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Track practice begins. Instead of running outside in the brisk mid-winter tundra we hustle through the aquatic dim of the hallways after school as one exhaling herd, as a pack, as a unit of kneecaps and roving limbs, beaded droplets of perspiration forming a sentence of lined abacuses and wet dots on the top of our brow, slowly skiing down the pasture of our cheekbones and chin as we continue our gallop, through different vectors of the school—a smashed unit. It is the first day of Track practice. Logrotto is still swimming. Beano is overweight claiming that he is not going to run track this year, promising a disdained-eyed Coach that he will be back for Cross country next autumn. It is myself and it is Peacock from the cross-country team. My leg is what I would say somewhere between 85 and 90 percent. There are several sprinters working out. The winter workouts are light. We slice through the hallways. The lockers I pass every second of the day become a blur. It feels like I am ready to hatch Five concomitant loops around the first floor is equivalent to a mile.
It is a two weeks after wining the contest, two weeks after rising in the sea of conference rooms slapped palms at the sound of my name being acknowledged as the recipient of the award. Two weeks after becoming accustomed to hands lanced in my direction to shake. Two weeks after all this, and still I am leaving, to be on a trip that will change my life with a group of paperboys from the continent. Every day I check the creaky jowls of our mailbox, wondering when I shall receive more from Parade. The trip is always a constant, the first thing I see as my eyelids wield open absorbing the nauseating static of morning as I dress and accompany my father down the illuminated streetlamp-fizz cool breeze of morning. Brewing coffee in the kitchen and waiting as my siblings rouse and dress and stumble down into the dining room. I am an athlete. I am healthy, incessantly configuring methods to shave extra lashed digits off the time of my mile. My world revolving around the galactic orbit of a track, my fists and elbows forming a rhythm, a syncopated melody sub woofer of my heart, constantly seeking a swift revelation of validation for the intellectual fetus I am becoming.
I look around and wonder where the fuck I am.
The stampede is whittled down every week, the regime for practice, for discipline, for respect. Each week the content of some ones locker is split open and disemboweled. Some weeks a new troop joins our constant sprint around the hallways. Come two weeks the weather will have subsided so we can rehearse our mile times outside, but for now, the mounds of snow and frost curtail our swagger from modulating outside the heated incubation of the hallways.
I am waiting. Waiting for more news. Wondering beneath the bony skeletal planks guarding my chest if the trip will actually transpire. Wondering if it wasn’t some dream dipped in the frost of a late January windshield haze. Looking at the calendar mom has posted above the phone near the mirrored dining room buffet, watching as the heralding names of months cosigning meted increments boxed time—the time signature for the globe, flipping over the names of heralding months—the frost of February, the eclipsing dew of late March, wondering when April will in fact arrive and what magic the locked calendar squares will unravel themselves to contain once I am to hop scotch to that place in time, discern the panoramic vista and wonder in awe, as the blank geometrical package slowly becomes illuminated in a pastel dawn covering, as the vistas and trees and vernal countryside fuse up like spring, inside the calendar squares, inside my chest, a place we are yet to get to, a moment we have anticipated experiencing.
I have filled out my passport. I have been told that sometime mid-march I will receive more information regarding my trip.
Everyday the steel interior palette of the mailbox continues to be a black cover of nothing when I look inside.
Everyday after school I continue to run.
***
It is second hour and I am waiting for Coach Mann. My limbs are sore from a hardcore workout. Coach Mann is continuing to meander across the chronicled atlas of history discussing the reign of Charlemagne. One linear eyebrow Aron Rothman still scowls every time he sees me. I am bent into my French workbook conjugating flowery forms of etre as a keyhole shadow looms above my desk.
It is Tasha. Tasha Clack.
I say Hi. Tasha responds by saying hi back before adding a listen, I was wondering.
"Listen, I was wondering do you know my sister Tabby?"
I nod. I tell her
***
It is second hour and I am waiting for Coach Mann. My limbs are sore from a hardcore workout. Coach Mann is continuing to meander across the chronicled atlas of history discussing the reign of Charlemagne. One linear eyebrow Aron Rothman still scowls every time he sees me. I am bent into my French workbook conjugating flowery forms of etre as a keyhole shadow looms above my desk.
It is Tasha. Tasha Clack.
I say Hi. Tasha responds by saying hi back before adding a listen, I was wondering.
"Listen, I was wondering do you know my sister Tabby?"
I nod. I tell her
“I think it would be so cute if the two of you would go to vice-versa together.”
Tasha's sister is a senior. Her name is Tabitha Clack who everyone refers to as Tabby Clack. She is thin with straight hair that skids down her back. She is Hispanic and on the swim team and involved in key club and volunteers for local food pantries over the weekend. She is going out of town for college next year. Her sister’s name is Tasha. She has an oily leftovers 80’s perm and sits close to me in Coach Mann’s class. Earlier in the year she asked if she could borrow my belt telling me that her pants keep falling down and my jeans look like they fit me perfectly with or w/out said belt.
“You would love my sister,” Tasha espouses, “Everybody loves Tabitha. She’s so much fun. She saw you running around the hall after school and inquired who you were. She thinks you are really cute.”
Tasha then asks for my number so her older sister who has less than four months less of high school can call me sometime.
I oblige.
Tasha then asks for my number so her older sister who has less than four months less of high school can call me sometime.
I oblige.
***
I get my passport back the first week of February. It is black and white. It looks like a Mug shot. It looks like I am wanted for a crime. No one in my family has ever had a passport before. The last person in my family to travel over seas was my grandfather in World War 2 half a century earlier.
***
“A senior?” My mom is saying, her head tilted.
“Yeah, She asked me to vice-versa. She’s pretty cool.”
We are driving in the station wagon home after indoor track practice. My indoor mile time remains halted around the 5:15-5:20 mark.
“But a senior?”
“Her name is Tabitha. Her sister is a freshman in a few of my classes. It should be fun. She really is a sweet girl.”
The vehicle glides past Madison golf course. Past the apartment complex on the lip of the golf course where the hot student teacher lives, the sand trap where Patrick carved the word FUCK in large letters, before halting at the stop sign, stretching down two more blocks before swinging a hard right on Sherman avenue, on the street I have lived my entire life.
Mom inquires when is this homecoming dance.
“ It’s vice-versa. It’s in a couple of weeks. I think the third weekend in February.”
Mom asks if this girl knows that I’m going to England in April. Mom tells me that I shouldn’t get involved with anyone b/c she doesn’t want me hung up on some chick and thinking about her the entire time I am participating in the contest I worked so hard at to win.
“It’s not like that at all mom. We are just going to be going as friends.”
There is snow and ice sleeked across the ground in a precipitous glaze as we amble slowly back into the cement steps leading up to the house registered as twenty-thirteen. Mom is behind me and says but still.
The first thing I do is pull down the handle to the mailbox. There are bills. There are brochures from various so-called Christian institutions that my parents support. There is nothing from New York. Nothing from Parade magazine. No atlas to tell me where I will be traveling come two months time.
***
“Tabitha has a baby,” Tim says, as we walk in the direction of Acme comics even though I have not purchased a comic book since the death of Superman. Have not bought an Xmen comic since issue 300 hundred. Since they branched off, sold out and became popular.
Tim tells me that Tabitha has a baby. Everyone knows that.
“No she doesn’t,” I retort. “I talked to her on the phone last night. Its common knowledge
“Its common knowledge that Derrick Andratti knocked her up at the end of her Junior his sophomore year respectively.”
I am not paying attention. I think she’s adorable. I think she’s beautiful. I think she’s a Hispanic angel with a halo underneath that sombrero.
She has a kid. The kid is either living with her right now or she gave it up for adoption. A lot of people wanted her to have an abortion because she was only sixteen and she didn’t because she’s a Christian. She didn’t feel it was ethical.
“I run cross country with Derrick. He is my age. We’re actually pretty close since he’s also a distance runner. He never mentioned anything at all about having a kid.”
Tim stammers back that they had a kid together. I asked Tim if he witnessed Tabitha firsthand walking around firsthand in a maternity gown looking bloated. Tim says not exactly. I ask him what he means not exactly.
“You could tell something was up, There were rumors and all that. She was maybe early six months when school got out last spring and she had the baby over the summer and then returned in late August looking fine like she always does.”
Tim is overtly Christian. I tell Tim that I still don’t believe him. He tells me fine.
“But just ask he who she took last year to the dance she’s inviting you to accompany her on now. Ask her how she took Derrick Andretti. Ask her what happened afterwards. Ask her how she wanted it,”
I tell Tim to stop.
“Ask her how he fucked her brains out. Ask her how there was no such thing as safe sex. Ask her how when Tabitha told Derrick she was pregnant he completely dissipated and even changed schools for a while, which, if you remember, he did.”
I remember. The first time I met derrick was when he was at the Woodruff meet. He was attended woodruff at the time. He then transferred back to Manual in late October, right after cross-country season ended.”
Tim begins his next sentence by stating all I can say is.
“All I can say is that she probably just wants you to fuck her and that she picked someone who was young and didn’t know her past so that she could do the same to him.”
Dirty banks of gasoline snow ploughed abutments and heaps still heaped together in campus. I look at Co-op records. The store I bought Tori Amos’s Little Earthquakes almost exactly one year earlier.
“Tabitha’s not interested in you. All she wants is some young kid just to fuck her brains out. Fuck her brains out so she can have more kids and get more well-fare money.”
“I thought you and Tabitha were friends?”
Tim tells me that there are no friends.
There are only acquaintances.
***
The next day there is a Saturday Track meet in Streator, Illinois. I am traveling with Randy Peacock, waiting for Coach Ricca to pick us up. I am looking at the record board of Manual high school. The board where my second cousin Todd Brooks has the record for the fastest junior to run the course in fifteen minutes.
It is mid-February. Outside everything is kitchen appliance white.
Peacock joins me. We are leaving for an outdoor meet in Streator, Illinois. Coach Ricca surprises us holding a thermos of coffee from behind. He has been down stairs grading papers, in the office where he shook my hand the day I informed him I had won the contest.
He calls us gentlemen. He asks if we got sufficient sleep last night. He asks us if we are ready to go.
The two of us pick up our nylon bags fraught with out athletic gear and sling them on the back of our shoulders. Peacock was the fastest runner last autumn, the only one of us who made it to sectionals, who almost made it to state.
The runner who lead our group after Jose dissipated.
As we are walking out he door into the hard frost of early February we launch almost directly into Tabitha who is coming in for a swim meet. Tabitha looks down and says hi. I wonder if I should give her a hug. All I say is hi as well.
Both Coach Ricca and Randy are smiling.
“Who’s that David?” Coach says to me, with an almost avuncular grin.
****
I finish first in my age group. I run a 5:20. The indoor track is half the orbit of a regular track measured out in 200 elliptical meter increments, a mile being eight laps in lieu of four, the 3200 being a tedious sixteen.
Peacock’s time is slower than what Coach is expecting. He has been video taping the girls basketball team who are en route to state. He has been protesting school board meetings. Coach tells Peacock that he needs to focus to get his priorities straight. Coach tells Peacock that he has potential. That he doesn’t want to go the route of Jose. That he needs to focus on graduating and attending college next year.
I clutch the trophy like a wand on the way home. We stop at country bar and have pop and pizza.
Later that night I phone Tabitha for the first time.
I am nervous. All my icebreakers are beginning to melt. I ask her what she is into. What music she likes. I ask her hoe she is enjoying her big time senior year and who her favorite teacher at manual are. I tell her about my trip to England. She told me that she saw my picture in the paper only I look different with my glasses doffed. She tells me I look handsome. I make a witticism and she laughs.
I try not to think about her fucking Derrick Andretti. I try not to think about her clad in maternity garb, her feet splayed into a u-boat of clasped forceps, tears of sweat slaloming down her forehead in medias grimace as she is being advised by Doctors to breath and push.
I call her an Hispanic angel. I ask her if she would like to get together sometime and watch Like Water For Chocolate. I make her laugh by telling her that even though I am in love with the French language and French culture I’m still fairly adept when it comes to speaking Spanish. I then recite the entire dollar menu from Taco Bell.
She laughs some more. I smile to myself. She tells me that her favorite band is Depeche mode. I tell her that Depeche Mode is like my best friend and she is the first person in the school I have met who is heavily into DM. Tabitha notes that she thinks she heard somewhere that they are supposed to have a new album coming out shortly in which I tell her that I know nothing.
The conversation is going good. There is laughter. I am using the phone in my parents bedroom, the same phone I used to call Renae every night last autumn. The same phone I used sitting the bed where I was conceived feeling that whatever deity there was possibly would not allow me to go to Europe.
I hear a scream in the background. It sounds like child. Like a baby. I can hear Tabitha say the word shit. She tells me to hold on a second. She says the word okay.
There are more screams. Three minutes later Tabitha returns. I am silent. She asks me if I am alright. I tell her yes. She apologizes. She says she is watching her little sister. I ask her how old her little sister is.
“She was born late August, two weeks after school started.”
I nod. I tell her that it has been a pleasure talking with her. I tell her that I have to go and that I will call her soon.
***
After I hang up with Tabitha I call Renae. Her mother tells me that she is not in.
She does not ask to take a message.
***
That Monday I slip a note into blue locker in the science hallway that is Tabitha’s thanking her but informing her that I will not be able to go to Vice-versa with her since I have an out of town track meet that weekend. I am not exactly lying. The meet is in Urbana at the U of I campus but we will probably be home in time for the dance.
I circumambulate between classes as if not to saunter into Tabitha. When I see her a week later she waves and tells me that she is sorry I can’t go with her, informing me that she really would’ve liked that a lot.
The next day Peacock is caught outside the school holding a megaphone goading students to picket about a school board meeting where Home ec classes are being cut from the curriculum at Woodruff high school. The majority of the kids who are picketing are students who go across the street to before school and during lunch to fire up a cigarette. It is French class and students are outside across the street and I can hear Peacock’s voice in the megaphone encouraging cars to bleep their off-kilter horns in support.
I find out later in the day that Peacock is cut from the team for his actions.
“You are the head varsity distant runner know, even though you are only a freshman. I really need you to stay focus.”
There is no Jose. There is no Peacock. I am the leader of the pack.
Focus.
When I get home I ask mom if anything from New York has arrived.
She tells me there is nothing. Nothing at all.
When I get home I ask mom if anything from New York has arrived.
She tells me there is nothing. Nothing at all.
