Twerp Page 16

  I stared at the words after I’d written them. There was no shame in being the second-fastest kid in school, even if the fastest kid was a fifth grader. That just proved it was a fluke case. He was a fifth grader, but he was two years older than I was, and bigger and stronger, so after it was over I could still say, and not be lying, that I’d never lost to anyone my age or size.

  But then a thought came to me that made me shiver: What if I didn’t even make it to the finals? The way I had the thing pictured, Eduardo would sail through his heats, and I’d sail through mine, and then we’d end up racing in the finals, and he’d win, and that would be that. But at least the entire school would see how he towered over me, and how he kind of had a mustache, and how the race wasn’t fair from that point of view. That would maybe take some of the sting out of it. But what if we wound up together in one of the first heats? No one would be paying attention at that point. The bleachers would still be filling up, kids would still be looking for their friends in the crowd, waving their arms and yakking. If Eduardo blitzed me in the first heat, no one would notice. The thought of losing in the first heat was unbearable.

  That meant I had to avoid standing near Eduardo as the runners were grouped. The problem was that the rest of the runners were going to avoid standing near me for the same reason. So, in a way, I did have a strategy. I figured I’d take a long time in the locker room changing into my gym shorts and sneakers, maybe even make an extra trip to the toilet, then head across the street to Memorial Field at the last minute and show up as Mr. Greetham was counting off the first heats. I knew Eduardo was the kind of guy who stepped forward as soon as he was asked. So if I could sneak into the very last group, we wouldn’t meet until the finals. Mr. Greetham would be looking around for me, on account of last year, so even if I got to Memorial Field a minute or so late, he’d squeeze me into that last group.

  Track and Field Day came on Friday the thirteenth. I hung around after social studies period talking to Mr. Loeb. He told me right off he hadn’t graded the final exams yet, but I told him I just had a question about social studies. Then I asked him how come the class was called “social studies” and not “world politics” or “world history” or “world geography”—which, when you think about it, was what we learned in that class. He took that question and ran with it. I remember listening to the sound of his voice, but I didn’t hear a word he said. I kept thinking about the gym shorts and T-shirt tucked under my arm.

  The conversation with Mr. Loeb, if you want to call it that, took maybe five minutes, and then I headed downstairs to the boys’ locker room. It was jammed with fifth and sixth graders changing their clothes, which made the old dirty sock smell stronger than usual. There was a lot of yapping back and forth, bragging without meaning it, griping about teachers. That kind of thing. Two guys moaned real loud when I walked through the door—like they’d been praying I wasn’t going to show up. I also got a quick nod from Willie, the guy who finished second to me in the finals last year. I nodded back at him and then made a beeline for the last toilet stall at the rear of the locker room.

  That was where I changed. Afterward, I just stood in the stall with my school clothes tucked under my left arm and listened. There’s a big difference between listening to guys when you’re looking at them and listening to them when they’re just voices. You pick up more when it’s just their voices. You start to hear not only what they’re saying but their mood. Even guys I didn’t know, I could tell from the tone of their voices whether they thought they had a chance to make it to the finals or whether they were running just for the heck of it. Most of them were running just for the heck of it. That killed me—how they knew they were going to lose, and how after they lost they’d just shrug, walk back across the street, change back into their school clothes, and nothing would be different for them. You could almost think of the scene at Memorial Field like a painting that was about to be painted, with guys in the background and guys up front. The guys who were running for the heck of it were in the background. The guys up front were Eduardo and me.

  I waited for the entire locker room to clear out, and then I waited another couple of minutes just to be safe. When I opened the door of the stall, it was eerie how quiet and still it was. There was a gray sock dangling out of the bottom of a locker, stuck between the frame and the door. It caught my eye, the way it was all twisted and mangled. I felt bad for it. It was a stupid thought. I mean, it was just a gray sock. But the thing looked like it was in pain.

  I waited as long as I could in the locker room and then headed out to Memorial Field. The walk took about half a minute, and I arrived as Mr. Greetham was dividing up the guys into heats. Just as I thought, Eduardo got picked for the first heat. So did Willie, which made me feel bad. He was like that gray sock, in a weird way. About to get mangled by Eduardo. I could’ve warned him to avoid Eduardo’s heat. But then he would’ve realized what I was doing.

  Mr. Greetham shot me a where-have-you-been look and then penciled me into the last heat. There were only four of us in the last heat. The other eleven heats had six runners. The winner of each heat advanced to the semifinals—twelve runners in all. Then the top two finishers in each semifinal—four runners—raced in the finals.

  As Eduardo and Willie lined up for the first heat, I was feeling real guilty. I should’ve warned Willie to avoid that heat. He was a good guy. He’d given me a quick hug and whispered “Good race!” after I beat him in the finals the year before. He still smiled at me whenever we passed in the hall. If the situation were reversed, if he knew about Eduardo and I didn’t, he would’ve warned me.

  There was nothing I could do now but watch.

  Eduardo towered over Willie and the other four runners at the starting line. It wasn’t fair. He was just too big. He looked like a camp counselor who’d rounded up his campers and forced them to stand in line. Then he did something I’d never seen before, at least not in person. He got down into a sprinter’s crouch—like the runners do in the Olympics. Willie glanced over at him with a confused expression on his face. It looked weird, not just the fact that Eduardo had gotten into a crouch but also the fact that he looked even bigger and faster hunched over than he did upright. The way his shoulders were pointed forward, the way his hair was trailing down his neck, he looked like a racehorse. It caught the attention of pretty much everyone at Memorial Field, even the kids in the stands. The yakking stopped. It was like someone flipped a switch. Not only could you hear the hush—you could feel it.

  “Runners ready!” Mr. Greetham yelled.

  Willie and the rest of them leaned forward. Eduardo didn’t flinch.

  “Set!”

  Eduardo raised his head slightly.

  “Go!”

  Eduardo rocketed off the starting line. He was ahead by three steps almost before the other runners got going. His arms and legs were churning together in perfect rhythm. There was no wasted effort. He began to straighten up, and his stride began to stretch out. My heart beat faster and faster as I watched.

  But then a miracle happened, or at least it seemed like one to me. Willie stayed with him. Eduardo still had that three-step lead, but he wasn’t pulling away. My heart started to pound even more. It was pounding as if I were running, not just watching. Eduardo and Willie were out by themselves … and then Willie started gaining on him. Willie lowered his head, and Eduardo’s three-step lead became two steps, and then one step. Then Willie let out a yell. I remembered that yell from the year before. He’d yelled as I pulled away from him in the finals. Back then, I thought he was yelling out of frustration. But now I realized it was because he was going full speed, putting his guts into the race. He was dead even with Eduardo now, and the two of them were hurtling together toward the finish line ….

  Willie beat him by a step.

  Yeah, I know how plain and dull that sounds, Willie beat him by a step, but I don’t know how else to say it—maybe because at first I couldn’t even make sense of what had happened. I could st
ill hear the echo of Willie’s scream in my ears even though he was walking calmly now, with his hands on his hips, ten yards beyond the finish line. I could feel, but not quite hear, cheers coming from the students in the bleachers. I watched Eduardo jog over to Willie and shake his hand.

  Then, just as the world clicked back into place, I heard Mr. Greetham call out the time: “Five-point-one.”

  Five-point-one?

  I’d run four-point-nine twice as a fifth grader and coasted at the end. How could that be faster than Eduardo? Then again, the way Eduardo was running, how could Willie have caught and passed him? It wasn’t possible. Except I’d seen it with my own eyes. But the time had to be wrong. Had to be wrong. That was the only explanation I could come up with. No way was that a five-point-one. Mr. Greetham had read the stopwatch wrong, or maybe the stopwatch was broken.

  But the times for the rest of the heats sounded right—five-point-seven, five-point-six, five-point-eight. That was the range for the next nine heats. After the first six, I couldn’t watch them anymore. I listened for Mr. Greetham to start each race, and then I listened for the time. I felt exhausted and sick to my stomach, so I closed my eyes and waited for my turn.

  I heard Mr. Greetham call, “Heat twelve, to the starting line.”

  I opened my eyes and walked onto the track.

  I heard a girl in the bleachers yell, “That’s him! That’s him!”

  But I didn’t turn around. I focused on the track crackling under my feet as I stepped up to the starting line. The chalk was smudged from the first eleven heats. The longer I stared at it, the blurrier it looked. The wind was blowing in my face, not hard, but enough to make me think, I’m a quintessence of dust.

  I heard Mr. Greetham yell, “Runners ready!”

  I tensed up, then relaxed.

  “Set!”

  I took one deep breath.

  “Go!”

  The weird thing is, I don’t even remember running the race. I remember pushing off, and then taking one hard step, and then grunting, and then nothing. Not even the rush of wind. The next thing I remember is running past Mr. Greetham, who was standing at the finish line.

  Then, a second later, I heard his voice: “Four-point-seven.”

  When he called out the time, a loud cheer came from the crowd. The sound of it washed over me, and I knew what it was for, but it felt wrong. It felt like a joke. I felt like a joke, like a fake. When I thought I was going to lose, I’d told myself there was no difference between being the fastest kid in the school and the second-fastest. I’d told myself that I was a quintessence of dust whether I won or lost. I’d talked myself into it. Except now I was going to win. What difference did it make? I was still a quintessence of dust. I was a quintessence of dust who’d run a four-seven forty. But still a quintessence of dust. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the other three runners in the heat walking off the track with their heads down.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, half to them and half to myself.

  Then I heard Greetham again. “Why’d you slow up?”

  I turned to him and said, “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry. Just run through the finish line.”

  As I was jogging back to the starting line for the semis, I saw Jillian jumping up and down in front of the bleachers, waving her arms at me. I started to wave back, except then I noticed Devlin standing next to her—he must’ve ditched school. I lowered my head and jogged past them, but Jillian yelled out my name.

  I took a deep breath and walked over to her. “What?”

  “Julian, that was so amazing! You’re so fast!”

  I was shaking my head. “It doesn’t matter ….”

  “It doesn’t matter? I’ve never seen anyone run so fast.”

  I shrugged at her.

  Then Devlin said, “Maybe next year, when you’re in junior high, I’ll race you.”

  The way he said that, for some reason, just cracked me up. I started to laugh.

  “What’s so funny?” he yelled.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, but I kept cracking up. I couldn’t help myself.

  “I’ll race you right now! You think I won’t? I’ll race you right this minute!”

  The more he yelled, the funnier he sounded. I was laughing in his face, which I guess he deserved, but I was also laughing at myself, at what a fake I was. I turned and started to walk back toward the infield.

  “You’re a punk!” he yelled. “You’re nothing! Did you hear me? You’re nothing!”

  I called back to him, “Maybe you’re right. But I can outrun you backwards.”

  He kept yelling, but I couldn’t hear the words anymore.

  I looked up and saw Willie standing and smiling with the rest of the semifinalists near the starting line. He stepped forward as I jogged over to them. “Four-point-seven, huh?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “What are you sorry about?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He laughed at that, even though I didn’t mean it as a joke. I couldn’t bear to look him in the eye after I hadn’t warned him, after I’d let him race the first heat against Eduardo.

  “You know what?” he said. “I think I might run a four-point-six … just to see what it feels like.”

  “I hope you do.”

  Except he wasn’t going to run a four-six. He’d just run the race of his life at five-one. He was never going to know what a four-six felt like. That was the truth, whether he knew it or not.

  But then at once I realized: I could run a four-six. I could run it for both of us. Willie deserved to run it more than I did. He deserved to know what it felt like. But the world doesn’t care who deserves what. The world doesn’t care, period. It had coughed up two quintessences of dust, me and Willie, and I could run a four-six, and he couldn’t. There was no rhyme or reason to it. It was just how things had worked out. If one of us was going to run a four-six, it would have to be me. Maybe, then, it wasn’t exactly true that nothing mattered. Maybe what mattered was doing what you could do … for the sake of the guys who couldn’t do it themselves.

  I wasn’t going to let Willie down.

  Mr. Greetham separated me and Willie for the semis. I’m sure he did it on purpose since we had the two fastest times. None of the other ten runners had broken five-point-five. So Greetham put Willie in the first semifinal and me in the second. I smiled at Willie and wished him good luck as he walked to the starting line. He ran a good race, and he pulled away at the end, but without Eduardo to push him, I knew the time wasn’t going to be as fast.

  Greetham called out, “Five-point-three.”

  I looked down …. I couldn’t bear the thought of how bad I was going to beat him in the finals.

  Then Greetham called out, “Next semifinal, to the starting line.”

  As I walked to the line, I had one thought: I’m going to run a four-six.

  That was the thought that carried me through the race, the reason I pushed myself not to ease up at the end even though the race wasn’t close. I bore down and leaned forward as far as I could crossing the finish line. Then I held my breath and waited for Greetham to call out the time.

  “Four-point-seven,” he said.

  The kids in the bleachers cheered again.

  I turned to Greetham and stared at him. “But I didn’t slow down!”

  “You got ragged at the end. The effort was right there, though.”

  “I want to run a four-six.”

  “That’s going to be tough. You’ve run two races already.”

  “I’m going to run a four-six.”

  He got a big grin on his face. “Then don’t talk about it. Do it!”

  There were four runners in the finals. I had no idea who was going to finish third or fourth, but I knew Willie was going to finish second and I was going to finish first. I also knew I was going to run a four-six … because I could. Greetham gave us a couple of extra minutes to catch our breath before he lined us up again. While we were standin
g around, Lonnie called my name from the edge of the bleachers. He waved me over. I glanced around to make sure I had time, then walked over to him.

  “You crazy son of a gun,” he said. “Four-point-seven.”

  “I’m going to run a four-six in the finals.”

  “So I guess Willie took care of Eduardo for you.”

  “Yeah, he beat him. I didn’t think he would.”

  “It should’ve been you who put him in his place.”

  “For God’s sake, Lonnie, let it go!”

  “I don’t mean nothing bad by it, Jules. You know I don’t like the guy. Maybe I don’t know him like you do. So we can agree to disagree if you want. But I’m not taking it back either.”

  I turned and started to walk toward the starting line.

  Lonnie called after me, “You mad, Jules?”

  “No,” I called back, but didn’t turn back around.

  “Then get mad! Run that four-six!”

  That’s the thing about Lonnie. He’s got his faults, for sure—I mean, the guy’s only human. But he gets to the heart of the problem. I’d coasted in the first heat. I’d thought too much in the semis. I wasn’t going to run a four-six unless I got mad. Real mad. Whether I got mad at Lonnie or at myself or at the world didn’t much matter. I just had to get mad.

  So I decided to get mad at the world. That was the biggest thing, and it included Lonnie and me, and even God, so I figured if I was going to get mad, I might as well get mad at the world. I mean, look at the way the world is. I don’t even mean the huge stuff like earthquakes and disease and hunger. That kind of stuff is too awful to wrap your mind around. Or Eduardo’s parents getting killed, or Lonnie’s mom getting her tongue cut by the Nazis. If I got worked up about stuff like that, I’d feel like even more of a fake. Who am I to get mad at things like that? It would be like a mosquito getting mad at the cold weather. You don’t like it, if you’re a mosquito, but what the heck are you going to do about it?