“I could probably tell there was something in front of me, but not really a hurdle.”
“So what can you see?”
I looked over across the field. Sunny licked his finger and put it in the air again. I could see that. “Sunny.” I looked down to the curve and could see Patty stretching her arm out, passing the baton. “And Patty.” I looked opposite the straightaway and could see Ghost, squatting, positioning himself for takeoff. “I can see Ghost, too.”
Coach turned around to see how far they all were. Then he walked back to the center of the track, rearranged the hurdle I’d knocked out of place. Stood at the top of the line and looked down.
“Come here.” When I got over to where he was standing—walking like a zombie—he put his arm around me and turned me so that I was facing down the track. Told me to look down the line of hurdles. “What you see?”
Everything was a blur of gray and white and red and green, becoming hurdles and track and grass the farther down the line I got. The clearest part was the end. “I can see . . . down there.”
Coach nodded. Even though at the moment his face looked more like clay than face, I could tell he was nodding. “The finish line.”
Here was Coach’s plan (get ready for this): to jump the hurdles blind. Surprise! His theory was, since the hurdles were scaring me—they weren’t . . . okay, they were—now I didn’t have to be scared because I couldn’t really see that they were hurdles, even though I could tell that something was there for me to get over. And that if I just stayed focused on what I could see, which luckily for me was what was at the end of the race, I could jump the hurdles just based on timing. I know. The dumbest thing I ever heard too. But what was I supposed to say? He was Coach. And I am Lu. The man. The guy. The kid.
And this was for the championship.
He asked me if I was sure I wanted to try this.
“Do I got a choice?”
“You always have a choice,” he said.
My choice was, yes. He explained that what he wanted me to do was count how many steps it took for me to get from the starting line to the first hurdle. He moved the hurdle out of the way, which looked like a blur moving a smaller blur. Kinda looked like when my science teacher, Mr. Rich, played a video of what cells look like. Coach grabbed his clipboard and set it down on the track in the exact spot the hurdle was. At least that’s what he told me. I had to take his word for it.
“Sprint straight down the lane. Just count your steps, and stop when you hear the whistle,” he explained.
Badeep!
I took off. One-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight-nine-ten-eleven-twelve. And could feel the ground change when I stepped on the wood of the clipboard. Could hear it too.
Badeep!
“How many?”
“Twelve.”
“Twelve,” Coach repeated, grabbing me by the arm and walking me back up the track. “Okay, so twelve will get you to the first. The rest . . .” He smiled. “The rest is the waltz.”
“The what?” I stopped walking.
“You remember the dance I made you and Ghost do earlier in the season, when Patty and Deja and all them were learning to run their relay?”
Of course. How could I ever forget? Coach clowned us in front of everybody just for cracking a few jokes about Patty. Had us slow dancing in front of the whole team. “Coach, I can’t do that again.”
“Not the dancing part. But the counting.” Coach led me back down to the hurdles. Everything blurry. He stood between the first and second hurdle. “Between these two, there’s . . . one-two-three.” Then he moved down and stood between the second and third hurdle. The farther he got, the clearer he became. “One-two-three. Three steps, see?” Then between the third and fourth, unblurring a little more, his nose and ears appeared on his face again. “One-two-three. And then . . . hurdle.”
“One-two-three, hurdle,” I repeated, trying to understand and deal with my weird half-blind world.
“That’s it. You don’t have to see the hurdle to know it’s there. You’ll feel it in your way. And sometimes timing is all you need to get over it.” I could tell by the sound of his voice that he was trying to control the excitement from his own ridiculous theory. “Let’s give it a shot.”
Again, he started walking me back to the starting line, this time all the way, going on and on about how risky this was, which was a terrible way to get me gassed up to do it. But I had to try it. Had to. Not just for me, but for the team.
I got on the line. “Twelve steps to get to the first. Then, waltz the others,” Coach (as a funny-looking cloud) reminded me one more time before slipping the whistle in his mouth.
Twelve to get to the first. Waltz to the end. Get up quick. Lead with the knee. Twelve steps to get to the first. Twelve steps to get to the first. Twelve . . .
Badeep!
One-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight-nine-ten-eleven-twelve. Up!
I went over,
clean,
smooth,
like a . . . Tenderoni. Or something. I can’t explain it, but it felt amazing. So amazing that I forgot the waltz part and added an extra step in there and clipped the next hurdle. I crashed hard on the track—my third time today—and could hear everybody else suck air through their teeth, like a bunch of hissing snakes (that needed their venom removed).
“I’m okay, I’m okay!” I called out, rolling onto my back, then rocking up and hopping to my feet. I brushed myself off.
“You sure?” Coach asked, running over. His voice sounded sideways, which meant his face was sideways, which meant he was looking for something. And I knew exactly what he was looking for. He was trying to see if I was embarrassed. I ain’t have to see him to know that.
“Yeah, I’m straight.” I was. It felt good to make it over one. Blind.
Coach’s voice had some smirk in it when he said, “Then back on the line.”
After a few more falls, and eventually some successful jumps over all four hurdles, practice—which felt more like football than track—was over.
I sat on the bench and waited for my mom. The bench was the safest place for me, since I couldn’t see nothing. I watched everybody go in and out of focus, from teammates to talking smudges, drifting around me. Aaron was Aaron, but he was nothing but a smear of brown when he walked by. He ain’t say nothing. Me neither.
Ghost sat next to me, and it was like sitting next to a real ghost. He ain’t say too much either. Even though I could hear the different voices of my teammates all around, I could also hear the crackling sound paper makes when folded or unfolded. Knew it was coming from Ghost and remembered the stuff about his dad. The anniversary. It had been a tough day for the both of us.
“You good?” I asked, rubbing my knees. They were sore. Scraped up. Sunny had already left—his father was almost always on time—and Patty had her little sister, Maddy, on her back, over by the parking lot, which is how I was able to see her, and was slap-boxing Deja. Her whole relay team, Deja, Krystal, and Brit-Brat, had been messing with her after practice, calling her Captain Jones.
“You good?” Ghost said back, the paper sound now gone. “Aaron finally got to you, huh?”
“Ain’t nobody worried about Aaron,” I snapped. “I’m worried about these hurdles. Either way, I’m good. I can’t see nothin’, but I’m good.”
“Can’t see?”
“Nah. Got dirt in my contacts, they got all messed up.”
“You wear contacts?” Ghost asked, just like Coach asked, and I immediately thought he was going to roast me. But instead he followed with, “Dude, you know how wild you gotta be to stick something on your eyeballs? I can’t just be touching my own eyeballs, bro. That’s . . . nah.”
I laughed, still rubbing my knees. Rubbing rubbing rubbing. Not as hard as earlier when I was putting on my sunscreen, but still hard enough to maybe rub the pain out. “It ain’t that bad.” And I ain’t that wild.
“So you can’t see, for real?” he asked, and I immediate
ly knew he was waving his hands in front of my face, because everybody do the same thing. Plus the constant flashes of brown were making me feel sick.
“Stop.”
“Couldn’t help it.”
“Anyway, like I was saying about the hurdles. I should be ready for Saturday if I can just stay out of my own head, y’know?” Rubbing. Rubbing.
“Of course I know.” I heard Ghost’s bag zip. He patted me on the shoulder, told me he’d see me tomorrow, and started walking away.
“Uh . . . Ghost? Help me out, bro,” I called out. “I can’t see, remember?”
“Oh yeah.” Ghost came back, grabbed me by the arm, and we headed toward the parking lot. The breeze had settled and was now just whispering around us.
“Hey, can I ask you something?” I looked ahead, could see my mother pulling in in the distance.
“As long as it ain’t about my dad.”
“It’s not. It’s about that dude you were with today in the store. The big guy,” I said. “How you know him?”
“I don’t. Just met him today. In the summertime I always help Mr. Charles do stock, and clean, and just take care of different things in the store. It’s only a few times a week, but at least it gives me something to do during the day. Plus, Mr. Charles always puts a little chicken in my pocket.” He stopped. “Don’t tell Coach, ’fore he try to hit me for cab fare. Anyway, I went in today, and that dude was there helping out too. Mr. Charles told me he just moved to Glass Manor. Not sure from where, because we ain’t talk about nothing like that. Just . . . basketball. I told him I used to hoop, but not no more. And then he just, like, started going on about how he’s nice on the court. Swear he going to the league. That dude—that big dude—thinks he’s going to the NBA.” There was giggle in Ghost’s voice. “I wanted to be like NFL maybe, but I don’t know him like that yet.”
“Word,” I said, dry, partly because I still couldn’t believe Kelvin was working with Ghost, and a partly because . . . the NBA? Really?
“Yeah. He seems okay, though. His name—”
“Kelvin,” I cut him off. “I know his name. I know him.” And I know he is not okay.
“Yeah, I could tell. But the way you was looking at him made me think y’all had static or something.”
“Hmm. Nah. Ain’t no beef. He just . . .” Then I thought about who I was talking to. Ghost. My friend. And if there’s one thing I knew about him, it’s that he ain’t play with bullies. I remember what he told us happened between him and that boy at his school who was talking about him, what was his name? Run for the Bolts. I can’t remember but I know he got balled up by Castle Cranshaw, and I ain’t want that Ghost to do nothing to Kelvin and get fired from his job. Plus, Kelvin is big. Ghost ain’t. And I know Ghost can hold his own, but . . . against the smelly capital T? Nah. Not without some serious lumps. “Ain’t no beef, man. Just wanted to know how you knew him. I used to go to school with him. That’s all.” I reached my hand out for a five and started zombie-walking to my mother’s car.
“Hey, oh, Lu, before you bounce, can I ask you something right quick?”
I turned around, thinking it would probably be about what Aaron said about me teasing Ghost when we first met. I called his shoes—the mashed-up ones he had ruined by cutting the high-top part off so that he could use them as running shoes—Freeboks. Sikes. And honestly, for that, I’m lucky Ghost ain’t thump me too. “Wassup?” I braced myself. Ghost’s face now just a smear of peanut butter.
“How come y’all delivered a sombrero?”
“Oh.” I shrugged. “It’s called art.”
7
A NEW NAME FOR DAD: You Gotta Be Kidding Me! For Real for Real?
My mother always calls Wednesday “Hump Day.” Which is . . . terrible. I mean, seriously? Hump Day? Um . . . wow. But the reason she calls it that is because she says that if you can get through Wednesday, you’ve gotten over the hump, and the rest of the week is a breeze. But for me, Wednesday couldn’t have been no worse than Tuesday. Matter fact, they should call Tuesday “Hill Day,” because a hill is bigger than a hump. Either that, or Lu’s Day, which when you say it, sounds like Lose Day, even though I thought I had some possible winners when I was thinking of my little sister’s name before bed.
Newbie.
Magic.
Breeze.
Windy.
Dusty. (Still thinking about this one.)
Hurdle. (Spelled Herdle.)
And then it kinda drifted into
One.
Two.
Three.
Four.
Nine.
Ten.
Eleven.
Twelve.
S l e e p.
Morning. Hump Day.
And the other thing about Hump Day, especially when it comes to my mom’s business, is that no matter what, she only makes camels with the fruit. Only. Camels. That’s it. She started doing this a while ago when business really got jumping to the point that it was too much for her to handle by herself (when I’m in school), and she was trying to figure out a way to slow it down. So she made up this rule that if anybody orders something to be delivered on a Wednesday, it was going to be a camel, no matter what. She was hoping that people just wouldn’t make Wednesday orders and she’d have a day off to relax. And that’s basically what happened.
I got up, ready for a chill day, figuring maybe her and me could catch a movie—Sunny always be recommending strange ones—or maybe I could rest my sore body before practice. But as soon as I hit the kitchen, Mom just spat, “It’s a workday.” She poured a half cup of coffee for herself. Put the pot down, while I opened the fridge and took out the milk like a well-choreographed dance. One-two-three. Coffee-fridge-milk.
“On . . . Hump Day?” I asked, confused by the fact that anyone would want a camel.
“Yep.” She nodded slowly. “On Hump Day.” She ain’t sound too excited. She was probably bummed about having to work on what was almost always a day off, but the other thing was that my mother had never actually got a real order on Hump Day before, so now she had to figure out how she was going to make a camel out of fruit.
“What’s the game plan?” I asked, curious about this myself.
Mom leaned against the counter, took a sip, thinking, thinking, thinking, then . . .
“Kiwi. All kiwi.”
For the rest of the morning I was stuck peeling kiwi, which is nothing like peeling oranges but is way more of a surprise. See, when you peel an orange, the inside of the orange is also . . . orange. I mean, there’s the stuff that holds it all together, but mainly it’s just orange. But when you peel a kiwi, the fuzzy brown reveals a bright green mushiness that you would never know was there. It’s like cracking open a coconut and finding a tennis ball inside. Wild. So I did that, over and over and over and over and over and over again. She must’ve had twenty of them. I peeled, she chopped. I peeled, she chopped. And after she had a mountain of little pieces of kiwi, the juice running all over the place, she took a few bananas and put them and the kiwi in a blender and blended it all up. I won’t lie. This was one of the strangest things I’d ever seen her do, and the whole time she had that real serious look on her face, chewing on her bottom lip like she knew she was about to shock the world.
I don’t know about the world, but she definitely shocked me, because the bananas turned the kiwi into a thick paste. Almost like some kind of clay. And it was the color of clay. No, worse. And she shook it out of the blender and then shaped it into a camel with her hands. And when she got it right—two humps—she stuck it in the freezer for like ten minutes. And it was during this ten minutes, my mother ran to the bathroom to puke.
When she was done, she came back in the kitchen like it ain’t happen. And that’s when I realized that putting contacts on your eyeballs was really nothing compared to throwing up and then right after you done, taking a camel, that happens to look like it’s MADE OF THROW-UP, out the freezer.
I just watched her as she poked it gent
ly, and once she saw that it had turned a little stiffer, she started taking the leftover skin from all the kiwis I peeled and began laying it on top of the kiwi-banana blend. What . . . the?
“Toothpick,” she called, as usual. I handed her one, then another one, and another one. and she used them to tack the skin down. And before I knew it, the camel had fur.
We stood back to get a good look at it. “Not bad,” I said. “But who is it going to?”
My mother checked the paper, then smiled. “Of course.”
“What?”
She handed me the note, and then she picked the tray up and put the camel back in the fridge. It said:
To: Skunk
Thanks for helping us, especially Patty, get over the hump. And please clean your car out.
Love, Ms. Bev Jones
Underneath the signature, it said:
Christina, please feel free to deliver this gift in the middle of the day because Skunk don’t have a job.
Skunk was Cotton’s older brother, and he had been helping Patty’s family out since her aunt, who takes care of her, broke her arm in a car accident. Cotton and Skunk lived with their grandma right around the corner from me, so instead of getting in the car and driving, I told my mom I would just walk it over there. I got dressed, slathered on some sunscreen—just a single coat; it was a short walk—while Mom boxed up the “art,” finishing the packaging with the usual ribbon and sticker. I grabbed a small tangerine and stuffed it in the pocket of my sweatpants. Picked up the box with the camel in it and headed for the door.
The sun was shining and the neighborhood was alive with kids excited to be out of school. Some were sitting on porches eating ice cups, some drawing on the sidewalk with pieces of fat chalk or some limestones they stole from Ms. Clark. She always kept limestones around her flower beds even though her flowers were always dead. I was holding the camel steady, maneuvering down the block, trying not to bump into some random little kid or, even worse, trip over nothing, which is what always happens when you don’t need it to. Like when you holding your mom’s hard work in the form of a fruit camel that was paid for by your friend’s mother as a gift to a dude who was the older brother of the girl you like but don’t like . . . to like.
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