The next morning, Mom hangs up the phone and tells me that everything's fine. Actually, she says, "Fine. Just fine," which usually means it's really not. Or maybe it is, but she's not happy about it.
"Is Dad coming back with Grandpa?" I ask. "Is he taking him to Sunshine?"
"I think for now he'll stay with us." She sighs. "I don't know how Sunshine will feel about all this."
This could be the last straw for Grandpa at Sunshine Senior Living. It sounds like their patience was already running thin. I've heard my parents whispering about how he didn't like it there, how he didn't follow the rules. I have no idea what rules they have, but probably ending up under arrest in Atlantic City is breaking one of them.
"You ready for school?" she asks in a trying-to-be-cheery voice. "I'm off to Maison."
My mom works at A La Maison: Home and Kitchen. She just calls it Maison, like it's a good friend. We only live a few blocks from my school, but when my mom works the early shift I let her drive me. I think she feels guilty about leaving me to walk by myself. She's afraid I'll feel abandoned. Or maybe she thinks I'll get distracted and forget to go to school at all, which is totally possible.
So today she drops me off and calls, "Have a good day!" and as soon as she drives away I try to decide where to go that isn't a hangout spot for Charlie Kastner or his buddies. The front steps are out, and the back steps, and the hallways, because you never know where those guys are going to turn up. But then I remember that the running meeting is this afternoon and I decide to go take a look at the new track.
I cross the empty practice field and look down at an area that was filled with tractors and backhoes and cement mixers all summer. What used to be blacktop with weeds pushing up through the cracks is now a brand-new oval-shaped track, with thick green grass in the middle. The track is a bright tomato red, divided into lanes by lines painted in crisp white paint. It's all so sharp and clear, it could be in a Pixar movie. There are smaller lines painted crosswise, too, and numbers and little triangles are sprinkled around like some secret code or ancient cave writing. I want to see it up close. I want to race right down and try it out.
But I'm stopped cold at the top of the stairs. They're the same old tippy, uneven stairs that have been here since cement was invented. I hate them. They smile up at me like an ogre with cracked, crooked teeth. Forget running: these stairs are going to knock me down and chew me up before I've even made it to the organizational meeting.
I almost turn back, but I try to think of Mrs. T's saying, "Don't say 'can't.'" It's an annoying saying, because sometimes I really can't, but this time, maybe I can. I grip the metal railing and lower myself down one step at a time. Just one at a time. And despite the ogre's best attempts to pull me down, I somehow make it in one piece.
Surrounding the track is a waist-high chain-link fence. It's unlocked, so I open the gate and step in. The track smells just like it looks, all rubbery and new. Its surface makes me think of the sponge painting we did in second-grade art. I almost expect it to squish and ooze red when I press down. I wonder if Mrs. T knows all this—I bet she does.
I lift my heels and bob up and down, then I bend my knees and lay my hands flat, to get a better feel. I always like to know how things feel. There's even a name for it. Mrs. T says I'm a "tactile" learner.
I hear a voice. A girl's voice. When I look up, I see it's the new girl from PE.
"Friedman, right?" she says.
"Um ..." I say.
"It's a pretty simple question. You are Friedman, right?"
"Yes." I don't like being called Friedman. Any sentence that starts with "Friedman" usually ends with an order or hysterical laughter.
I stand up and brush my hands off on my pants.
"What were you doing?"
"Trying out the track."
"You're supposed to run on it, not do handstands," she says, not in an un-nice way, but maybe she's just warming up.
"I wanted to see how it felt," I say.
"You joining the track team?"
"I don't know. Are you?"
"I might."
"Aren't you playing soccer?" I ask. She looks annoyed. I feel like I've said the wrong thing. I hope she doesn't beat me up.
"I don't really like soccer. I went to soccer camp last year. The girls get mean and then they end up hating you."
Just for a second, she looks different. A little sad. I think about what my mother said, how it can't be easy for her, being better than the boys. And a ton better than the other girls. I wonder if you can be as miserable being good at something as you can being bad at it. Maybe things are reversed somehow, when you're a girl.
"Do you have a first name?" she asks me.
"Joseph."
I forget to ask hers, but she tells me anyway. "I'm Heather," she says. "We just moved here."
"Where from?"
"A place called Cherryfield, Maine," she says.
"That must be pretty different from New York."
She nods. "It's the blueberry capital of the world."
"Wow," I say.
"Aren't you going to ask?"
"Ask what?"
"Why it's called Cherryfield and not Blueberryfield?"
"Should I?"
"No," she says. "Not really. It's just that everybody does." She reaches down to touch her toes.
"I'm allergic to blueberries," I tell her. "I get itchy, way back in my throat." I demonstrate my scratching technique by sticking my finger in my ear, wiggling it around, and making a clucking sound with the back of my tongue. This is probably not something you should do on first meeting. "So, why is it?" I ask her.
"Why is what?"
"Why is it called Cherryfield if it's the blueberry capital of the world?"
"Oh. Because there used to be cherries. Before the blueberries." Then she says, "You want to run?"
"Run?"
She moves her arms and legs in a running motion. "Run. On the track. Now."
"I'm slow," I say.
"After gym class, I'm not expecting Usain Bolt."
"Who?" I ask, but she's already off, bounding along like there's nothing to it.
She's a quarter of the way around the oval before I even start running. When I finally get going, I'm surprised by how the track feels hard and soft at the same time, kind of cushiony. It makes me try tiny steps and then bigger steps and even a jump. Then I try zigzagging across the lines, out and back, holding my arms out to feel the air go by.
Heather is running straight and fast and she doesn't even slow down when she goes around the curve. She makes it look fun and easy, so I take the middle lane and try running the same way. There's something about the painted lines, all clean and sharp, that dares me to go faster, and I speed up, for about ten seconds, until I'm out of breath and have to stop.
Heather comes around and passes me, but then she stops for a second to look at something in the grassy field in the middle of the track. It's a cement circle about the size of a kiddie pool. I walk over to where she's standing and she says, "That's the discus ring." She points to the other side of the field. "Shot put's over there."
"Oh," I squeak out. That's about all the breath that's in there.
"I'm doing shot put in winter, and in spring I'll do discus, like Stephanie Brown Trafton."
"Who?"
"Stephanie Brown Trafton. She won the gold medal for discus throw in the 2008 Olympics."
I'm about to say, "Really?" but then I think it must be a trap. I know from experience that kids say things that sound logical, and then I go, "Really?" and then they laugh their heads off, because it's not true at all. Now that I think about it, she might have made up the whole Cherryfield thing, too. So, even though I'm out of breath, and light-headed and shaky, this time I see it coming. I've never even heard of this Stephanie Whoever-Whoever. I put on a "Yeah, sure" kind of voice and say, "If she really won a gold medal, I bet I would've heard of her."
"Yeah?" says Heather, and she takes a step toward me. "Well, maybe nobody's heard of her because she's not what people want to see. She's six foot four and two hundred something pounds and she throws things farther than most guys. Everybody wants to cheer for little gymnasts and pretty volleyball players in bikinis. Maybe that's why nobody's heard of her, even though she won an Olympic gold."
Heather is now about five foot ten of angriness, but she's blinking her eyes in a way that reminds me of me, when I'm trying not to cry. I want to tell her I'm sorry, that I didn't mean to hurt her feelings. I just thought she was trying to make me look stupid, like everybody else. But I don't have a chance. She shakes her head and starts to run again, much faster than I can go. At the end of the track, she crashes through the chain link gate and takes the cracked stairs back up, two at a time, and she's gone.
