The Jamboree

 

“THEY BROUGHT IT home last night,” Odette told Mieko the next day at school. It was the last period of the day—PE—and today they had to run the mile one last time. All sixth-graders had to run the mile three times, once at the beginning of the school year, once in the middle, and once more at the end. Most kids complained about it, and a few even tried playing sick, but Coach Santiago made them make it up the next day.

Odette and Mieko were stretching with the rest of the class. They were on the lawn in the center of the track, which wound around them like a wide, flat ribbon. Odette liked running, and so did Mieko, so neither of them was complaining, but some of the kids were trying to devise last-minute escape plans, spending their energy freaking out instead of conserving it for the run.

“The Coach?” asked Mieko. She’d spent lots of after­noons at Odette’s place. She’d heard Odette’s mom and dad comparing the various secondhand RVs they’d been checking out and had looked over their shoulders at the pictures on the computer screen. “Did they pick the Weekender?”

Odette shook her head. “The Jamboree.”

“Ooh,” said Mieko. “Tough blow.”

Coach Santiago blew his whistle then, and Odette was glad, because running would be better than talking about the Coach, and the SOLD sign, and the boxes lining the hallway, Mom’s daily calls with Grandma Sissy, the pinched, worried look on her face each time she hung up, and the annoying high-pitched whistling Dad had been doing since he took the “voluntary layoff” and the severance package at his job.

They lined up in groups of five, alphabetically. Coach Santiago held his whistle between his teeth, his stopwatch in his hand, and noted the start time for each group of runners. Mieko was in one of the middle groups (Ishida), but Odette had to wait until the very last whistle before she could spring off the pads of her feet and let go, before she could let the breaths grow sharp in her lungs and relax into the pace of her strides.

Before she could fly.