continent I have no trouble digging my bare cleats into the raking surf and salty tides of the ocean.

As I step into the water I begin to descend. My lips are blue. I am still pedaling my limbs and I can hear her subtle whimpers, telling me that she is lonely, supplicating for help, imploring me to hold her as I continue to move and what passes as animated bubbles exit from my lips and eventually I m no more.

                                                                       *** 

In Dawn's station wagon there is a single speaker stereo planted between myself and Dawn. She presses down the play button and music from a band I have ever heard of emanates out of the side.

“The car stereo is broken so I guess I just decided to improvise.”  Dawn notes we are driving up Farmington rd Hill. “It’s hard to find a radio station outside Chicago that plays most of the music I like anyway.” She states, before asking for directions to my abode. I tell her to keep on ging straight down Western and then take a right two blocks before Jumer’s. Mentally I tell myself that that is what I love about you, my first official girlfriend. The fact that she is into cool music and has a vestigial stereo in her car.

I still feel violated that she has seen me in my glasses.

“I love this band.” Dawn says,  I ask them what their name is She tells me it is Concrete Blond before turning up the volume.

We continue to drive down past the out of sync-lights at Western and Rohmann taking a right on Sherman. I have no clue where my parents’ are but it is clear from the lack of traffic that they are not inside the house.

“So” I inquire, as she puts the station wagon in park. 

"Wanna see where I live?”

                                                                        ***

The first week I am up to 140 miles per week. I am somewhere in Indiana. The next week 163.  I am in Akron Ohio. I run three times a day. I run East. I can't stop pushing myself. I can't stop feeling that if I could find myself next to the jarring surf of the Atlantic ocean somehow I can find the girl in the white leotard and hold her close and that somehow her tears would be sopped and she would never fall again.

                                                                        ***

“This is like the messiest room I have ever seen in my entire life.” Dawn states, she has her fingers cupped over her mouth. I smile. I am proud at the insanitary status quo of my living quarters.  She sees the contents of the drawers spilled open as if my dresser has just been fatally shot. She says several pair of athletic shorts and upside down running shoes. She sees my Nintendo and Sega stacked upon each other like a game of jenga in front of my diminutive bedroom television. She sees my poster of Ryne Sandberg and Batman Justice Digital half-peeled off the wall. She sees my stereo. I make it a point to note the music I have been listening to inspired chiefly by her tonal preferences. .

She smiles a wounded grin.

“I mean, this is like 10 times worst than my brothers’ room and I thought they were the most  unkempt bipedal species on the planet, this is just...."

Dawn completes her sentence my offering out a shudder. I smile. I tell her that she should see my closet. She tells me that she thinks she should pass.

I walk her to my front porch. This is our third date. Something should be about to transpire, something other than our tight hugs we use to greet each other and then say goodbye.

As if a choreographed ballroom dancing move I swivel her around facing my direction. I am talking to her in the same scripted manner in which I have seen adolescents slowly talk to each other and pause before making out on slightly concave screen of the television my entire life.  I step close to her. The closer I get to kissing her was when we were in the doorway of  Shakey’s during the Cast Party. Our attired genitals bump into each other and touch as I lean in. The caps of her knees thump into the middle of my shin. Our lips find ourselves trying to undress the others lips. Dawn's eyes are welded close. Mine are shocked open.

I then tell her goodbye.

Throughout our jaunt in Bradley park we never skirt near the Columbus statue once.

                                            

After we kiss Dawn enters her car and closes the door. I see her press down on the side of her car stereo, listening to Concrete Blonde, driving far away until she is no more.