by B D Grant
The game isn’t a huge win for my team like I figured it would be. With Tempero like Mick on the other team, we had players stopping mid-run to cry or laugh uncontrollably. We did cause a couple of players on the other team to have to be carried off the field though. Our overwhelming size and strength was still the winning factor in the end.
Besides playing a team with such a huge size difference, I found myself really enjoying the game. When it’s all over I look down my arm to find blood running down it. “Nice battle wound, new guy,” one of my teammates comments when we get in the locker room.
I take a shower. When I’m done dressing, Mr. Grad stops by to look at my arm.
“The other team is known for making their padding sharp on the edges in order to cause some bodily harm to you Dynas. It looks like one of them got you good.” He presses on it, causing the cut to open, exposing the pink tissue on the inside.
“Go to the health unit at the welcome center and have the nurse check it out. I’ll let her know you’re coming,” he instructs.
I have to walk all the way around the welcome center, to the front door, because I’m not sure how to open the hidden back door. The office is clearly empty when I enter. I find the cafeteria to be in the same state. A room number would have been helpful.
I walk out the cafeteria when I hear someone talking. The guy I saw on my first night at the welcome center walks out of a room with the Tempero secretary with him. He asks her something and she tells him to be quiet. I see him tense. She notices too.
“You’re okay, Jake,” she says and he relaxes looking out the front doors, talking about hunting season. He shoves his hands in his pockets getting tense again.
“Excuse me, ma’am,” I call out. She looks up from the clipboard in her hand.
“Yes?”
“Could you tell me where the health unit is?”
She smiles and I suddenly feel warm inside. I know she’s doing it to me but it feels nice and natural so I don’t fight it.
“We’ll take you,” she says sweetly. They continue down the hall. I fall in step.
She stops at some unmarked doors that have chairs in the hall lining the side of the wall.
“Wait here,” she tells us.
She goes inside and I sit down. Jake remains standing on the other side of the door facing the wall. He places both hands on the wall and his upper body slowly sinks toward it. He looks like he’s about to do a standing pushup against the wall. He closes his eyes when his face gets close and rests his forehead on the wall between his hands. He lets out a slow breath. I start to think he might be sick or something.
“You okay?” I ask him. He doesn’t answer. He keeps his forehead against the wall with his eyes shut.
“I got here the day before you did,” I tell him, leaning back so my head is resting against the wall. He doesn’t acknowledge me. “I saw you when you got here,” I continue. “I was in one of the upstairs bedrooms.” Still nothing. “I heard you giving them hell when you came in. Is that why they’ve kept you at the Welcome Center so long?”
“Pff. Welcome Center,” he mumbles to himself.
The door opens and Jake pushes off the wall, acting like he wasn’t being weird just now. The secretary and a woman wearing scrubs walk out.
“Kelly Edwards,” the woman calls.
“That’s me,” I say, getting out of my chair.
“Sheep,” Jake mumbles low enough for the nurse to miss it, but I don’t. He’s staring at me as I walk in the room.
“Is there something wrong with him?” I ask once the door shuts.
“Why would you think that?”
“Just wondering,” I say, nonchalantly.
The phone on her desk begins ringing. “Give me a sec,” she tells me as she answers it. I hear someone talking fast on the other line. She tightens her grasp on the phone and turns her back to me.
“Give him a cheeseburger and he might respond better…. You know, if everyone was as big of a jerk as you are, then nothing would be accomplished around here.” She slams the receiver down on the phone. When she sees me staring at her, she forces a smile.
“Sorry about that. I’m Pauline, the nurse practioner,” she says.
“Nice to meet you,” I say. I hold my cut arm out. “I got a small booboo while playing football.”
She truly smiles now. “If I had a nickel for every time I heard that one,” she laughs. “I’ll look at it in just a minute. I need to get an IV bag together real fast.” She opens one side of the large, metal cabinets that are lining the wall across from me. The side she opens is full of different size bags like you see hanging in hospital rooms. She takes one out and sets it on a tray that has some syringes on it and a small glass vial of medicine. With the syringes, she adds some of the medicine to the IV Bag and sticks a label on the front of it.
“Okay, now let me take a look.” She rolls a stool over to sit across from me. She puts on gloves then examines my arm. She numbs the wound, cleans it, and stitches it up. All the while I’m looking at the phone she was talking on, sitting on her desk.
“Do you know if you are up to date on your tetanus shots?”
“Not sure. You could call my grandmother and ask her.”
She doesn’t move from the stool. “Have you had the chicken pox?”
I nod my head, “Yeah.”
She flips through a chart she has out. “It says here, your grandmother is hospitalized.”
“Does it say anything else?”
She shuts the chart. She looks at me sympathetically, “No.”
She rolls to her desk and gets some things out of a drawer. One of them is a syringe. She sets it all down on the counter next to me. She returns to her spot across from me.
“What are you going to do with all that?” I ask her when she takes my other arm in her hand and rubs an alcohol swab over the inside crease of my arm.
“I need a blood sample to make sure there aren’t any health issues we should be aware of.” I turn my head as she picks up the syringe. “So are you close to your grandmother?” She asks right before I feel something push on my arm.
“She’s raised me since I was little.”
“My papaw didn’t raise me, but I was the apple of his eye. He would make sure there was always macaroni and cheese with cut up weenies cooking every time I went over. That was my favorite. The best part of the summer was when I got to stay with my grandparents. Papaw would take me around town, introduce me to people he knew. He would tell me interesting things about some of them. He liked to tell me how people came about their success.”
I feel her doing something to my arm. I instinctively look down and she’s done. She’s putting everything away. I have a small band-aide covering the injection site.
“You know what I learned?” She asks, with her back to me. She hands me a snack cake when she turns around. “Most people have gotten where they are because their family had money or knew the right people. Very few come from absolutely nothing and go on to become something.”
I get up to leave, opening the snack cake. She stops me. “I need you sit down and eat that so I don’t have to worry about you passing out on your walk back.”
I oblige her and she gives me a drink to go with it. “Gran liked to say, “Anything is possible with dedication and hard work.”
She smiles at me. “There’s truth to that. Your grandmother sounds pretty smart.”
She’s trying to be nice, but I’m getting aggravated thinking about being here while Gran is stuck in the hospital. “Not smart enough to know she was going to have a stroke.”
I would have been prepared for it if I would’ve been warned. It wouldn’t have been so overwhelming at least. Looking back, I don’t know what I was thinking leaving her like I did. I’m all she has and I left her.
“Not knowing makes every day more precious,” She says while she pats my hand that is holding the snack cake. I take my hand away and eat the last of it.
“Can I go now?”
She takes a minute to answer. “I guess.” I get up to leave. She stops me. “You know, I realized all that success stuff isn’t important. I think that’s what my grandfather wanted me to take away from those summers I spent with him. What the truly fortunate people have are grandkids like you and me. We should hope to be as lucky as them and be someone’s grandmother or grandfather one day.”
“Yeah,” I say, feeling bad momentarily about wanting to rush out.
I walk out and the secretary is escorting a different, younger student to the nurse’s office. He asks her if it is going to hurt this time. I feel a calming cloud surround me. I don’t see any difference in the secretary so she’s got to be the one causing it but the student suddenly doesn’t seem anxious. I feel myself walk out of her range shortly after passing them.
The normal place I meet my group for ability advancement is swarming with other Dynamar groups. The woods are taped off stopping us from going in. I find Jessica and Evan in the crowd. They seem to be having an argument when I walk up. “What’s going on?” I ask them. Evan breaks away from Jessica’s angry gaze to answer me.
“She’s freaking out because they moved Competition Day up to today and you aren’t close to being ready.”
Jessica crosses her arms and watches as the first groups are called. The teachers hand out empty paintball guns to both groups, tells one group they are going first, and when they blow the whistle twice the second group will be coming to find them. The teacher speaks loud enough for us to hear, “You will do your best to camouflage yourselves, as you’ve practiced and the team that takes the longest to be found will win today’s competition.”
A whistle is blown and the first group is off. Maybe ten minutes go by when two whistles send the second group off to find the first.
While we all wait for something to happen another teacher starts calling the next groups. “Evan, Leigha, ..”
We all straighten hearing our group being called.
“These two groups will head directly across campus to meet with the teachers that will be evaluating you today.”
Jessica gets flustered, “What? We only practiced on this side. This can’t be happening.”
But it is. The other group has found each other and are making their way across the grounds. Doyle walks up with the rest of our team. She’s enjoying Jessica’s frustration. We all follow the other team to our competition site. The teachers there give us our empty guns, and the same instructions before starting.
“Of course we get picked to go first,” Jessica complains after we’re told.
“Ssshhh,” Doyle says, looking at the teachers to see if they heard her remark. “Your mouth is going to get us in trouble before we even start.”
The first whistle blows and we run into the woods. Jessica and Doyle end up in front arguing which way we should go for the best coverage.
Evan interrupts them, “There’s no time to fight.”
The guys and I start grabbing dirt by the fistful and rubbing it on all of our exposed skin. Doyle starts calling out all the decent places she sees. “Kelly, there’s a stump,” she says, pointing at the small remains of a once young tree.
“Do you really think he can hide behind that?” Jessica asks sarcastically. “Are you planning on cutting off his arms and legs first?”
Doyle slings her arm down hitting her legs. “I don’t see you coming up with any ideas so shut up, and worry about yourself.”
“I’m going that way.” The guy next to me announces.
Jessica beams, “No, I have a better idea.”
We listen to Jessica as she whispers quick instructions before we split up. I do my best getting camouflaged and balled up behind the stump Doyle pointed out when the whistle blows again, letting us know the other team is on their way. My group has disappeared finding their places to blend in.
I hear soft steps coming from behind me. The steps stop. I think I’ve been spotted. I hear more steps coming in my direction. I wait as long as I can, without pushing my luck, hoping the entire group is surrounding me. Then, I take off. They weren’t expecting that. Their stunned pause gives me time to put some space between them and me. While I run I try to stay away from any places my teammates might be hiding. Jessica will pistol-whip me with her paintball gun if I unintentionally run the other group into anyone on our team. Someone’s gaining on me but being the only stage three in a stage two group means the team we’re paired with is also stage two. By god, it may be the only benefit I have so I’m going to use it to my advantage.
I end up making it to an area of the woods that’s taped off, marking the end of our competition site. I slow down knowing I’m caught. The boy that was the closest behind me draws his gun, panting. “You’re …caught.. what’s..you..problem?”
I raise my hands in defeat, catching my breath while he does the same. Two more from his team run up. I grin at them leaning over, putting their hands on their knees to breathe. “Good job, you got me,” I say enthusiastically.
The girl glares at me before she turns her sights on the first guy. “Why did you chase him? All we do is locate, that’s it.” He looks at me like it was obvious.
“He ran,” he tells her.
“We aren’t playing tag, you idiot. You just let him waste all of our time,” the other guy says as he leaves us to run back to the others. The girl joins him.
“They didn’t have to follow me,” the boy says to me. He begins walking back.
“You’re pretty fast. You do marathons or something?” I ask him, trying to lighten the dampened mood. He just glances over at me. He’s not too mad so I don’t push a conversation any more while we walk back.
When I get back, the rest of the team has found Evan, Jessica, and one of the other boys. Despite being found, Jessica looks happy with herself. Two of the teachers walk up with stopwatches to see how everyone’s doing.
Mr. Melvern, one of the Tempero teachers, is one of them. “This’s impressive. It’s going to beat the record,” he says to the other teacher. When our entire team is found, the other team explains to the teachers why it took so long.
“Back to the starting mark, everyone,” Mr. Melvern announces to us. With his back to us he runs his hand through his hair, saying, “We need Mr. Grad over here.”
When we get back to the starting mark, Mr. Grad is waiting with the next teams. The teachers go straight to him, discussing the situation privately.
After talking, a member from the other team is called over and he describes the events of the competition.
Mr. Grad looks at his watch, “We don’t have time for this. Another set of students will be called over here soon.” He gets the time sheet and writes something down. He reads through a sheet of student names then presses on his ear, and starts talking, “Which team has students that are down with the flu? Call them next, we have a team that can sub in for them.” He releases his ear. He motions for the rest of us to join him. I try to look in his ear for an earpiece when I walk up but I can’t see anything. He looks at the clipboard and calls out a few names from the other team. He tells them that because of the time crunch they will be exempt from performing in the competition. “The remaining members of the group will sub in for a team that is missing people today.”
One of the boys that isn’t exempt complains, “That’s not right,”
Mr. Grad looks like he’s getting irritated. Mr. Melvern steps in, “Not right? What isn’t right is your scores on the last two competitions. If you had the scores they had,” he points at the exempt students, “then you would be exempt too. So, unless you want some quality time with the kids at stage one we better not hear your lip again.”
Mr. Grad nods in agreement with him. I’m happy Mr. Grad looks a little less hot when he talks to my team. “Evan, I need to see your team in my office, now.”
At Mr. Grad’s office, he instructs us to wait in the hall until he calls us. Two more teachers join him in the office. Evan is called first. I lean against the w
all, opposite the room. Doyle leans on the wall with me, the others squat down against it. Jessica stands, arms crossed, in the middle of the hall. Two students walk down the hall requiring her to move.
“As today’s team leader, they gave me a week with stage ones,” Evan reluctantly informs us when he walks out.
Jessica, with no surprise, throws her hands up in annoyance, “No way! What did they expect us to do? We did what we had to or we would’ve failed today. They’re the ones that put Kelly on the team.”
Doyle’s heard enough. She gets off the wall, facing Jessica. “Kelly would’ve been the only one that was found easily. They have to get the entire team to call time. Now, we are all going to get in trouble for your bright idea.”
Evan joins the boys squatting down comfortably, “We’re a team. Anyone goes down, we all do.”
“That’s what they would expect us to do as a team,” the boy next to him adds.
Doyle rolls her eyes, “It was Jessica’s plan. She should be the one punished, if anyone.”
Jessica bows up to Doyle, towering over her. “You went along with it just like everyone else. Don’t lose your spine when things don’t go as expected. You’re going to suck it up and deal with what happens, just like the rest of us.”
“Come on in,” the teacher at Mr. Grad’s door tells all of us.
We file in the room and stand in front of Mr. Grad’s desk. He sits coolly behind it with a teacher on either side of the desk facing us. Mr. Grad’s eyes scan over each of us. “We’ve been told that you didn’t follow directions for today’s competition. Who wants to explain?” I shift uncomfortably in front of him. Evan clears his throat. Doyle looks at Jessica who’s staring at Mr. Grad’s desk.
Jessica breaks first. “The directions were to use the skills we’ve been developing in order to last as long as we can without being found,” she says, crossing her arms. The teachers don’t respond, they just look at her.
I look from the floor in front of me to Mr. Grad, the other teachers, then to my team. “Today was my fault. My team shouldn’t get in trouble for what I did.”