Chapter 7 2004
Gaines Academy took their sports seriously.
Which was why PE was reserved for the last period of the day.
All the elementary school grades participated together, and it lasted two hours.
I had never played sports. My experience with competition was limited to watching the occasional soccer match on television with Profe and playing handball in the driveway with Astur.
Ms. Michaels gave me a uniform so large the shorts kept slipping down. Not wanting to draw attention to myself by asking for another, I simply held them up with one hand as I followed the girls from the locker room into the gymnasium.
My classmates sat far from me in the bleachers, positioning themselves on the benches above and below me, leaving me alone in the middle. I stared at the lines in the aluminum at my feet.
A man and woman in white collared sports shirts embroidered with their names took roll: Coach Stevens and Coach Lee.
Coach Stevens was older, white, and built like a box.
He had a broad chest that stretched the seams of his shirt and skinny legs that stuck out from his wide navy shorts.
Coach Lee was young, brown, and thin. She had a bounce in her step and smiled a lot.
Coach Lee took roll for the fourth- and fifth-grade classes, while Coach Stevens called out the names for the younger grades. When he reached my name, he stopped, then cocked his head and looked up from the clipboard.
“Your mother is Miranda?” he asked.
I nodded, and he went back to the roll call, but his voice was lower and slower, and he kept glancing up with a dark, stony-eyed gaze, which caused a bad feeling to grow inside me.
When he finished, we lined up for stretching and calisthenics. It was difficult doing the jumping jacks with my loose shorts, and I was terribly uncoordinated at burpees.
While we did sit-ups, Coach Stevens said, “Bart,” to one of the third-grade boys and gestured for him to step to the side with him.
Coach Stevens put a hand on the boy’s shoulder and said something that caused the boy to turn and search me out, and I felt it again, the cold slithering feeling of something bad about to happen.
The sport that day was dodgeball. Coach Stevens divided us into four teams, and I followed my team to our quadrant of the gym. I’d never played dodgeball and didn’t know the rules, so my plan was to avoid the three balls being thrown back and forth and stay out of the way.
When only three of us remained on our side of the court, I realized my mistake. The other team still had six players, Bart and Heddy among them.
“Save Poopface for last,” Bart said with a nod toward me.
The name stung but only for a second. Having spent so much time at Blue House, I was used to such names, and I was well aware that it looked like someone had pooped on my face.
They made quick work of my teammates—bombarding the first with all three balls at once, then doing the same to the second. I stood as far back as possible, holding up my shorts and praying for it to be over quickly.
“You need to throw the balls back,” Coach Stevens called to me, a note of glee in his voice.
I scanned around and saw the three balls on my side of the court. I swallowed, and with the hand not holding up my shorts, rolled the balls back one by one. The kids on the sidelines, the entire second- and third-grade classes, watched in silence.
I glanced over to see the girl, the one who had told me where the cafeteria was, looking at me with sympathy, but when our eyes connected, she quickly looked away, making it clear that, though she felt sorry for me, she didn’t want anyone to know.
Bart held one of the balls, while Heddy held the other two at the ready for him. The other three players stood behind them.
“Forfeit!” Coach Lee yelled as she hurried from the other side of the gym. “Say you forfeit!”
I didn’t know what that meant and turned to look at her at the exact moment Bart charged over the line, ignoring the rules completely, and slammed the ball at my face.