Coach Alphonsus Curry had never seen his Tubman Titans track team win a meet. They had come close a few times, but there was still no victory. He had some pretty good runners on the team this year. Marko Lane was the best, with Trevor Jenkins a close second. On Tuesday morning a tall, well built junior approached Curry.
“Hi. I’m Kevin Walker, and I belonged to the track team back home in Texas. Is there a chance I could join the team here?” he asked.
Curry looked the boy over. “I’m always interested in good athletes. After gym class, come on over to the field and let me time you,” he said.
“Okay,” Kevin said. Alonee had put the idea of joining the team in his head. Kevin didn’t enjoy any other sports, and he loved running. He was pretty good at it too.
When Kevin showed up at the track field after gym, he was surprised to see Alonee standing there. She gave him a high five as he walked by. “Good for you! You’re trying out,” she cheered.
Coach Curry stood on the sidelines as Kevin ran around the track. Back in Spurville, Kevin learned a lot about running. He learned to run with open hands. Making fists brought tension into the whole body and slowed a runner down. Kevin ran leaning forward, improving his speed. He even learned how to breathe properly so that he wouldn’t be gasping halfway through the race. Coach Podyard at Spurville High had poor equipment and a dirt track, but he understood the sport and Kevin learned a lot from him.
“Okay, that’s good,” Curry said, as Kevin finished the trial run. He didn’t want to overpraise the boy, but he was clearly excited. Curry had never seen so much speed in a boy. Kevin was way faster than Curry’s best runner, Marko Lane. “Very good, Kevin. I’ll give you the schedule for team practice. Get in as much running as you can. I think you’ll fit in with the team real well, son.”
When Kevin showed up for the first practice, he noticed Marko Lane standing there with a smirk on his face. “Oh boy, real competition here,” he laughed. “I bet you chased plenty of cows back in Texas.”
“We’re going to do a mile today,” Coach Curry said. “Four laps. I’ve got six boys lined up, and I want you guys to do your best so that I can see what we’ve got going for us here.”
Usually Marko Lane won the mile, coming out fast and leaving the other boys well behind. Trevor Jenkins usually came in second, but today he was determined to do better. He’d been doing his stretching exercises and he felt strong.
“Get ready, get set—go!” Coach Curry shouted, blowing his whistle.
Marko took off fast, as he always did. He had long legs. Trevor was second, and Kevin was back at sixth place. Marko noticed this and laughed. The Texas guy was even more of a jerk than Marko thought he was. He was making a fool of himself, a couple hundred feet behind the leaders after the first lap. But at the second lap, Kevin passed two boys. He was now in fourth place. Trevor had dropped to third, and Marko was still in the lead. When the third lap started, Kevin began to gain speed. He passed Trevor and the second-place runner, and he was soon just behind Marko. As the final lap came, Marko was worried. He pushed himself as he’d never done before. He couldn’t bear for this Texas yokel to make him look bad.
To his horror, Marko watched Kevin sprint past him, seemingly without effort, sailing across the finish line. Marko had used every ounce of his strength to try to stay ahead of Kevin, but he failed. After Kevin won, Marko leaned over to him and whispered, “You Texas turd, you’ll never do this to me again! I swear it!” Nobody but Kevin heard his comment. Kevin said nothing. He turned away as a smiling Coach Curry approached him.
“Whoa, Kevin, you can run boy! That was impressive,” the coach told him. “You are a member of the Tubman Titans now. We’ll get you suited up so you’re ready for the next meet.”
Trevor Jenkins, who finished third, came up to shake Kevin’s hand. “Man you go,” he said. “Only time I ever ran near that fast was when my mama was chasing me with a frying pan for coming home late from school. You hear what I’m saying dude?”
Kevin smiled. “Thanks. I’ve done a lot of running for fun. There’s a special high in just going all out,” he said.
“Man, your arms were really swinging. You were a blur man!” Trevor remarked.
“Yeah, my coach in Texas told me that the faster your arms swing, the faster your legs go,” Kevin replied.
Alonee came over then, a big smile on her face. “You were pretty awesome, Kevin. When you said you loved to run, I was expecting a soso runner. You blew me away. Marko Lane looked like he’d been hit by a cement truck or something. I bet he didn’t take it too well either,” she commented.
Kevin shrugged. He didn’t repeat Marko’s slur.
That day, Kevin jogged home from school as usual. He moved at a slow, steady pace. Sometimes he listened to music as he ran, but mostly he liked to hear the natural sounds of the fields he ran through. When he ran in Texas, he could hear a lot of bird sounds.
When Kevin was halfway home, he noticed that another boy was behind him. He didn’t know the boy’s name, but he remembered him from Mr. Pippin’s class. Every time Marko did something stupid, this guy and a couple others would laugh. He was part of Marko’s cheering section.
“Hey dude,” the boy called out to Kevin.
Kevin slowed and turned around. “Yeah. What’s going down?”
“I’m Tyron Becker,” the boy said. “I’m a friend of Marko’s. We hang out a lot. We go back to grade school. Know what I’m saying?”
“Okay,” Kevin acknowledged.
“You really made Marko look bad in that race. Marko has a lot of pride, and it was kind of dirty how you played that. You hung back and waited for your chance, and then you came on like a racehorse. You kinda tricked Marko into not doing his best and that wasn’t cool, y’know?” Tyron said.
“That’s how I run the mile man,” Kevin replied. “I don’t come out flying. I gradually gain. I ran the kind of a race I was trained to run. I didn’t pay any attention to what kind of race he was running. When I run, I feel like I’m all alone out there.”
“Yeah, well, it didn’t look good,” Tyron advised. “I just want to give you a heads-up man. Marko has a lot of friends at Tubman. He’s really popular. I mean, he’s the man around here. If you start playing dirty against Marko, you’ll have the whole school against you and I don’t think you want that. You’re a stranger dude, and we stick with our old friends around here.”
“Okay,” Kevin said. “I haven’t been at Tubman long, but I’ve already seen a lot of Marko Lane. He does his best to cause trouble in most of the classes. He really baits Mr. Pippin in English, scraping his chair, getting phony coughing spells. And you guys are laughing like it’s funny to torment a teacher. And then when some poor guy took a fall at the library, there was Marko, leading you guys in ridiculing him. I guess stuff like that makes a guy popular, but it’s not my business. I’m a stranger here, yeah. I do my own thing. And I run my own race.”
Tyron’s eyes narrowed. “Dude, you got bad attitude. It’s not gonna help you around Tubman. We’re tight. We look out for our brothers, and that’s what Marko Lane is, a brother,” Tyron threatened.
“I thought we were all brothers man,” Kevin snapped. “My grandma, she says we’re all brothers. Not just me and my friends. Everybody. Mr. Pippin, he’s our brother too. He’s old and everything, but he’s still our brother. That guy who tumbled down the library steps and got all muddied up, the guy you mocked when he was hurting. He’s our brother too.”
“You just watch your back man,” Tyron warned bitterly.
Kevin just stood there and watched Tyron turn and walk away. Kevin knew he’d gone too far. He should have just listened to what Tyron had to say and then let it go. It might have even been wise to nod and say that he appreciated the warning. He might have agreed that Marko Lane seemed like a leader around the school and that he would try to avoid crossing Marko. But somehow all the wrong words came out—words that were from Kevin’s heart, not his head.
Kevin didn’t know all the exact details of the crime that got his father sent to prison. All he knew was that a man insulted Charlie Walker and there was a fight. Maybe the cause was just a conversation—like Kevin’s with Tyron just now—that went bad. Kevin didn’t know who threw the first punch. He knew who threw the last one.
What Kevin did know was that he had a temper too—a bad temper, like his father’s. He might have killed Buck Sanders that day when he was only thirteen years old. Kevin drew back from that terrible cliff edge at the last minute that day. Now Kevin knew he must never get to that point again because he might not be able to draw back.
When Kevin was eating lunch the next day, Alonee came to join him. She introduced him to some other friends too. “These are my posse,” she announced. “This is Sami Archer.”
“Yeah, we know each other already,” Kevin nodded.
“He the strong, silent type,” Sami said with a grin. “He don’t have much to say, but I’m hearing on the grapevine that this boy can run. Coach Curry is getting down on his knees now every night, thanking the good Lord for sending Kevin his way.”
“This is my friend Sereeta Prince,” Alonee went on, as a beautiful doe-eyed girl sat down and smiled at Kevin. Finally a lean, handsome young man joined them. “This is Jaris Spain. He acted in a school play last month, and he was fabulous.”
Kevin looked at the group that formed around him. Back in Spurville he had two friends, neither of them very close. Now he had quite a group already. Trevor Jenkins showed up and told everybody, “You guys, you can’t believe how fast this guy runs. This Texas stranger left Marko Lane in the dust!”
“You know,” Jaris Spain said, “the sports department gives an award every year to our best athlete—the Arthur Ashe Award for Excellence. And lately we’ve had trouble finding kids who earned it. It looked like Marko would win this year because he’s been the fastest on the track team and pretty good in football too, but now maybe you’ll get it Kevin. I’d sure love to see somebody other than Marko get it. Character counts in the award, and he’s not doing so well in that department.”
“It’d be a joke if Marko won it,” Sami said grimly. “It’d be an insult to Arthur Ashe!”
“Yeah,” Jaris said. “You know, when I was a little kid, every day my mom would pack one of those beautiful, big, seedless oranges in my lunch bag. I don’t remember what they were called but they were awesome.”
“Navels,” Sereeta said. “They’re the best ever.”
“Yeah,” Jaris continued, “and I really looked forward to that orange, and then one day Marko said if I didn’t give it to him, he’d hurt me bad. I was kinda small and skinny then, and I was afraid of him. I gave him my orange every day. It made me so freakin’ mad I felt like screaming, but I was afraid of the bully.”
“We all were afraid of him,” Trevor added. “Some of us still are.”
“But you know,” Jaris said, “I was afraid to tell my mom what was going on because she would have marched over to Marko’s parents’ house and made a big deal of it, and it would’ve been all over school that wimpy little Jaris went whining to mommy to make sure he got his orange back. And Marko would have really gotten even then. He used to threaten me that, if I crossed him, he’d find a rattlesnake and put it under my bed at night.”
“Then I found out what was going on,” Alonee interjected, “and I told Jaris’s father. I’d see that nice big orange disappearing every day in that creep’s hands, and I had to do something.”
“Well, Pop has his own way of handling stuff,” Jaris remembered with a smile. “He didn’t go whining to Marko’s parents. He puts on a red wig and a fake beard, and one day, when Marko was out shooting baskets, he comes along and tells him my big oranges had magic seeds in them. They’d grow inside Marko, and branches and leaves would come out of his ears and his mouth. Marko was like seven, and he got scared. Pop told him to drink a lot of cod liver oil to wash away the seeds he’d already swallowed, but never to eat another one. For weeks Marko kept watching me eat my oranges and waiting for branches to come popping out of my ears!”
“There’s somebody like Marko in every school,” Sereeta commented. “They got this way of knowing who to pick on. I don’t know what anybody can do about it. I worry, though. I worry about the kids who get bullied. Some of them can’t or won’t fight back and sometimes they like explode. . .”
“Marko better watch out,” Trevor remarked. “Some day he’s going to bully the wrong guy, and then he’ll be sorry.”
Kevin focused on his peanut butter and jelly sandwich and said nothing. He avoided Trevor’s gaze. Of course, Trevor had no way of knowing Kevin’s past. Nobody at Tubman knew about Kevin’s father. And nobody knew how close Buck Sanders came to dying that Friday afternoon.
When the others drifted away, Kevin thought about Buck Sanders again. As soon as he was spat upon that day, Kevin knocked Buck down and started pounding on him with his fists. Buck struggled to get up, but he couldn’t. Somehow, between blows, he was able to scream at Kevin, “You leave me alone or you’re in big trouble.”
But Kevin kept on pounding him in the face and the body. Buck cursed him, and then Kevin put his hands around the other boy’s neck and squeezed. Buck’s eyes widened, and he looked as though he knew he was about to die. And if Kevin had continued, he would have died. But Kevin yanked his hands back, and Buck lay there gasping and coughing as Kevin walked away. Buck understood what almost happened. He knew that he had almost been murdered, that his beaten and strangled body would have been found in the morning when the sun came up.
Kevin stumbled toward home that day. He stopped at a tree and vomited. He was shaking and covered with perspiration. He felt weak, scared, and, in a strange way, triumphant. Buck Sanders never bothered him again. They continued to be students at the same school, but they never spoke a word to one another. They passed one another like unseen ghosts.
But Trevor Jenkins did not know any of that when he said Marko Lane better be careful, or he might torment the wrong guy and pay the consequences.
“So what’s your time for the two-hundred-meter dash, Kevin?” Trevor asked, drawing Kevin aside after school.
“Well, back in Texas I did it in twenty-one-four,” Kevin answered, meaning 21.4 seconds.
“Oh man, that’s awesome dude!” Trevor said. “What do you do to stay conditioned?”
“The usual, run, stretch, stuff like that. I eat good. My grandma is a good cook. Grandpa too. I drink a lot of milk,” Kevin replied. He hadn’t intended to mention his grandparents. He knew it would lead to questions.
“You live with your grandparents?” Trevor asked.
“Oh yeah. The school in Texas wasn’t that good, so, uh, we decided I’d live out here with my grandparents for the rest of high school. It was good that they live here in California. Schools got modern computers and stuff. Spurville is a little town, kind of behind the times. My grandparents, they’re great and it’s all working out,” Kevin explained. He didn’t want to talk about his mother being dead. He didn’t want anybody feeling sorry for him.
“Well, we’re sure glad you’re here,” Trevor said.
On his way home from school that day, Kevin felt pretty good. He wasn’t looking for friends. He was trying to keep a low profile. But still he enjoyed the gang Alonee called her “posse.” He liked Sami and Sereeta, Jaris and Trevor. They were friendly and comfortable to be with. Even though he never admitted it, Kevin was feeling a little lonely in Spurville after his mother died. He had no close friends. She was the only emotional attachment he had had there. Now he felt better.