THE GREEK CHORUS
* * *
“Okay, practice is over. Stretch out. I’ll be in my office . . .”
We didn’t know if Coach Fogden had actually said those words or if we had just been wishing he’d say them for so long that we, together, had made the sentence magically become audible. It could have been a group hallucination. We didn’t know for sure, so we kept running.
There’s a certain sound that a group of basketball players in a gym makes after they have been running for two straight hours. The time between steps is shorter. Your legs feel so heavy that they’re really being dragged more than lifted. You can no longer make out the sound of distinct footsteps hitting the floor. It becomes more of a group-shuffling noise.
Sh-sh-sh-sh-sh-sh.
But over and over again. Up and down the court. Everywhere.
Sh-sh-sh-sh-sh-sh.
Oh, and don’t forget the breathing. The loud, labored, painful breathing, in various rhythms coming from all over the court. And the coughing, and the spitting, and the occasional throwing up of a sandwich that was eaten too close to the start of practice.
But mostly it’s the sound of shoes shuffling on hardwood.
Sh-sh-sh-sh-sh-sh-sh.
Touch the line and run back. Touch the next line and run back to the first line. Touch all the lines and don’t stop running. Ever.
Coach Fogden gleefully calls them “suicides.” That’s what we are running. We are running suicides. We think we might be allowed to stop, but again, we may be hallucinating.
We finish the suicide and look up. We scan the gym. We blink and rub the sweat out of our eyes.
Coach Fogden is gone. He’s no longer in the gym. He is in his office, like he said. We weren’t hallucinating. Practice is over. We are supposed to stretch out now.
We look at each other. Normally there are twelve of us, but today there are ten.
We have our hands on our knees, our torsos bent over our legs, and we’re sucking in breaths of air so rapidly that it might appear to an outsider that we are all competing over a limited amount of it.
The breaths are loud because they are urgent. It is the only thing we can hear. We need that air.
Whoooo-woo whooo-woo whoo-woo.
Then we all fall to the ground. Just start collapsing. One after another, right in the exact spot where we stopped running. It can’t really be called sitting on the ground, because we don’t sit. Sitting requires controlled movement. We have no controlled movements anymore.
We crumple.
To the ground.
Nobody says anything. Nobody can talk.
The first thing that goes when you have been running for that long is your ability to speak. Even if you are somehow able to open your mouth, which requires muscles that you no longer have the strength to use, you have another problem: the fact that you don’t have any saliva left in your mouth.
You aren’t going to be able to produce any sounds with a mouth as dry as the Sahara.
That’s what Coach Fogden told us the last time he made us run and not stop. It was after someone had talked back to him. He told us we were going to run until we couldn’t talk anymore. And then we’d see if anyone spoke back to him.
That was a month ago and now it was happening again.
Only our offense was much worse this time. Or so he told us. We still aren’t really sure what we did. How could we have stopped Matthew from punching Stewart?
All Coach Fogden said was, “I don’t care what happened. All I care about is that now Stewart can’t practice.”
And then he yelled “SEW-AHHHHH-CIDES.” So we started running.
And now we are here, countless suicides later, crumpled on the floor, attempting to breathe normally again.
Whooo-woo whooo-woo whoo-woo.
Eventually some of us are able to get up, get some water, Gatorade, any kind of liquid, and slowly begin stretching.
Normally Stewart would start us off. We’d get into a circle at center court and he’d call out each stretch as we went through them, but without him there we are more than glad to make do on our own.
Nobody needs to count to ten out loud. It’s not necessary.
But the silence was killing us. The only noise we could hear was one of us bouncing a basketball, playing around with it as he was stretching.
Bom-bom, bom-bom, bom-bom.
The silence was draining. Someone needed to say something. Our saliva was back.
“We need to get back at him somehow.”
Finally. Words. It didn’t matter where they were coming from. We all knew who the “him” was and we all agreed.
We knew we would never be able to get revenge on Coach Fogden. And if we tried and failed, we knew it would be the last thing we would ever do.
And we also knew this wasn’t Matthew’s fault. He did what we all wish we could do. Matthew was a hero.
It was Stewart. Stewart was the reason we all had throbbing headaches and could no longer bend our legs. It’s all because poor Stewart couldn’t practice.
Poor Stewart with his broken nose.
We had to do something.
“Yeah, that was the worst practice of the year. I think I am literally dying right now.”
“I know. I can’t feel my legs. Someone tell me if they are still attached to my body. Please. I’m serious.”
“Oh, you’re lucky. I can definitely feel my legs, and they hurt like hell.”
Bom-bom, bom-bom, bom-bom.
The basketball was still bouncing. It was steady.
“Can someone explain to me why we even had to run today? What did we do?”
“Oh, that’s pretty clear. We let Stewart, the O Holy Stewart, get punched in the face. Or something like that.”
“Yeah, we didn’t somehow stop Matthew from knocking King Stewart back to third grade and Coach Fogden knows we can’t win without him this weekend.”
“God forbid anything happens to baby Stewy.”
“How were we supposed to stop Matthew? That just makes no sense. We knew nothing about it. I wasn’t even in school that day.”
“Does anything ever make sense with Coach Fogden?”
Bom-bom-bom-bom-bom.
The bouncing was getting faster.
“I can’t believe we just had to do all that running because of Stewart. That piece of crap.”
Bom-bom-bom, bom-bom-bom, bom-bom-bom.
“Yeah, but what are we going to do to get him back?”
“Let’s piss in his locker.”
“How about pissing in his lunch one day when he’s not looking?”
“Yeah! We could get it in his apple juice or something.”
“Who drinks apple juice?”
“How about we just tell on him, fill out one of those stupid bully forms? Dude, he’s been taking your math homework every day for the last three years and turning it in as his own.”
“Or the time that he pulled your chair out from under you in class and you smacked your face on the desk and then told the teacher you had ‘tripped.’ ”
“Or that he used to throw out Jake’s lunch every day because he needed to ‘shed a few pounds to get quicker on the court.’ ”
“Come on. We all know Meadhall wouldn’t believe any of those stories and Stewart would find out we told on him. We need something we can really do.”
“Yeah. Something embarrassing.”
“Isn’t the dance coming up?”
“Yeah, this weekend. Why?”
“Do you guys remember what Stewart did to me during the game against Bethel last year . . . ?”
We all did.
The basketball stopped bouncing.
AND THEN CAME GOAT
* * *
“But what if something happens?” Elizabeth said to her mother. “If she gets out and gets lost in the house or trapped in something? Cats like to crawl into tiny spaces and not come out.”
They had set up a litter box, food, and water, and kept the cat in the bathroom.
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Elizabeth’s mom wasn’t as worried. “Nothing is going to happen. Just don’t mess with the animal kingdom and everything will work out.”
The cat was named Goat because of the little tuft of hair that grew from just under her chin. Her owners, the Wolfs, were in a fix.
“Please. We know you don’t usually take cats, but she’ll be fine in the bathroom for a week, just make sure to change the litter and have her dry food always available,” Mr. Wolf begged. Their house had been badly damaged by a tree that had fallen during the hurricane and they needed to move out for a week while repairs to the roof were made.
She never saw herself as a cat person, but when Goat snuggled into Elizabeth’s lap and buried her head, Elizabeth melted. The person2person page seemed further away. Goat purred loudly, like medicine.
Elizabeth sometimes wondered how her mother could ever be right about anything, when all she did was watch TV. Elizabeth had never seen her mother read a book, or read anything other than People magazine. But she did often seem to be right about animals and their natural order. She was like the dog whisperer, except without her own television show.
No toys, that was one of her animal rules. If there are no toys, no bones, no chewies, then there is nothing for the dogs to fight over. And no cats.
But now there was Goat.
“She keeps getting out,” Elizabeth said. She had grown attached to the little Bengal-striped cat.
“Leave her alone. She’s a cat. She’ll figure it out and so will the dogs. As long as you stay out of it.”
When her mother was out at the store, Elizabeth tried picking up the cat and carrying her into the living room. Maybe if the dogs saw Goat in her arms they would know she wasn’t a mouse or a squirrel or something to chase and hunt and eat.
But there was something about holding the cat captive that drove the dogs crazy and they lunged at Elizabeth. The cat panicked, twisted and squirmed to be let go. She jumped out of Elizabeth’s grasp and darted into hiding, leaving Elizabeth with deep, red, angry-looking scratches all over her arms.
“I told you to leave that cat alone,” her mother said at dinner.
Elizabeth pulled her sleeves down quickly.
Not only did Goat ignore Elizabeth’s pleas to stay in the bathroom, but she learned to pull open the bathroom door with her paw and she wandered farther and farther out into the house. Then one day, Goat made her way into the living room, where the dogs were resting after dinner and after their evening exercise. Carefully Goat stepped around each one, sniffing their ears and their feet, and sniffing their tails.
It was too late by the time Elizabeth saw what was happening. Denali, the Chinook, was the first to notice the cat tiptoeing around his head. He bolted up.
It didn’t take long—one by one the dogs became alert. Willie, the beagle mix, planted his legs and started to bark. Kelly, another mixed breed, began making high-pitched whining sounds, like he could hardly contain himself. The hair on his back pointed straight up at the ceiling.
Goat froze. Her only escape was now blocked by Sadie, the Saint Bernard who had been allowed to return, but at double the going rate, because Elizabeth’s mother really needed the money.
Elizabeth felt her heart pounding in her chest. Goat was surrounded. The dogs were in attack stance, growling, ears back, tongues hanging out of their mouths. Never get in the middle of a dogfight, her mother had warned her many times. No exceptions. Never.
But she could shout. She could yell and scream and whistle and try to break the dogs’ hyper-concentration on Goat. Her wails just seemed to further rile up the dogs. Willie made a sudden move forward toward Goat, barking. Denali responded to the advance by making a second lunge. They had formed a mob in no time. Without a word, without any prior discussion, they ganged up on the cat, each dog taking energy and impetus from the other, to form one single killing machine.
By this time Sadie had gotten her massive body up and was on her feet. She hobbled over and placed herself directly in the middle of all the dogs. Elizabeth held her breath and her tears. Time stood completely still. She watched as Goat hinged her body up onto her back legs, bared her claws, and hissed. She swiped her front paw in the air and caught Sadie right in the face.
That’s all it took.
It was all over. Sadie didn’t back down, but she didn’t attack, either. She leaned her giant head forward and took a sniff of the new “cat” air, then she turned around and hobbled back to her bed, the biggest bed, the one with a lamb’s wool comforter, before any of the other dogs could take it. Sadie turned around five or six times, in a counterclockwise circle, until she felt things were just right, then she plopped her whole body down and went to sleep.
With that, Kelly lost interest and went into the kitchen to sniff for bits of dog food that might have rolled under the counter. Willie got spooked and headed off with his tail tucked between his legs. Denali, too—a little sniff from a safe distance and then he went and laid down. It was over.
Then Goat sat down on her rear end. She lifted her back paw and began calmly grooming herself, licking her foot and rubbing it over her ears and head.
Elizabeth hadn’t realized she had been holding her breath the whole time, until she let out all the air in her lungs.
Don’t get mad, get even.
If Goat could stand up for herself, Elizabeth could too. And the school dance Friday night would be the perfect place.
TAG, YOU’RE IT
* * *
Zoe knew Maggie had put up that Smelly-Girl person2person page. Who else would do that? And who else would get scared and take it down as soon as the power was back on? But it was too late. By tagging so many kids from class, everyone had seen it just before the power went out, and people had added their own little jokes and comments.
There was no doubt Maggie was scared now. And that explained why Maggie wasn’t talking about who was going to dress like a freak at the dance tomorrow. That’s why she was trying to act all nicey-nice about everybody.
So why had Zoe spent so much of her lunch period holding the table, while Maggie got to go up and get her lunch first? On Italian dunker days that meant only the broken, smooshed ones would be left.
And the school had found out about it. Or at least they heard rumors. Since the page was already down they couldn’t really punish anyone, but that’s why they were starting this ingenious new lunch table arrangement: Punish everyone.
Instead of letting kids sit wherever they wanted, tables were now organized by homeroom. The idea—presumably—was to break up cliques and prevent students from holding tables for the popular kids and ostracizing those less fortunate, who had to stand with their tray in their hands, pathetically searching for a place to sit. It would force everyone to make new friends.
But it was Zoe who had been pathetic, wasn’t it?
The new seating also ensured that kids who had suffered all morning in a classroom filled with students they didn’t like and who didn’t like them, were offered no reprieve during lunch if their one friend in the whole wide world was in another homeroom.
“You know,” Zoe began as soon as Maggie sat down, “someone could have called the Feds and found out who made that Smelly-Girl person2person page. They can do that, you know. They can trace the IP address if they want.”
“Well, lucky for whoever did that, it’s down now,” Maggie answered. Maggie and Zoe shared homeroom. Larissa was three tables away.
Zoe lifted her head. “I guess. Just saying, though.” She waited a beat. “But I think they can trace it anyway. You know. I’ve seen that on Law and Order. Nothing is ever really gone from cyberspace. It’s in there somewhere.”
When a dog on a leash encounters another dog that is unleashed, the unleashed dog will behave aggressively, even if it is a normally unaggressive dog. It’s almost as if seeing another of its species, trapped, fallen, weak, brings out the worst.
“And you know the school doesn’t have to give students civil legal rights? The
y can make their own rules and do whatever they want. Like that New Jersey vs. T.L.O. case. Remember when we learned about it in humanities?”
“No, what was that?” Maggie asked.
Zoe didn’t even know the girl sitting next to her—which was the point of this new table arrangement—who suddenly joined in the conversation.
“Oh, yeah. I learned about that case. The Supreme Court decided students have no constitutional rights while in school. The state has the right to provide a safe school environment at all costs.”
“Yeah, that’s it,” Zoe told Maggie. “What she said.”
In the wild, mountain lions have been known to attack their own leader when he appears weak and unable to protect the pride. And circus animals under pressure to perform and suffering from close confinement with other animals—especially ones not of their social status—have been known to attack for no apparent reason whatsoever.
Maggie didn’t look so good.
“Are you going to eat those?” Zoe asked, pointing to Maggie’s Italian dunkers. “Because if you’re not, I’m really hungry.”
Tropic of Cancer
* * *
The first Preston Middle School dance was a big deal. It was always held right before winter break and it was pretty much the first boy-girl event since fourth grade, when everybody still went to the same birthday parties. The parent-teacher organization raised the money and did all the decorations. This year’s theme was “The Tropics.”
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