by Gary Paulsen
“Gimme a lap.”
It was a command he used on any and every person who did not do exactly as he ordered — in short, everybody. But it came down hardest on Jacob, who was not physical. His arms were thin, and he could do only one warping, twisting, torturing pull-up — he felt like an earthworm hanging on the bar — when everybody else did ten, and so he took laps. He’d been around the gym so many times he’d worn a groove.
You had to go to gym, and then you had to go into the locker room and change into shorts and a T-shirt with everybody else, and somebody always wetted the end of a towel and snapped you with it — fun for everybody but the snappee, usually Jacob, who found himself driven into the lockers when he got hit.
Fun. Gym, he thought, rounding the corner by the locker room, was such fun. About as much fun as having a sister who was a beauty queen.
Too late.
He was too late. Everybody had changed and was already out on the gym floor playing volleyball and jumping around on the mats. That meant he would have to change and come into the gym alone, not at the back of the group, and everybody would turn and stare at him. Notice him.
Arrggh!
In gym shorts that were so big he could tie the waist around his neck, in a T-shirt that practically hung to the floor, the earthworm would have to enter the gym alone, the center of attention.
Madness.
Maybe he could be sick. If he stuck his finger down his throat and puked he could tell the gym teacher he was sick. He was sick. Sick of gym. No, that wouldn’t work — Rocco would just tell him to run until he died.
Maybe that was the answer. He could just die. No. He thought about the other half of the idea: He could run.
There was the answer. He could just enter the gym and start running, enter running and move right into doing laps because Rocco would just have him doing laps anyway. Maybe everybody wouldn’t stare at him.
Yeah.
He changed quickly, threw his clothes in the locker, tied his shoes, and ran for the gym door, slammed his shoulder into it and hit the floor of the gym running at a full lope.
Right up the middle of Maria Tresser’s back.
IT was definitely not a good start for gym class.
Maria Tresser was the most beautiful, the most popular, the most everything girl in school. She had it all. She was scheduled to play the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz, because she was so good as an actress and the role was so hard to do right. She had a dazzling smile. She did not wear braces and never needed them, did not wear glasses and never needed them, had full, beautiful, black hair that hung down in soft waves. And to top it all was nice, truly nice, and everybody loved her.
Jacob went over her like a truck.
He knocked her down, and his momentum was so strong that he couldn’t stop. He actually put a foot in the middle of her back and ran over her, kept running two more steps before he realized what had happened and tried to stop and go back to help her. Had he not been going so fast it might have worked, but as it was his feet stopped and the rest of him kept going. He went down like he’d been hit from behind, flopping end over end on the gym floor like a beached carp, and each time he flipped all he could think was: I wish I was dead, I wish I was dead, I wish I was dead.
Not really his best start for a gym class.
He scrambled to his feet and ran back to where Maria was just getting up. “I’m sorry. I was late and I thought if I ran …”
“No problem.” Maria dusted off her shorts, tucked her T-shirt back in where it had come out, rubbed the end of her nose where it had slammed into the floor, ran a hand through her hair, and started to trot back to the volleyball game. “I shouldn’t have been playing in the fast lane — my fault.”
Jacob’s heart went out to her. What absolute class! It was like nothing had happened, she just bounced up. Then he looked around. The entire gym had stopped. Everybody had turned from what they were doing, and they were staring at him, through him, into him.
“Heck of a way to get a girl,” somebody said. “Running over her.”
“Hit and run …” Somebody else laughed.
And Rocco turned from where he had been tightening the volleyball net. His eyes like fiery little marbles, his neck swollen, his shoulders curved forward like some primitive beast, he stood and looked at Jacob, and his mouth opened and he said, “Gimme a lap.”
Jacob started trotting in the endless circle around the gym, eyes glazed, staring down at the wooden floor, his brain turning to liquid. All of them were staring at him. All around the gym. He could feel their eyes on him like a hot wave, watching him as he trotted. The earthworm in his too-big shorts and T-shirt, wimping around the gym.
It felt like a year, two years, before they started playing volleyball and jumping on the mats again, a year or two while he trotted around the gym in a circle like a trained pony, wishing the floor would open and swallow him, but it was probably eight or nine laps, and then he settled down to the normal torture of just running. When Rocco said, “Gimme a lap,” he didn’t mean just a lap. He meant the victim to keep running until he said to stop running. The problem was that Jacob figured Rocco’s attention span and memory were something on the order of a paramecium’s, so when he told Jacob to take a lap he promptly forgot him, and often Jacob would run the whole gym period.
Running, even all period, was preferable to the other choices — volleyball, for instance. In volleyball he simply became a target for anybody who wanted to spike the ball, and the few times he had tried to “play” volleyball he had spent the whole game trying to look like he was playing but really running in little circles trying to get out of the line of fire — which never worked. The spiked ball invariably nailed him in the top of the head, driving his eyes lower than his glasses, and of course that meant he tripped over everybody else and turned the game into a shambles — which triggered Rocco who then made him run laps.
A vicious circle. Like the circle around the gym.
But even volleyball was preferable to gymnastics. Jacob had blocked the memory of the only time Rocco had insisted on him doing gymnastics — the vault and the rings — but the misery was still there. On the vault he had jumped off the board and missed the horse entirely, probably because his legs were so strong from all the running. He came down on his face on the mat eight feet past the horse with a mighty splatting sound — there was still a stain on the mat where he hit. On the rings he found his left arm was weaker than his right, so that he hung like a chicken with a broken wing, just hung there while Rocco yelled and grunted at him….
Past halfway through the period and Jacob had hit his stride, an easy trot he could probably do all day. I could probably run down antelope in Africa with this trot, he thought, probably lope around the world, Rocco yelling at me — just floating along, when he felt his right tennis shoe coming untied.
Problem. A bad problem. Rocco might have forgotten he was running, might have even forgotten who he was, but Rocco knew when anyone stopped running. Even to tie their shoes. He could sense a stopped runner by the change of rhythm in the air currents. People who stopped running designated laps for any reason short of actual, proven death were in for trouble with Rocco, who used his other sentence on them:
“Gimme more laps.”
This usually meant you were supposed to run laps until you were thirty or thirty-five years old, but worse, far worse, if Jacob stopped to tie his shoes and Rocco hit him with his second sentence, he would be the focus of the class again. They’d all stop and stare at him: the earthworm standing there while Rocco yelled at him.
Jacob stole a quick look. The lace was completely loose now, trailing about a foot in back and to the inside of the shoe. But the old caged clock on the wall was moving as well. Only six minutes left before Rocco would release them to the locker room.
Six minutes.
If he ran by swinging his right foot out in a small circle, it would swing the lace out and he wouldn’t step on it with his left foot. He tried
it and it worked, but it made him run funny, his feet going whummmmmp-whump, whummmmmp-whump, like somebody with one leg about a foot longer than the other.
Four minutes.
Whummmmmp-whump.
And he would have made it except that with three minutes to go he felt somebody looking at him, staring at him, and out of the corner of his eye saw with shock that Maria Tresser had stopped playing and had turned and was watching him run.
Whummmmmp-whump.
Staring right at him.
The thought was enough to make him forget to swing his right foot out.
His left foot came down on the lace and stopped his right foot just as it started to move forward.
For a brief part of a second there was a mad flurry of shoes slapping the floor as he tried to stay up but it was no use. He knew it was no use. He was supposed to fall. That’s what he thought: I am supposed to fall. All my life I have been living just so I can do this now, step on my shoelace and fall while Maria Tresser is staring at me.
He went down like an oak.
In front of the coach’s table used for basketball games was a wastebasket full of styrofoam cups from the game the night before. Some of them still had pop in them. It tasted like Coke. Jacob came down on top of the wastebasket, which tipped, and he slid into the cups on his face while the wastebasket went spinning out ahead of him across the gym floor, just as the early buzzer sounded ending the gym period.
Another gym class completed, he thought — perfect.
HE had also developed moving through the hallways to an art form. From gym he had to go to industrial arts. He changed in a darkened corner of the locker room which smelled of foot powder and fungus at the same time — a corner everybody else avoided, which they called the Rat Corner — and moved into the halls.
First he headed to his locker to get his letter holder. They had to make plastic letter holders in shop, which seemed insane — how many fifteen-year olds needed letter holders? Jacob got about one letter a year, and two cards from his aunt who traveled all over the world and kept writing him things like: “Nepal is great,” or “Brazil is great,” or “Paris is great.” He didn’t need the letter holder about as much as he didn’t need to do The Wizard of Oz but he liked shop more than the rest of school. It was dumb, but Mr. Stans who taught the class didn’t bother him except to come around the room once or twice and pretend to look at his work. He didn’t really hassle anybody since he spent all his time making an endless row of gun racks, which he gave to relatives for Christmas. Jacob figured he must have the best armed family in the world. Figure ten, twelve gun racks, each one holding five guns — fifty, sixty guns. The Stans family must be like an army.
It was knowing the flow of traffic in the halls that was the secret. The classes were staggered so that three bells rang for the end of each period, to avoid major jams in the halls. Just as the first bell segment kids were hitting their classrooms, the bell for the second one started, and when that finished the third triggered.
It should have worked, but of course it was madness. The first one ran into the second, and they both got tangled with the third, and the end result was pandemonium — a traffic jam worse than pictures Jacob had seen of people trying to drive into Los Angeles. Gridlock. Kids jammed in the corners, fighting to get to their lockers, elbowing each other, trying to run, while the hall monitors — Rocco with his neck swollen — screamed at them to slow down to a walk.
But in this chaos Jacob had discovered a pulse, a rhythm of sanity. Just between the first two bell segments there would be a ripple in which it was possible to move without too much effort, a kind of peaceful line that moved along, and he knew exactly when it went past the gym, his locker, and then on to the industrial arts room.
He grabbed the ripple like a salmon heading upstream, followed it to his locker, picked up his letter holder and moved along — looking down, just letting it take him — until it came to room 302, industrial arts. There he peeled off, took the corner bench in the back of the room, and started to sand.
Mr. Stans used the belt sander for all his gun racks. But he made the kids sand everything by hand. The result was that all their letter holders looked like garbage, rounded ends and scratches and crude smudges, while his gun racks looked polished and clean and professional. He was always pointing his handiwork out to the kids like the class was some kind of competition. “See how clean the edges are?” he’d say, holding up a gun rack. “You have to make yours the same. It’s just elbow grease.”
Jacob figured Stans did that because he had a problem with self worth. Jacob understood that.
I wish I had a belt sander for my life, he thought, rubbing the letter holder but thinking of the coming rehearsal.
He didn’t dread it much more than, say, having his braces “turned,” which he didn’t have to do anymore but which used to make him feel like his head was coming apart. Back when he wore braces his orthodontist would take the little chisel and hammer and pliers and just about rip his head open, laughing and talking about basketball all the while. He thought all boys liked basketball. Then at Christmas he would send Jacob a card covered with little elves and bunnies telling him to be a “good little boy” and “brush and floss regularly.”
There it is, Jacob thought, sanding — I can keep the old cards from my orthodontist in my letter holder.
Funny how things work out.
“Good work, good work.” Stans came up in back of him. “Make the edges a little neater. Check that gun rack over there and you’ll see what I mean. Clean edges, smooth …”
After industrial arts was lunch, then study period, math, social science, and rehearsal.
Rehearsal.
And the day had started so well, too. He had gotten in so smoothly, gotten past the jocks, moved well in the halls, even into the seat in English. Everything was working just right until Mrs. Hilsak nailed him.
Rehearsal.
Even if he just worked on the sets he’d have to be with the others. He’d be noticed. They’d start to watch him, and he’d goof up because they were watching him, and it would all snowball into a disaster. He could ruin the play. Easily. Just by being there.
Mrs. Hilsak should know that. He should get extra credit for not being involved with the play.
That was it. He’d explain things to her, and maybe she would understand and let him off.
His best possible contribution to the theater, he thought — stay away from it. It was the only safe thing to do. That’s how he’d tell her.
Of course then he’d have to talk to her.
Hmmmm.
He sanded on the letter holder, making more smudges and lines and rounding the corners still more. He looked up at the clock. Twenty more minutes to lunch. Twenty minutes to stand at the bench and sand.
He might as well let the daydream come.
THE dreams were a continuing battle. For a time Jacob had had one friend, a boy named Clayton — before Clayton’s father either got fired or promoted and was either forced to move or wanted to move, depending on how Clayton was feeling when he told the story. Clayton had been Jacob’s only friend and wasn’t much of a friend at that, because he went to a different school and Jacob had only seen him once or twice a week for about three months before he moved. But Clayton was the best friend Jacob had, and once he had told Jacob he was weird because he daydreamed in color, and the dreams were stories, and Jacob had no control over them.
Jacob hadn’t known it was strange until Clayton said so, just thought he had bad dream-luck, and wasn’t sure exactly how it was strange, since Clayton had been kind of weird himself. He had collected dead ants, collected them and kept them in a jar. He didn’t kill them, just kept the ones he found that were already dead. Jacob wasn’t sure somebody who was always looking for dead ants was a good judge of other people’s weirdness.
But the dreams were strange. They were in color and were whole stories, with beginnings, middles, and ends, and the true problem was that he really
couldn’t control them.
Oh, he could start them like anybody. Just let his eyes glaze over and stick in an idea and there it would go. Like today. He wanted to dream about Maria Tresser, which was a normal dream for him, and wanted to make the dream be about maybe him and Maria being together, and so he started this dream as if he weren’t like he was, weren’t an absolutely perfect example of a geek, but was somebody normal with a pretty good car and an ugly sister, and he never tripped and was, really, quite good at whatever he chose to do.
That’s what he started.
And the idea was that in the daydream, in the twenty minutes left in shop, he would get Maria to go out on a date with him, perhaps to a movie, and he would drive well and not wreck the car, and after the movie maybe they would go someplace and park, and he would turn to her and she would be beautiful sitting there in the car seat with the curves of her hair falling in the moonlight, and she would ask about his poor, ugly sister, and he would reach out and touch her hair….
And that’s as far as it got. That’s how he wanted the dream to go. But he had to be careful, and this time he’d forgotten to be cautious. He had just turned the dream loose, and the last time he’d done that was when he daydreamed he was a test pilot testing a new fighter while Maria Tresser watched, and at the last moment he couldn’t remember if he was supposed to pull the stick back or push it forward to climb, and he had flown into a mountain at about eighteen hundred miles an hour just as the math teacher asked him for the answer to a problem.
Still, this time he thought he was safe. No planes, no guns — nothing that could blow up. No sharp objects. He even daydreamed the car had an automatic transmission, because he wasn’t sure if his shifting was smooth enough.
His mistake was that he overdressed. In the daydream he had shoulders, real shoulders, and a kind of a loose-fitting jacket. He looked fairly cool and could have left it that way, but he thought a tie would make him look even better.
That was the mistake.
