I almost felt an ache, hearing those words. “You could come with us to the next rest stop,” I said.
“How far is that?” asked Kneecap.
“Seventeen miles.”
Kneecap laughed. “I’ve had enough exercise for one day,” she said. “Actually, I’ve had enough for the whole year!”
Kara slung her hydration pack over her shoulders. “Nice meeting you, Kneecap,” she said.
“Ditto,” said Kneecap.
The two of them high-fived. Kneecap gave me a military salute. I saluted back, and then she turned and walked away.
“Be careful on the ledges,” I shouted.
“Yeah, yeah,” she replied.
When she rounded the edge of Shark’s Fin, the wind blew her hair straight back and her face turned golden brown in the sunshine. Then she dropped out of sight and was gone.
“Cool kid,” said Kara. “Not much of a runner though.”
“Come on,” I said. “We’re losing time.”
A DIFFERENT KIND OF SPORT
SYDNEY WATSON WALTERS: How long have you and Kneecap been friends?
QUINN: Ever since she moved to our neighbourhood. We’re in the same year at school and we used to sit together on the bus.
And of course, we started the UHL together.
SYDNEY WATSON WALTERS: The UHL?
QUINN: Last year at school, Kneecap made this amazing discovery. She kicked a quarter across the floor of the boys’ washroom, and it ricocheted off the rounded lip where the floor meets the wall and flew into the air. Somehow she got the angle just right and the quarter landed right in the urinal! It was a perfect goal. And that’s how urinal hockey was born.
SYDNEY WATSON WALTERS: So UHL stands for …
QUINN: The Urinal Hockey League. We had eight teams — The Whiz Kids, The Main Vein Drainers, The Double Flushers … We even had an anthem for the league.
SYDNEY WATSON WALTERS: Someone wrote a song about urinal hockey?
QUINN: I did! We used to sing it before all the games. It goes to the tune of “God Save the Queen.”
God save our humble can,
Smelly and pee-stained can,
God save our can!
Lead us victorious,
Yellow and glorious,
Please don’t flatulate over us,
God save our can!
SYDNEY WATSON WALTERS: That’s very … creative!
QUINN: We had twenty games in the regular season, then the playoffs after that. We played two on two, with 5-minute periods. Whenever someone scored, the losing goalie would have to pick the quarter out of the urinal with his fingers.
SYDNEY WATSON WALTERS: Sounds … um … disgusting.
QUINN: Everyone washed their hands right after. I also invented the “fresh flush” rule.
SYDNEY WATSON WALTERS: And Kneecap was involved in this? Even though the games were played in the boys’ washroom?
QUINN: Kneecap never had any problem with that. None of the boys minded either, since she was one of our best players.
The trouble began when Kneecap started bringing other girls into the league. I’m all for equality, but it wasn’t smart, sneaking ten girls into the boys’ washroom every lunch hour.
SYDNEY WATSON WALTERS: The teachers caught on, I gather?
QUINN: Yeah. Kneecap got suspended for a week. I thought I was going to get nailed too, but I didn’t.
SYDNEY WATSON WALTERS: Why not? Did Kneecap protect you?
QUINN: She must have. She’s pretty loyal.
SYDNEY WATSON WALTERS: I’ve got a crazy question for you, Quinn Scheurmann.
QUINN: What?
SYDNEY WATSON WALTERS: Remember how Kneecap called you a fun vampire? I’m curious … When’s the last time you had some fun?
QUINN: I don’t know. Maybe at last year’s Hallowe’en dance? Actually, no. That wasn’t fun at all.
I didn’t see Kneecap until the end of the night. I don’t like dancing very much, especially when I’m wearing a lame Hallowe’en costume, so I spent most of the evening in the cafeteria, playing cards.
At eight-thirty I wandered down to the gym. Kneecap ran over from her group of friends and grabbed my hand.
“Where have you been hiding?” she asked.
“Nowhere,” I said.
Her body was encased in a bunch of cardboard cubes. She’d painted them red, green, blue and yellow. Her head poked out of a yellow cube on top.
“What are you?” I asked.
“A game of Tetris, dummy!” she said.
She looked like a giant letter L, perched on two skinny legs wrapped in black leggings. She was wearing red Converse sneakers with Tetris-themed shoelaces. It looked like she’d painted the Tetris shapes herself.
“What are you?” she asked me. “A doctor?”
“A killer doctor,” I said, showing off the fake blood on my hands.
Kneecap nodded, unimpressed. “Didn’t you wear those scrubs last year?”
“That was two years ago,” I said. “I was a marathon runner last year.”
“Of course. How could I forget?” Kneecap put her hands on her hips, which were a metre wide with all those cubes. She was wearing a little bit of makeup, I noticed, which she didn’t usually do.
“Come on,” she said, pulling me toward the dance floor. Her hand felt soft, like the grips on my handlebars. Her friends were watching us from the corner of the gym.
“You can actually dance in that costume?” I said.
“Of course! I’ve been dancing all night.”
To prove this, she did a little twirl and accidentally hit a grade-seven boy dressed as Thor.
“Sorry, Thor!” Kneecap said.
“He’s the Hammer God, he can take it,” I said.
Kneecap kept dancing. “Come on, Q-Tip! Show me what you’ve got!”
“I’m not a very good dancer,” I said.
“Who cares?” she said. “This isn’t Dancing With the Stars.”
“But I don’t really like this song,” I muttered.
“You don’t like any normal songs,” Kneecap said.
“Sure I do,” I said. “I like Bovine Ancestry. And Troutspawn.”
“Oh, come on,” said Kneecap. “A vacuum cleaner makes better music than those guys. And it’s impossible to dance to that stuff.”
Just then, the song “Don’t Stop Believin’” came on.
“Perfect!” Kneecap squealed. “You have to dance to this one!”
Everyone was swarming onto the dance floor.
“But it’s lame,” I said. “You know that it’s lame.”
“You’re lame,” Kneecap said. “Come on, it’s late, and we need to dance.”
She dragged me to the centre of the gym while strobe lights flashed atop the stacks of speakers. She surprised me by putting her arms around my neck, even though everyone else was doing their best air guitar. I put my hands on either side of Kneecap’s cubes, and we staggered back and forth in a weird boxy shuffle. Kneecap smelled nice, like green-apple jelly beans. I was nervous, and left sweaty handprints all over her cardboard.
“You okay?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “But it’s a little bit awkward.”
She detached the cubes around her shoulders and arms. She also took the yellow box away from her head. “That better?” she said.
It wasn’t really, since she still had cubes around her waist. Kneecap smushed her cheek against my neck. “This is nice,” she said. “I’ve wanted to do this for a while.”
Off to our right, thirty kids swayed back and forth in a big circle. Zombies, soldiers, sexy cats. A group of grade-seven boys grinned at me from the stage. My friend Spencer was up there, laughing.
“Hey, Quinn!” he shouted. “Your girlfriend’s a square!”
I glared at him. What’s your deal? I thought.
“Something wrong?” Kneecap whispered in my ear.
“No,” I said.
But something was. I had a gross feeling in my stomac
h, as if I’d drunk too much pop. But I also felt happy to be dancing with Kneecap.
“Careful!” Spencer shouted. “She’s got a wide load!”
I shot Spencer my death stare. You snot rocket, I mouthed.
Kneecap didn’t seem to notice any of this, but I felt really embarrassed for some reason. So I did something really dumb. I took Kneecap’s hand from the back of my neck and stuck it straight out, like the spout of a watering can. Then I swayed Kneecap back and forth, with our hands stuck straight out, like we were a waltzing teapot or something.
“What are you doing?” Kneecap said, laughing.
“I’m not sure,” I said, tipping her forward. I wanted to get as far away from Spencer as possible.
And then I did something even stupider. The stupidest thing I possibly could have done.
I told a joke. Not just any joke. A racist joke.
I’m not sure why I did this, exactly. I only wanted to lighten the mood.
Not surprisingly, Kneecap didn’t like the joke very much. She threw away my hand like it was a dirty diaper.
“Why would you tell me that?” she asked.
“I was only making conversation!” I sputtered.
“Don’t Stop Believin’” came to an end, and the deejay launched an even slower song. The disco ball started spinning. Most of the kids broke off into pairs.
Kneecap stared at me. “Do you even know what a towel-head is?” she said. “Some jerks use it to mean Arabs — people from Saudi Arabia.”
I stared at her. I hadn’t known that.
“My mom is from Saudi Arabia, you idiot.”
She turned and stalked away, stopping to pick up her extra Tetris cubes from the floor. Then she stopped and looked back. “Throw away your weird pills, Quinn,” she said.
With that, she walked across the darkened gym, the strobe light flashing off her cardboard outfit. She suddenly looked ridiculous in that costume, and very sad, and I wanted to run over to her and cheer her up, only I couldn’t.
For a while after that, she and I didn’t talk very much. Actually, we didn’t talk at all. Kneecap never sat beside me in Science class anymore. And I didn’t sit with her on the bus, since I was running to and from school every day.
For a day or two, I was confused about what had happened. But then I thought about what I’d said. That towel-head joke. What a boneheaded thing to say.
But here’s the weird part: It was my dad who told me that joke. Did that make him a racist? Was I a racist for repeating it?
I decided that I needed to ask my dad about it. I’d do it on Sunday, the next time he Skyped. But that was the first Sunday that Dad didn’t call. And so the towel-head thing got swept under the carpet.
THE BONK
Mile 29
With Kneecap gone, Kara exploded down the path, plunging left and right down a chute of sun-baked stones. A third of the way down the mountain, we skirted a giant bowl of rock and scrabbled over boulders as large as couches. I felt totally out of control, charging downhill at death-defying angles, my legs running faster than the rest of my body could keep up. Kara, as usual, was incredibly fast. Gravity didn’t seem to apply to her.
We dropped below the treeline and ran through a forest of evergreens. They were tall and pressed closely together, and the branches felt like razor blades as they brushed against my arms and neck. It was hot again and sweat poured off my skin. I felt like I’d been dunked in cooking oil.
Three-quarters of an hour later we reached the foot of the mountain. We stopped for a break in a meadow filled with purple wildflowers. My legs felt like rubber, and my brain was mush. I turned around and looked at the mountain behind us.
“Did we really just climb over that?” I said.
Chimney Top shimmered in the haze. Kara nodded.
Clouds dotted the sky.
“Think it’s going to storm tonight?” I asked.
“Hard to say. Maybe.”
We walked along the trail. A flat, grassy swamp stretched out ahead of us. Wooden duckboards had been laid across the marsh, but many of the planks had broken, or rotted away. As we walked, dozens of tiny frogs leapt from the mud banks, barking out froggy yelps as they splashed into the water.
“Look at that one!” Kara said.
The bullfrog was cramming live dragonflies into its mouth. Its jaws were full of wings and eyeballs and legs that were still twitching.
Ollie would love this, I thought to myself. I thought about calling him, but decided against it. Kneecap had said the roaming charges were brutal. So I sent Ollie a text: LOTS OF FROGS OUT HERE.
“We’re still behind pace,” Kara said, checking her watch. “Come on; let’s kick it up a notch.”
“Sure thing,” I said.
Big mistake!
By now my legs were as weak as rubber bands. I trailed behind, watching Kara’s ponytail bounce back and forth.
“It’s important to bank lots of miles during the day,” Kara shouted. “We’ll be a lot slower tonight, after the sun goes down.”
She was getting harder and harder to hear. Then, quite suddenly, BLIP — she was a hundred metres ahead. Then, BLIP — she was a hundred metres farther ahead. My mind was popping in and out like a radio station. BLIP — Kara was a dot on the horizon. BLIP — she was gone.
I stopped, expecting to see her turn around and come back. Then, BLIP — I was lying down on the boardwalk.
When had I decided to take a nap? I didn’t remember doing that.
I looked up and noticed a wooden post. There was a sign at the top: Mile 35.
“Things get pretty strange after thirty-five miles,” Dad had said. And he was right. Things were definitely getting weird.
Then another BLIP. My shoes had come off. I was wiggling my toes in the sun.
Wait a second! I thought. Who took off my shoes?
I pulled out the bag of sweet potatoes. The wedges were crunchy and loaded with salt. I ate as many as my stomach could handle, then I stuffed the bag back into my pouch.
I took off my hat and dunked it in the swamp. When I put it back on, skunky-smelling water trickled down the back of my neck.
Stand up and start walking, I told myself. If you fall asleep now, you’ll never get back up.
Then, BLIP — I was walking. BLIP — the swamp was gone. BLIP — I was back in the forest, and my cap was dry!
I found myself walking down an old logging road. It had deep wheel ruts on both sides, and long grass was growing in between.
Suddenly I heard a noise. Something was humming. Thousands of flies were whining like a chainsaw.
I followed the sound, leaving the trail behind. The smell of moss and mud filled my nostrils. And something else too — something sweet. I pushed aside some branches and saw a strange sight. Rusty splashes on the ground. Paint? Truck primer?
The sound of the buzzing flies grew louder. Then I saw it. Nastiest thing I’ve ever seen.
Putrefying flesh, pulsing with white worms. Bloody swatches of brown fur. A pink hoof, covered with ants.
The deer’s leg was more than a metre long. No — it was too big to be a deer. Had to be a moose.
What animal was strong enough to tear the leg off a moose?
Coyotes? Wolves?
Something bigger?
Mom’s advice came back to me. Don’t forget to sing, she’d said.
I suddenly burst into one of my songs. I didn’t care if anyone heard; I just wanted to scare the bears away.
What he’s running from —
To himself he doesn’t show.
And what he’s running to
Even he doesn’t know.
I slashed my way back to the trail. When I reached it, I started running again. Of course, this little burst of energy didn’t last very long. I sprinted for maybe 15 seconds. My heart was pounding like a chopper’s rotors.
Then, once again, BLIP — I was lying on the ground. Marshmallow-white clouds were tracking lazily across the sky. I tried to stand up, but I di
dn’t have the strength. I rolled my head sideways and saw a beaver pond.
SYDNEY WATSON WALTERS: Okay, I have to stop you. What the HECK was going on?
QUINN: I was bonking.
SYDNEY WATSON WALTERS: Bonking?
QUINN: I’d run 35 miles, and I hadn’t eaten very much. My gas tank was empty. I was all out of go-juice.
SYDNEY WATSON WALTERS: Is bonking the same thing as “hitting the wall”?
QUINN: Yeah. My dad calls it “premature deceleration.” It’s basically a total brain meltdown.
So there I was, lying on the grass beside this beaver pond. Dead logs stuck out of the water at all angles, with turtles sitting on the logs. Lily pads were everywhere. Water bugs skated across the surface between them. Pinpricks of white light were flashing in my eyes.
That was the good news. The bad news was, the weather was turning to crap. All morning the sky had been as blue as the bottom of a Jacuzzi, or, as my dad would have said, so blue you can smell the paint. But now black clouds were rolling across the sky. They gathered on the horizon like an invading army.
I took off my shoes and shook out two clouds of dirt. A breeze freshened the air and the pond glazed over with ripples.
The clouds got fatter and started climbing into the sky. One was larger than the others. It looked like the head of an octopus.
Whitecaps curled across the pond. Electricity crackled through the air. “Have you seen my shadow?” the octopus cloud said.
SYDNEY WATSON WALTERS: I’m sorry — what happened? You heard a voice in the clouds?
QUINN: Yeah. It sounded like sheets snapping on a clothes line. I thought the cloud was talking to me. But it was just a hallucination.
SYDNEY WATSON WALTERS: Which part was the hallucination — the cloud or the voice?
QUINN: The cloud was real, but the voice was something else. It felt like a dream. Only I wasn’t sleeping.
The cloud had purple tentacles that reached out over the hills. The tops of the trees thrashed back and forth.
“Have you seen my shadow?” the cloud repeated.
A bird nest glanced off my leg and blew down the trail. My heart was hammering.
“Who wants to know?” I shouted.
Ultra Page 6
