and Celeste, when I saw her, was Legless Mite, the girl balanced atop the wheeled cart—beautiful and dark-eyed and powered with a grace frightening to those burdened by regular limbs.
It was the last Friday of the semester, and I entered the school with almost breathless excitement. It had been a tremendous week. After returning from Kansas City, I had nailed every paper and exam the bastards had put before me, and a perfect score on my closing biology test was all I needed to claim victory. The final day of classes before Christmas break was Monday, which meant I had all weekend to prepare for Gottschalk. Most kids groaned; I celebrated.
After lunch, I hurried to the final Fun and Games. I didn’t expect to remain friends with Celeste, if that was what we were, when classes picked up in January, and so felt an urgency to talk to her a final time, no matter how many lies I had to make up about theatrical agents who were this very moment booking tickets for Bloughton. But when I walked through the gymnasium doors, my hopes sank. Stettlemeyer and Gripp lounged next to each other on the bleachers as they had for the first half of the semester, and students gathered in loose assemblies, not a single one of them wearing gray shorts. There were a few basketballs and Frisbees lying around for those so inclined, but clearly the coaches had decided to let the final session function as a social hour.
Stettlemeyer barked a reminder that we all needed to go empty out our lockers at some point. Half the crowd got the task out of the way immediately, including Foley, whose invisibility made him impervious to intimidation. When he returned with his sweats twisted into a rank knot, we situated ourselves on the bleachers and watched our classmates mingle. I was so used to seeing them in dismal gym wear that they seemed rather like sophisticates at a cocktail party. Stettlemeyer’s superhits completed the deception.
Celeste, Woody, Rhino—I kept tabs on them for ten or fifteen minutes, then let them slide from sight. Dwelling on any of them was not going to help the next few days of intense study. But Foley’s constant bitching—currently about how his grandparents always gave him noncirculating commemorative coins for Christmas, what the fucking fuck was up with that?—wasn’t interesting enough to keep my mind off the gymnasium’s missing character, Heidi. I stood up.
“Hey, where you going? I haven’t gotten to the Limited-Edition Barack Obama Inaugural Series yet. Wait’ll you hear what those things are made of. You’ll shit a brick.”
“Clothes,” I said. “Locker room.”
“Oh, right. Well, hurry up.”
Alone in the stairwell, I paused to relax in the cool darkness. Maybe next semester I could get out of gym entirely, I thought. The locker room door squeaked beneath my fingers. I had heard of such arrangements in Chicago, of being permitted to add an extra class in lieu of gym. I passed red benches, black lockers; my nose tickled at the fog of aerosol. Yes, I would ask the school counselor, maybe even today after school—I didn’t know why I hadn’t thought of it before. The first number of my combination was thirteen. I smiled. Maybe my luck would just keep getting better.
Then impact—teeth rattled, cheeks and lip smashed against clammy brick. There was no air; I wheezed; great vises collapsed my lungs. The spice of armpit hit my nose. Far away I heard the skittering of my shoes and then the horrible absence of sound as they were lifted from the floor.
I went horizontal. Blood rushed to my head. There was a splashing noise and I looked down to see two large Nikes stomp across a thin puddle of water; I was being toted like a suitcase. I wrenched my neck and saw Rhino and then there was a great blow to the top of my skull. All went black—and then I saw starbursts, tasted the blood from my lacerated tongue, and heard a chuckling from above.
“Didn’t mean to hit that wall,” said Rhino. “Honest I didn’t.”
I opened my mouth but my swollen tongue took up too much space.
“It’s your lucky day, Crotch.” I didn’t need to look to confirm the identity of this second voice. “We’re performing a public service. Free showers to anyone who smells so shitty I can smell him all over my girlfriend.”
“Trask, do they still count as girlfriends when they don’t even let you—”