A lot had to happen before I went on the biggest trip of my life. A lot had to happen before that guy in the Congo had the not-so-bright idea to put a crocodile in his duffel bag and board the plane, right?
Because the number one fact of being a plane-crash survivor is this: You must be on a plane. You needed a reason to fly.
A seventh grader like me didn’t have a whole lot of reasons to fly. My family lives in Texas. All of them. My mom is single and we aren’t exactly rich. Our idea of taking a vacation was driving down to Galveston or hanging out at Six Flags for the day. That was it.
It was an October Friday in the land of BEFORE. One of those really great days where the air was beginning to cool and you just wanted to take big gulps of it. It would be the day I got my reason to fly.
I was late to the bus. I was late to the bus every day ending in the letter y. I’d eat my cereal at the kitchen table and try to load up on a few new facts so that I’d have something to say to Sandy Showalter. I couldn’t risk having nothing to say to her. Better a fact than an awkward silence.
Everyone was pretty crazy on the bus that morning. I got Carl, the bus driver, to yell at me for being late.
“You gonna do this every day, Kovok?” he asked. His eyebrows rose.
“Carl, did you know everyone has a unique tongue print, just like fingerprints?” Carl was usually the beneficiary of my first fact of the day. I liked to try them out on him first.
“It’s against company policy to call you weird, Kovok,” he said. “Take your seat.”
I wouldn’t have minded if he called me weird. I considered it a compliment.
So I got to my seat, dodging a few flying erasers and one mystery object. I hoped I hadn’t perspired too much during the run. I had precalculated the amount of Axe body spray I needed to use to make me smell acceptable by the time Sandy arrived. Two and a half sprays. That’s the right amount. Anything more overpowers the bus. You learn this in sixth grade when a mean eighth-grade girl says, “You smell like you want to be alone.”
True story.
By the time Sandy, the prettiest girl in seventh grade, boarded the bus, I was breathing steady. Smoothing my hair back. Putting on a brave face.
Did you know the prettiest girl in seventh grade went to the fall social with me, Wayne Kovok, three weeks earlier? Did you know that when I asked her if we were going together, she replied, “Sort of, I guess”?
Sort of.
That was a fact that had the power to distract even me! A fact I enjoyed repeating to myself often.
Sandy. Wayne. Sandy. Wayne. Sandy. Wayne. Sort of together for three weeks and four days.
Not that I was counting the days.
Sandy was a beautiful, blue-eyed, golden-haired true lover of poetry, if you want to know. Sandy was also a hero in my book. My first memory of her was when she handed me a stack of napkins in fifth grade after some jerk squirted ketchup all over my face.
You didn’t forget a girl who helped you like that. A girl like that could plague you. In a good way.
That morning, she sat in the row of seats right in front of me.
“Sandy. Hey, Sandy. Sandy,” I said.
“What?” Sandy said.
“Hi.”
“Hi, Wayne.”
“Hey.”
“Did you race to the bus again?” Sandy asked.
“Yes.”
“He’s going to get mad.”
“Whaddya gonna do?” I said.
“Why do you have to run, Wayne?” she asked.
Why do I have to run?
Why? The plaguing question.
I told myself to be quiet. Not to expand on all the running facts I knew. Or thoughts about shoelaces. Sneakers. Foot powder. Or how fast cheetahs can run.
Don’t say a chicken fact! Don’t say a chicken fact! “Did you know that chickens can run up to nine miles an hour?” I tried to make it sound funny. The look on Sandy’s face told me I’d failed in my attempt.
“But don’t humans run that fast?” Sandy asked.
“The average human jogs at an average speed of seven miles per hour,” I replied, which was true.
“Oh, cool,” Sandy said.
She turned around and faced the front. I saw her reflection in the window. She smiled. I tried to remember to breathe.
A chicken fact? Really?
Why didn’t I just give her a simple answer?
Well, the real answer to why I ran to the bus had nothing to do with outrunning chickens. The real reason was a secret known only to me, my sneakers, and the pavement we flew over.
My dad had been a medal-winning, trophy-receiving, scholarship-earning high school track star. He dreamed of his son being a medal-winning, trophy-receiving, scholarship-earning high school track star, too. And I wanted to be like him. I really did.
So I ran because he wanted me to.
You think you’ll be a track star like me, boy?
Yeah, I hoped I’d be like him.
And then in a snap, I hated running. It was because of that time he did what he did. I was eight. He made me chase his car. You know how embarrassing that is? You couldn’t change some facts, even if you wanted to. Those were the facts you tried to forget.
Oh, come on, Wayne, I was just messing with you, he’d said. Let’s go get ice cream.
Do you know how miserable it is to eat ice cream when you feel stupid? Pretty miserable. Miserable enough to stay away from ice cream for a long time.
After that, I wanted to run away from him. Sometimes I looked in the mirror and saw a younger version of him: tall, skinny, dark-haired, and blue-eyed.
You couldn’t run away from yourself.
So then I ran for myself sometimes. Mostly just to the bus. When I ran, I was free. And if he dared me to run again, I’d be ready.
Was this the kind of information you shared with the prettiest girl in seventh grade, who considered you her sort-of boyfriend? No way.
It was safer to go with a chicken fact.