Before the central race no one knows where Jose is. We are without a captain.We are stretching. We are getting ready for a third meet in seven days. We face our rivals central. We are without Jose. Apparently he has not been to school the whole week. Coach has already talked to myself and Peacock about stepping up even though our captain has been inexplicably absent. Apparently coached Stopped at Jose’s house and his father was passed out with a forty on the front porch.

He said that no one has heard from their son in three days.

                   

The third week of Physical Education we take a break from round the clock hooping to perform state mandated tests.We are to see how many push up and sit up we can perform in a minute. A steel machine with pincers takes our body fat. The encore is that we are given fifteen minutes to run as many laps as is humanly possible.

Coach Simmons is already impressed. I did 80 sit-ups in one minute and 71 push-ups. I haven't told him that I run Cross Country. I haven't told him that I have a race in a couple of hours. Somehow I figured I wouldn't run in PE on the day of my race.

I shouldn’t be running so hard. I have a race that night.

 

Coach Simmons keeps looking at  me. I am taking off. Juniors and Seniors are exempt from taking PE. I am lapping everyone on my fifth lap.  

I am wearing high tops rather than  my traditional shoes. I am running the way I always do. I am pushing myself. I am oscillating around the orbit of the gymnasium. I am passing everyone insight. I am thinking about my cousin's record planted on the wall less than 100 meters away.

At the end of fifteen minutes I have 69 laps. Just short of three miles.

Coach Simmons has a smile on his face.

 

                                                                        ***

“Do you remember me, Dave?”

I turn around. There is a ginger-haired girl. She is wearing the same patriotic garb as the rest of us.  My glasses our off. I tilt my head.

“Laurie?”

“Looks like you made it down here okay,” She says, with a smile. Her boobs look larger in her red PE shirt.

It is Laurie from last summer. Laurie whom I met while waiting for the bus to go to ICC. Laurie who took a poetry class last summer at Manual, the teacher who ironically was Pam.

I ask her how the poetry is doing these days.

“I actually kind of gave that up. I don’t want to be a poet anymore.”

“Why not?”

“I just don’t think that its something I’m very good at.”

I want to tell her that I used to listen to Def Lepard and think about her reading poems to me.”

I think you’re incredible at it. I think you are brilliant.”

Laurie shrugs. She says she thinks it was just a phase or something she was going through.

                                                         

                                                                ***
In the shower room the boys are expected to walk into the open showers completely naked, the majority of heads concentrating in skewed directions so as if not to inadvertently make contact with the keen part of their peers anatomy, the chrome overhead nozzles in the row of protruding showerheads look like something the Tin Man might empty and shake over the urinal during the seventh inning stretch. All the while showering.

You think about  the fashion in which the females are slouging off their red tops, reeling down blue shorts. You think about an cup-clad shell-braissered mermaid trying to free herself of her fins in slithered wiggle.

 

 

You continue to skate through a slipped martinets of  time, students ferrying nylon back packs like a Neanderthal man and a fresh kill, students looking clueless, popular girls wearing shoulder pads forming acute angles, cupping fingers over giggled braces,  girls holding books in front of their chest in almost mammogram fashion.

All the girls are wearing shoulder pads.

You next race is tonight.

You sometimes feel all alone even though you are surrounded by flesh all the time.

                                                                    

There is flutter and there is movement and there is the scent of cheap cologne and hairspray and there is youth. The arthritic squeak and colloquial hush of rusty lockers blinking open and clinking shut in a stuttered chorus of random clangs. Teachers standing outside their respective learning kilns in sentinel –like fashion.  We are falling through high school. We are empirical slaves to the shrill of the bell. We are ferrying books. We are perusing information and scratching our number two pencils into scantron sheet giving the answer that somehow will get us the premier alphabetical emblem. 

More than anything else I can't stoop emotionally drooling over Angelina Lighthouse, sniffing the back of her head as she swivels her chair in Cool Joe Thomas' Biology class.  

Cool Joe Thomas still has not taught one page,

 As I am walking out of History class I feel an arm halt in front of me as if protecting me from banging me head into the dashboard of the front seat of an oldsmobile.

It is coach Mann.

“David, excellent job on your first quiz.  Not many people ace those things right away.”

I don’t know what to tell him. This is the first time I have ever been held after class before by a teacher. I can’t understand how I can ace History and French and straggle behind the rest of the class in biology and advanced algebra.

“I really enjoy learning about early civilization. I really enjoyed reading all about ancient Greek and Hannibal crossing the Alps.”

Coach Mann smiles. He looks like he is ready to ruffle my hair On the wall is a poster for Last of the Mohicans, a movie staring Daniel Day Lewis which has just come out..

“I just want to say that you are really good at that cross-country aren’t you.”

I don’t  know how to respond. Coach Mann is smiling.

“Well, if ever you think about playing football I’m sure you;’d make one helluva fullback.”

He looks back at me and smiles. He outstretches his arm.

“In the mean time David keep it up. Keep on reading too.”

                                                        ***

Between classes Patrick is next to me the entire time, holding his books in front of him in a pyramid

I keep telling him that we need to be like his favorite word. Pat looks at me and quizzically says the word Fuck. I say no, nonchalant.

“Remember when you were jacking everything from the mall the day we rode our bikes out there everything was nonchalant.”

Patrick nods as if he has just taken a hit off a joint and says oh yeah.

Occasionally we see Tim. For reasons that makes no sense Tim is perennially wearing his purple sunglasses inside the school even though he has repeatedly been asked if he is looking for Helen Keller to give him a handjob.                                                             

I am chewing through French sentences. I am fucking algebraic equations. I am enthralled by Coach Manninoni history class even though my fellow freshman feel compelled to talk and jest and flirt while he is talking about Hannibal. While he is talking about Charlemgane, his football team is undefeated and ranked in the state and Coach M gives a lecture about the Magna Carta that defied me not to cry, even though everyone in the classroom is always talking because he is old, because everyone knows he is the football coach, because everyone knows his job is secure.

I am in love with Mr. Reents. I am convinced he is the most cultural human being I have ever met. I an enraptured with the name in which he straddles his desk as if it has equine genitals, brandishing the vocab book hymnal fashion

Mr. Reents is ebullient. He is kind. He makes you want to read. There is always coffee brewing in his classroom. He is constantly talking in the third person always referring to someone elusive as we.  He seems to wear a different polo shirt to class every day that is starched and extremely well ironed.

For some reason he loves to use the word, “really?” in an almost quizzical fashion.

At lunch Timm will say that apparently there was something going on where Mrs. Donaghue was vying to teach Trig and High school Calculus only those classes were given to veteran staff.  She teaches mainly a lot of remedial math courses to FROSH and SOPH. Your is the most advance she teaches by far.

Tim is still wearing his purple sunglasses even though he is inside the cafeteria and it is raining outside.

“I just felt sad to be in your  class because apparently there was some sort of state grant that went along with teaching Advanced courses and, since she didn’t get it, she’s probably taking it all out on you.”

 B and C lunch over lap. Just as we are leaving I see Angie Lighthouse walk into the cafeteria.

She is walking all alone.