Fierce as the Wind

by Tara Wilson Redd

  At the track, I don’t even make it three feet before Rei is shaking her head, marching over from the others. I want to go over and see what’s in Lani’s picnic basket, but Rei is standing in front of me with her hands on her hips.

  “No good?” I ask.

  “First of all, what is this thing you are wearing? You are going to chafe like hell.”

  “They’re called sweatpants.”

  “Second of all, what is on your feet?”

  I look down. My sneakers are old and a little battered, but they’re not falling apart or anything.

  “Show me the soles,” Rei prompts.

  I lift my leg up to show her and she grabs me by the ankle, sending me falling backward into the grass.

  “See this big flat spot on the bottom?” she asks. I take my foot back, twisting my leg so I can see.

  “Yeah?” I ask. From the look on her face, I can tell that I should totally know why these shoes shouldn’t have flat spots on the bottom. When it becomes clear that I don’t have an answer, she throws up her hands.

  “You’re a size seven?” she asks. I nod. “My sister is too. Let me see if she has any hand-me-downs that aren’t cleats.”

  “I can buy new shoes.” My cheeks are burning.

  “Oh, please, she tosses hers out brand-new if she doesn’t like the laces,” Rei says.

  Trinity is waving wildly at us, saving me from declining the sneakers. The truth is, shoes are expensive AF, and it won’t be the first time I’ve taken clothes secondhand from Rei and her sisters. Rei doesn’t even remember: these shoes were her sister’s too.

  Over by the picnic basket, there’s a big lab notebook spread out on the grass. Wyatt is busily copying something out of one of Rei’s gold-speckled notebooks.

  Wyatt flips the notebook so I can see it. He’s turned it into a dated diary, like a planner on Instagram. It’s got spaces for what I ate, my planned workouts, my actual workouts, even what shoes I wore. Pages and pages.

  Today we’re doing a run workout. It’s called a “benchmark” session. Then tomorrow I do a bike benchmark, and then the next day a swim benchmark. Rei says that, according to her book, we shouldn’t be doing these so close to each other, but since we’re short on time, we’ll work with what we’ve got.

  “Short on time?” I ask.

  “People train for these things for a year minimum,” Rei says. “We’ve got six months.”

  “So I’ll train twice as hard,” I say.

  “You can’t,” Wyatt says. “You can only ramp up your training so fast before you’re doing more harm than good.”

  “Then I’ll want it twice as much,” I say, tightening the laces on my shoes.

  “For anyone else, I’d say this is impossible,” Rei says. “But you already bike well over ten hours a week.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Thirty minutes to school and thirty minutes back gets you to five. Then there’s pizza deliveries. Let’s say you’re on your bike sprinting like hell an hour out of every four-hour shift—”

  “Way more than that!”

  “But for the sake of argument. You work, what, five shifts a week? So we’re at ten. And that’s conservative.”

  “So, piece of cake,” I say.

  “We’ll see,” Rei says.

  The run benchmark is simple. First I jog around the track for ten minutes, which isn’t too bad. Then when Rei hits the button on her timer and yells “Go!” I’m supposed to run as hard as I can for twenty minutes. I start off strong, sprinting like I did on the beach. But by the time I do the first lap, I’m ready to lie down and die. I’m back to a jog. The others cheer me on. I start walking. Cheers turn to taunts.

  I want to keep running, but I can’t catch my breath. I keep walking, trying to force my legs to jog. In my head I make deals with myself: When you get to that line, start jogging. When the old guy power walking passes you, start jogging. Come on, legs! Just freaking do it!

  But I can’t.

  X jogs over. I realize the group has gotten quiet, but I’m too embarrassed to look.

  “Is that the best you can do?” X walks beside me.

  “No,” I groan, and start jogging again. He runs next to me, even though he’s wearing his favorite brogues.

  “A little faster,” he says, looking at his watch. “Slow down,” he says when I start sprinting. We do one full lap, matching steps, and then he peels off. This time, I hold the pace. I’m running slower than the old people out here jogging, and it’s taking all of my willpower to keep going. “I think I can, I think I can,” I chant in my head, one word per step. It feels ridiculous, but it keeps me on pace. It is the longest twenty minutes of my life. When Rei calls time, I sit down on the track.

  Rei trots over. “Okay, so that went…less well than I had hoped,” she says, standing over me.

  “How far did I make it?”

  “Including the warm-up? Three miles.”

  “Are you kidding me? That was only three miles?”

  I’m a little ashamed of myself. I tried so hard.

  “A ten-minute mile is totally respectable,” X says. I put my head in my hands. I thought I’d be knocking out seven-minute miles no problem, like I did that first day. X, reading my mind, continues: “I mean, training is not a race, and your mile time is different from your 5K time, which is different from your 10K time…”

  “I know. I just wanted to be good at this,” I say.

  “Then don’t give up before you even start,” X says.

  “Don’t worry, Mi-kins. It’s not where you start, it’s where you finish,” Rei sings.

  If you finish, I think.

  * * *

  X drops me off at home. My legs ache. My feet burn. My whole back hurts.

  I wander into the house, past the complaints of my dog and the yapping of my dad and neighbors. In my room I fall face-first onto my pillow and take a nap, my sweat-soaked hair making the pillow unpleasantly damp.

  I wake up two hours later. I stretch out and, much to my surprise, I don’t feel that bad. A little sore, but not horrible. I stand up. I can walk. I take a shower. I go out to the living room.

  “Lazy Sunday?” Dad asks. I shrug. The neighbors are gone. Achilles brings me a yellow tennis ball, and I open the front door and pitch it away as far as I can. You think of throwing as something you do with your arms, but it turns out it’s not. Everything is connected. The ball lands pathetically close in the yard, and I can feel up and down my sides exactly which muscles are used in running, because they’re the ones saying “hard nope.”

  Aki passes me by on attempt two of fetch. Harsh. Dad takes the ball and, without even getting off the love seat, pitches it out the open door. Achilles gallops after it, bites it on the steps, somersaults onto the grass, then continues running like nothing even happened.

  “I thought you were training for an Ironman,” Dad says.

  “I ran like a million miles this morning.”

  “A million?”

  “Well, three.”

  Dad laughs, returns to the paper.

  “Well, how far did you run today?” I snap, sinking into the love seat.

  He raises an eyebrow at me and nods toward his prosthetic leg. I roll my eyes.

  “You can run with the other hook-looking one,” I say. “You’re just lazy.”

  “Disabled.”

  “Yeah, right. You’re selectively disabled. You’re not disabled when you hear there’s a sale on at Costco. I’ve seen you sprint down those aisles.”

  He laughs. “Old, at least. You can give me old.”

  “Yeah, that’s true. But lots of old people run. Or at least power walk.”

  “If I power walked, people would go blind from a mere glimpse of it.”

  “There’s a famous triathlete named S
ister Madonna who still does Ironman triathlons. She’s older than you.”

  “How are there famous triathletes?”

  “I mean, they’re not famous famous. They’re famous to people who do triathlons. Kind of like how Tua is famous in one town only.”

  “So they’re the local celebrities of triathlon-ville.”

  “More like triathlon-polis. Triathlopolis? Whatever. Triathlon is super popular, Dad. It’s huge. And there are tons of Paralympic triathletes. All those blind people who had the misfortune to see you power walking can do the race with a guide.”

  I bite my lip. I know better than to push this. “You could do a triathlon if you wanted,” I say.

  “140.6 miles? No, Miho. I could not.”

  “But there are shorter ones. Like you could do a sprint or something. Maybe it would be fun. Or just…swim, or bike, or run. You know, kind of like they tell you to at the clinic? Like literally every time you go?”

  “You know, I did used to jog,” he says, putting down his newspaper.

  “You should take it up again,” I say, stretching out my legs. Ouch. “Or not. Running sucks.”

  Dad runs his hands over his belly, a remnant of when he drank beer.

  “Maybe,” he says. “Maybe I should.”

  I spend the rest of the afternoon hanging out on the love seat with him. He reads and I grab a sketchbook. I haven’t drawn or painted anything in a while. I didn’t feel like it after…everything. Normally, I paint and draw almost as much as I bike. How many hours a week? Ten? At a minimum.

  It’s a different kind of energy than biking, but when I’m painting, time vanishes like it does when I’m riding. I disintegrate into this weird focus where the world falls away but I also notice everything. It’s like the me that is nervous, or sad, or angry, or happy, or in love, isn’t even there. I’m a gear being turned by forces outside myself. Mr. Bu told me that’s the peace you’re supposed to get from meditation. But I hate meditation. I’d rather bike and paint.

  I want to sketch my dad the way I see him, but I put my pencil to the pad and it doesn’t move. It’s like it doesn’t know which way to go, because it doesn’t know what I really see. So I think about how I would put my dad on paper. How would I put into lines the way it makes me sad, all the things he doesn’t do because he thinks he’s disabled? Why can’t he be like Aki and run after the metaphorical ball?

  And how would I sketch out how I love him now, but I also know that he abandoned me before I was even old enough to talk? That “dad” didn’t even make it into my first five words? How could I possibly paint the way that I know, abstractly, that he used to be a very bad person, but I can’t see it because I never met that person?

  The picture in my mind is so complicated that I can’t imagine making it two-dimensional. This is why it’s easier to copy Van Gogh.

  I look at my paper. It’s blank.

  That’s what happens when I think too hard about drawing.

  I’m worried I’m going to think myself out of this race. Because, the second I stop to think about it, I realize how far 140.6 miles actually is, how I don’t have the money to pay for the entry, how I’ve never even played a sport—

  Stop. One step at a time.

  I look at my sketch pad again. One step. One line. I force myself not to think, and I draw a quick sketch of Dad, loose and easy. And it’s not perfect. It doesn’t say everything I want to say. But it’s there, on the page. And there’s something in it that I like. A tiny thing: the way the paper he’s reading looks like it’s fluttering in his hand. But that one tiny thing is better than the nothing I had before.

  I go to my room. I put my sketchbook into my art box and start rearranging the stuff that’s all out of order from when I threw it across the room. I still feel like I’ll never paint again without thinking of Scumbucket. But that’s only a feeling. Rationally, I know it isn’t true.

  I look at the closet, go to throw that shirt away.

  As I put my hand on the closet door, I hear the front doorbell, which Dad had Mr. Oshiro turn into a crow’s caw with some stupid thing they ordered on the internet, so every time someone rings it, it sounds like there’s a crow in the house. It was supposed to be “for me,” but it was obviously something he wanted, like the Lego set in the living room we used to play with all the time, which mysteriously builds itself into fortresses while I’m at school. Dad wanted to be an architect. He was a construction worker; now he’s a day laborer.

  “Your boyfriend’s here!” Dad calls back into my room. My heart leaps for one instant, but in almost the same moment, I realize who he’s talking about. I actually have to steady myself on a chair, my chest hurts so bad. Why does heartbreak have to feel like heartbreak? Maybe it’s all connected, like running isn’t only in your legs, and throwing isn’t only in your arms.

  I grab my bag, and when I set foot in the living room, it’s X I’m expecting, and it’s X I’m glad to see. Tonight we’re binge-watching TV at his house: our current obsession, this old show from the ’60s, The Avengers. It is…of varying quality.

  “Let’s go, boyfriend.”

  chapter ten

  A few nights later, my friends come by to meet me at the end of my shift, which is when things are starting to pick up. The late lunchers have given way to the dinner rush, and every table is full. Now all I see around me are orders and table numbers. I get so caught up in it that it’s hard for me to head out, even though my shift is over.

  I throw off my apron when I see Trinity tapping her watchless wrist in the doorway. I worked fifteen minutes over already.

  “Sorry,” I tell Tua. “You want me to stay?”

  “You’re done. Get out,” he says. “Go do teenager things. But good teenager things.”

  Uncle Tua hands me a fat stack of bills—my tips, which I of course report to the IRS the way I’m supposed to—and off I go feeling a little rich, the way a good tip night always makes you feel.

  “Gangsta,” says Trinity, looking at the money. I flip through it.

  “Singles,” I explain. It’s probably eighty bucks, though. Very good night. I will say mainlanders tip extravagantly. If I could only have a few weeks of nights like this, and didn’t spend a dollar of what I earned, that would be the entry fee. Except, of my tip money and paychecks, most will go to my “college savings” fund, siphoned off by Dad into an account I promised him I would not touch. A promise is a promise. Dad takes care of food, but I buy my own clothes, and I need new everyday shoes because my feet hurt. My Van Gogh sneakers were comfy. My old Converse are not much better than socks at this point. I put it off too long because I also need a rain jacket, but now I think the shoes are more important. I also buy some things Dad doesn’t understand, like tampons and birth control. It adds up.

  So it might take a few months of good tip nights. Except I don’t have a few months. Maybe if I make do with my old shoes—

  “I don’t care what Lani tells you, you save your pennies for bike parts,” Trinity says. “Bike trumps food.”

  “It’s irrelevant, because I don’t have the entry fee,” I say.

  Trinity is grinning like she has something up her sleeve, and I refuse to get my hopes up, but they’re already up. I can’t help myself. Maybe there is a miracle out there. God knows I need one.

  Everyone is sitting between the open doors of Rei’s Prius and X’s ancient beat-up Honda, making our own little clubhouse out in the parking lot.

  They get up as we approach. Trinity backs away from me, raising her hands to make an announcement.

  “So, you’re not doing an Ironman,” Trinity says. “There is no way we can raise that much money.”

  “Yeah, thanks, I got that,” I say. Trinity holds up a finger.

  “Instead, you’re doing a Miho…man!” Trinity shouts. Lani unfurls a sloppily painted poster she’s been hiding behind
her back, and Rei throws some jazz hands in front of it. “A Miho-man?” Trinity tries it out again, looking around with a quizzical bend to her eyebrows. Rei shakes her head.

  “I told you it wouldn’t sound cool,” Rei says. The poster, which has “First Annual Miho-man” painted in kiddie tempera, features a somehow out-of-proportion stick figure swimming, biking, and running.

  “I kind of like it,” Wyatt says.

  “It sounds like a Japanese superhero. Like One-Punch Man,” Lani says.

  “Well, Iron Man is a superhero. So it works,” Trinity says.

  “Can’t we call it something that doesn’t end in ‘man’? For feminism?” Rei asks.

  “Doesn’t ‘woman’ end in ‘man’?” Wyatt asks.

  “Wow. Just…wow.” Rei swats him playfully.

  “Guys, what the hell are you talking about?” I break in.

  Trinity shushes everyone. “We’ll work on the name. And the logo. We need something that’ll look cool on a T-shirt. But the point is, you don’t have to do a stupid expensive Ironman race. You can do the same race without the branding and we can work it basically for free.”

  “How exactly?” I ask.

  “We can’t get you into an Ironman race, but you can do what’s called an Iron-length race. 140.6 miles, but without the corporate bullshit,” Trinity says.

  “Okay,” I say, a little confused.

  “Wyatt and I spent the day at the computer lab at the community college looking at topographical maps. We think it’s the best choice,” Trinity says.

  “And the only choice,” Wyatt admits.

  “But therefore the best choice. And besides, this way, we can choose the date ourselves.”

  “It’ll be exactly like the original Ironman,” Wyatt says. “Like, vintage.”

  “The bad news is: apparently, you aren’t technically an Ironman unless you do one of their ‘M-Dot’ races, even if it’s exactly the same distance,” Rei says.

  “So I won’t be an Ironman. I’ll be a…Miho-man,” I say, trying to keep the disappointment out of my voice.