Coach grabbed his whistle and clipboard from the glove compartment. “Okay, here’s how you’re spending your suspension. We got us three hours before practice. We’re going to use this time to get you caught up on the way all this goes.”
“How all what goes?”
“Being on my team, boy.”
I could tell he was still irritated, but not as much as he had been.
We headed over to the track, the bright white lines marking out the red lanes, the green field in the middle.
“Okay, so first things first. Where’s your practice clothes?” Coach asked.
“These them,” I said.
“You have on jeans and high-tops,” he stated the obvious.
I looked at myself. There was a stain on my sneakers. A new one. Maybe ketchup. Or chocolate milk. “So?” I said. “What’s wrong with that?”
Coach sat down on a bench, stretched his legs out. “You know what, don’t worry about it. We’ll figure that out later. Let’s just start with some stretching.”
Apparently there were a whole slew of different kinds of stretches, and Coach showed me how to do them all. Each one was for a different reason. This one for this part of the leg, that one for that part of the leg, another one for your back. Then jumping jacks, toe touches, push-ups. It all seemed silly to me, but not as silly as the next part—the two-lap warm-up jog.
Me and Coach bounced around the track, him telling me to keep my arms tucked, which was actually hard to do. He said form is everything when it comes to running, and that it has more to do with form than how fast your legs move. That didn’t sound right. To me, it seemed like if my arms were tucked but my legs weren’t moving fast, then I wasn’t gonna be beating nobody. Just common sense. But then again, I didn’t think a two-lap jog—as slow as we were jogging—would get me going, but by the time we finished I was pouring sweat.
“Good, good,” he said as we got back to the bench. He bounced around on his toes like a boxer before finally settling down. “Feels good, don’t it?”
I wiped my face with my shirt and took a seat. I was tired and energized at the same time, which was weird.
“I didn’t do it to make me feel tough,” I blurted out of nowhere.
Coach stopped bouncing. He sat down next to me and grabbed a towel from his bag.
“What you talking about?” he asked, wiping sweat from his bald head. More like buffing it off.
“What you asked me in the car? If beating up Brandon makes me tough,” I reminded him. “I said I didn’t know, but I do.” We locked eyes. “The answer is no, it don’t make me tough.”
Coach moved the towel from his head to his neck. “So what does it make you, then?”
“I don’t know, but not tough.” I thought for a second. “Because for something to make you feel tough, you gotta be a little bit scared of it at first. Then you gotta beat it. But I wasn’t scared of Brandon at all. He’s just a big guy with a big mouth. That ain’t really all that scary to me.” I had been thinking about this when we were running around the track, warming up. In between Coach’s tips about form and all that stuff, my brain was kicking that question around.
“Let me guess,” Coach said, now flinging the towel over his shoulder. “You’re one of these kids who ain’t scared of nothing or nobody.”
“Nah.” I chuckled just for a second because I knew the kinds of kids Coach was talking about. The kids who say they ain’t scared but really be scared of everything. Kids like Brandon. He talked all that trash and teased people because he was shook. A cupcake. But that wasn’t me.
“I ain’t saying that. I’ve definitely been scared of somebody before. Real scared,” I added, thinking about how loud a gun sounds when it’s fired in a small room. “That’s how come I know how to run so fast. But now, the only person I’m scared of, other than my mother . . . I mean, like, I do things I know ain’t cool, but even though I know they ain’t cool, like beating on Brandon, all of a sudden I’m doing it anyway, y’know? So I guess . . . I guess the only other person I’m really scared of, maybe . . . is me.”
A grunt seeped from Coach. He rubbed his right knee.
“I hear ya, kid,” he said, wincing, stretching out his right leg, bending it, then straightening it. Then he did the same to the left. “Trouble is, you can’t run away from yourself.” Coach snatched the towel from his shoulder, folded into a perfect square, and set it in the space between us. “Unfortunately,” he said, “ain’t nobody that fast.”
4
WORLD RECORD FOR THE WORST DAY EVER
I KNOW IT seems like this was the best suspension day maybe in history. And to be honest, it was. At least, at first. I got to punch that jerk Brandon in the face—I know, I know, not cool, but still!—leave school early, and hang out at the track with my new coach—because I was on a team now—who turned out to be a pretty cool dude. Me and Coach didn’t go no further into my life or nothing like that, which was a good thing because I never really told nobody about my dad. Instead Coach asked me who my favorite basketball player was.
“LeBron,” I said, like it should’ve been obvious. “Who else?”
“Who else?” Coach said, surprised. “Uh . . . let me think . . . Michael Jordan?”
“Jordan? Come on, man. Jordan is like somebody’s granddaddy. Jordan don’t wanna see LeBron on his worst day. LeBron could be sick from a bad batch of cafeteria chicken drummies and still give Jordan the business.”
Coach stood up. “See, that’s the problem with you kids. Y’all don’t know what a true champ is.”
“Coach, I hate to break it to you, but LeBron is a champ. He got rangs,” I said, holding up two fingers and wiggling them around.
“But Jordan has six.” Now Coach held up both his hands. All five fingers spread on his right, just his pointer finger up on his left. He wiggled them like I did. “Six!”
“Jordan got six?” Whoa! I probably should’ve known that, but I didn’t. Dang. I knew he won a few, but six? “Is that the Guinness world record?”
“The what?” Coach asked.
“The Guinness world record. Gotta be.” I put it in my head to check the book when I got a chance.
“I don’t know, probably. He was the greatest of all time.” Coach shot an invisible jump shot, his tongue hanging out his mouth. It looked ridiculous. Clearly he wasn’t a ballplayer.
Then I asked him about that guy I read about who was supposed to be the fastest man alive. Usain Bolt. Coach knew all about him, too.
“Usain ran a nine-five-eight,” Coach said.
“What’s that mean?” I asked, because the numbers nine, five, and eight meant nothing to me. They’re not points or nothing like that. At least I didn’t think they were. I actually wasn’t even really sure if you could score points in track or not. Just seemed like the kind of sport you just win ribbons and medals or whatever.
“That was his time for the one hundred meter.” Coach pointed up the track toward the start line he had had everybody sprinting from the day before. “From there”—he moved his hand to the finish line—“to there. Nine seconds and fifty-eight milliseconds. The boy is like lightning.”
I looked at the distance and in my head counted, one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi, and pictured myself running. Nine seconds seemed like a pretty long time.
“But that ain’t even that fast,” I said. Plus it just didn’t seem like one hundred meters was all that long. I mean, I had just run it the day before in what had to be six or seven seconds. Couldn’t have been more than eight.
“You don’t think so?” Coach asked, flashing a sly grin. “You think you can beat that?”
I looked at the distance again. One Mississippi, two Mississippi . . . “I don’t know.” I shrugged. “Probably.”
This was when the best day ever went bad. Coach told me to try to run one hundred meters in nine seconds and fifty-eight milliseconds—Bolt’s time. He stood at the finish line with his whistle in his mouth. I rolled my pants
up to my knees and my shirtsleeves up to my shoulders just like I had done the day before.
“On my whistle,” Coach said, holding up the stopwatch. “On your mark, get set,” and then, badeep! I took off down the track running as fast as I could, legs pumping, arms pumping, heart pumping, until I got to the finish line.
“Ohhhh,” Coach howled excitedly. I felt good. Knew that I had proven my point. I bopped over to Coach with my hand up, ready for the high five. But Coach never lifted his hand.
“Not even close!” he yelped. “Not. Even. Freakin’. Close. You ran a twelve-five.” And before I could even respond, he barked, “Back on the line!”
I jogged back to the start. Coach blew the whistle. I ran. He blew the whistle. I ran. Again, and again, and again. Each time I came in a little slower than the last. My head started swimming, my chest burning, and my legs got all gooey, like all the running was turning my bones to liquid or something.
After the fifth try, Coach yelled out, “Fourteen seconds? Fourteen seconds? On the track, that might as well be fourteen minutes! Are you kidding me?”
I bent over and planted my hands on my knees. My legs were shaking, but only on the inside. Like my muscles were . . . shivering. My heart was pounding as fast as my feet had pounded the track. Maybe even faster. My stomach was flipping, and I just knew that my french fries were gonna come out as mashed potatoes all over the place. Coach walked over, his shadow making the red track burgundy around me. He leaned in and said lightly, almost as if he were whispering to me, “Back on the line.”
That’s when I lost it.
“What . . . what? What . . . again? I . . . need . . . a break,” I panted. “I’m tired.”
“Tired?” Coach squealed, and I could hear the smile in his voice. I glanced up and there it was, big and chipped and wide like whatever words were hiding behind those teeth, he was struggling to keep in. So he let them out. “You know who’s really tired, son? Your principal.” Coach put his hands up, palms facing me as if to stop me from even thinking about responding. Then he continued, “No, no. You know who’s really, really tired? Your mother. She’s so tired. So tired. And she’s gonna be even more exhausted when she hears about your suspension.”
“Come on, Coach,” I begged. “That’s messed up.”
“Come on, nothing,” Coach said like every old black person says when they don’t have a good comeback. He grabbed my shoulder and stood me straight. “Bending over cuts off your air,” he said. “We stand straight up at all times. Understand?”
I nodded, now understanding what was happening. I was being punished after all. This was Coach’s way of telling me that I better stop acting up in school. If this was what the consequences of getting sent to Mr. Marshall’s office were going to be every time, I’d rather have him just call my mother.
“Now, Mr. Better Than Bolt, get back on the line.”
Coach made me do the sprint two or three more times before finally letting up, and the only reason I think he let me stop was because my sprint had broken down into that weird, sloppy trot the tall skinny kid, Sunny, had done at the practice the previous day. My shirt was gone. I had peeled it off and thrown it on the field just in case the wet cotton was weighing me down or something. My legs had pretty much clocked out, but instead of letting me just sit down and rest, Coach told me to walk it off.
“Walk it off?” I asked, annoyed and confused and almost ready to cry.
“Yeah, just walk around the track. It’ll cool your body down slowly.”
But I didn’t want my body to cool down slowly. I wanted it to cool down immediately! So, yeah, at this point I had pretty much made up my mind that track was the dumbest sport ever. I mean you gotta move to warm up, and move to cool down? Don’t make no sense. Cooldown should be, I don’t know, some juice and an Icee or something like that. Not no walk.
Once I finished the first lap, Coach told me to take one more, and about halfway around the second lap of me mumbling under my breath about how stupid all this was, I could see the other runners—my new teammates—showing up, dropping their sports bags and water bottles and all that on the track, some of their parents trailing behind.
“This is gonna be it,” Coach was preaching to everyone as I finally made it back to the other side of the track for the second time. “Ten girls, ten boys. Just so we’re clear, this doesn’t mean you still can’t be cut. It just means you ain’t cut yet. Now, I’d like to keep it this way, but that’s totally up to you. Got that?”
Everybody nodded, including a woman with braids who looked too old to be on the team even though she was dressed in running clothes. I had first noticed her from the other side of the track and figured she was somebody’s mother . . . until she didn’t sit down with the rest of the corny kids’ cheering squad.
Coach went on about how this was the third day of practice for the spring season, and how he wanted to make sure we all knew each other, or at least make sure all the vets knew the newbies. I was still standing back, sort of outside the circle, as Coach started rattling off everybody’s name.
“On the girls’ side, for the vets we have Myisha Cherry, Brit-Brat Williams, Melissa Jordan, Dee Dee Gross, Krystal Speed . . .” Any girl with the last name Speed had to be fast. Kinda like any dude with the last name Bolt. Coach continued, “Deja Bullock, Lynn Tate, Kondra Fulmer, Nicky McNair.” He paused and motioned toward the last girl. “And our newbie for the girls, Patina—but she told me a few minutes ago that she goes by Patty—Jones.” Everybody clapped. “Patty, I got high hopes for you, young lady. Let’s make it happen.”
Then he started calling out the boys’ names. First, the vets. “Eric Daye, Curron Outlaw, Aaron Holmes, Mikey Farrar, Freddy Hayes, Josh ‘J.J.’ Jerome, and Chris Myers. You boys better look out for our newbies, Lu Richardson, Sunny Lancaster . . .” And this was when Coach turned to me. “And as of yesterday, this kid. Castle Cran—”
“Ghost,” I cut him off before he could even get the shaw out. “Just call me Ghost.”
Coach gave me a look. Actually, everybody gave me a look. Probably because I didn’t have no shirt on, and my pants were rolled to my knees, and my belt was yanked so tight that it made the denim bunch around my waist like genie pants. But whatever.
“I was gonna tell them that, son,” Coach said. Then he turned back to the rest of the team. “Lastly, this is your assistant coach, Coach Whit.” Coach Whit was the woman with the braids. She also had chubby cheeks, and like I said, she looked too old to be on the team, but she definitely didn’t look old enough to be nobody’s coach. Then she pulled a whistle from underneath her sweatshirt, so that pretty much meant she was.
“Give it up for your squad,” Coach told us, slapping his hands together. “This is gonna be a great season!” Everybody cheered and clapped for maybe ten seconds before Coach shut it down and told us it was time to get to work.
He divided everyone up into whatever their specialty was. Because most of the other kids had been running track for, like, forever, Coach knew who was a sprinter, who ran long stuff, and who ran all the junk in the middle. As far as the newbies were concerned, Sunny was a long runner and Patty ran the in-between. Me and Lu were the sprinters. (I never even knew I was a sprinter!) So guess what we were doing for practice? Sprinting. And guess who had just finished sprinting and didn’t get to take a break? Me.
“Today is Wednesday, and Mikey, why don’t you inform our newbies about what sprinters do on Wednesdays,” Coach said. Mikey was a vet sprinter. A light-skinned kid with braces and a rock face. The kind of guy who you didn’t really say too much to, because you just assumed he wouldn’t say nothing back. Except to Coach, of course.
“Ladders,” Mikey grumbled.
“That’s right.” Coach paced back and forth. “Four, three, two, one, one, two, three, four.” Every time Coach called a number, he clapped his hands together like a cheerleader.
Okay. Let me explain what Coach was talking about, because I didn’t have a clue at first eit
her. All those numbers, the fours and the threes and all that, yeah, add a “hundred” on the end, and then add a “meters” on the end of that. So four hundred meters, three hundred meters, two hundred meters, and so on. We had to run those. Down the ladder to one hundred, then back up to four. I didn’t think the day that started kind of bad, then got good, then got bad, then got better, then got bad again, could get worse until Coach told me, Lu, Mikey, and Aaron—the four sprinters on the boys’ side—to get on the line, four words I was already sick and tired of hearing.
The whistle blew, and . . . well . . . Lu, Mikey, and Aaron blew me away.
Back on the line, this time for the three hundred. Toasted.
Back on the line, now, the two hundred. Roasted.
Back on the line for the one hundred. Dusted.
“Five-minute break,” Coach said. “Grab some water.” He came over to me, put his hand on my shoulder. I was literally folded in half, trying to catch my breath. My eyes were watering, but I knew better than to cry. I ain’t no crybaby. Especially not over no running.
“You all right?” Coach asked. I couldn’t get the words out. Every time I tried to speak, the sound was shoved back in my throat by a sharp inhale. So I just nodded. Then Coach squeezed my shoulder and pulled me up so that I was standing straight. “Remember what I told you. Stand tall.” I put my hands on my head, wove my fingers together. “Now hustle up and get some water.” Coach nudged me. “You only got three minutes.”
Here’s the other thing that I didn’t really know about being on a team. There are rules to drinking water. I mean, I guess it might be different on different kinds of teams, but on this team, everybody had their own water bottle that they had brought with them. So when I went over to the bench with the other sprinters, I just sat down. Didn’t ask nobody for a swig or nothing because . . . I don’t know . . . it just didn’t seem like something I should do. The only feel I had for these guys was that Lu was cocky, and Mikey seemed way too serious to share, and Aaron . . . well, I couldn’t get a read on him at all yet. So I figured, three minutes to catch my breath was just as good as water. It would have to be.
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