9
WORLD RECORD FOR CLEANING THE DIRTIEST CAR
ONE TIME IN gym class we had to do this thing for warm-up where Mr. Perham made us form two lines, facing each other. Everybody had to reach out and hold the hands of the person standing in front of them. For me, that person was, of course, stupid Brandon Simmons. His hands felt slimy, as if he had just blown his nose into his palms, which he probably did just to be a jerk. After we all were holding hands, Mr. Perham stood in the front of the line with his back to us.
“This is called a trust fall,” he said. “I’m gonna let myself fall backward, and I’m trusting you all are going to catch me.”
“Like stage diving?” Greg Dodson said.
Mr. Perham turned around. “Pretty much.”
For someone about to be all trusting, he looked kinda worried. Shoot, I was worried for him. I mean, I wouldn’t trust somebody like Brandon to catch nobody other than himself or Monique. But Perham turned back around, took a deep breath, and leaned back.
That’s basically what the whole “you gotta tell a secret to eat” thing Coach pulled on us was all about. It was like a trust fall with words. A warm-up to being Defenders. By the end of the dinner, it seemed like we were all connected in some strange way that none of us had imagined, and it stayed that way as we came to practice on Monday.
“Awwww,” Aaron teased, as me, Lu, Patty, and Sunny hung around talking to each other before the stretch. Coach and Whit were on the side of the track, having an extra-long conversation with Chris Myers’s father. “Look at the newbies. All of a sudden y’all besties, huh? Let me guess, Patty told y’all a secret about how she got a crush on Curron.” Curron grinned as the other players laughed.
“Ain’t nobody got a crush on Curron!” Patty replied.
“Dang, Curron. You heard that?” Freddy chimed in, yanking the drawstring on his shorts.
“Yeah, I heard her. What’s wrong with me, Patty?” Curron asked, fighting back his embarrassment.
“Sorry, Curron,” Patty started. “But I don’t like boys who jump the gun.”
Everybody laughed and Krystal Speed gave Patty a five, then fired off a few finger guns at Curron. “Pyewn! Pyewn!”
“What you laughing at, Krystal No Speed? When’s the last time you won a race?” Curron fired back.
“The last time I seen your mama,” Krystal said. “Ain’t never ran so fast, ’cause I ain’t never seen something so ugggly.”
“Hey, hey, no need to bring anybody’s mom into this,” Sunny chimed in, struggling to get his voice to cut through the oohs.
“Oh yeah?” Curron was now feeling big. Being laughed at was getting the best of him. “How ’bout we talk about yours, newbie?”
“That’s enough, Curron.” Aaron, who started this whole mess, finally decided to step in and fix it. But it was too late.
“Nah, let’s talk about Sunny’s mother,” Curron insisted, now sizing Sunny up. We all knew he was just joking and that whatever zing he was gonna attempt was just gonna be silly, but still, this was Sunny. His mother wasn’t even alive, and I knew that. And to me, that fact made those jokes off-limits. I also knew Sunny wasn’t the kinda guy to stand up for himself. So I did.
“Let’s not.” I stepped in front of Sunny and looked cold into Curron’s eyes.
Curron faced me, trying to hold his square, but I could tell instantly that he didn’t want what I had for him. “Y’all see this kid?” he said, turning around to the other vets. Patty and Aaron came up alongside me, joining me in protecting our friend.
“Yeah, we see him, and since you a cupcake, we suggest you leave him alone,” Aaron said, shutting Curron down.
Then a hand clap. Slow. One. Then another. Then another. Coach was standing with Whit, clapping. “That was fantastic,” he said. “Wasn’t it, Whit?”
“I thought so,” Whit replied, folding her arms across her chest.
“So many tough guys and girls on this team—” Coach stopped himself. “Wait, did I just call y’all a . . . team?” He started toward us. “That’s what this is, right? Right?”
“Yes, Coach,” Aaron said, instantly slipping back into his role as Coach’s pet.
“Oh, so only Aaron knows we’re a team?”
“We’re a team, Coach.”
“Yeah, Coach. We’re a team.”
“We’re a team.”
“So then act like it. You understand me? Each and every one of you.” He waved a finger past each of our faces. “Act like it! Matter fact, learn from the newbies. Defend each other. They ain’t your opponents. They’re your new family. And as y’all can see, they mean business.” I looked at Patty, Lu, and Sunny and tried hard to totally cheese. Then I looked at Curron and nodded as Coach commanded, “Now let’s stretch it out. Toe touches. Everybody down.”
After stretching and warm-up, the sprinters spent the rest of the practice doing fartleks, which sounds like fart licks. Funniest name ever. Fart . . . lick. HA! But it has nothing to do with licking farts. It just means you run three minutes at 80 percent speed, and one minute full-out. Sounds easy, right? Try doing ten of them. It’s harder than it sounds. Way harder. Trust me.
On the first few I was able to keep pace with Lu, Mikey, and Aaron, and on the fourth, I decided to prove a point and turned the jets on. We hit the final stretch, the last hundred meters, which was when we were supposed to run full-out, and I must’ve channeled my inner Usain and bolted to the end.
“Good job, Ghost!” Coach said, whistle still in his mouth, clasping his hands behind his back. I bent over as the other boys crossed the line. They all swung their hands toward me, dapping me as Coached continued, “You proved that you can get it if you want it. Now get back on the line.” But I couldn’t move. Because even though Coach had blown the whistle, I had blown my legs.
“I ca . . . I can’t,” I panted just loud enough for Aaron to hear me. I dropped to one knee.
He grabbed my arm. “Yes, you can. Let’s do it. You got some more in you.” And even though he was the captain, and kind of a suck-up, and he’d gotten smoked by me—a stupid decision that didn’t feel nearly as good as I thought it would—I knew he meant that. That I still had more.
Needless to say, the rest of practice was rough, and ended in me crawling from Coach’s cab, barefoot, to the house, through the house, into the bathroom, and into the bathtub, where I basically let the hot water cook my muscles.
And that’s how it was every Monday after. Every other day during the week was similar, but with a different routine. Coach had it set up so that we always knew what we were doing at practice every day. That way if he was late, or if Coach Whit wasn’t around, we could—Aaron could—run the workout for the team.
So it went like this:
Mondays: Fart licks. Which for me meant an afternoon of running my legs to death, and an evening of boiling them back to life.
Tuesdays: Technique. How to come off the block. Elbows in. Open up your stride. Head up. Back straight. Glide, don’t wobble; be a horse, not a penguin. Run through the finish line, not to the finish line. Blah, blah, quack, quack, wah, wah, on the line, whistle, whistle, over and over and over again.
Wednesdays: Ladders. Four, three, two, one, one, two, three, four. Also known as, Don’t Eat a Big Lunch day. Going from four to one was rough but most of us could crush it. Even me. It was heading back up the ladder that was the killer. Go down, throw down. Go up, throw up. The absolute worst.
Thursdays: Long run. Every week, a different route. Once I was finally able to keep up, it was kinda cool being part of the train of runners zooming down the sidewalk, dodging people, and bus stop benches, and fire hydrants, and trash bags, with the Motivation Mobile trailing behind. My only fear was that one day Coach Whit would lead us on the wrong route—the route that went past the sporting goods store, where I was probably a wanted fugitive. Sure, I could just turn my head or shield it with my shirt—pretend to wipe sweat—and nobody would know it was me. But the shoes? There was no disguising them. That girl, Tia, would know the sparkle of the silver bullets, easy. Luckily, we never went that way.
Fridays: Everybody’s favorite day. Off. Thank God.
I had pretty much gotten used to everything and everybody. Mean Mikey, mumbling stuff. Aaron, the captain of the team, acting like the captain of the team, which at first I wasn’t so sure I was going to be okay with. I mean, the guy had a big mouth. Like, big big. But he knew how to keep everybody together and motivated, which could get hard when you’re on the side puking your guts out. And then there was the four of us. The newbies. Our special gang. I had gotten used to Patty and Lu snapping on each other and arguing. All. The. Time. I had gotten used to Sunny quoting some spacey book that nobody had ever read. Or saying something really cool, but it’s so out there that you don’t really even know why it’s cool, but it’s cool. As a matter of fact, I think that’s the record he holds. The record for saying the coolest what in the world is he talking about sayings. Definitely. I had even gotten used to Coach on my back every day about my homework, which I usually got done during the ride home, and whatever I didn’t, I finished while Ma was zoning into the cheesy movie of the night. Even Coach’s stupid whistle and the constant shouting of “on the line” became just as normal as sunflower seeds from Mr. Charles’s store. I had gotten used to it all, and I was pretty sure that they had all gotten used to me. So everything was cool. Maybe the coolest it had ever been.
But uniform day changed everything.
Uniform day was the day when Coach was going to give us our jerseys and shorts. He had been talking about this day for two weeks, going on and on about how uniform day was important because it meant you were officially on the team. It was the last piece to the puzzle. And I wanted that piece. I mean, I had traded running in my jeans for a pair of cutoff scrubs I got from my mom, but that was like running in a pair of drawers! And when I got to sweating . . . man, straight-up gross. So a uniform sounded amazing. An actual uniform, just like basketball teams, except for a track team. Yes.
Coach showed up at practice carrying the box. He dropped it on the track in front of us as we bent and stretched, getting ready for the usual “Technique Tuesday” routine work. I was gonna practice coming off the blocks, because it was where I needed the most help. It felt weird to not just stand up straight and run when I heard the whistle. But to bend down and press my feet against that metal . . . thing, was way weird.
“Bring it in,” Coach said. “As you all know, our very first meet of the season is this Saturday. You’ve worked hard these past few weeks, and I’m proud of you. So to get you excited about smoking everybody this weekend, I’m gonna give out this year’s Defenders uniforms.”
We clapped it up as Coach folded the cardboard flaps of the box back. “When I call your name, come get your uniform and go put it with your stuff. Then give me some warm-up laps,” he said. Then, one by one he called each runner forward. I was standing next to Lu, and when Coach called his name, I gave him a way to go nudge. He grabbed his gear, then jogged back and gave me five. The jersey, which he held up, was electric blue, with gold letters across the front, DEFENDERS. Underneath the word was a picture of a fist clenching a wing. It would go perfect with the silver bullets. I liked it. No, I loved it.
“Sweet!” Lu sang out.
“Man,” I said, not really believing how good it looked.
Coach called out name after name. Outlaw. Speed. Lancaster. Farrar. Bullock. Fulmer. McNair. And after every name I’d say to myself, waiting, Cranshaw, Cranshaw. Cranshaw. Tate. Cranshaw. Hayes. Cranshaw. But Coach went on and on until he got to the last uniform. My uniform. But he never called my name.
“And that’s it,” Coach said. That’s it? I knew my eyes were buggin’. That’s it? Everybody was checking their jerseys out, putting them in their gym bags, or jogging around the track. But I was still waiting.
“What about me?” I asked. I didn’t understand what was going on. Where were my shorts? My jersey? Where was my uniform?
“Oh!” Coach said, as if suddenly remembering that he had left me out. But how could he have left me out? I had proven myself. I was pretty much the best sprinter on the team. At least one of them. Whatever. Didn’t matter, I thought, because I had reminded him. “Oh right, I have something for you, Ghost,” Coach said, digging back in the box. When he pulled his hand from the brown cardboard, he wasn’t holding no electric blue dopeness. Instead he was holding a piece of paper folded into a small square.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“Unfold it and see,” Coach said, his face changing, falling into that familiar look of disappointment, the way Principal Marshall’s face does whenever I’ve had an altercation.
I unfolded it as quickly as I could because what the . . . and what I found on that piece of paper was the most shocking thing ever. It was a picture of me, dashing from the sports store. A close-up of my face, and underneath it, in red—big bold red—was the word SHOPLIFTER.
I looked up at Coach. My tongue had suddenly turned into a stone in my mouth. I couldn’t breathe, like I had just finished running ladders, like I was going to yak up every sunflower seed I had ever eaten, and if there was ever a sunflower growing in me, it was definitely dying right then.
“I went to go pick up the uniforms at the sporting goods store, and guess whose photo was taped to the window?”
I didn’t say nothing. I couldn’t.
“Guess!” Coach insisted, forcing me to say it. But I just couldn’t. He snatched the paper back, ripped it into confetti. “That’s your uniform,” Coach said, holding his hand open so I could see the white confetti. “And since you can’t wear this”—he turned his hand over and let the paper fall to the ground like awkward snowflakes—“you can’t run. So take your silver shoes and have a seat.”
“Wait, Coach—”
“Sit!” he shouted, pointing at the wooden bench. Everybody looked at me as I started walking. But they weren’t laughing, and instead just seemed shocked and concerned, which was probably the only reason I didn’t take off running, away from the track, and off to the basketball court or Mr. Charles’s or anyplace else. Instead I did as Coach asked and sat down. “And for the rest of you, mind your business,” Coach warned the team. “If I hear anything about this—anything at all—you can give your uniform right back. Am I clear?”
The team, shook about the prospect of having to hand over their sweet new jerseys, grumbled and started their warm-up laps.
I stayed right there on that bench the whole practice. And Coach never once looked over at me, not even to check that I was still there. It was like he didn’t even care. As a matter of fact, I could’ve just gotten up and left, but that seemed like a bad idea, because I felt like if I left now, I could never come back, and my life on the track team would be over. For good. So I just sat it out and hoped for the best. But I don’t know what the best could’ve been. I was caught. Didn’t really think it would happen. And even though I had already told Coach the shoes were a gift from my mom, I still had to tell my mom how I got them at some point, and I’d planned on telling her that Coach got them for me, and then hope and pray that she never thanked him. When I think about it now, that was the stupidest idea ever. Wow. Anyway, the point is I wasn’t a thief. I mean, I guess I was. But I wasn’t a criminal. I’d never swiped nothing before! I was just a dude who needed some new shoes to run in.
After practice, everybody came over to me, doing the best they could to hold their words in but sending me all their what did you do’s with their eyes. They each gave me five as they left, and it was like they were giving me my final five, the one that said, We don’t know what’s about to happen to you, but hold your head up. The one just before I’d have to walk the plank.
“Let’s go,” Coach threw at me, once everyone had left. His words knocked against my chest like knuckles. A two-piece. Let’s. Go. I grabbed my bag and followed him to the car. As I opened the back door, he spat, “Up here,” delivering two more to the ribs. He threw everything in the backseat as usual, then opened the passenger-side door. I closed the back door and got up front. As we rode through the city, neither of us said a thing. Coach didn’t look over at me or nothing. He just bit down on his bottom lip, and occasionally he would shake his head like he was picturing the picture of me in that store over and over again. I thought about trying to explain myself, but what was I going to say? I didn’t steal them? Because I did. So I just sat there, my legs becoming wooden with fear.
When we pulled up in front of my place, Coach cut the car off and opened his door.
“Where you going?” I asked, because he never got out the car except for the time he had to ask my mom if I could go on the newbie dinner, but that had been weeks ago. The routine was, he pulled up out front, dropped me off, waited for me to get inside, then pulled off. But he never, ever, got out the car.
“What you think I’m doing, Ghost? I’m going to tell your mother what you did.”
OH. NO. I fumbled at the handle trying to get the door open and scrambled out of the car.
“Coach, no. Please,” I begged. I ran around and got in front of him, holding my hands up as if I was trying to use some kind of magic force to push him back. Oh, man. I’m sounding like Sunny. But . . . hey. “Please, please, please,” I pleaded, but Coach pushed past me. He was storming toward my house, and there was nothing I could do to stop him. I grabbed his shirt. “Coach!” He spun around. A tattoo I had never noticed before peeked from the now stretched-out neckline.
“Ghost,” he said, his eyes closed. “I’m only gonna tell you this one time. Let me go.” His voice was flat. Hard. Scary. I let his shirt go and put my hands together.
“Please, Coach. You can’t tell my mother.” It was like a rerun of the first Coach bailout when he came and picked me up from school and I said pretty much those exact words. And here I was again asking him not to snitch on me. It’s not that I was scared of being punished or getting in trouble with my mom. I was, but that’s not why I was begging. I just didn’t want to add to the problems. I mean, I’m her only child, the reason she was working so hard, and I went out and did something stupid. But the only reason I did something stupid was because I knew I couldn’t ask her for the money. And the reason I couldn’t ask her wasn’t because she wouldn’t have gotten the shoes for me. It’s because she would have. She would’ve done anything to get them. I knew that. And I just didn’t want her to have to give up something—something else—for me to have some stupid shoes. And now because I stole them, she would be disappointed that I didn’t come to her and feel even more guilty. She’d think she was a bad mom on so many levels. But I couldn’t just tell Coach all that. I didn’t have the time. So I fell to my knees and pressed my hands together. “Coach, please. I know I messed up, but please. Please, Coach.” The words began to break up in my throat. “Please.”
Neighbors outside were looking at me act a fool. Coach noticed them too and knew that this just wasn’t a good look, so he told me to get up and get back in the car.
“Just tell me why,” he said, after slamming his door. He put his hands on the steering wheel and stared straight ahead. “Why, Ghost?”
“What was I supposed to do? My mother don’t have no money for running shoes. I couldn’t put that on her!” I replied.
“Ask me!” Coach said, now laser-beaming straight at me. I clenched my jaw as a marble of anger and frustration and fear rolled down my throat. “Why didn’t you just ask me?”
“Because you ain’t my father,” I snapped. “Why would I just expect you to help me? Why would you?” I felt like my entire body was now shaking. “I mean, you got me on the team, and thank you for that, and you bailed me out with my trouble at school and I thank you for that, too, but you . . . you . . . you just not . . . why you care so much anyway?”
“What are you talking about, Ghost? I care about all of you. Why you think I’m out there every day coaching y’all?”
“But I’m different. You know that. You heard my secret. You heard it. That ain’t normal,” I explained, my voice now straining, ripping into its own confetti. “And I get teased and laughed at all the time because I live here. And I look like this. You don’t live here! You don’t look like this!” Now stupid tears were welling up in my eyes. “You don’t know what it’s like, Coach. You don’t know.”
Now Coach swallowed something, like bitter air, twisting his face up. He turned his whole body toward me and yanked his shirt down so that the neck stretched even lower.
“You see this tattoo?” he asked. It was a dark band diving down into his curly chest hair. “It’s my Olympic medal. I got a tattoo of it after the man who did this to me”—now Coach curled his top lip so I could see his chipped tooth—“stole the real one.” Coach didn’t give me a chance to say nothing, he just bulldozed on. “That man was my father. He was an addict. And every time he got high, he got violent. He punched me in the mouth when I was fifteen because I asked him to change the channel on the TV. The Olympics were on. And four years later, after I had worked my butt off to make something of myself, I got my shot to run in the same race I tried to watch when he hit me. And I won. It was the happiest moment of my life. And my mom’s. And, I think, even my dad’s. But three weeks later . . .” Coach paused, swallowed another dose of that bitter air, then continued. “Three weeks later, he . . . um . . . he sold my medal for a twenty-dollar high. And that was his last high. He overdosed, right over there on those steps.” Coach pointed to a building a few buildings down from mine. Then he started tapping hard on the dashboard. “Because that’s where we lived. That’s where I grew up. So don’t tell me what I know and don’t know, Ghost.”
I sat frozen in my seat.
“You from Glass Manor?” I asked softly.
Coach nodded. “That’s how I know Mr. Jefferson,” he explained, which made a lot more sense to me now. “So I know what it’s like to live here. I know what it’s like to be angry, to feel, I don’t know, rage on the inside.” Coach’s face seemed to relax a little, like he was cooling down. “And the same thing running did for me, I felt like it could do for you.” He looked out the front window and shook his head. “But maybe I was wrong.”
“What did you think it would do for me?” I asked, realizing that he never thought it could help me dunk by next year. Realizing I didn’t even really want to play basketball anymore.
He faced me again, looking straight in my eyes. “Show you that you can’t run away from who you are, but what you can do is run toward who you want to be.”
I let that sink in. Who was I? I was Castle Cranshaw, the kid from Glass Manor with the secret. The one with a daddy in jail and a mother who worked her butt off for me, and cut my hair, and bought knockoff shoes, and clothes that were big enough for me to grow into. I was the boy with the altercations and the big file. The one who yelled at teachers and punched stupid dudes in the face for talking smack. The one who felt . . . different. And mad. And sad. The one with all the scream inside.
But who did I want to be? Well, that was harder to answer. I wasn’t exactly sure yet. But definitely one of the world’s greatest.
“Do you understand?” Coach asked, his head cocked to the side.
“Yeah,” I replied sheepishly.
“Do you really?” He was glaring at me, hard.
“I do. Seriously.” I wiped my face, sniffled, then added desperately, “But please don’t tell my mom.”
Coach sighed. “I won’t.” He paused, then followed with a threat. “This time.”
“Thank you,” I murmured, so relieved I thought I was gonna pass out. But I still had another question burning inside. “Well, do I still get to run?”
Coach glared even harder at me, and I was hoping that somewhere in my face he could see himself and give me another chance. I never wanted to be on no track team before I met him anyway. But now that I had been on one, even if it’d only been for a few weeks, I felt like I didn’t want to do nothing else.
He unclenched his jaw. “Yeah, you can run.” Then pointing down at my raggedy regular sneakers, he added, “In those.”
“But I can’t—” I started, but Coach cut me off.
“You wanna run or not?”
“Got it.”
“And Friday, you’re cleaning my cab,” he commanded.
“Coach!”
The rest of the week was pretty much filled with me being on my best behavior at school—I was straight-up acting like that annoying goody-good, Maureen Thorne—then working extra hard at practice, which was much more difficult than usual because running in my regular raggedy sneakers made me feel like my feet had gained weight. Like I had obese toes or something. It had been a while since I had practiced in my cutoff shoes, and I think the silver bullets had me spoiled. Not to mention, everybody wanted to know where the silver bullets were, and I kept making ridiculous excuses like, “Lettin’ them rest” and “Coach work us so hard at practice that I was scared I’d ruin them before the race.” And then they would say something like, “Oh, so you are gonna run, right?” or “Word, so you getting your uniform, right?” But they’d say it under their breath. And I would just shut all that down by saying, “Shhhh, uh, uh, uh, it’s not worth talking about it. Not worth you risking yours. I’m here, ain’t I? Still on the team, right? That’s all that matters.”
So the raggedy-runners was what I had to run in. And I stuck at it, through ladders on Wednesday, and Thursday’s long run. I, of course, was now a step behind Lu, who was blazing around the track like it was nothing, doing everything he could to secure his spot as the lead sprinter. I mean, we both were sprinters. And Aaron and Mike. But Mike was going to run the eight hundred and the four hundred, just because me and Lu were both faster than him in the shorter sprint races, and Chris Myers—who ran the eight hundred—his father took him off the team because his grades were slipping. Aaron was going to run the four hundred. He was the master of it. Like, seriously, could burn anybody. And between me and Lu, one of us was going to run the two hundred meter, and one of us was going to run the one hundred meter.
Now, here’s the thing. The two hundred was a good race. A hard sprint. But it wasn’t as, I don’t know, glamorous. No, no, that’s not the word. The two hundred just wasn’t the . . . main event. The main event was the one-hundred-meter dash. It was what Usain Bolt set the record in. It was the race. Before I got caught and Coach forced me to run in my old sneakers, I had a pretty good chance at snatching that spot from Lu. Don’t get me wrong, he was crazy fast and had been running that race pretty much ever since he started running. But over the month of practice, my time was maybe a half second faster than his. But not during the week of slumpy, cutoff shoe running, which was definitely the week that counted. But hey, it was only the first race of the season. So I figured I’d take the two hundred—honestly, I’d run any of the races Coach would let me—and work my butt off (and my legs and feet) to earn the chance to run that race.
Friday, Coach made me do exactly what he said I would have to. Clean out his cab. He came over to my house after school and drove around to the back of the building, where the Dumpsters were.
“Ghost, I’m not gonna lie to you,” Coach said, popping the trunk. “I don’t know what might be in here.”
I wasn’t sure either. I mean, the backseat was pretty much clear, just because that was the part of the car that he rode customers around in every day until I got in the car after practice. Then he put all the stuff in the front seat in the back. So the trash went from back to front, then front to back. Fast-food bags, gym bags, paper, shoes, and who knows what else. And then there was the trunk. When he popped it, and I looked in there and saw the end of the world, the backseat and front seat seemed spotless. The trunk was ridiculous.
“Coach, this is crazy!” I said, staring into what looked like the black abyss.
“I know,” he said, flashing an embarrassed smirk. “I sure am glad you did a stupid thing and have to clean all this up.”
And I did. I trashed all the fast-food bags, some with french fries and half-eaten burgers still in them. I pulled out the duffels. I don’t know why Coach needed so many gym bags. Who needs more than one? But there was nothing in them. They were all pretty much empty, because all the shoes, and stinky shorts, and towels took up about half the space of the entire trunk! Dirty socks, and headbands, and old jerseys from past years with the Defenders. He also had starting blocks, which are big and metal and heavy, shoved in there. And whistles. Whistles everywhere. I opened up the gym bags and loaded them up with all that crud. When I got to the last one, a yellow-and-green duffel with the name Otis on it, I unzipped it.
“Who’s Otis?” I asked Coach, who was sitting on the hood of the car, flipping through the lists of all our run times.
“Otis is me,” he said, not even looking up.
“Oh,” I said, flat. I mean, I knew Coach’s last name was Brody, and I figured his first name wasn’t just Coach. Nobody’s name is Coach. Well, that might not be true. My name is Castle, so someone might actually be named Coach, somewhere. But not chipped-tooth turtle face.
I started loading the bag up with a busted pair of cleats that probably would’ve been better off in the trash, when I spied a piece of paper, a crinkled-up rectangle, in the corner of the duffel. I pulled it out. It was a faded picture of a man, tall and slim like Sunny, facial hair only around his mouth but none on his cheeks. He had his hands resting on a little boy who stood in front of him. The kid was cheesing. The man was looking away, almost like he was calling out for someone.
“Who’s this?” I asked, bringing the picture around to the front of the car. Coach took it from me, looked at it like it was his long-lost gold medal. His mouth hung open for a few seconds before he finally answered.
“This is my father.” He tapped the picture with his finger. “And that’s me,” he said about the happy little boy. “Where’d you find this?”
“In that bag.”
Coach pulled the photo closer to his face, as if he was studying every detail. “Thank you,” he said, and right then I got the feeling that being mad at his dad wasn’t the only way he felt about him. He was. But I could tell Coach also missed his pops. He loved him. And I could totally relate to that, because as happy as I was that my crazy father wasn’t around to hurt us no more, whenever he wasn’t wasted, he was dope. That was my dad too. And I missed that version of him.
Coach gingerly slipped the photo in his back pocket, then pulled it right back out.
“Throw those bags in the trunk. I think you’re done,” Coach said, climbing into the cab. He took the photo and put it up in the dash part where the speed numbers are. I tossed all the gym bags full of dirty sports gear in the trunk and slammed it shut. Then I hopped in. “Where we going?”
“You’ll see.”
On the way to the land of you’ll see, I teased Coach about the name Otis.
“Seriously, Otis is the name of old men who smell like cinnamon and barbecue sauce.”
“Shut up, Ghost,” Coach said, laughing.
“I mean, Otis is the name you give short, fat dogs. Not people.”
“Oh, so I’m a dog now?”
“No, I didn’t mean it like that.”
“Well, how did you mean it?”
“I just meant Otis is a great-great-great-grandpa’s name.” I paused, struck by another thought. “Are you a mechanic? Because if you’re a mechanic, then it’s okay.”
Coach pulled over on the side of the road. “You wanna get out?”
I zipped it. And my mouth stayed zipped until we pulled up right in front of—wait for it—Everything Sports. I looked out the window and into the store. Tia was there, leaning against the counter, checking her cell phone. She could be doing some high kicks or some jumping jacks, but no. She was texting. Not an athlete.
“Do I need to tell you what we’re doing here?” Coach asked. And the truth is, he didn’t. I knew why we had come. Why we had to come. I had to come. But it didn’t feel good, that’s for sure. As a matter of fact, it felt pretty wack. I looked Coach in his eye and shook my head before exhaling a heavy, guilty breath. “You ready?” he said.
“Yeah, I’m ready.”
Coach walked in, and I trailed behind him with my head down, nervous and stupid feeling.
“Welcome to Everything Sports. Let me”—Tia stopped mid-greeting when she saw me. “Oh. It’s you.”
“Yes, yes, it’s him,” Coach said, his car keys clinking as he set them on the counter. I was still behind him, staring down at the gray carpet. “Head up, son. You know my rule,” Coach coached. “Stand tall at all times.”
I lifted my face and looked at Tia straight on. “I’m sorry,” I started, and in that moment realized sometimes a real apology can go a long way. Just like Shamika’s at school. Just like the one I never got from my father. But had he just told me he was sorry for what he’d done, maybe . . . I don’t know. . . .
Coach was leaning his ear toward me like Mr. Charles always did, as if he was hard of hearing. I followed up. “I’m really, really sorry for stealing the shoes. I just . . . I didn’t mean anything. I made a stupid mistake.”
“Stupid mistake. I mean, a stupid, stupid mistake,” Coach added, way too enthusiastic.
“That’s what I said, Coach. Stupid.”
Tia’s mouth went from straight line to little bitty smile. Not big smile, but definitely not frown, and that was all that mattered.
“Okay,” she said. “I forgive you.”
Coach then handed over his credit card, and as Tia swiped it to pay for the shoes, Coach threw his arm around my neck, put me in a tight headlock, and whispered in my ear, “If you ever do this again, I promise I’ll make room for you in the trunk.”
I looked him in his face, in his eyes. Not a flinch. Just that big chipped-tooth smile, and a scary wink.
Yikes.