I can hardly believe track season’s over in two weeks when Coach announces it in the quiet, tense moments before our meet begins. Last season ever, for me.
We do team cheer, stretch, and then break, dispersing to our corners to jump and parade around like possessed mechanical monkeys. I’m having (another) one of those days where sex is literally the only thing I can think about.
Javelin in hand, I try and focus my thoughts, step out the distance from start line to launch. I jog, sidestep, mime a throw. My foot goes over the line. I sigh, backtrack, take a look around, watch the 100-meter dashers lugging their blocks across the track, scoping out the competition. I get stuck on a massive ace cornrowed betty, long legs for miles bending into her starting squat. She powers her legs, up and down, up and down, and I try and keep my jaw from grazing the freshly mown lawn.
I know I should be more focused, setting a proper example and everything. I am, after all, co-captain this year, along with my hit-Jack, Luke Castle, the team’s star mile-runner, and a betty we all call Rabbit, for her Energizer-like, marathon-style masochism. Together, the three of us are tri-captains. For the past two months I’ve been tri-ing to care.
I look around for Dad and my wee-Jack brother, Miles—Dad said they might make it—but to no avail. Then Castle saunters by and shoots me a movie-star smirk as he helps some cute sophomore betties with the high-jump mats. He flexes his biceps at me and winks when they’re not looking and I flex the middle finger of my right hand.
Every day, before practice, Castle and I drag tars at the edge of the student parking lot and we scat about how much everything sucks. Flip this, flip that. You know, the uje. Go-Go Captain Rabbit wheels by in her banger, equipment crowding her back seat, and she waggles her digit at us and laughs, though she really does disapprove. Don’t get me wrong, I love Rabbit. But she’s in-n-out. She isn’t one of us, one of the slack-stars.
At practice, I’ve weaseled out of my races. I pass the baton and never look back. I tell Coach I hurt my hip flexor doing the triple jump, which is mostly true.
He says, “Bloody ’ell, Butler. Doesn’t mean you can’t still throw that javelin. You’ve got a scholarship on the line!” And I hold up my digits in peace signs.
“Rinse and repeat, Coach,” I say. “Rinse and repeat.”
I watch Rabbit lap the track for the gajillionth time and I yank the cold metal rod from the grass and curl my wrist, laying the silver shaft across my heart cage. I jog, sidestep, extend, and then hurl the steel up and out over the field. It arches through the air and I stand and admire my skills, thinking again about Eve Brooks, Ms. Ancient History. The javelin lands, sticking with a soft, satisfying swish in the manicured green turf and I have this weird feeling—like maybe she’s nearby. Delusional thinking, I believe it’s called. Then I’m reminded of when all this nonsense began, this throwing pointy sticks and running in circles.
The Crush That Broke the Camel’s Back.
Two words. Raine. Hall.
She was a junior enrolled in ninth-grade French. She was doubling up with Spanish, which she already spoke, fluently. Madame thought she walked on water. I’m still not sure she couldn’t. Cut class, forgot homework, she got away with murder.
We sat in the back of the room and talked. Raine had long hair and sported tight flared jeans, penny loafers, and hippie shirts. We both drew. We did portraits of each other. She said, “Is my nose really that curved?” and ran her finger along its lioness bridge. I said, “Lemme try again,” and grew my shag and wore tight flared jeans, penny loafers, and hippie shirts.
She was hit with my Satan-souled older sister, Marta, and they dragged canna and toasted together back in the day before Marta graduated and went on to achieve absolutely nothing. Raine and I, we talked about heart-Jacks. I despised hers. Raine ran track. She said I should try out.
She threw the javelin. I threw the javelin. She did the long jump. I did the triple. She did the high jump. I was crank at the high jump. I asked her if there was a low jump and she took my head in both hands and laughed and leaped over skyscrapers.
She ran the hurdles. I could only muster the 200-meter sprint. She ran long distances in her sleep. She was Dream Queen Gazelle. I was Princess I Heart You Raine Hall.
Twelfth grade. Today. I still run track, am being paid via college degree to throw a sharp piece of steel, jump three times in a row, and run a relay for 200 meters at a time. Raine came to a meet last season and I could barely look at her. She’s the Crush That Broke the Camel’s Back and I am a caged bird, perched high on my secrets and shame.
And that’s when I see her perched on the hill.
Evelyn Brooks. Here. At my meet. I was actually, finally, maybe a little bit right. It’s a new sensation.
She’s watching, looking slightly confused, standing there in this beat knee-length army coat, arms wrapped tight around her too-small frame. Pretty Penny entourage nowhere in sight. I gawk, shaking off the tight weave of Never-Ending Pending memories slowly suffocating my pulmonaries and I wave and she waves, gives me a crooked-smiled, I-know-it’s-random-I’m-here shrug. I’m floored.
The javelin judges mosey past and I stumble over myself getting in line. And I throw like a prince. I even take names in my 200-meter relay. I run hard and sure, and after I sprint by the coaches with their stopwatches, I fold at the waist, mitts on my knees, my smoker’s lungs burning, and look to see Eve’s small frame as she thumbs-ups and waves once more, heeling it off to the student parking lot.
Castle comes up, shoves a thick shoulder into mine.
“Nice sprint, Jackie Joyner. Didn’t know you had it in you.”
“I don’t.”
He pokes me in the ribs and I wiggle, turn around, and pinch his left teat. Even though we made out last year and I pretended it never happened, Castle’s still my best shaver-Jack. One of a kind. He socks me lightly in the arm and strides away and it finally hits—like seventeen tons of bricks—that high school’s really going to end. And Castle and I won’t run track. And Zo and My and I won’t see each other every goddamn day. And that Eve Brooks just showed up to my track meet and I have no idea why, but I sort of maybe do, but can’t believe it’s true because that’s impossible and I’m brain-cell-challenged for even considering it.
I look again for the small silhouette of her oversized coat, see it fading away. She really was here. Imagine that.