The cross country team was small, a tight-knit group of fifteen runners (ten of whom were boys) who intimidated me slightly because they were outspoken and quirky and because they seemed to know and take pride in the fact that they were outspoken and quirky. I loved to run – I had thrived as a part of the track team the spring before and had kept up my own training over the summer – but there was also something about the dynamic of the team that drew me to it. They were like Rudy, in a way, with their confidence and self-assuredness. I still find myself intrigued by this type of person, people who are fully comfortable in their own skins, and when I was in high school and college, I would attach myself to people like this in the futile hope the quality would somehow rub off on me.
Cross country was serious though; there was practice every day we didn’t have a meet, even on Sundays, which drove my mother completely nuts. Though we weren’t religious, when I came downstairs on Sunday mornings in my running shoes, she would sigh and lament that Sunday was a day of rest, and was the school even allowed to hold practice on the weekends? I would remind her this was a voluntary practice, that our coaches wouldn’t be there. We just wanted the extra exercise. She would sigh again, and ask, “what about church?” “We don’t go to church,” I would say, and she would counter with, “What if we wanted to? I’ve been thinking maybe we should start,” and typically, this was the point where I would simply walk out the door, waving over my shoulder as I left.
Sunday runs were our longest and slowest – endurance runs and team building runs where we all stayed together, trotting along at the pace of the slowest runner on the team (this was Rudy when she made it to Sunday practice, though she didn’t always). Sunday runs were also when we stole signs.
The first thing Rudy and I had discovered on our first hot, sweaty day of practice, was that the cross country locker room (all of the sports teams at Ogden had their own locker rooms featuring a side for the boys, a side for the girls and a “conference room” in the middle, with wooden benches for team meetings; all of the locker rooms were separated by a long, tunnel-like concrete hallway that cut through the middle of the school basement and was often used by students for secret, public hook-ups) was covered in stolen traffic signs. One short wall was half covered with rows of street signs, most of them green with white trim around the edge, some of them white and blue or red, all of them lined up perfectly, end to end. The ceiling was peppered with caution, no U-turn and huge, red stop signs. Some of them I couldn’t even discern the meaning of (surely these weren’t on my driving test? I couldn’t remember). I was highly impressed by their size though, almost as wide across as I was tall, far larger than they appeared from inside a car on the road.
How we got away with this, I had no idea. The coach was cool – he rolled his eyes and warned us that if we were ever caught, he would feign ignorance and throw us to the wolves (he was also the only male coach at Ogden who wore his hair pulled back in a six-inch long ponytail, and the rumor among the students was he had been a decathlete at the University of Oregon but had been kicked off the team for smoking too much pot and performing poorly at meets). The administrators hardly ever went down into the locker rooms (even at a prestigious school like Ogden, the locker rooms were still locker rooms; they smelled like stale sweat, and it was difficult to imagine our principal, in his expensive suit, wandering around the blue painted cement floors amongst lockers that housed jock-straps), but the janitorial staff cleaned several times a week, and I found it hard to believe we never got into trouble (they did, eventually, years after I had graduated).
For the new team members, Rudy and I and a freshman boy and girl, the initiation rite was to steal a sign, any sign of our choosing. We wouldn’t be alone – we would have the help of our teammates – but we had to select the sign, remove it from its post and carry it while we ran back to the school. We took turns, the freshmen each obtaining their signs the first and second weeks of school, then Rudy, and then it was my turn, the day after our first meet.
I had placed well at the meet the day before, finishing just thirty seconds after the top female runner from our school, Tawny Barrow, a junior. When we crossed the finish line, I bent over, exhausted. I braced my arms against my thighs and ducked my head, panting, afraid I was going to vomit. I had felt the contents of my churning stomach, the smooth muscles starting to contract, ready to propel up through my esophagus. Then, I’d felt Tawny come up behind me, her breathing heavy as well. She placed a dry palm (I don’t think there was an inch of my own body that was dry) on my back, and rubbed her hand in a slow circle, standing there until finally I stood, the park around us spinning in circles in my cloudy vision.
“You okay?” She was still touching the small of my soaked back, and looking up at me as though she were bracing herself to catch my weight if I toppled over. It was attention of this sort that made me unbelievably uncomfortable – I never cried in public, not because it was particularly embarrassing, but because it would invite the sympathy of others, and to have people patting my back and whispering words of pity or encouragement, watching me with cautious, sad eyes (girls, especially, were so quick to jump to your aid), would always make me cry harder and harder.
“I’m fine,” I wheezed, my legs jiggling Jell-O beneath me.
“Nice race,” she smiled. “You totally kicked ass back there.”
Tawny was, befitting of her name, dark tan all year round. She was gorgeous, despite (or maybe this even enhanced her beauty) wearing her long blonde hair in dreadlocks. She was the only girl I had ever seen with the hairstyle (and the only men I had seen with them were homeless), and I was endlessly fascinated watching the tangled-looking chunks bobbing from her ponytail when I was running behind her. How long had it taken her to get them to do that? Did she wash them? When I asked her, she had laughed long and hard, and told me of course she washed them, a few times each week, with a special shampoo.
I had soaked in my parent’s Jacuzzi bath tub the night after the meet, letting the jets drum water into my exhausted muscles, and now they ached dully as I pounded softly against the pavement, Tawny’s tan legs peddling a few feet in front of me. I was sore and tired, but I still felt strong, buoyed by my second place finish.
“Lead the way, Jill,” Peter Scaggs, the tall, lanky, boy’s team captain waved back at me after we had run a couple miles. “It’s your catch this week.”
My heart began to thud in my chest as I pushed to the front of the pack. I ran another half mile, winding through side streets, where the buildings were worn down, the brick crumbling in places. There were “For Sale” signs popping up on the corners of each block, and there was a lonely, yellow plastic slide at the end of the street, the fossil of a forgotten playground.
“Hey, slow down turbo!” I could hear Rudy yell from the back of the group. In my anxiousness, it seemed I had picked up the pace.
“Sorry,” I yelled back, slowing. There was a sign at the top of the street, weather-worn green with the street name, “Weedley Avenue” printed in all capital letters across it in white. There was no one around, only a few empty cars flanking the sides of the street. This was the one.
I slowed to a stop several feet from the sign, and I could hear the footfalls of the others behind me slow.
“Weedley. Nice,” Tawny laughed, and I laughed nervously with her as I slipped a small bag from my back. I unzipped it, the sound of the zipper cutting loud through the air, and pulled out our tools, the set that was kept in one of our empty blue lockers.
“We’ve got guard,” one of the twin junior boys on the team volunteered, punching the other twin softly on the arm. The other boy (I think the one who had spoken was Easton, and the one who had agreed was Ellis, but I was never sure) nodded his consent to this arrangement, and they jogged off to the points where other streets would intersect this one.
I was tall but not tall enough to reach the top of the sign to see what I was doing.
“Here, let me climb on your shoulders.”
I waved Rudy over, and she bent down to let me climb up her back. I swung my legs around her neck and she hugged my shins. Tawny and Peter helped her to stand all the way back up.
I worked fast, twisting the bolts from the back of the sign, my biceps twitching with activity. My heart was beating in my throat now. I had been present for three other sign snatches, but I had been a bystander. To actually touch the sign, to steal it with my own fingers, made my stomach flip. A bead of sweat ran down my face, the sun beating down from overhead. I was unscrewing the second bolt, twisting it out of its rusty hole and dropping it to the ground below, when I heard someone yelling. Rudy had heard it too, and she turned beneath me, twisting her shoulders so the sign was no longer within my reach.
We could see Easton (Ellis?) sprinting toward us from the west side of the street, waving his arms above his head and shouting. I couldn’t make out what he was saying; his lips were a jumbled mess.
“Shit!” Someone yelled and, simultaneously, someone else cried, “Let’s get out of here”.
Rudy jerked, and I pitched forward and squealed. “Wait!” I screamed. “Wait, hang on!”
She steadied herself, and swung around to face the sign again, and I grabbed onto it with both hands and yanked, while our teammates ran past us up the street.
“Hurry!” Rudy mumbled from between my legs. I yanked a final time and the rusted sign came off in my hands. The force of the pull threw me backward, sending both Rudy and me tumbling onto the sidewalk, where we landed with a smack on our backs.
“Ow,” I cried, the point of my elbow striking the hot concrete. Sharp pain shot through my arm. But then we were up again, onto our feet, and I was shoving the sign into the bag and pulling the zipper shut, and we were sprinting after our teammates. The wind whipped at the sides of my face and blood thumped in my ears.
“Hey,” someone hissed. An arm shot out and grabbed mine, and we were pulled into a narrow alley. I crouched beside a dirty yellow brick building, weeds growing up the side of the wall, and I tried to catch my breath.
“Did you get it?” Someone else whispered, and I nodded my head, pointing at the bag in my hands.
“Good shit,” Tawny grinned, holding her long arm up toward me. I reached out, my arm still stinging all over, and slapped my palm against hers as hard as I could, and the noise rang out all around us.
I first met Celine in my sophomore Geometry class (as I had predicted, I had not excelled enough in freshman Advanced Algebra to skip ahead). She was a transfer student, new that year from Seattle, and she sat in the seat beside me on the first day of class.
“Hi, I’m Celine,” she had dropped her bright yellow book bag on the tabletop we shared and stuck out her arm.
Surprised, I looked up from my unopened textbook (I had been examining the Technicolor shapes dancing across the front of it).“Hey,” I said. I shook her outthrust hand, and her palm was soft and a little damp. “I’m Jillian.”
“Jillian, your hair is so pretty.” She plopped down in the chair next to mine. For a second I thought she was going to reach out and run her fingers through my hair, but she did not. “Is it naturally that color?”
“Thanks,” I smiled politely. “It’s been this color since I was a baby.”
Celine had a soft, pretty face, with tiny features: a little pointed nose, thin arched eyebrows, a short bowed mouth. Except for her ears, which were round and stuck out from the sides of her head through her pale brown hair.
“You’re lucky.” She smiled at me, and a dimple formed on one side of her mouth. “I’d kill to be a blonde.”
I laughed, unsure how to respond, but before I was forced to say anything else, the bell rang and Celine was pulling a notebook from her book bag. During class, I noticed she studiously took notes on every single thing the teacher said, even though it was only the first day and Mrs. Touk, our plump Geometry teacher, was mainly going over the format of the class and the syllabus she had printed for us. Celine wrote in big, curling letters, with a hot pink pen that, interestingly, also featured hot pink ink. In contrast, I spent most of the class either watching out the window (a freshman gym class was out on the lawn doing jumping jacks and some sort of sprint drill in their matching grey and navy gym clothes) or studying Celine herself. She was wearing a plain red t-shirt, tattered jeans that hung loosely on her thin legs and colorful woven bracelets lined both of her arms. She laughed at all of Mrs. Touk’s stupid, first day jokes (and she seemed to be laughing genuinely, which Mrs. Touk rewarded with appreciative glances every so often) and her laugh was deep, unlike her soft, girlish voice. When the bell rang at the end of the class period my stomach was growling and I didn’t even bother stuffing my math book back into my bag before I bolted from the room, hurrying to the cafeteria.
“Hey.” I heard someone call from behind me as I was pushing my way through the hall, and it took several tries before she finally caught my attention by grabbing the back of my book bag. I stopped and turned.
“Hey!” Celine was grinning and she stepped up beside me. We started walking again. “Do you have lunch now, too?”
So, I reasoned, she had decided she liked me. She had decided we were going to be friends. Though I hadn’t made any clear decisions about her yet, I ceded to her resolve.
“Yeah,” I offered. “Do you want to sit with me?”
The previous year, Rudy and I had sat in the back corner of the cafeteria, at one of five round tables, with a small group of girls from our class. When Celine and I exited the lunch line carrying sandwich-laden trays, I looked across the crowded room to see Rudy already seated at the table, two girls sitting beside her. She met my gaze, and seeing Celine walking beside me, raised her eyebrows in curiosity. I raised my own and shrugged one shoulder in answer.
“Hey,” I said as I took my seat beside Rudy, setting my tray down on the marbled plastic tabletop. The lunches Rudy and I had selected were identical, turkey sandwiches with mozzarella and lettuce, small bags of tortilla chips and crisp red apples. “This is Celine. We just got out of math together.”
I offered no further explanation, mostly because I didn’t know anything else about Celine. But she picked up the slack, extending her hand across the lunch table toward Rudy first, then each of the other two girls.
“Celine Donner,” she smiled widely. “I just moved from Seattle. It’s so different here! So weird.” She bit into her sandwich, which, I noted, was really just several slices of cheese stacked high between two pieces of bread.
“Seattle? That’s cool,” Deena, the girl sitting beside me, who I knew from cheerleading the year before, said.
“Yeah, it was really nice. I liked it there.” She opened her bag of potato chips, lifted the top of her sandwich and layered chips on top of the cheese. “My dad’s in the military, so we move around quite a bit.”
“How long did you live in Washington?” Rudy asked.
Celine closed her eyes for a second as she thought. “About five years. That was the longest we stayed anywhere. Before that we were in North Carolina, California, Florida. And Germany and Korea, overseas.”
“Geez,” Rudy was eating her chips first, sliding them into her mouth one at a time and crunching down with her teeth. “I bet California was a cool place to live. I think I want to go to school at UCLA.”
The Goldens had spent a week at the end of the summer in Los Angeles, and since then, Rudy had been obsessed with the idea of moving to California. “The beaches were gorgeous,” she had gushed, while we sat in her room and ate ice cream the night she got back. “And the people there were so interesting. Kind of…eccentric, I guess. It was like they didn’t exactly care what other people thought of them, but at the same time, they were showing off for someone. Plus, I tried surfing, and it’s so much fun.”
I shook my head and rolled my eyes at her, but I could see it too, Rudy fitting seamlessly into Hollywood. Shopping on Rodeo Drive with the waves of her dark hair blowing in the breeze, or laughing as she played on t
he beach – her long, tan legs were perfect in a bikini. But I did not like to think about growing up, going to college or leaving St. Louis, even though I’d only lived there for two years. I was sure Rudy and I would go to college together, but we were only sixteen! I didn’t want to think about anything past the next weekend.
“California was pretty,” Celine agreed, noncommittally. “But we were mostly in the desert there. I didn’t get to see a lot of beach.”
“That sucks,” Rudy said, and I couldn’t gauge her opinion of Celine. The five of us sat and talked through the rest of lunch, though I mostly ate and listened, watching the other girls’ faces and studying their reactions to one another. Usually I ate lunch so slowly I only had time to finish half of my tray of food, but when the bell rang – three short bursts to send us on to our next class and send the next lunch shift into the cafeteria – I had polished off my entire sandwich and bag of chips and my stomach felt stuffed.
“See you in bio,” I said to Rudy as the five of us cleared the table and stood. This year we had only two classes together, and one of them was biology, our last period of the day.
“Right.” Rudy sipped the last drops of her soda from the can and swallowed. “I heard she’s showing a movie. No syllabus.”
I smiled. When we watched movies in class, Rudy and I would sit in the back of the room and pass a notebook back and forth beneath the table playing tick tack toe or hangman or writing funny stories about our classmates as superheroes or cartoon characters.
“Thanks for letting me sit with you guys,” Celine said, dumping her empty sandwich wrapper into the trashcan. She slung her yellow backpack onto one slim shoulder and gave us a dimpled smile. “See you tomorrow in math, Jillian.”
“Yeah, no problem,” I said. “See you around.”
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