Answer Sheet

DOWN

  2.  Watching Coach exercise in the morning when no one else was on campus yet became a mystical experience like watching this creature close-up in flight, should not be possible according to physicists, but there it is, natural as a rainbow: bee.

  3.  The thing each girl on the softball team possesses but can’t find without me and T: asses.

  5.  Those who liked being told what to do by Coach under any situation: girls. Don’t be trashy, Brooks. Find a can for that can, Smith. They loved being called by their last names, found it challenging or endearing.

  6.  How I used to feel in the mornings before a game: new.

  7.  The most primitive, universal, timeless, essential, and risky exercise: fucking.

  9.  The boys were jealous and studious. They studied Coach’s movement and imitated him, causing this and testosterone to explode in the air like swarms of midges: sweat.

11.  An act performed during PE and lunch. A territorial marking done through motion, declaration of being, a summoning of bodies together, the most accurate test of physical intelligence: dance.

12.  The number-one thing I missed after quitting softball with my sister, T, to avoid Coach—the careful washing after practice, the cold cycle to preserve the color, the hand-drying and ironing, the green stripe down the side with not a single ripple: uniform.

14.  The outcome of most games when T and I played: win. The team looked impeccable, performed much the same. T had the image, I the strength.

ACROSS

  1.  The boys’ nickname for Coach. They mocked his hairline, low to the eyebrows, quick to point out something bearlike about his face, a dark nose set in a brown backdrop: Chewbacca.

  4.  Because his upper body significantly outweighed his lower limbs, Coach resembles this bird while running, chest puffed, arms tucked close to the torso like he held important files there: pigeon.

  8.  When talking to the counselor about Coach’s inappropriate/criminal behavior I could tell she wanted to smoke. Her eyes reminded me of these pointy tools of sinister men in white who can see a child bleed and cry and suddenly feel they’ve done a good job: needles.

10.  The type of people who found Coach attractive: stupid.

13.  According to T, this is most similar to sex with Coach: influenza. “It’s like being hot and sick under a huge blanket.”

15.  Coach treated the girls like these animals, which are sometimes eaten or mutilated by assholes with more power than cuteness; they get drowned by sociopathic preteens or develop mange or when lucky lose an eyeball to a flock of braver-than-most seagulls in an alley, fighting over a corn chip: kitten. They are very cute, and cute can get you killed.

16.  The energy that surrounded Coach could not be dismissed among the girls and boys; it got hold of you from the inside out like a drumbeat stuck in your head: sex.