I am not a big fan of Mr. Wall.
The first reason isn’t really his fault: I hate gym class no matter who teaches it. One kickball to the face in first grade was all it took for me to develop skepticism for all sports. (Upside to the trauma: A wiggly-but-stubborn tooth popped out on impact, and I got a fiver from the tooth fairy.) It hasn’t gotten much better as I’ve gotten older. As I’ve explained, with the exception of running, I’m not the most coordinated person. I feel like I’m put together wrong and weird like one of Hope’s Frankenplushies: all rubbery octopus arms and wobbly baby-giraffe legs with the head of a blind mole rat. Even the least dangerous activities like yoga or Ping-Pong become life-and-death situations.
Plus, it’s a hassle changing out of my regular clothes and into my regulation PJHS gym apparel. And the gymnasium is always hot and humid, like the planet’s sweatiest, stankiest rain forest. Worst of all, jocks like Scotty take gym class more seriously than all their other classes combined. They get all hyped up and gladiatorial and RRRRAWR!!! and it’s really, really unpleasant for the rest of us who are just trying to get through the next thirty minutes without becoming collateral damage in their BLOODY KICKBALL BATTLE TO THE DEATH.
But I suspect their over-the-top intensity has a lot to do with Mr. Wall’s teaching style. Teaching isn’t the right word. It’s more like bullying. As coach of the Pineville Junior High football team, he treats each gym-class activity as if it is the Super Bowl. And I mean every activity, including yoga and Ping-Pong. And, evidently, square dancing.
“PARTNER UP, YOU LAZYBONES!”
He reminded me of my sister yelling at the dance team. Up to that moment, I’d never noticed the similarities between Mr. Wall’s and Bethany’s insult-ridden motivational tactics.
“WHADDYA GOT, WAX IN YOUR EARS?”
Now that football season is over, he’s the coach of the wrestling team. Which brings me to the second reason I don’t like Mr. Wall: He totally tried to stop my friend Molly from going out for the team. He was all like, Oh, she’s just a little girl. She’ll get slaughtered, and her parents will sue the school, and blah blah blah. He obviously didn’t know who he was dealing with. Molly’s tiny but tough. And she’s a girl of few words, but when she speaks up, she makes them count. So she was like, Title IX, Mr. Wall. Supreme Court says I have the legal right to try out. And she did. And guess what? She totally pinned the little dude in her weight class, and it was a victory for girls everywhere, and hooray feminism!
“I SAID PARTNER UP, YOU.”
There are about thirty of us in this gym class. It’s mostly students from the Gifted & Talented classes, with a few randoms thrown in just to make things interesting. Partnering up is kind of standard. Like, one person does the sit-ups, and the other person holds her feet and counts. Or one gets her wobbly baby-giraffe legs pretzeled up in lotus pose, and the other gets her unstuck. Or one hits a Ping-Pong ball, and the other swings and misses with all eight of her rubbery octopus arms and takes it right in the blind eye.
You know. FOR EXAMPLE.
Usually I’m with Hope, but sometimes we’ll end up splitting Sara and Manda if they’re in a fight and refuse to partner with each other. With all of Manda’s giddyapping about the Down-Home Harvest Dance, it looked like today was one of those days. I acknowledged the situation with a simple nod to Hope. She returned the nod and sidled up to Manda as I approached Sara.
“Looks like it’s you and me,” I said as the rest of the class shifted around to stand next to their usual gym partners.
“Not so fast,” Sara said.
Mr. Wall was shaking his head in misery.
“Not THOSE types of partners,” he shouted. “PARTNERS partners!”
This still wasn’t making any sense to anyone but Sara.
“Boys with girls! Girls with boys!”
Because we weren’t getting the point, Mr. Wall grabbed the nearest boy by the back of his PJHS gym shirt and shoved him in the direction of the nearest girl.
“For square dancing!”
Sara smiled. But the rest of us didn’t move a muscle.
“Get moving! You’ve got thirty seconds to pick your partners, or I’ll pick them for you.” He clicked the stopwatch he always wears around his neck. “GO.”
The next thirty seconds were as harrowing as any I’ve ever experienced. And this is coming from someone who was once chased by a giant goose who wanted to make me his girlfriend. But that lovesick bird was nowhere near as terrifying as the person who came after me in the gym.
“You and me,” Scotty said, grabbing my hand.
I yanked it back and slapped him on the wrist.
“You’ve got to partner up with someone; it might as well be me,” he said. “And Dori isn’t in this gym class, so…”
And then he winked.
ACK. HE WINKED. WHAT’S WITH SCOTTY AND ALL THE WINKING?
All around me, couples were coming together: Mouth isn’t in our gym class, so Manda put aside her negative attitude about square dancing long enough to make a beeline for Scotty’s cute friend Vinnie. Sara targeted a quiet kid named Sam who wouldn’t even try to interrupt her endless chatter. Hope pointed at Mike, the tallest boy on the basketball team, who responded with a comic “Who, me?” pantomime, as if their pairing hadn’t been inevitable all along.
My options were running low with every second that ticked by. Pretty soon, it would be down to Scotty and this kid John-John, who always has a runny nose and always wipes it on the back of his hand. What would be worse? Being on the receiving end of Scotty’s winks or John-John’s snot? So help me, I went with the winks. But not without a stern warning.
“Don’t get any ideas,” I said.
“I never have any ideas,” Scotty replied.
I used to think that was true. That Scotty was one hundred percent pure jock and nothing else was going on in his head besides, like, fart jokes and RAWR!!! But I was discovering that Scotty has lots of ideas in his head. Many about me. AND I DON’T LIKE THOSE IDEAS ONE BIT.
“You’ve got ten seconds to find three other couples and make a square.” Mr. Wall pressed the stopwatch and blew the whistle. “GO.”
I assumed this would be easier. The obvious square was me and Scotty, Hope and Mike, Sara and Sam, Manda and Vinnie. But Sara was having no part of any square that included Manda as one of its sides.
“Omigod! No!” she said. “You don’t want this dance to happen! You will not sabotage my square!”
“Oh, puh-leeze. Like I even care enough to sabotage your square.”
“You do and you will,” Sara shot back. “And I won’t let that happen!”
“FIVE SECONDS,” warned Mr. Wall.
“Scouts!” Sara shouted at a pair nearby. “You’re with us!”
Everyone calls them the Scouts. I don’t even know their real names. He’s a Boy Scout and she’s a Girl Scout; they wear their full uniforms to school sometimes. This is something nobody—and I mean NOBODY—else does, which is ironic because wearing uniforms is usually, like, a sign of conformity. (I just imagined Hope saying, “You can’t spell conformity without uniform!” This isn’t accurate, but you get the idea, right?) I’ve often wondered if the Scouts genuinely like each other or if they felt obligated to start a junior-high romance based solely on their matching uniforms. Either way, the Scouts joined our square without hesitation, because they’re used to following orders.
Manda was livid.
“Fine!” she shouted. “I’ll put my own square together!”
“No time for that,” Mr. Wall said. Then he steered her by the shoulders over to a triangle that needed a fourth pair to complete their square. Vinnie followed. I don’t like playing into Pineville Junior High’s popularity stereotypes, but there’s no question in my mind that Manda categorized those three couples as the nottiest of Nots.
“Oh no! We’re not going alone!” Manda dug in her heels. “Hope’s coming with us!”
Mr. Wall blew the whistle. Time was up. Hope looked at Manda and held up her hands in a way that was supposed to look like “sorry” but came closer to “whew.” She stayed put.
“The squares stand,” Mr. Wall pronounced, as if there were any question in the matter.
“Heeeeeey, everyone!” Sara called across the gym triumphantly, loud enough for the entire class to hear. “How can a square also be a circle?”
It was unlike Sara to pose a mathematical riddle. But it would be even more unlike me not to answer.
“It can’t,” I replied automatically. “In fact, the phrase squaring the circle is a metaphor for an impossible problem. It goes back to the ancient Greeks—”
“Gee, thanks, Einstein,” Sara said, cutting me off. “A square is a circle when—”
“Euclid,” I corrected. “As in Euclidian geometry.”
I honestly don’t even know how I know these things sometimes. I just do. I read a lot, I guess. And my dad is also a big nerd. THANKS, GENETICS!
“Omigod! Nerd alert! You’re killing the joke!”
Then Sara raised her hand in the air to deliver the punch line: She “zeroed” Manda’s square.
There’s no way everyone in the gym knew what it meant. And yet EVERYONE IN THE GYM KNEW EXACTLY WHAT IT MEANT.
If you know what I mean.
Manda’s response was furious and swift. She fought back with a defiant hand—or rather, finger—gesture of her own. One that definitely did not comply with the vulgarity rule.
“OMIGOD. MR. WALL, DID YOU SEE THAT?”
Of course Mr. Wall saw it. We all saw it. To make sure no one missed it, Manda did a full 360-degree rotation. Yes, a perfect circle within the square.