Izzy Barr, Running Star

by Claudia Mills

  “Where is your book, Cody?” she demanded.

  Cody didn’t answer.

  “You did work on getting information about your person over the weekend, I hope.”

  Cody nodded.

  “So where is it?” Mrs. Molina pursued.

  “It’s at home.”

  Mrs. Molina sighed.

  Outside the open window next to her desk, Izzy could see Mr. Boone doing chin-ups on the playground bars for a group of second graders. He was as tall as the tallest chin-up bar, so he had to hold his feet off the ground as he struggled to chin himself.

  “Izzy, you need to be reading your library book, not looking out the window,” Mrs. Molina said.

  “But Mr. Boone is—” Izzy began.

  Mrs. Molina cut her off. “Mr. Boone doesn’t have to write a Famous Footprint report by Friday. You do!”

  It was too late. The rest of the class had already run over to the window to look.

  “Children, back to your desks!”

  Nobody left the window until Mr. Boone had done a few more chin-ups. He definitely wasn’t any better at chin-ups than he was at jogging. But he was definitely good at making second graders laugh. And at making third graders ignore Mrs. Molina’s scolding.

  “Now!” Mrs. Molina said, sounding even more cross this time.

  Izzy made herself look away from Mr. Boone’s antics and finish reading her Wilma Rudolph book. Of course, she didn’t mind having to read about one of the greatest runners who had ever lived.

  Wilma Rudolph was poor. Her parents were sharecroppers in a time when it was almost impossible for African Americans to get ahead.

  Her family had twenty-two children. Twenty-two!

  Worst of all, when she was four, Wilma had polio, a terrible disease that paralyzed hundreds of thousands of people in America, including Wilma, who had to wear a horrible, heavy iron brace on her leg to walk at all.

  But then, at age twelve, she decided to do whatever it took to walk without the brace she hated so much.

  She learned how to walk again, and then she started to run.

  And run.

  And run.

  Until one day she ran so fast that she became the first American woman to win three gold medals at the Olympics.

  Izzy had looked up Jackie Joyner-Kersee on her parents’ computer at home, and Jackie had won three Olympic gold medals, too. But Wilma Rudolph still had the best footprints ever.

  7

  On Tuesday afternoons Izzy had Fitness Club. On Tuesday evenings she had softball practice. Izzy loved Tuesdays.

  Fitness Club didn’t meet all year long, just in the spring, two afternoons after school each week: the whole point of Fitness Club was to train to run the huge 10K race on Memorial Day. Izzy knew she could beat her own time from last year: 55 minutes and 18 seconds. But the time she needed to beat wasn’t her own time from last year: it was Skipper Tipton’s time from this year.

  It was strange that Mr. Tipton was Izzy’s P.E. teacher and running coach in the Franklin School Fitness Club and the dad of the girl Izzy was trying her best to beat. Maybe this way Mr. Tipton would be happy whichever girl won. But he’d probably want his own daughter to win most.

  Izzy did her warm-up exercises with the other kids in Fitness Club. Two other kids from Mrs. Molina’s class, in addition to Skipper, were in the club, but not Annika, Kelsey, Simon, or Cody. Some parents were helping with Fitness Club, too, running alongside both the faster and slower kids so that nobody would be running completely alone.

  Izzy wished her parents could help with Fitness Club, but of course they had to work.

  Warm-ups completed, the Fitness Club took off running.

  Izzy pressed herself to run faster than she had last week, which was faster than she had run the week before that.

  As she ran she could see Skipper’s ponytail bobbing up and down with each step and Skipper’s blue-and-silver shoes flashing. Thank goodness her own blue-and-silver shoes were flashing, too.

  She thought how funny Mr. Boone had looked jogging around the flagpole.

  She thought about Cody neck and neck with Simon in the P.E. race.

  She thought how great Wilma Rudolph must have felt the first time she ran without the heavy brace dragging her down.

  She tried not to think about her father and how he wouldn’t be watching her cross the finish line on Monday. At least her mother would be there; her mother had the whole three-day weekend off for a change. But the race wouldn’t be the same without her father.

  Past the public library, past the little bagel place on the corner, past the park, Izzy ran.

  * * *

  On Wednesday Cody still didn’t have a Famous Footprint book with him during language arts.

  “Cody, the assignment is due on Friday,” Mrs. Molina said wearily. “Two days away! You do have a book for the project at home, don’t you?”

  Cody hesitated. Then he shook his head.

  Mrs. Molina glared at him. “Cody Harmon, I want you to go to the library right this minute and come back with a biography of some famous person whose footprints you want to follow. Any famous person.”

  Cody just sat there. For someone who was so fast at running around the track racing Simon, he was certainly slow at getting up from his desk to fetch a library book. Finally, sighing as heavily as Mrs. Molina herself, he headed off to the library while the rest of his classmates were busy taking notes from their library books to copy onto their footprints.

  Cody was slow getting back from the library, too. At least he had a book with him now.

  “Thank you, Cody,” Mrs. Molina said with exaggerated politeness.

  Izzy saw the cover of the book as Cody set it on his desk. It had a picture of an unsmiling, olden-day lady wearing a pearl necklace.

  “Who is that?” Izzy whispered to Cody.

  He turned the book so she could read the title: Abigail Adams.

  Izzy had no idea who Abigail Adams was, except she was obviously a famous person from a long, long time ago.

  Kelsey whispered the answer since Cody still hadn’t said anything.

  “Abigail Adams was one of the First Ladies. She was married to President John Adams.”

  Kelsey knew things like that from reading all the time.

  Bewildered, the two girls stared at each other. That was the person whose famous footprints Cody wanted to follow?

  But Cody must not have been all that eager to follow in the footprints of First Lady Abigail Adams, because he didn’t open the book about Abigail Adams to read a single page.

  * * *

  After school at Kelsey’s house, the girls finished their math homework, with Annika explaining some of the problems to Kelsey and Izzy.

  “Are you nervous about Field Day?” Kelsey asked Izzy when they were done. “And about the big race on Monday?”

  “A little bit,” Izzy confessed. “I want to beat Skipper Tipton so much, and at the big race there might be some other girl who runs even faster than Skipper Tipton, so I might have to beat her, too, whoever she is.”

  And my dad isn’t even going to be there to see me run because I told him not to come.

  “How fast was the winning time for third graders last year?” Annika asked.

  Izzy knew the answer without having to look it up: the scores of the top runners in each category were on the race website, and published each year in the newspaper, too.

  “The winning time for nine-year-old females last year was fifty minutes, twenty-one seconds.”

  The 10K race sorted runners by age and gender, not grade level. Izzy and Skipper had both just turned nine, so they were in the same age group as well as in the same grade.

  Annika scribbled some numbers on a piece of paper. “Let’s call it fifty minutes to make the math simple. So all you basically have to do is run an average of two hundred meters per minute, and then run a little bit faster at the very end of the race. Do you want to borrow my new watch for the rest of the week to use whenever
you run? It has a stopwatch on it, plus a pedometer that tells you how far you’ve gone, so you can time how fast you’re running every step of the way.”

  “Sure,” Izzy said.

  Annika handed her the watch, and Izzy strapped it onto her wrist.

  “I’ll show you exactly how to use it,” Annika promised.

  “And don’t get distracted by anybody or anything,” Kelsey told Izzy. “There’s a story about a famous maiden—that’s another word for girl—in Greek mythology who was the fastest runner in the world. Like your Wilma Rudolph, Izzy, only longer ago. Her father wanted Atalanta—that was her name—to get married, but she didn’t want to marry anybody because all she wanted to do was run.”

  Izzy liked Atalanta already. “So what happened?”

  “She said she’d get married to a man only if he could beat her in a footrace,” Kelsey continued. “Lots of guys raced her, and they all lost. But this one guy loved her so much that he went to get help from the Greek goddess of love.”

  “That doesn’t sound very fair,” Annika said.

  “Don’t blame me—blame the story,” Kelsey said. “Anyway, the goddess gave him some beautiful golden apples. During the race, every time Atalanta got too far ahead, he rolled an apple out in front of her, and she slowed down to pick it up, and so he won, and they got married. The moral of the story is: Don’t pick up any golden apples!”

  “There won’t be any golden apples at either of these races,” Izzy said, wondering how Kelsey could possibly think this was useful advice.

  “That’s not the point! The point is not to be distracted by anything. Like if Skipper says something braggy, don’t listen. And even if Mr. Boone comes along—on stilts, or riding a unicycle and wearing a clown costume—don’t look. Don’t look at the crowd, either, to see who’s there watching you.”

  Or who isn’t there.

  Izzy decided she would remember Kelsey’s story and wouldn’t let herself be distracted by anything.

  She held out her wrist to admire Annika’s watch with its time-counting and distance-measuring buttons.

  “You two are the best!” Izzy told her friends, beaming.

  8

  On the morning of Field Day, Izzy’s father made pancakes for breakfast even though it was a weekday and Dustin wasn’t there. Izzy’s mom gave Izzy a kiss on her forehead as she got ready to head off to work. Her nurse scrubs today had flowers and flowerpots all over them.

  “Good luck, sweetie,” she said.

  “Thanks!” Izzy said, over a mouthful of pancakes.

  But she had something better than luck to help her win the third-grade race today. She had brand-new running shoes from her dad, Annika’s stopwatch strapped to her wrist, and Kelsey’s story still in her ears, plus inspiration from Wilma Rudolph. Her Famous Footprint of fascinating Wilma Rudolph facts was in her backpack, ready to turn in to Mrs. Molina that afternoon.

  The only thing she didn’t have was a parent to watch her win.

  “How come you made pancakes even though Dustin isn’t here?” Izzy asked her father, sopping up the last dribble of maple syrup from her plate with the last bit of pancake.

  “I don’t just make pancakes when Dustin is here,” he protested.

  “Yes, you do.”

  “I usually don’t have time for pancakes on workday mornings. But this morning the factory isn’t opening until noon because of a safety inspection, so I’m a gentleman of leisure.”

  He gave Izzy a searching look, as if there was something he wanted to ask her, but then he turned away to flip another pancake.

  A new idea popped into Izzy’s brain.

  If the factory was opening late, her father could come to Field Day! He had to know she hadn’t meant it when she told him not to come. She couldn’t make herself speak up and say that, but he had to know how much she always wanted him to be there. He was probably planning to surprise her.

  Izzy felt her smile spreading as wide as the distance she’d leap today in the long jump.

  “Do you want another pancake?” her father asked. “Or two or three?”

  “No, thanks.”

  She couldn’t run her best on a full stomach. But she could definitely run her best on a full heart.

  * * *

  Mrs. Molina didn’t even try to make her class do any math between the end of morning announcements at eight-fifteen and the start of Field Day for all the Franklin School third graders at nine.

  “We might as well go outside early,” she said with a sigh.

  Izzy cheered with the rest of her class.

  Too excited to walk quietly in line, the boys, except for Simon, pushed and shoved as the class headed down the long hallway to the door that led out to the field. Partway down the hall, the boys, except for Simon, got into a contest to see how far they could kick their shoes off their feet. Half a dozen shoes went flying into the air, one of them narrowly missing Mrs. Molina herself.

  Mrs. Molina, at the head of the line, whirled around in fury.

  “Put those shoes back on!” she barked. “Field Day can still be canceled, you know.”

  Izzy knew that Mrs. Molina didn’t really have the power to cancel third-grade Field Day. Not after Mr. Boone had been whipping everybody in the school into a frenzy of anticipation for the various Field Days for each grade all week. Izzy hadn’t seen Mr. Boone anywhere this morning. Maybe he’d be outside on the field doing push-ups or sit-ups while he waited for the third graders to arrive.

  “Boys!” Mrs. Molina said, even louder this time, as one more shoe soared through the air. “Put your shoes on now!”

  The boys scrambled to retrieve their kicked-off shoes.

  “Does everybody have his shoes?” Mrs. Molina demanded as she stood scowling back at the class. “If I see a single boy without his shoes, that boy will be spending Field Day in Mr. Boone’s office. Am I making myself clear?”

  She waited while the boys, except for Simon, bent down to shove their shoes back onto their feet and retie their loose laces.

  Izzy saw that one boy was still missing a shoe.

  It was Cody.

  “Where’s your shoe?” Izzy asked in a low voice, dropping back to the end of the line to walk next to him.

  “I can’t find it,” Cody said miserably. “And I can’t tell Mrs. Molina because if she sees I don’t have my shoe, she won’t let me run against Simon in the race.”

  Izzy stared down at Cody’s shoeless foot.

  “How can she not see that you don’t have your shoe? It’s not on your foot!”

  “I know. She might not notice if I don’t tell her, but she’s bound to notice if I do, and then I can’t beat Simon.”

  As if Cody could beat Simon wearing only one shoe. Besides, sooner or later, Mrs. Molina noticed everything.

  It wasn’t Cody’s fault that he couldn’t find his shoe. All of the boys, except for Simon, had kicked off their shoes. It was Cody’s bad luck that he was the only one who couldn’t find his to put back on.

  “I’ll tell her, and I bet she’ll understand,” Izzy said, sounding more confident than she felt. Mrs. Molina was often crabby. But on the morning of Field Day, with no time for math, and with the boys in her class kicking their shoes all over the hallway, she was even crabbier than usual.

  Trailing outside behind the others, Izzy walked up to her teacher, who had sat down heavily on the bench at the edge of the playing field, while her class ran around whooping and hollering as if math had never been invented.

  “Mrs. Molina?”

  “Yes, Izzy?”

  This was harder than she had thought it would be.

  “Yes, Izzy?”

  “It’s Cody.”

  “What about him?”

  “He can’t find”—she had already started the sentence, so she had to finish it—“his shoe. He looked for it everywhere, really he did, but he just couldn’t find it.”

  Mrs. Molina’s gaze fastened on Cody, standing a short distance away, trying to hide his sh
oeless foot behind the other one.

  Before Mrs. Molina could say anything, Izzy pressed on. “So I’m going to go back inside with him to help him look again, okay? If we don’t find his shoe, he can’t run in the race, and Cody has to run, he just has to.”

  Izzy wanted to add, Because he has to beat Simon! but she didn’t.

  Mrs. Molina’s scowl softened. “All right. But remember, Izzy, the first event for our Field Day is the race around the track, and it’s going to begin in ten minutes. Did you hear me? Ten minutes.”

  Izzy sprinted back inside the school, Cody loping crookedly behind her. She couldn’t see a running shoe in the hallway anywhere.

  “Could it have gotten kicked into an open door of one of the classrooms?” she asked.

  Cody nodded. “Maybe. There was a lot of kicking.”

  Izzy looked in despair at the long row of doors extending down the corridor. She and Cody didn’t have time to go into every single one asking whether anyone had seen a strange shoe come flying in. She couldn’t even give Cody one of her old shoes from the shoe tree because Cody’s feet were bigger than hers.

  That gave her another idea. “Maybe it got kicked under the shoe tree!”

  She and Cody hurried over to the shoe tree to look. Its bottom branches were so heavy with shoes they drooped under the weight, but no loose shoe was hiding beneath them. Izzy saw her old shoes again, now surrounded by shoes everywhere.

  So where was Cody’s shoe? A shoe couldn’t just disappear, walking away on its own.

  Then Cody’s face lit up. “There it is!”

  He pointed to one lone running shoe stuck on the very top of the tree, like a Christmas angel.

  Like a very worn and shabby Christmas angel.

  Cody’s shoe was definitely the oldest shoe on the tree, with a visible hole where his big toe had pushed its way through the fabric.

  “How could it get all the way up there?” Izzy marveled.

  “I guess I’m pretty good at kicking,” Cody said.

  “You’re good at kicking and running,” Izzy told him.

  How were she and Cody supposed to get it down? Neither of them could reach that high. If they shook the tree to dislodge Cody’s shoe, dozens of other shoes would come raining down on them in a May-morning shoe-storm.