Chapter 50

 

List and Learn

 

 

Well, Jane must have Porridge is your recurrent thought as you warm up a bowl of Instant Quaker Oatmeal and peel a banana to enliven it (slightly) on mornings when you don’t spread Jif on a sliced bagel instead.  Either way, you cite Miz Huntoon’s pastoral maxim A gal’s gotta have fuel and wash breakfast down with lots of water before Alex arrives to rehydrate herself while you shoulder your knapsack.  Then the two of you set off, taking your Adidases on the run from Burrow to Foxtail to Lesser to Panama, crossing Petty Bridge to the south side of the boulevard, dashing through the open-air Tunnel of Sighs beneath the Expressway overpass, penetrating the pine grove, turning onto Wheaf, and so reaching Vanderlund Township High School.  Total distance just a smidge over three miles (5K to the metric-minded) that you aim to cover in less than thirty minutes, depending on the weather and early-morning traffic.

 

Freshen up and don a non-running outfit in the girls locker room, gulping down more hydration till you feel like Thirsty Kirsten Ogilvie; then lope upstairs to your third-floor locker, stash jacket and knapsack, extract books and binder and spirals for a.m. classes, dart into Room 312 and take your back-row desk for First Hour Spanish.

 

Such has been your weekdaily routine since your sprained ankle healed a month ago—at least on those mornings that aren’t so inclement your parents forbid transport on foot.  As if you don’t use those feet to get to the bus stop, or run a few quick sprints around it while waiting for the bus—though that can be no simple task if you’re under an umbrella and the wind keeps trying to turn it inside-out.

 

(“You look like a blown-away nanny applicant,” Spacyjane remarked one time after you joined her inside the Big Green Limousine.)

 

(“Might say it’s kind of a damp sky to go fly a kite in,” added Nonique.)

 

(“Hardy har har,” you told them both.)

 

This is the last week before midterms, units are being completed in every course,  and there’s those T.A. obligations in English for which you get some extra credit that you wish could be applied to a more difficult class like Geometry or Biology—not that you’d want to assist Mr. Rankin (whom you still half-suspect of covert lechery) much less Mr. Dimancheff (shiver shake).  And each Lunch 5D you dig into macaroni salad or other carb-loading pasta dish while trying to tune out Lisa Lohe’s unsolicited lecture on the theoretical fine points of track & field—

 

“—make sure your body lean isn’t all above the waist, especially in the first ten or twenty yards of a sprint, you want to keep lifting each knee high and bringing it forward under your lean, don’t ‘leave your legs behind’ where they can’t be nearly as effective—”

 

 

advises the note Jenna slides into your eyeline.

 

Then after Seventh Hour Gym, change from hideous gymsuit into practice sweats and prepare for another session of real-life tracking & fielding.  Unlike volleyball, this is more of an individualistic than team sport; and unlike cross country, multiple events go on simultaneously in different places.  So Vanderlund has a whole bunch of track & field coaches, an exotic lot too, with not one Phys Ed teacher among them.

 

For instance: distance and relay runners are looked after by Miz Huntoon of the Math department, who scarcely needs an electronic calculator to reckon up long-range stats.  She’s also from Dolly Parton country “in the shadder o’ the Great Smokies,” speaking with a pronounced highland twang, and so goes by Miz rather than Ms.

 

Sprinters are drilled by Monsieur Dunlap, whose French class is enjoyed by Joss and Spacyjane (“he has such a pepperminty aura”) though Fiona dislikes him for behaving like her glib uncle Buck Dunlop—“(can’t even spell his name right)”—and Isabel resents his apparent immunity to her sex appeal (“I mean, of all the nerve”).

 

Shot put and discus throwers are supervised by Ms. Derwent, who hails from Home Ec/Social Studies and New Zealand.  It’s rumored that she’s ornamented with Maori tattoos in places not clearly visible; certainly her Kiwi cries of Tu meke! and Good on you, mate! can be heard all over the gym or field.

 

Jumpers and hurdlers are trained by Ms. Ohara, who teaches Physics and Human Physiology and maintains the track team’s first aid kit.  She’s also a Nisei, the Oregon-born child of Japanese immigrants, and grew up in an internment camp before her family relocated to The Cityland.  You always feel a twinge of guilt around Ms. Ohara, though she’s matter-of-fact about bigotry; maybe the scientific method helps her with that.

 

Lastly but no way leastly is the head coach, Ms. Grigoryan—the Grigster, the Armenian Arrow, who raced against Wilma Rudolph in the 1959 Pan American Games after running for DuPaul University.  Now she’s an Economics and Marketing teacher at Vanderlund, plus the natural choice to create its girls track & field program when that went interscholastic five years ago.

 

Track was the last sport to do so.  All the others—volleyball, basketball, softball, swimming, gymnastics, badminton and tennis—had a pre-Title-IX intramural squad to build on, while golf and cross country both got aborted.  Most of the girls teams operate easily enough alongside their equivalent boys teams, in separate gyms or on separate courts/diamonds; but Hordt Field has only one track, so access to it has to be divvied up every week each spring.  (True, there’s also only one pool, but the swimming seasons were de-overlapped for that very reason.)

 

Now is the time for all good track stars to run like the wind for their high school.  The Grigster used her marketing knowhow to deliver track & field to the girls who first signed up to take part; also to the t&f boys so they’d coexist peaceably, to VTHS at large and to NESTL(É), the Northeast Suburban Townships League—“Our Accent’s on Excellence!”  Her profile-raising was boosted by the Ryders, a family eminent in Vanderlund running circles: Mickey “Red” Ryder, setter of State records in half-a-dozen events, had four kid sisters who were all determined to beat his times.  This quartet formed the backbone of the new girls squad: Pinky and Randi and Cammy and Cindy, each of whom set records of her own before breaking those and going on to set more.

 

Cindy Ryder’s the only one still at VTHS, the team’s celebrity sprinter, outshone only by Captain Louisa Lang who just missed qualifying for the Junior Olympics hurling the discus and putting the shot.  Other soon-to-graduate seniors include Heather Hendon the hurdles heroine; foxy Roxie Jenkins, who runs the 880 and two relays; high jumper Naomi Fish, Natalie’s older and more flexible sister; long jumper Lydia Shanahan, cousin of Bunty O’Toole’s associate Long John; and the familiar trio of Ginger Snowbedeck, Gwendolyn Cokingham and Joyce Usher.  (Much to your relief, Demandin’ Amanda Pound and Mauly Carstairs both went out for softball instead of track & field.)

 

Joining these nine seniors are nine juniors, including the foursome from the groundbreaking 1975 VW cross country squad: Yvette Metcalf, Susan Baxter, Rhonda Wright and (of course) Lisa Lohe.  The other five juniors didn’t do cross country for various reasons—Thirsty Kirsten and Elke DuPont because they’re not long-distance runners; Nicole Paar and Marlene Crivitz because they were friends of ex-captain-designate Frieda Pieper, who got yanked out of Vanderlund after her father’s affair with the pink-slipped XC coach; and Michelle Blundell because she quailed at the thought of being coached by Mr. Heathcote, a man who might barge into the girls locker room.

 

(“What about Monsieur Dunlap?” you asked Michelle.  “Oh, he doesn’t count,” she replied.)

 

Other juniors from last fall’s volleyball JVs have gone elsewhere: Pebbles Preston is doing handstands with Isabel on the gymnastics team, and Doreen Jobling would’ve joined them there if Mary Kate and Cheryl hadn’t redirected her to the softball bullpen, where she can back up ace pitcher Natalie Fish and reduce her own risk of further fractures.  (“We hope so, at least, knowing it’s Dory.”)

 

A dozen sophomores are trying out this week for track & field—which is to say they’re on the team as “rookies” (there isn’t enough budget for a JV squad) but haven’t yet been formally assigned to events; the coaches are evaluating everybody’s skills, speed and stamina.  Five of the sophs ran cross country at VW in ’75: yourself, Alex, Sheila Quirk, Laurie Harrison, and—making an unexpected comeback as hooptediddle runner—Britt Groningen.  Three others took up XC in ’76, most valuably Sammi Tiggs who’d’ve chosen softball as this year’s spring sport but is here to protect Laurie from Britt and other potential menaces like Marlene Crivitz, that spiteful-tongued Gossip Brigadier.  Also here from ‘76 XC is sprinter Paula Holsch, known as “Sherlock” for her attempts to solve mysteries like the Mad Bludgeoner’s true identity or who was up on the roof with acid-tripping Madeline Wrippley.  And there’s Jacqueline Vinsault, whose name puts you in mind of an elegant sophisticate like Pamela Redfern rather than a stout young female Tom Bosley who goes by the monicker “Jackie Vince.”  She was your running buddy on the ’76 squad and your alphabetic neighbor in last year’s Typing class, cracking you up on/in both with wry Rodney Dangerfieldish commentary.

 

(“I tell yuh, this Industrial Revolution is gonna devour us all,” she quipped when Laurie leaned too far forward in Typing and wedged a pooftail behind an Olivetti roller.)

 

(“Jackie Vince, you’re wasted running around cindertracks when you should be doing standup!” Nancy Sykeman told her.  “Hey, yuh can get plenty o’ yucks doing ‘em both,” replied Jackie.)

 

The other four rookie sophs are ex-volleyballers Henrietta Lang and Ann Hew, working now on the high jump and long jump respectively; Theda Grampian, thickset younger sister of fickle Scott, who’s throwing the shot and discus with Louisa and Elke DuPont; and wannabe hurdler Eileen O’Kinney, a transfer from Houlihan and old enemy of Sheila‑Q, though they’re trying to repress their Skinny!/Squeegee! snarls (when the coaches can hear them) in the interest of team harmony.

 

Total: thirty girls.  Which doesn’t furnish a wealth of depth, particularly when compared to a four-year high school like Willowhelm that can draw upon their freshman class to expand track & field ranks.  Still, this “allows for more personalized coaching,” according to Ms. Ohara—or “heppin’ you-‘uns one-on-one” as Miz Huntoon phrases it.

 

You-‘uns get to use Hordt Field only two afternoons out of five this tryout week; the other three days you’re tested and trained in the Girls Gym (soon to become the West Gym when Phys Ed goes co-ed next semester) so the boys track team can practice outdoors.  Boys take de facto precedence, Title IX or no Title IX, even though their Head Coach Jung is a supporter of the girls squad; his daughter Lorinda anchored the 440 relay team last season.  Nevertheless, even jumpers and throwers can get a good workout inside the gym, using rubber mats and non-marking projectiles, while laps can be run cleatlessly and batons handed off indoors as well as out.

 

As two-year cross country veterans, you and Alex are being assessed in longer-distance events along with Gwen Cokingham, Rhonda the Road Runner and Big Sue.  You’ve also expressed interest in learning to hurdle, despite your petiteness which won’t make it easy.  Alex’s gazelle-limbs would make her a natural hurdler, but she’s more eager to master the relays at which you’re a butterfingered klutz.  It was Alex who predicted you’d be unstoppable on the hurdles after your flawless grand jeté displaced Frieda Pieper herself in that first XC meet against Athens Grove, though Mr. Heathcote scolded you for “overstriding.”

 

A couple weeks ago Coach Celeste asked Heather Hendon to drop by Seventh Hour Phys Ed and demonstrate the basics.  Hers is an inspiring story: at the age of twelve she came down with a bad case of labyrinthitis, which doesn’t mean being trapped in a maze with a Minotaur but having inflammation of the inner ear that causes severe vertigo and loss of balance.  Part of Heather’s rehab therapy was to keep her eyes fixed on specific targets while moving her head, which eventually led her to leap over seven 30” barriers on an 80-yard track, followed by ten 33-inchers over 110 yards; outpacing all competitors at both events the past two seasons.  This year NESTL(É) replaced the 80 with a more challenging 220 yards, which Heather’d much rather be training for than outlining fundamentals to a sophomore gym class; yet she knows someone’ll have to carry on hurdling at Vanderlund after she leaves for Florida State (fingers crossed) or Nebraska-Lincoln (definitely second choice).  So listen up, ladies, she’s only going to show these once and in rapidfire progression:

• wall drill lifting your lead leg over the hurdle, planting your toes on the wall, repeating five times, doing both sides 

• same drill with your lead arm bending forward, trail elbow coming back, repeat five times, do both sides 

• wall drill pulling your trail leg over the side of the hurdle as you lean on the wall—heel close to butt, thigh parallel to ground, then knee up high and snap that trail leg down, land on ball of foot, five more times on both sides

• standing arm drill matching the three steps you’ll take between hurdles, pump-pump-pump then bend lead arm forward and bring trail elbow back, five more times on both sides 

• walking drill lifting your lead leg over an imaginary hurdle every fourth step, hands on hips, snap that leg down, land on ball of foot, five more on both sides 

• walking drill pulling your trail leg over the imaginary hurdle every fourth step, hands on hips, snap that leg down, land on ball of foot, five more on both sides 

• walking drill first lifting lead leg then pulling trail leg over the imaginary hurdle, hands on hips, snap each leg down, land on balls of feet, five more on both sides 

• walking drill lifting lead leg over the imaginary hurdle while bending lead arm forward and bringing trail elbow back, five more on both sides 

• walking drill pulling trail leg over the imaginary hurdle while bringing lead arm back sharply over trail leg as it comes forward, five more on both sides 

• walking drill lifting/pulling legs over while bending/bringing arms as you lean into each step, snapping those legs down, landing on balls of feet, five more on both sides

Right?  Right.  Next [glancing at wristwatch] repeat the first three walking drills while putting your legs over the sides of actual hurdles, then the last three walking drills over the middle of the hurdles starting out at 18” high, be sure to get each move down pat before advancing to the next so you’ll be ready to start on running drills which we don’t have time for today so come to our track & field tryouts the week after next and see us in action I think Ms. Schwall’s got some handouts that show what we just went through so you can practice ‘em on your own till then good luck remember patience and persistence can turn you into champions right? right—

 

—as Heather left, having given you the impression of a virtuoso 4-H Clubber lecturing callow City girls on how to plow a forty-acre farm all by themselves.

 

(Hard to believe she’d ever been subject to crippling dizziness.)

 

While waiting to see if Candlestick would derail the Operetta, you studied the handout and tried doing the drills using a makeshift hurdle that Avery whipped together for you.  (Some girlfriends get flowers.)  So far, not so bad; but there was no time to keep this up during Hell Week and even if there were, Chookie Yentlebaum—again slated to be assistant manager—offered less-than-encouraging advice:

 

“You can work on hurdling, sure, they can always use more depth, but what we’ll really need you to concentrate on is the mile and two-mile runs.  ‘Cause just between you ‘n’ me, Gwen’s not in good shape—not at all.”

 

Which is quite evident during tryout week, the first time you’ve seen Gwendolyn Cokingham close-up since the end of volleyball season, if you don’t count her grotesque pantyhose-hooded appearance at the Shoreward bal masqué.  Last fall she was wiry-fit; now Gwen can outscrawn Petula Pierro or Lynddha Ednalino.  Scuttlebutt (courtesy of discourteous Marlene Crivitz) says she doesn’t stand much chance of getting into UCLA, her first-choice college, even if accepted there; her dad’s a second-rate cement contractor who can’t afford to pay her whole way, and Gwen’s grades aren’t likely to merit a scholarship.  Trackwise she lags behind Rhonda and Alex and lacks the stolid hardiness of Big Sue; you yourself overtake Gwen on several time trials.  She can’t berate you for beating her, not in front of the coaches, but singles you out to hear her bitch at whatever else ticks her off.  “This is bullshit!” begins every grievance, you nodding compliantly while trying to beckon Alex or Rhonda or Joyce Usher to come distract Gwen long enough for you to escape.

 

Her cup of bile runneth over at any provocation, but never so extensively as when Ginger Snowbedeck starts “swugging around.”  This (as defined by Gwen) is an infernal meld of strutting and hogging; “and that skank gets deferential treatment left and right, ass over teakettle!”  Gwen still holds Ginger responsible for the varsity volleyball squad’s dismal win-loss record, though Ms. Ramsey, Gretel Hitchens, crooked referees at Hereafter Park, and (somehow) Leonid Brezhnev all receive their share of blame.

 

Ginger (if not Brezhnev) shrugs this off with the same unaffected nonchalance she displayed last autumn, regardless of how hard or often she parties.  Self-assured she’ll soon be gettin’ down at a swingin’ college like Ball State or CSU Chico—thanks to illicit aid from the Traverser cheating ring, Gwen imputes.  And she ought to know, hanging out as she does with a fraudmeister like Jive Mansfield; though with that in mind, it’s surprising Gwen’s own report cards haven’t been spiffier.

 

Another recipient of Cokingham spleen is Ginger’s relay teammate Roxana Jenkins, who has a mass of curls that outbillow Joss’s and stream behind her when she runs.  Whether or not Ginger relies on cheatsheets to slide through school, Roxie has no need for them—she’s a whiz at digital computer programming, certain of acceptance at Carnegie Mellon.  You wouldn’t pick her out of a crowd as a punchcard nerd; at VW she was a cheerleader and Cicada Queen candidate, discarding the pompons in senior high so she could run track with fluttering curlylocks and a flirtatious panache that nauseates Gwen but captivates male bystanders.

 

Look no further than the boys track team.  It has at least one gentleman (Frank Wharton) and one mystic (Kevin Wingate) but also the “Barnyard Balladeers” (Wolfie Mullane, Oink Gibson and Hound Dog Hauck) who dawdle in the corridor when the girls head out to Hordt Field, and make animal noises at foxy Roxie as she, Ginger, and other alluring females jog past.  Such misconduct reminds you of Roger Mustardman and his Smarks Brothers roto-rooting the Ladybugs back at VW, except that the Balladeers don’t bother to climb a tree first.  You yourself have been targeted by their grunts/squeals/howls this week, but you’re more miffed by Avery’s dismissive “Aah, those clowns pull that stunt on all the gals.”  Which is sort of true: the Barnyard Boys are equal-opportunity reprobates, and even hefty types like Jackie Vince, Theda Grampian and Elke DuPont get an occasional whistle.

 

Gwendolyn isn’t the only one to critique Roxie and Ginger for not devoting their hearts and souls to track & field.  Cindy Ryder, Lydia Shanahan and (of course) Lisa Lohe are all singlemindedly dedicated to the sport, impatient with more relaxed outlooks.  But “Lighten up!  We’re in this for the enjoyment,” they’re told.  “It’s springtime, we’re halfway through our very last semester—and hey, check out the caboodle on that guy—”

 

“Nobody ever got to State by skylarking!” snaps Cindy.

 

“‘Is there a meadow in the mist / where someone’s waiting to be kissed?’” asks Naomi, drywitted like all the Fishes.

 

“Hey, remember to kiss a Canadian nickel so you won’t have bad luck—I’ve got some here for anyone who needs one,” offers Joyce, generously superstitious as ever.

 

“Enough chitchat.  Nome saing?” rumbles Louisa, and everybody goes to work on their events.  The captain’s word, if not law, is universally hearkened to.

 

You’re the youngest and shortest of the milers, and aren’t likely to ever beat Rhonda or Alex to a finish line unless they stumble during their final kick; so you too are running mainly for enjoyment.  A mile or two on a level track is/are a breeze compared to the uneven up-and-downhill terrain encountered at cross country meets or on your morning sprints to school.  So here you are, trying to shave a few seconds off your Personal Bests (5:51 on the mile run and 13:26 on two miles, give or take a few tenths) while Miz Huntoon seems deadset on scraping the butter off your fingers so you can handle a baton and be a backup for the mile relay team—“mayhap somebody hurts theirselves”—when you know you’ll never be able to grasp that stupid stick with any confidence.

 

What you really want to do, naturally enough, is learn to hurdle.  Leaping gracefully over barriers as you race down a track ought to feel like a kinetic fusion of running and ballet, even if grand jetés count as “overstriding” and are to be avoided.

 

Ms. Ohara has okayed your advance to the next stage of training.  This involves actual runs over actual hurdles (more like croquet wickets, just 12” high) and becoming accustomed to one-two-three-stepping between leaps as you increase speed and distance, alternating lead legs.  So far, not so bad (again) but moving on up to 18” could be a tall order for your little legs, great as Sally Field said they are.

 

Nine times out of ten you’d rather have shapely-though-petite gams than a pair of spindle shanks like Eileen O’Kinney.  However, that tenth time is when you’re out on the track or gym floor, where Eileen’s clearing 30” hurdles with no perceptible effort.  It’d be real easy to dislike Eileen almost as much as Sheila-Q does—“that skinny grade-skipping know-it-all-ing smartymouth!”—if not for her being sociably approachable, once you get past the pocket spiral that’s always getting scribbled in when Eileen isn’t hurdling.  At first this reminded you of Fiona hunched over staff paper, jotting down musical notes; then you wondered if Eileen, like Sherlock Holsch, is busy solving whodunnits.

 

“Naah, I’m just trying to find my footing—so to speak,” says Eileen, waggling a long narrow gym shoe.

 

She transferred to Vanderlund at the beginning of the semester, after Archbishop Houlihan raised its rates to compensate for the loss of students following the previous rate hike.  Eileen did skip a grade at Houlihan and has only just turned fifteen, which partly accounts for her skinniness.  Track & field is her first activity at VTHS, but she’s more interested in joining the Channel staff and writing “human interest stories.”  Too late to do it this school year, but she’s laying the foundation for next fall by cultivating Trina Purcell’s stop-the-presses acquaintance.

 

“Warily, though.”

 

“Warily?”

 

“Well, doesn’t her family sort of own the newspaper, and try to keep it all to themselves?  Trina kind of acts like a wise guy.  Sorry I said that if she’s your best friend or anything.”

 

“Um, she’s not, but I better fess this up in case you don’t already know it—Sheila ‘n’ me are good friends and for a long time now.”

 

Pause, then fatalistic shrug.  “No big deal.  It’s not as if Squeegee’s given you the mumps or chickenpox—unless” [flipping open the pocket spiral] “she ever did?  That’d make a great human interest story!”

 

Rookie sophs like you and Eileen (and S-Q) are on the bottom rung of the totem pole, obliged to do any scutwork chores for the team; yet you’re also supposed to receive supportive guidance from upperclass veterans, and not just Lisa droning on about proper body leans.  But Hurdles Hendon’s idea of mentorship is [a] did you see me demonstrate the drills? [b] are you doing the drills like I showed you? [c] then keep watching what I do, and try to do it the same way.  Right?  Right.

 

That didn’t even fill up one page in Eileen’s notebook.

 

Even so, it dwarfs the nurturing assistance bestowed by the junior hurdler, Nicole Paar.  Volumes about her are spoken by the fact that she’s archenemies with Candy Gates and Cheryl Trevelyan, each of whom claims to’ve been the first to tag her as “Snickers.”  In the satirical sense: you haven’t heard the least glimmer of a snicker pass through Nicole’s inscrutable mask.  She’s another of those presumably-pretty girls who wears far more makeup than you’d think she’d need, not relaxing her cosmetic regimen even out on the track.  Zerlina Monticello might do this so her face won’t look like it belongs to a preteen; Nicole Paar seems to be garnishing a perpetually sullen expression and attitude.  (Compassionate Mary Kate says she was a nice-enough girl till Frieda Pieper, her closest friend and innocent victim of a parental affair, got packed off to Athens Grove three years ago; but Cheryl rejects that mitigating theory and insists Snickers has always been a shrewish floozepot.)

 

One thing’s for certain: Nicole may not be much taller than you are, but her thighs and calves are spectacularly curvaceous and crammed to the hilt with steel-spring Slinky-muscles.  “Legs fit for a cocktail waitress!” snorts sourfaced Lisa Lohe; “Grunt/squeal/howl!” concur the Barnyard Boys.  Nicole refused to put those exquisite stems onstage as a dancing chorus girl in Follies, since that would’ve entailed proximity to Cheryl and C.G.  She did agree to take up the the high jump as well as the hurdles, but only with grudging reluctance and while objecting to such over-the-bar techniques as the Brill Bend and Fosbury Flop, calling them “bass-ackwards.”

 

So you can expect no mentoring by Snickers Paar.  Nor by her cohort Marlene Crivitz, apart from dollops of malevolent scuttlebutt.  Fortunately you can rely on Kirsten Ogilvie, who learned the hurdles last year but was too slow then for regular competition.

 

“Oh jeepers, don’t mention it, I’ve got loads of good karma to share,” Thirsty K says when you thank her for giving you hurdle-tips.  She earned that good karma on the swim team this past winter, not only for her second-place freestyle finish at The State meet, but also in a full-length bathing-beauty photo (taken by Split-Pea, needless to say) that graced the back page of the March 10th Channel.  Which irrevocably hacked off Gabey Sundheit with the Ogilvie sisters—“I’ve done bikini catalog modeling, for Chrissake!”—once and for freaking all.

 

At least Spacyjane wasn’t disturbed by this pinup, as opposed to last summer’s prizewinning magazine splash of loosey-goosey Lillie Guldbaer.  After all, Kirsten is practically engaged to Jacuzzi Jake Korva and can’t help having a glittersome aura. 

 

(Curious, though, that such a lovely blonde should have to cope with such hyperactive sweat glands.)

 

Thirsty K and Ms. Ohara suggest some exercises to improve flexibility in your hips and hamstrings, building up the pushoff force of your great little legs so they can raise their hurdle clearance.  Additional force and flexibility will bolster distance running too, enhancing endurance and resilience.  So nyaah to Snickers Paar and her unhelpful ultrathighs: they may find themselves outmatched sooner than they may think.

 

Practice over, shower taken, street clothes and jacket redonned, bag reshouldered, take-home textbooks regathered; off you head to the parking lot.  Avery will either be waiting in his Mustang or show up soon afterward, done with his own baseball practice.  Either way you’ll be greeted quizzically (or as close to quizzically as Bomber’s deadpan gets) thanks to the mantra you’ve chanted since turning sixteen:

 

First, track this spring; then, dance in June; then, driver’s ed and license.

 

Then being after Joss and Spacyjane get back from music camp and Alex from Girl Scout camp, and you complete a month of avant-garde dance lessons with Octavia Fredericks at the Kickshaw Conservatory.

 

Oddly enough, it was while watching the Ice Capades that you realized you just couldn’t possibly handle Driver’s Ed during track season while dissecting a different critter every week in Biology.  Robin and Zerl think you’re crazy not to get your license just as soon as the law allows, but Joss (who loves her bicycle) and Alex (who cherishes travel by horseback) promptly subscribed to mutual postponement.  Spacyjane will go along for the ride; Nonique’s father still needs convincing to let her learn to drive at all; and besides, Avery’s rules-of-the-road tutelage already qualifies you to pass the written test, doesn’t it?  You won’t forget any of it before July.

 

“Well,” remarks Avery, “it’s your funeral.”

 

“That’s not a nice thing to say!”

 

“Okay then, it’s your bed of roses.”

 

Leave it to a guy to work the conversation around to bed.  “In the summertime I’ll be able to pay my whole awareness to the road and stuff.  Not like now.”

 

“If you say so.”

 

“I do say so.  ‘N’ if I had my license I’d be driving myself home (if I had a car) ‘n’ hardly ever see you.”

 

“There is that.”

 

(Silence, other than Cluster’s Zuckerzeit playing over the Boss speakers.)

 

“...I learned some new hamstring exercises today.”

 

“Good.  You’ll need to work on your quads too.”

 

“I will?  My quads?”

 

“At the front of your thighs.  Hamstrings are at the back.”

 

“Well I know that.”

 

“Be sure you build ‘em both up together.”

 

Abruptly: “Whaddaya think of Nicole Paar?”

 

“Snickers?  Her thighs are sure built-up.”

 

“I know that too!  I mean like as a person.”

 

“Ohhhh, as a person...  She can leap with the best of ‘em.”

 

“Mmph!” you go as Avery parks in the Burrow Lane cul-de-sac.  Then again, with mollified moderation, when he leans over and gives you a good-night kiss.

 

*

 

On Saturday morning an ice storm struck The Cityland in spite of springtime’s having sprung almost a week earlier.  However, Joyce Usher’s Canadian nickels brought a measure of merciful fortune: had the freezing rain fallen during a weekday commute, thousands of travelers would’ve been imperiled instead of a few hundred.  Also, Stella Foote the track team manager (don’t refer to her as “Footsie” much less “Tootsie”) succeeded in alerting everyone that Saturday’s practice was canceled, so they could remain safe at home and work out on their own.

 

“Stella called, there’s no practice today, PLEASE stay off the phone!” shouted Juanita from upstairs in the Cape Cod house on Pfenniger Street.  No response by Juanita’s daughter, slouched on the couch before a roaring fireplace (in anticipation of power outages) and not inclined to communicate, even if Juanita weren’t panicking about tomorrow’s Easter fol-de-rol.

 

Paar for the course.

 

No nickel from any nation would lend good luck to Nicole Paar.

 

Staring into the rapacious flames, she tried again to isolate the exact moment and circumstance that had turned her life into a bass-ackwards regression.

 

Had it been the eighth-grade skirmish with Moose Sedgemoor after going to see At Long Last Love?  He, being both her sanctioned steady and a power forward on VW’s freshman basketball team, had copped a feel or two (above the waist) after the Sweetheart Hop and on subsequent dates; but his offcourt persona was that of a big ol’ shy-faced country boy.  True to life, or wily camouflage as his hands crept below the belt?

 

In retrospect Moose could be diagnosed as traumatized by the notion that being christened “Bruce” tainted his ninth-grade virility.  Hence: grabby-gropey overreaction.  Or he might’ve had a case of Lennie-and-the-Rabbits Syndrome, and simply wanted to pet soft warm girlish bunnies.  At any rate Nicole’d rebuffed his fastbreak moves to get under her skirt (especially unwelcome after sitting through At Long Last Love) so Moose had taken his downhome courtin’ elsewhere.  Making a kingsize judgment-error by cozying up to Mary Kate Hazeldene, who at fourteen looked like a torrid femme fatale instead of the supervirtuous Snow White she actually was.  Mary Kate even would’ve apologized to Nicole for accepting Moose’s invite to the International Kennel Club Dog Show.  And Nicole would’ve warned her what sort of poochie-tricks Moose might try to pull, if Cheryl Trevelyan hadn’t interfered and forestalled their talking to each other.

 

All the girls at VW liked Mary Kate, but Cheryl was a whole other tureen of bouillabaisse.  She and Nicole had begun butting heads in seventh grade Phys Ed and by eighth grade were ingrained adversaries.  Cheryl, who pretended to be oh-so-protective of Mary Kate, should’ve seen through Moose’s big ol’ shy-faced country veneer; evidently she didn’t.  Sure enough, he made a crude move on Mary Kate at the dog show; sure enough, it freaked her out; sure enough, Cheryl then blew her belated top.  And before Nicole knew it, the whole Sedgemoor family—Bruce the Moose, his parents, and kid brother Gary who’d just gotten his slimy salamander-ass whupped by Mike Spurgeon—vanished from their bungalow on Kennelly Avenue, leaving only a for sale sign behind.

 

It threw Nicole for the proverbial loop.

 

She’d presumed Moose would receive some sort of comeuppance and deservedly so, but then return to her as a chastened (no, make that wiser) boyfriend.  More attuned to the niceties of a romantic relationship, yet able to dish out homespun lovin’ suitable for Nicole’s wants and needs.

 

Instead: nada.

 

Halted in her tracks, as if in a game of freeze tag,

 

At least she still had Frieda to lead her out of immobility.  “Don’t look back, don’t even think back, keep your eyes and brain always facing forward, never quit moving on.  ‘Climb every mountain, ford every stream, row your boat so merrily, life is but a dream.’  And remember to yell excelsior!”

 

In other words: follow the Pieper.

 

Frieda lived a block away on Pearlwort Drive (in the same neighborhood as the Pentires, Pierros and Purcells, north of Petty Hills Country Club).  Even in nursery school her personal credo had been “Onward and upward”; she could outrun all the girls and many of the boys at Petty Elementary, outlasting everyone in any marathon pursuit.  “C’mon, let’s do something!” Frieda would tell Nicole, meaning not homework or household chores but being in motion—whether on a swingset, a skateboard, a ten-speed, or a sidewalk along which gym shoes could race.  “Faster! Faster!” she would demand, and Nicole would strive to keep pace despite having shorter legs, shallower lungs, and a less powerful cardiovascular system.  “Don’t let me down!” Frieda would demand not just of Nicole but everyone she knew, up to and including God Almighty at the Calvary Lutheran Church.

 

And He will lift up an ensign to the nations from far, and will hiss unto them from the end of the earth: and, behold, they shall come with speed swiftly.  None shall be weary nor stumble among them; none shall slumber nor sleep; neither shall the girdle of their loins be loosed, nor the latchet of their shoes be broken...

 

As another blue ribbon was won by Frieda Pieper’s feisty exuberance.

 

Her father was a ghostwriter, which triggered many giggles and a lot of mock fright until the girls were old enough to understand he provided behind-the-scenes buttressing to local politicians, business executives and minor luminaries who couldn’t pen a coherent memoir on their own.  “What am I writing?  Mostly a lot of nondisclosure agreements,” Mr. Pieper would say with a just-between-us wink.

 

He was dapper and debonair, though not very tall and prematurely gray: rather like Charlie Chaplin out of tramp costume, and like Chaplin he preferred teen girls to women his own age.  This Nicole didn’t realize till she herself turned thirteen and her thighs (pumped up by keeping pace with Frieda) began to receive admiring gazes that weren’t avuncular yet also not bothersome, even when Mr. Pieper advised her to wear miniskirts instead of jeans.  Lookie-no-touchie attention from such a suave and handsome man made Nicole feel grownup, even sophisticated.  It would’ve been a different matter with Marlene Crivitz’s dad, who was fat and bald and frankly gross but away on the road most of the time, assessing fire damage for insurance claims—and staying as far as possible from Marlene’s mom.

 

(Now there was an isolatable circumstance...)

 

Flash forward to a couple months after Moose and the Sedgemoors disappeared.  The school year had just ended but a lot was still going on, organizing the new girls cross country team that would be launched at VW next fall.  Frieda was the obvious choice to be its first captain, with Nicole as her second-in-command.  Marlene would run too, but also had to keep taking violin lessons at the insistence of her because-I-say-so-young-lady-none-of-your-backtalk! mother.

 

The best way you could describe Mrs. Crivitz was as a proficient beautician at the BonBon Salon down in The City.  Marlene would’ve never looked better than halfway-decent if not for her mom’s cosmetological expertise.  But Mrs. Crivitz also “put the itch in bitch” according to Marlene’s violin teacher Sara Saltseller, who was about to depart for a summer tour of Europe which could not be delayed.  Mrs. Crivitz swore that Marlene was entitled to one last paid-for-in-full lesson, and a civil suit would be filed if said lesson were not given forthwith or its fee refunded ditto.  All of Sara’s limited funds were earmarked for the tour; she’d already sublet her apartment and had no time (or desire) to come out to the Crivitz house; so Marlene’s last lesson took place at the Airport TraveLodge while Sara finished packing her suitcases.

 

“With Ma sitting there glaring like some gahdam chaperone!” Marlene would later remark.  “Youda thought I was gonna fly off to Paris with Jean-Luc Ponty (I wish).”

 

Lesson done, the Crivitzes were heading for their Pontiac in the TraveLodge parking lot when Marlene glimpsed Frieda’s father stepping out of another motel room—not alone, nor with Mrs. Pieper.  His dapper arm was debonairly twined around the narrow hips of Billie Gibb, the ninth-grade Phys Ed teacher at VW and coach-designate of its new cross country team; and upon her narrow lips Mr. Pieper was planting a far-from-avuncular kiss.

 

Marlene’s deft maneuvers with violin case and sheet-music folder prevented her mother from noticing this.

 

Back then Marlene was still a harmless gossip, not bent on hurting anybody’s feelings.  She’d hushed her tittle-tattle about Mary Kate at the dog show after Moose fled town, and she’d quit delving into why Mike Spurgeon beat up Gary Sedgemoor after hearing it involved Alex Dmitria—the sevvie counterpart of Mary Kate, equally popular with all the girls.  But at the TraveLodge Marlene knew she’d stumbled across a dynamite powderkeg that was primed to blow sky-high.

 

Miss Gibb not only looked much younger than the rest of the VW faculty, but the same age as her freshmen students.  Many of them, pitying her for still getting carded in bars and liquor stores, hoped not to share her perpetual pubescence.  But Frieda’s mother (among the most active in organizing the new XC team) had befriended Miss Gibb and gotten her a guest membership at Petty Hills, where they often played tennis.  Mrs. Pieper was a trusting soul and devoted churchgoer; no way could she be aware of or okay with any infidelity.  Yes, it was well-known that Mr. Pieper could charm your pants off, particularly if you had adolescent hormones; but so far as Marlene knew, no actual depantsing had been done till now—why did they have to be Billie Gibb’s?  (Eww.)  Better hers than an actual adolescent’s; yet she was his own wife’s tennis buddy and his own daughter’s future coach, and what the hell should Marlene do with this sordid revelation?

 

Dump it in Nicole’s lap, of course.  She was Frieda’s best friend; they’d gone through grade school together (Marlene went to Bashford and didn’t meet them till VW) and they belonged to the same Lutheran youth group (Marlene was nondenominational).

 

Now what the hell should Nicole do?  Confront Miss Gibb?  Try to cajole or blackmail her into giving up Mr. Pieper?  Maybe so, if this were an episode of A Lover’s Question or The Young and the Restless, but hardly feasible in real-life Vanderlund.

 

“Okay—we’ll have to tell Frieda—break it to her gently—so she can warn her mom—who can have it out with her dad—and then they get everything smoothed over.  That way, no one but us’ll ever have to know.”

 

Marlene agreed to try, so long as Nicole did most of the talking.

 

They staged their intervention at the Paar house, into which Frieda came bursting with customary vim and vigor at the end of her habitual three-mile morning run.  “Hey, guys!  Why’re you looking so glum?  C’mon, let’s do something!”

 

“Uh, Freed, you better sit down.  We sorta gotta have a little talk...”

 

What Nicole should have said was: Don’t shoot the messenger.

 

Because a ballistic fusillade soon followed.  Aimed head-on at Nicole and Marlene.  Who, by the time Frieda stormed out in purplefaced tears, were half-convinced that they had arranged the whole affair—thrown Miss Gibb into Mr. Pieper’s arms, for the sole and willful purpose of upsetting happy-family applecarts.  Worse yet, Nicole’s mother overheard Frieda’s furious salvo and quickly gleaned its cause.  Worst of all, Juanita got on the blower to the BonBon Salon and spilled the beans to Marlene’s mom, slopping the scandal-fat out of the frying pan and straight into the fire.

 

Crackle crackle SNAP went the blaze on the Cape Cod hearth, almost three years later.

 

Yes: that had been the exact moment and circumstance.

 

Obvious in retrospect, but Nicole usually repressed the memory.  Just as she sugarcoated her complexion, which had broken out like a chain-gang fugitive during Frieda’s lambasting and resisted all Clearasil restoratives ever since.  (Here at least Mrs. Crivitz was able to be beneficial, imparting the art of paint-by-number coverup.)

 

Liesel Pieper sued Rolf Pieper for divorce, citing Billie Gibb as co-respondent.  And before Nicole knew it, their house on Pearlwort Drive—a place she’d felt more at home in than her own on Pfenniger—was empty, vacant, deserted, with a for sale sign in its front yard.  No clue where Mrs. Pieper’d taken Frieda.  No hint whether Miss Gibb (who’d resigned from VW and now, some whispered, was carrying Frieda’s half-sibling-to-be) might be in a depantsed love nest with Mr. Pieper.

 

The cross country program got terminated, then resurrected, but Nicole and Marlene would not take part.  They didn’t go to the first meet in October and only heard afterward that Frieda’d been there, running for Athens Grove (and finishing eleventh).  Armed with this info, Marlene ferreted out Frieda’s new address and she and Nicole made a pilgrimage to it, which brought them neither reconciliation nor relief.  Instead of onward-and-upward excelsior, they found a skinny-assed hollow-eyed zombie chick who slammed the door in their faces.

 

So that was that.  Nicole became hardboiled and Marlene turned malicious.  They teamed up with a fellow freshman and kindred spirit called “Jawbone” (Oliver Cromwell Jaubert IV, great-grandson of a famous Civil War general) and took a stab at school dramatics.  You could lose yourself in a theatrical role, with masking upon masking.

 

What the trio got was outflanked, outranked, and overrun by Candy Gates at the Battle of Scenes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  After that pucked-off mortal foolishness, Nicole and Marlene quit and Jawbone resorted to clandestine sabotage as the “Phantom of the Sock-Hop,” wreaking backstage mayhem (mostly blamed on Lumpy Skinner) during You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown.  Regrettably, the thirty-pound sandbag that fell from the flies during dress rehearsal and crushed Lucy’s Psychiatric Help (5¢) booth didn’t flatten Candy Gates.

 

From then on it was all inward and downward for Nicole.  In tenth grade at VTHS she shifted to a pulp/noir perspective: low-key, inexact, ambiguous.  Ripe for analysis.  By her, not of her (Juanita would be mortified) and zoological as much as psychiatric.  Nicole’s luscious legs got rave serenades from the Barnyard Balladeers, whom she contemplated much as Jane Goodall did chimps—though without empathy or affection.

 

Take Wolfie Mullane as a case in point.  Younger, taller, browner-haired and crasser-mannered than Mr. Pieper, but with the same hey-there-Little-Red-Riding-Hood gleam in his all-the-better-to-ogle-you-with eyes.  (Awooh!)  There’d be no hopping into Grandma’s bed on his hornyboy say-so, though.  Not if Wolfie could be put through pulp/noir paces—like Fred MacMurray by Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity, or John Garfield by Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice.

 

(Mary Kate Hazeldene might not be a manipulative femme fatale, but those stiletto heels could be filled by somebody else.)

 

Was it doable?  Pull-offable?  Get-away-withable?  More intriguing to mull over in theory than undertake in practice.  Why submit to being pawed or slobbered on while leading a fall guy down the garden path?  Plus, ending up dead (like Lana and Barbara) was not an ideal outcome. 

 

Milder entertainment could be gotten by observing Jawbone Jaubert’s skulkwork as an informant (“stoolie, if you please”) for Bunty O’Toole’s crew, and his experiments (“guinea piggery, if you don’t mind”) with controlled substances.  Jawbone displayed symptoms of numerous personality disorders—antisocial, borderline, schizoid—while twitting Nicole for acting like her father (an editor of self-help books) so as not to mimic her mother (that nervous-nellie fussbudget).  “Snickers the Shrink!  Laboring under a Kotex Complex!  Showing off your Freudian slip like a psychotease!”

 

Categorically antisocial.

 

No point in analyzing Marlene: she was as darkly transparent as polarized sunglasses.  Little interest in listening to her vitriol, except when it blistered Candy Gates or Cheryl Trevelyan.  Being cronies with Marlene mostly meant silent running together, to stay in shape and on the track & field team.  Taking morose satisfaction in Frieda Pieper’s complete overshadowment at Athens Grove by the Four Genies of the Apocalypse.  “Guess what’s left of her ass got ghostwritten,” sniped Marlene.

 

Crackle crackle SNAP echoed the fire.

 

Don’t look back, don’t even think back, keep your eyes and brain always facing forward, never quit moving on.

 

Forget it.  Focus analysis on the Big Kahuna.

 

A rambunctious troublemaker at Petty Elementary, forever being sent to the principal’s office.  Twice transferred at VW, from the 7-Y team to 8-Z and then 9-X.  Notorious as a motormouth, a toothyhead, a One-Shot Thanks-a-Lot Untie-the-Knot.

 

Dennis the Menace Desmond.

 

Marlene, feeling rowdily reckless, had gone out with him a single time the February before last—on the same night as that big rush-hour accident down in The City, where one crowded El train rear-ended another and sent four cars off the tracks, two crashing onto the street below.  Dennis and Marlene were nowhere near this when it happened and their date didn’t even get delayed (they snuck into an R-rated preview of Twilight’s Last Gleaming at the New Sherwood) but still.

 

This year they all had Second Hour American History with Mr. Hatch, along with Cheryl and Candy Gates.  Dennis took it upon himself to “razzledazz” every girl in class, plus a few exiting Room 413 after First Hour International Relations and others entering it for Third Hour Geography.  Among the latter had been Gigi Pyle (that bogus bo-nanna-fanna Southern belle) until her withdrawal from school.  No great loss, except that in December Gigi’s figure had gradually inflated till it got bigger than her swollen head.  And as it puffed up, Dennis had taken blatant hold of a fleshy fistful every time they crossed paths on the Room 413 threshold.

 

Peculiarities about this abuse:

1. Gigi had never squawked or complained about getting outrageously manhandled 

2. Dennis had never commented about his encroachments, before/during/afterward 

3. No one in the room or hall had seemed to notice any of this—aside from Nicole 

4. Not once had Nicole ever alerted Marlene as to what appeared to be going on 

5. Because after awhile, Nicole’d begun to wonder whether she was imagining it all

—although there were an infinite number of preferable things to see every morning.

 

For example: on Valentine’s Day the entire class had witnessed Dennis thrusting a BMV ribbon at Cheryl, who was down in the dumps from being given the boot (poooor baaaaby) by Stu Nugent.  As soon as the Third Hour bell rang, Marlene and Candy Gates had dashed off in different directions to spread the wickedbuzz that Cheryl’d asked Dennis to the Turnabout dance.  Fair play?  Foul play?  What’s the difference as another daily gauntlet got run, this time by Cheryl and not through any grabs ‘n’ gropes but a bombardment of bad-mojo razzmatazz from Dennis’s Joker-teeth and jaundice-tinted eyes.

 

Again, this had apparently been visible only to Nicole.

 

Again, she hadn’t enlightened Marlene or Mr. Hatch or any of his other students.

 

Again, she’d begun to suspect it might all be a paranoid hallucination.

 

(Symptomatic of the Kotex Complex, Jawbone would probably say.)

 

Either way and however reluctantly, you had to hand it to Cheryl: boogersnot she might be, yet able to bear up and hold out against the onslaught.  Shielded, it would seem, by a double-skullfaced amulet of her own design that Nicole unwillingly coveted.  And Cheryl hadn’t gone to the Valentine Turnabout, with Dennis or anyone else.

 

Same was true for Nicole, who’d tossed her own BMV tokens into a trashcan and spent that Saturday night at the Eclipse Cinema—“All Vintage, All the Time”—working the concession stand and listening in on Jane Greer in the aptly-titled Out of the Past.

 

I’m taller than Napoleon.

 

And a dame who could take out Robert Mitchum, no less.  (Not in the turnabout-dance sense, either.)  Can’t ask more from a femme fatale than that.

 

Crackle crackle SNAP.

 

So why take aim at a mere Barnyard Boy when there was a Big Kahuna prowling around?  You could shoot for the dark side of the moon—set your sights on a full-speed high-jump hurdle-leap tantalizing in its jeopardy, truly screwball in its consequences.

 

Sssscrewball.  Dennis never addressed Nicole as “Snickers,” but teetered on the edge with other hissy sobriquets.  Such as “Ssssternwood,” derived from the ssssisters Carmen and Vivian in The Big Ssssleep, which Dennis had caught Nicole reading last year in Mssss. Sssshelley Sssstoker’s ssssophomore Englissssh classss.

 

“¡El Sueño Eterno!” he’d exclaimed, dialing down the Sylvester-spittle sibilance.  “May I make so bold as to suppose you’ve already seen the movie (and if you did last Sunday on Channel 7, tut tut! and for shame! staying up till 1 a.m. on a school night like a Bad Girl and Worse Scholar) but hear hear! and you betcha! since it’s comme il faut not to mention como es debido to read an original work for the first time AFTER watching its adaptation on stage or screen or puppet show, that is to say if it WAS your First Time being a Chandler Virgin who hadn’t watched Murder, My Sweet or The Long Goodbye unless you might’ve seen both and merely been a Big Sleep Virgin in which case it’s to be hoped when you’re done you’ll fully enjoy la petite mort not to mention la pequeña muerte—”

 

“Put a sock in it, Dennis.”

 

Nine guys out of ten would’ve boasted there was no room to put a sock behind the zipper of their jampacked dungarees.  Dennis Desmond had pulled an actual tube sock out of his shirt pocket, flapped it in Nicole’s prettily-shellacked face, and thanked her for buying so much cold cream that the price of Chesebrough-Ponds stock was skyrocketing.

 

The next day he’d produced an alleged copy of William Faulkner’s draft script for the movie version of The Big Sleep, saying it contained a scene where Carmen Sternwood sucked not her thumb but the white queen from Philip Marlowe’s chess set, provoking Marlowe to slap her “terrifically” and use a heavy firedog to hammer the chesspiece into chessdust.  Nicole was welcome to peruse this entire script, then contrast it with both the novel and final film in a sure-to-get-an-A term paper, IF she’d agree to a wee ssssmidge of quid pro quo with her lush young sssself.

 

(Topaz irises twirling around dilated pupils like miniscule carousels.)

 

(Unnerving how Nicole’s physique had responded to such repulsive stimulus.)

 

Marlene’d been coyly evasive about what she and Dennis got up/down to after Twilight’s Last Gleaming; and Nicole hadn’t drawn her out at the time, nor asked for belated details at this fork-in-the-road moment.  Which was no fork but a skewer to be sidestepped, as Nicole had sensibly done—going so far as to leave The Big Sleep unfinished and do her English term paper on The Long Lavender Look instead.

 

Over a year had passed since then.  Dennis’s letch remained unquenched; just yesterday he’d flung a fresh raspberry, “Ssssufferin’ ssssuccubussss,” at Nicole in Room 413.  Candy Gates had emitted one of her extradistinct yips that posed as a laugh, and Marlene had added a noisy snortle (what a pal!) but Cheryl’d fingered that double-skull talisman and kept her mouth shut.

 

She may have borne up, held out, and survived (unlike Barbara Stanwyck and Lana Turner) but a heap more ought to be doable, pull-offable, get-away-withable, even without the aid of an eerie handcrafted amulet.  Go her one better by besting the Big Kahuna at his own bad-mojo mindgamesmanship—AND end up on top as an indomitable femme fatale, NOT a bass-ackwards Riding Hood in Grandma’s bed.

 

Again: intriguing to mull over in theory.

 

But this time: preliminary to undertaking it in practice.

 

With that in mind, Nicole unwrapped a Snickers (filched from the Eclipse candy counter) and took a decisive chomp of chocolate-nougat-caramel-peanutty fortitude.

 

Behold, we shall come with speed swiftly.

 

Shooting for the dark side of the moon.

 

I’m taller than Napoleon.

 

Paar for the course...

 

*

 

Vicki began thinking of herself in the third-person-singular during the four-day midterms week.  It was another gala pentathlon with her cramtastic bunchmates, bingeing on leftover Easter candy as she redigested nine weeks of instruction that’d been overlaid into obscurity by Operetta stagework, Sweet Sixteenery and getting in shape for track.

 

(One more Cadbury Creme Egg wouldn’t be a season-scuttler.)

 

(Nor would watching from above and slightly to the left of her physical self as it snarfed another handful of licorice Jelly Bellys.)

 

Accelerating that week’s out-of-body/out-of-mind experience was Felicia and Midge Monticello’s commandeering the Volester split-level to grind nonstop for their State Brokers Exam, having completed the Principles of Real Estate course at LCU.  They dared not study at Lutterworth Terrace, where the Maestro was “psyching himself up” for a critical Kickshaw Conservatory concert.  “More like psyching us all out,” remarked Zerl, who spent as much time as possible in the Nakayama apartment on Cedarapple—that is, when she and Keiko weren’t sneaking down to Carly Thibert’s house on North Crocker so Keiko could resume her tutorial duties on the sly.

 

Vicki in turn decamped with textbooks, notebooks and Easter candy to West East Bay for Spanish with Jenna; to the Old Brandoffer Place for Biology with Nonique; to Sprangletop Road for World History with Alex; to Villa Neapolitan for Geometry with Robin; and to the Queen Anne on Jupiter for English with Joss and Fiona (glad to get away from the Plexiglas Palace, where Chloe was cramming for VW midterms).

 

All sorts of music pervaded that out-of-body week—Jackson Browne’s “Running on Empty,” Linda Ronstadt’s “Poor Poor Pitiful Me,” Crystal Gayle’s “Ready for the Times to Get Better,” the Stranglers’s “(Get a) Grip (on Yourself),” X-Ray Spex’s “Oh Bondage! Up Yours!,” Trigo Limpio’s “Rómpeme, Mátame,” Vaughan Williams’s “Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence”—but not “I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together,” since Vicki missed the final episode of The Carol Burnett Show while boning up on Napoleon Bonaparte.

 

(Who’d said Champagne—in victory one deserves it, in defeat one needs it.)

 

(Settle for an additional chocolate bunny.)

 

Each afternoon Vicki reentered her body to run off its extra sugar-and-fat intake at track practice.  She was the first to volunteer for hurdle crew, which handled quick setup and swift removal of the barriers: a typical rookie chore, but one for which Vicki’s recent stage experience came in handy.  It was also likely to be as close as she’d get to hurdling in meets this season—not only were Heather and Snickers Paar at the top of their forms, but Eileen was doing very well and Thirsty K’s leaps had gotten speedier, putting her higher on the depth chart than a stubby-limbed novice like Vicki.

 

Be that as it may: Vicki’s great little legs kept busily active on their own behalf, improving her Personal Bests to 5:49 (mile) and 13:23 (two miles).  Her Klumsy Klutzer hands, though, continued to recoil from the relay baton as if it were a baked potato fresh from the oven and dripping with dairy products.  Changeover after changeover got botched; yet Miz Huntoon kept putting her into the hot-potato rotation.

 

Finally Vanderland Township finished its midterms and reached spring break—a Reader’s Digest Condensed Break, from Friday March 31st through Monday April 3rd.  Track & field practices were held both days plus April Fool’s Saturday, with most of the team showing up for all three; the rest had to submit parentally-signed requests in order to be excused.  Monday’s practice looked to be another washout/freezeout when temps plunged back down into the 30s on Sunday, with a windchill barely above zero.  That night Vicki rebundled herself in flannel jammies, quilted robe, thick bedsocks and fleece-lined slippers to watch the premiere of a new TV series called Dallas, but found it rather dull.  Other than Larry Hagman playing a villain against his usual good-guy type, the only thing that seized her attention was the hot blonde granddaughter’s resemblance to Isabel and therefore Tricia.  In fact for one dizzy moment, Vicki wondered if this could really be Tricia, making her prime-time showbiz debut.  But then significant differences became noticeable, such as Hot Blondie having blue eyes instead of emerald; so Vicki lost interest and went upstairs to warm her own ears inside stereo headphones.

 

Dance dance dance / yowsah yowsah yowsah / bop bop bop bop bow...

 

On Monday the thermometer bounced back toward 70° and practice took place as scheduled.  That was the day (after another round of baton-exchange exasperation, eating up precious time when Vicki could’ve been augmenting her hurdle skills) that she got drawn aside for her first personalized coaching, one-on-one, with Ms. Grigoryan.

 

The Grigster had grown a lot broader than when she’d run as the Armenian Arrow twenty years ago.  During indoor practices at VTHS she would stand tall in the exact center of the bleachers and survey the gym imperturbably; out on Hordt Field she would make slow circumnavigations of the track, absorbing every event in action from a levelheaded standpoint.  She was recognizable a hundred yards away, topped off by a ten-gallon version of the miniature Stetson worn sometimes by Fiona.  Ms. Grigoryan walked with a rolling gait not unlike John Wayne’s, as if she’d just dismounted from a saddle following an extensive gallop; she was in fact an accomplished equestrienne, admired for her horsemanship by Mumbles and Alex and Filly Faye Howell.  Mumbles said the Grigster could ride the meanest bucking bronco on the wild prairie, HA!!  HA!!  HA!!—with Alex hastening to add that no horsies were “mean,” well hardly any, and those that were had probably been abused as foals.

 

Vicki could identify with them as she underwent another ignominious bout of relay drills.  Alex, who was excelling at the 880 medley relay in all three legnths (110-220-440), tried hard to help her master that bastardized slippery-assed stick.  Mile relay runners Roxie and Mumbles patiently repeated pass-and-receive routines with her, as did Sheila-Q and Sammi; even Lisa (through gritted teeth) made an effort to be forbearing.  But catch and clasp had never been fluent verbs in Vicki’s sports vocabulary.  Volleyball, soccer, tennis, badminton, pingpong—those were tolerable because you batted or booted objects away from you.  On the so-to-speak other hand (insofar as Vicki’s palms and fingers were concerned) basketball was a lost cause, as were the fielding sides of softball and kickball.  It ought to be screamingly obvious that relay batons belonged on that futile second list; and when Ms. Grigoryan beckoned her over at Monday’s practice, Vicki hoped against hope that this was going to be officially acknowledged at last.

 

Only don’t say “You’re not even trying,” please Gahd, I can’t bear to be told that twice on two different teams in the same school year—

 

“I needn’t ask if you’re feeling frustrated,” said the Grigster in her brisk dry cowgirl-on-a-dusty-trail voice.

 

“—it’s just—I don’t—I mean—I can’t—”

 

“Take a breath.  Let it out.  Then speak your mind.”

 

Inhale.  Exhale.  “...I am trying, Coach, I’m trying the best I can, but I just don’t think I’m ever going to be good at relays—”

 

“Don’t think.  Don’t strain your brain.  Save that for the classroom.  Out here you develop your instincts, your reflexes, and rely on those.”

 

“...not sure I’ve got any when it comes to batons, ‘cept to fumble ‘em...”

 

“Trust your hands as you trust your heart.  And your feet,” advised Ms. Grigoryan.  Her levelheaded gaze below the ten-gallon brim unhurriedly swept Hordt Field before refocusing on Vicki with a thrifty economical regard.  “We wouldn’t ask you to do this if we didn’t think you had it in you.  All a matter of summoning it up.”

 

Oh, is that all?  Whaddaya think I’ve been trying to do?  (But you could no more sass the Grigster than Clint Eastwood in A Fistful of Dollars.)

 

“...yeah, well... I guess I can keep trying.”

 

“Don’t guess.  Feel it.  Inside your muscles, your sinews, your nerve endings.  Summon it up from there.  Know that your hand’s taking the baton, transferring it from left to right, passing it to the next runner.  Clear your mind of doubt.  Whether you’re in a relay, an individual race, or running the hurdles.  Depend on your body to get you where you’re going, and do what needs to be done along the way.”

 

“Um... I will, Coach.”

 

“That’s a start,” said Ms. Grigoryan, nodding Vicki back onto the track before ambling Dukeishly off.

 

And may the Force be with you.

 

Or: The hands, Grasshopper, are the eyes and tongue of touch.

 

You could end up like Mystic Kevin Wingate if you dabbled too deeply in soul-searching self-actualization.

 

But last night’s Dallas program might’ve been a lot more marketable if they’d cast the Grigster in it.

 

*

 

Up on the bandstand they’re singing about spiders and snakes and how that ain’t what it takes to love me like I wanna be loved by you, while down on the dance floor Froggy Scobee is hoppin’ and boppin’ and doin’ the Watergate with carefree amphibian verve, though Pops (the self-help editor) thinks he’ll “come to a sticky end” which is not the sort of forecast a girl wants to hear her father make concerning her seventh-grade boyfriend, yet jump ahead a few months and Froggy will get snapped up by Diana Dabney after that scag swannifies from uglyducklingness with a rowley powley gammon and spinach—so forget his would-a-wooing-go because it’s ninth grade now, Titania’s demanding a lullaby to ward off long-legged weaving spiders and double-tongued spotted snakes but hark! as one of the fairies croons this incantation like a sea-hag casting maelstrom-spells, the lulla lulla lullaby in that uncanny soprano giving Mirror-Nicole a diabolic frisson while trying out for the role of Hermia amid rude laughter that’s not her fault, it’s Lysander’s for wanting to share one heart one bed two bosoms and one troth (repeating two bosoms twice more) before Hermia has to wake up crying Help me, Lysander! Help me! like a namby-damn-pamby as she begs him to pluck a crawling serpent from her breast before it eats her heart away, so does that lullaby’s protective powers not apply to sleeping Athenians? and why try to repel spiders or snakes (or newts or bloodworms) when Titania herself is a thorny hedgehog alias Rancid Candy Gates who’s reducing Scenes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream to a goresplattered battlefield on which Mirror-Nicole gets crack’d from side to side before storming offstage past a little red-haired girl who gives her a sleepy-looking hatchet-honing s‑m‑i‑l‑e—

 

 —which is one hell of a thing to be awakened by.

 

Not least on the morning after an insufficient eleventh-grade spring break.

 

Ay me, for pity!  What a dream was here!  Shake it off and slap on the warpaint; then, after running to school like a conscientious track athlete, change from sweatpants into a snug charmeuse side-slit skirt and put it to work in Second Hour American History.  Ignore the predictable reactions by jeansed Cheryl Trevelyan and dirndl’d Candy Gates.  Pretend to take no notice of Dennis Desmond’s prattling purtlilangel purtlilangel purtlilangel THIGHS, apart from an askew eyeroll that might be interpretable as a come-hither with-a-slither bring-your-zither.  And don’t be discouraged when Dennis trails C.G.’s overstuffed dirndl-seat out of Room 413, extolling her purtlilpanty LINES.  This isn’t a case of Puck mistaking identities and bedewing the wrong snoozer’s lids—just a timely recoupling of Rancid Titania with her tender ass.

 

“You playing Go Fish now?” asks Marlene out in the hall.

 

“Say what?”

 

“I’d say Baron von Bitepattern slipped off your hook.”

 

“You’re tripping.”

 

“You’re gonna stumble into a tumble if you try to snag him.”

 

“Oh, am I stepping on your toes?”

 

“Hey, I don’t want my babies to catch his rabies.”

 

“Then keep your ‘babies’ inside your bra, Momma.”

 

Having the last word and zinging Marlene about her V-neck disco top as she peels off (travelwise) on the third-floor landing for Mrs. Pentire’s Communication class.

 

Continue downstairs for Physics with Ms. Ohara and further electromagnetism by the side-slit skirt, working its thermodynamic magic on engrossed hornyboys.  None more so than lab partner Tooey Hauck (he ain’t nothin’ but a Hound Dog, droolin’ all the time) who doesn’t hear a word Ms. Ohara’s saying.  Which may not matter, since he’s already been accepted at Arkansas and is exuding damply through a Razorbacks T-shirt.

 

(What a guy.)

 

And what a gal awaits in Sixth Hour Elementary Computer Programming.  This course was prescribed by Pops as a newly-necessary skill in the current workaday world.  Juanita’s qualms about its effect on femininity were allayed by the undeniable oomph of Roxie Jenkins, who filled in as occasional substitute teacher after Mr. Watford’s “Tiptoe Through the Do-Loops” crackup last November.  But he’s been back on the job since February and Roxie’s somewhere nursing a hangover from her end-of-spring-break fling in Ginger Snowbedeck’s decadent company.  So Sixth Hour’s What-a-Gal is the little Sissy Spacek clone in the far corner of the computer lab, seemingly intent on debugging BASIC code yet letting blue gaslight gleam and flare from beneath her heavy eyelids.

 

(Were those lids bedewed by Puck?  Not bloody likely.)

 

Yes: it’s the same crooning sea-hag-soundalike from two years ago.  She too has on a V-neck disco top today, much more expensive than Marlene’s, and though not teeming with boobflesh it’s getting plenty of peeks from the lab’s male technogeeks, Mr. Watford included.

 

(Stifle a childish impulse to compete by flashing thighflesh from the slit skirt.  No point trying to hooksnag anybody here.)

 

Her name is Britt.  The younger daughter of “Hoyt Groningen, Action Weather!” and Dr. Hilde Krühler the public school fanatic.  She’s a sophomore rookie on the track team, running the 100 and 220-yard dashes with Cindy Ryder, Michelle Blundell and another soph rook called Sherlock Holmes or Holtz or Who Cares.  Britt’s been flying under the radar most of the semester; her programming dots didn’t get connected to the Midsummer Night’s freaky fairy till track tryouts began.  Since then, dart—flick—dart—flicks from those gaslight glimmers have been directed at yours truly.  And also at another soph rook, Laurie Hoozitson, who does her best not to flinch.

 

(How do we debug this coding quandary, Mirror-Nicole?)

 

Entering the gym an hour later for afternoon practice, who should be up in the bleachers but Dennis Desmond, baring his bite pattern as he interviews Ms. Grigoryan for the Channel.  (Second-string quizzing: the senior sports editor’s out on Hordt Field with Coach Jung and the boys team.)  Dennis’s topaz-even-when-seen-remotely eyes pore over each girl as she runs or leaps or throws, reminding one and all why tracksters are referred to as “thinclads.”  Unabashed showoffs like Roxie, Ginger and Marlene bask in this scrutiny; others prickle or squirm or ignore it.  And then there’s Britt, whose blue gaslight meets and matches Dennis’s piss-colored shaftbeam to create a greenish miasma that permeates Britt’s corner of the gym—

 

—yet, once again, seems invisible to the rest of those present.

 

“Hey you two!” hollers Burke Quirk’s sister Sheila.  “Take a picture, it’ll last longer, and you can submit it to Penthouse Forum!”

 

“Only if you à trois our ménage, Mam’selle Q-tie patootie pa-frutti yer booty aw rootie,” Dennis ripostes before the Grigster calls a halt to this badinage.  A halt that does nothing to dissipate that will-o’-the-wispy marshlight from seeping across the gym...

 

By tradition, veterans and rookies don’t intermingle post-practice, so Britt isn’t encountered again till you exit the locker room—she half a step behind, not quite treading on your heels.  (Pseudo-deferential: classic passive-aggressive behavior.)

 

Bump almost literally into the Big Kahuna as he loiters just outside the double doors.  Sheila Quirk barges through to challenge him head-on: “Caught you red-eyeballed again, you peeper!  Hanging around girls locker rooms like a sicko perv!”

 

“Like a whoopee-groupie fanboy-handtoy campfollower-crampswallower!” goes Dennis, using thumbs and index fingers to unveil the entire front halves of his eyeballs.  “And as I’ve made mention of on this very spot to your obstinate disregard in the past and the present plus the future come-what-may-or-even-june—THESE are ever-lovin’ Easy-Bake-Oven witchy-brew-coven YELLOW.”

 

“Jaundice—”

 

“—can result from bile-duct blockage, yes yes yes, requiring drainage from the liver to the small intestine, oui oui oui all the way home—and while we’re on that subject I’m here to offer one of you lucky contestants an all-expenses-expended experience: being driven to the destination of your choice within the forty-eight continguous states in a Jolly Olly Orange Camaro with baby-blue rally stripes—”

“Not it!” hollers Sheila Quirk.

 

“I’m sorry, you’ve already been disqualified by our panel of judges-justices-and-magistrates for wearing a black lace garter belt under tacky khaki chinos.  Na na na na, hey hey, goodbye—” (as Sheila-Q departs in a huff) “—spread my passenger’s seat wide open, it’s primed and ready for you to come on down!  Let’s make a steal of a deal that you’ll feel on four wheels as we squeal it’s surreal to congeal on a Tuuuuuuuesday afffffffternooooooon innnnnnn Aaaaaaa-prilllllll...”

 

From a dozen voices: “Give it a rest, Dennis!”

 

Yours not among them.  Twitch that charmeuse side-slit and advance one of the best-rounded legs in Vanderlund as quid bait for his quo trap.  Rearrange those prettily shellacked features into a pick-me-up-if-you’re-man-enough pattern designed to revamp his bad-mojo bloodlust; then shoot for the dark side of the pulp/noir moon and get off on indomitable top—

 

“Sssswing yer partner!”

 

—with an impossibly long lawless arm stretching forth and around to pull a ripcord in the form of a little red-haired goblinette who turns you into a spinning top as she brushes blithely past crooning an abrasive haiku—

 

Twist and shout, baby It’s a hundred and eighty Degrees in the shade

 

—leaving Mirror-Nicole ditched and disoriented in the corridor, halted in her tracks as if in a game of bass-ackwards freeze tag.  Facing away from them and toward a puckish Marlene, a pallid Laurie Hoozitson, and that soph rook Vicki Vhatever who looks like she wants to say something meaningful but isn’t sure exactly what.

 

*

 

Soon thereafter, as Kraftwerk’s “Metal on Metal” clanged and beeped over the Boss speakers:

 

“D’you know Dennis Desmond at all?”

 

(Snort)  “OH yeah.”

 

“What’s that s’posed to mean?”

 

“Means yeah, I know him.  Since grade school.  Don’t let him get hold of a bat.”

 

“Why?  What’ll he do to it?”

 

“Swing wild.  Fracture a catcher’s helmet, maybe his skull.”

 

“Oh—I thought you meant... y’know, a flying bat.”

 

“He’d let a bat go flying if he thought it might hit somebody.”

 

“Yeah, I s’pose...  Um, d’you know Britt Groningen?”

 

“That Fleur’s kid sister?”

 

“Yeah.  The little redhead.  Lots of freckles.”  (And eyelids as heavy as Avery’s half-hoods.)

 

Clang clang clang / beep beep beep / Groningen Groningen Groningen...

 

Then, with an ahem, Avery rephrased Spike Jones and His City Slickers:

“I can do without their singing / but I wish I had their dough.”

 

*

 

Friday the 7th of April.  A warmer-than-normal—if there was still such a thing as “normal” in The Cityland—afternoon.

 

Season opener for the Vanderlund Township High School girls track & field team, hosting a dual meet against Archbishop Houlihan’s Lady Cardinals.

 

Besides familiar opponents like Josephine “Junior” Nygren, Raphaelle “Ralph” Monroe and Petronilla “Boomer” Wrang, the Cards showcased would-be world-beaters like sprinter Helga Tolstoy, hurdler Corinne Love, and distance runner Maria Gonzales O’Brien.  (Junior’s Franco-Swedish heritage was outexoticized by MGO’B’s blend of Ireland with Guatemala.)  Brother Francis, the Houlihan head coach, could’ve been a twin brother of Mr. Folz who chainsmoked so many Camels at VW that he got dubbed the Ambulatory Ashtray.  Brother Francis didn’t step off the Houlihan bus gripping a cigarette in his fingers or between his teeth, but both stayed clenched (and yellower than Dennis Desmond’s irises) all the time he was at VTHS.

 

Start time for NESTL(É) afternoon track meets was 4 p.m.  The league hoped to confine these meets to three-and-a-half hours, ending no later than 7:30 when there was still a trace of twilight to help girls get home safely.  The Mad Bludgeoner might’ve been out of the headlines for several months now, but he still remained at large—or on the loose, according to those with lingering suspicions of Wilmer Turkenkopf.

 

The order of events matched the one scheduled for the State Championship Meet six weeks from now.  Some people would’ve preferred beginning with the quickest event (100-yard dash) and concluding with the longest (two-mile run) but NESTL(É) wanted these meets to be appealing to spectators, whose ticket revenue was sorely needed in girls track & field coffers.  Getting the longest event over with before everyone became jaded seemed to make sense; so the two-mile run was one of the first on the program.

 

Vicki, who’d done well in the past week’s preliminary heats, got the nod for the two-mile along with Rhonda, Susan and Gwen.  (Alex was prepping for the next event, the 880 medley relay.)  Lining up for the Cardinals were Boomer, Maria, Junior—after she finished making out with Buddy Marcellus in the grandstand—and Crazy Daisy Culpepper.  This last-minute selection modeled herself on Anita from West Side Story, mamboing the night away in what Houlihan’s Sister Loretto deplored as “lowlife hoodlum hangouts”—despite having an aunt who’d been President Ford’s ambassador to Luxembourg.  No great surprise that Daisy hard-charged the same party circuit as Roxie Jenkins and Ginger Snowbedeck, both of whom were now at trackside jawing at her (when they should’ve been gearing up for the 880 medley like Alex).  Beside them Sheila-Q traded jeers with ex-schoolmates Junior and MGO’B, asking chunky Maria if she still scarfed down corned-beef-and-cabbage quesadillas.

 

“Squeegee, the only spice in your life is day-old saccharin!” Maria cracked back.

 

Eileen O’Kinney didn’t contribute to this heckling; she was diligently mobilizing for the 220-yard hurdles, and framing how her preoccupation might best be documented (scribble scribble scribble) in a human interest story.

 

Likewise aloof was Boomer Wrang, engaged in her ceaseless re-enactment of The Triumph of Joan of Arc.  No banner did she hold, no suit of armor did she wear, just a red jersey with black shorts and gray distance spikes.  Yet even in these thinclad togs Boomer bestrode her segment of the track like monumental marble statuary—

 

—and Vicki, who till then was mostly appreciative that as a miler you didn’t have to crouch down into starting blocks with your rear end in the air for Split-Pea’s camera to capture, sucked in a breath and exhaled an entirely different expression of gratitude.

 

Thank Gahd Avery’s playing baseball at Front Tree and not here to see this.  Even in twice-as-tall twice-as-lean profile, Boomer Wrang’s a dead ringer for that photo in last year’s Baratarian of Rosalind Kuhn!  I bet Avery’s still carrying a torch for her—and it’d get reignited by the sight of Saint Joan burning at the stake!  And oh my Gahd, “Boomer ‘n’ Bomber”—that’d be too perfect for words!  But stake or no stake she looks cold as ice, willing to sacrifice his love or whatever it was he felt for Roz to her own obsession with eavesdropping on Heavenly Voices—

 

“On your mark!”

 

Oops—assume the standing start stance: best foot forward, just behind the line, front leg bent, opposite arm raised, back foot poised on its ball, body leaning in from the hips, spine kept straight, eyes focused ahead, ears excuse-the-expression “cocked” for the sound of the starter’s gun because there’s no get set in distance races—

 

—BANG—

 

—and you’re off and running, relieved to hear only one BANG since two would signal a false start (most probably by Gwen “seeing a ghost”) and this year a no-false-start rule’s been adopted: automatic disqualification for anyone jumping the gun.

 

Okay, two miles, 3200 meters, eight laps around the track at an even speed for the first seven, conserving energy for the final kick.  Run tall, head up, chest out, shoulders back, arms swinging freely, hands and jaw relaxed, slight body lean: keep everything smooth and mellow.  Above all pace yourself, steady-as-she-goes, a long way to run yet but don’t trail by too much as Rhonda and Boomer pull ahead of the pack and the rest bunch up behind them in the two inmost lanes.  Second lap done, third lap done while Crazy Daisy drops back out of sight and Gwen’s ragged breathing translates to this is bullshit as she too loses ground, fourth lap done and the first mile run in less than six minutes, continue to circle the track, easy-peasy child’s play compared with the morning steeplechase to school, now pick up the pace a bit to match that set by Boomer and Rhonda, don’t get boxed in by Big Sue and MGO’B, both Amazonesses compared to you and Junior, fifth lap done, sixth lap done, begin edging toward the outside which means extra running but’ll give you room to maneuver except that Junior’s also going wide even on the turns, don’t let that little squirrel outscamper you, rely on stamina and endurance to hold the pace as you complete the seventh lap and the frontrunners start to sprint, Boomer leading with Rhonda hot on her heels and Crazy Daisy ahead of them but about to get lapped, looking like she’s slogging through a bog on Jell-O legs while you and the others round the last curve and accelerate into the home stretch, that final kick you’ve been saving energy for—so push it, push it now, push it hard as you can, arms pumping legs pumping feet pounding heart pounding as you make your all-out move pull away from Maria away from Big Sue and then from Junior zero in on the hellbent seat of Boomer Wrang’s black shorts ‘cause even if Avery never asks you to pose for a sculpted statue he sure as hell couldn’t be enticed by such a flat-assed Joan of Arc who isn’t on fire as Rhonda the Road Runner goes beep-beep and zooms across the finish line with Boomer behind her and you coming in third, not wanting to quit, to lose the rush of momentum and surge of adrenaline when you’re obliged to throttle down, slow to a stop, step off the track... bend forward, hands on knees, catch your breath.  Straightening up to slap palms with teammates and competitors except for Gwen who’s collapsed onto the infield clutching her stomach—eww, please don’t barf—and Crazy Daisy who hasn’t yet finished her final lap but is gamely wobbling down the backstretch.

 

Times?  Rhonda 12:46.7, Boomer 12:49.3, yourself 13:20.8 (a new Personal Best), Junior 13:23.4, Susan 13:26.0, Maria 13:28.6—and draw a charitable curtain over Gwen and Daisy.

 

Out of the second-person-singular-present-tense, Vicki toweled off and chugged Gatorade, wishing she had time to root for Alex, Mumbles, Roxie and Ginger in the 880 medley.  But that was already almost over, the clock was ticking ever onward; she had to go help set up the 220 low hurdles.  This took a sizable crew, Vicki and Laurie and Jackie Vince and Sheila-Q plus several coaches and meet officials, to correctly position ten barriers in each of eight lanes staggered halfway around the track; and setup took a lot longer to do than the actual event, which would be over in under forty seconds.

 

Aside from chores like hurdle crew, there was a lot of downtime for participants in a three-and-a-half-hour meet; no one was allowed to take part in more than three of the seventeen events (twelve track and five field).  Sheila was restricted to only one today, the mile relay; she’d strained her lower back on Wednesday practicing the triple jump, and the coaches had withdrawn her from that and the 880 run despite S-Q’s brass-bold assertion she was fully healed.  Ms. Ohara’d even made her blush (which Vicki, who happened to be nearby, hadn’t thought Sheila was capable of) by urging her to strengthen her pelvic floor muscles, warning that further injury could result in urinary leakage.

 

“(If you so much as breathe a hint of this to Robbo or Feef I will rupture your pancreas, Vicki Volester—don’t think I don’t know how!)” she’d whisper-raged afterward.  “(Thank the Lord Laurie or Marlene didn’t hear her say that!)”

 

“(Hey, you better build up your core and not just the pelvic part either—I don’t want to have to fill in for you on that damnfool mile relay!)”

 

Hurdle placement done, Q loaded up on sustenance for herself and fellow crew rookies from the gal’s gotta have fuel commissariat—bananas, apricots, Nature Valley granola bars—which she doled out with her usual Future Nurses of America pugnacity.  (“All right for you, smartymouth!” when Jackie Vince asked “What, no Jujubes?”)  Munching on these snacks, they watched the hurdlers line up for the Lady Gondoliers: Heather, Nicole, Eileen and Kirsten.  Thirsty K was sweatily buoyant, having come directly from achieving 16’8¾” in the long jump and then gulping down as much hydration as Ms. Ohara would allow, which was more than most girls could stomach without “sloshing” through back-to-back events.

 

Vicki, yearning to be out on the track alongside her, appraised the four Cardinal hurdlers as future opponents.  Corinne Love was stacked like Becca or Crystal or Theresa Challis, against the latter of whom she’d contended in January’s Junior Miss pageant; Chass said Corinne might appear to be naively innocent but was in fact a wirepuller “in every sense of the word, tee hee.”  Alyssa Ferrera reputedly had The Vocation and was destined for a convent, though running hurdles in high school seemed an overallegorical way to get there.  Debralee Bartlett looked like Florence Henderson, complete with Wessonality and a flipped-end shag haircut; the sort of student whom teachers would leave in charge of their class when they had to step out to pop a Valium.  And if Debralee could double for Mrs. Brady, her teammate Shawn Egan could be a stand-in for Marcia Marcia Marcia, even if no football would be so vulgar as to smack her golden nose.  (Sheila-Q had been tempted to do this back in fifth grade—“even then you could tell Shawn was a Future Sorority Pledge of Snooty Pooty Pie.”)

 

Rev-it-up rituals were going on in all eight lanes: touching toes, hopping around, stepping side to side, leg lifts and kicks.  Eileen, divested of her pocket spiral, was visibly jittery (snort by unsympathetic S-Q) and Vicki had a brief wild hope of getting subbed in, even though she’d rather have that happen with the shorter straighter 110-yard event regardless of its barriers being three inches higher.  No such luck, of course; “On your mark!” was announced and Eileen hunkered down, stepping into her starting block as did the other seven girls.  “Get set!”—eight backsides were raised (Vicki reflexively tugging a wedgie out of her own) for Split-Pea to FLASSSHHHH flassshhhh flassshhhh at—

 

—but what the hurdle crew rookies heard in that moment before the starter’s gun went off was Laurie Harrison going “Uh-oh”—

 

—and Vicki, her head turning to trace Laurie’s line of sight, beheld a pair of irises (topaz-even-at-this-distance) in the grandstand, trained upon one particular hurdler.  Not golden Shawn or buoyant Kirsten or flip-ended Debralee or jittery Eileen or vocational Alyssa or virtuoso Heather or even Corinne Love whose bent-forward bosom almost swept the cinders below.  No, it was—

 

—BANG—

 

*

 

Backtrack.

 

Forty-eight hours, more or less.

 

Plus or minus, what’s the diff?  Either way it’s Wednesday evening, which means Juanita has another of her middle-of-the-week “sick headaches.”  They’re regular as clockwork orange sunshine at a hippie festival.  Like a good kid (emphasis on like) I offer to pick up her latest prescription at Osco Drug.  She’s tried more meds than a fussy junkie at a pharmacist’s buffet, but nothing works for long.  The thud-thud-thudding comes back to her brain like disco Muzak in a stuck elevator.

 

I drive Juanita’s Mercury Montego, which may have been named after “the jewel of the Jamaican coast” but is just a ten-year-old rustbucket in the cold light of day.  Or the colder light of streetlamps on Gloaming Avenue, where I detour en route to the drugstore.  Parking under one cold lamp, I get out and stroll across the street to take a gander (better that than a goose) through the fancy-assed front gates of Foley’s Folly.

 

Humming: Fooools rush innnn where AYN-gels fear to tread...

 

We were warned to steer clear of this place when we were kids, so naturally we jogged and biked and skateboarded past it as often as we could.  Then and now it sticks out like the Amazing Colossal Man’s sore thumb—part pointy tower, part concrete silo.  Fearless Frieda used to unlatch these gaudy gates and swing on one, daring me to do the same on the other.  Sometimes a butler-type guy would open a door or window and yell at us to scram, but he’d never lock the gates so we couldn’t try it again.

 

If we were “lucky,” the Big Kahuna himself would come out and chase us.  In the funny papers I don’t remember Dennis the Menace chasing Gina, much less Margaret, but “our” Dennis was a different story (and how).  Frieda’d always outrun him, with a lot of on-purpose dodging and weaving just out of reach.  “Missed me, missed me, now you gotta kiss me!” she’d yell, and he’d make mwah-mwah faces at her.  I usually got caught soon but offhandedly, as if by a jaded hyena on scavenger patrol.  Then I’d be hoisted under one arm and toted around like a rolled-up carpet—“the penalteee for being a shorteee lightweighteee,” he’d singsong.  Frieda didn’t like that, on either my grappled behalf or her untouched own.

 

Even as a Little Kahuna, Dennis was as strong as he was fast as he was “fresh.”  Put ‘em all together, multiply by three and that’s how hyper he was.  “The Wild Boy of Borneo,” taken captive and sold to an orphanage (so he claimed) from which he got handpicked for adoption by That Weird Photographer Lady in the Folly on Gloaming.  Her real name’s Morrigan Foley-Desmond, but the pictures she takes are most definitely weird.  Bizarre.  Grotesque.  Looking at them, you can see why she’d choose Dennis to be her son and grow up in that Amazing Colossal Sore Thumb.  Which he calls “the Starmaking Planetarium of the Sideshow Abnormalities.”

 

All of us girls at Petty Elementary curled our lips at him and his manic pranks.  This was partly because he turned most of us on—and that was before we had a clue what on was.  Long before we got “our friends” or had “that talk” with our mothers, which in my case gave Juanita a royal sick headache.  Crush is the accurate word to describe how we really felt about him, deep down, even when we weren’t dangling from his armpit.

 

Classic example of your Bad Boy/Surf Bum Complex.  Even Frieda fell for it, in spite of her excelsior! battle cry.  We never discussed this in any relevant way, but my guess is she fantasized she could “straighten Dennis out”—like a barrel full of Tasmanian devils during a thunderstorm.  Better her than me, I thought at the time.  Worse off than me if she actually tried it.  As a matter of fact he didn’t ask either of us out in seventh grade, the first year we were allowed to sort-of-date.  Then we lost day-to-day track of him when he got transferred to Z team for eighth.  Then Frieda got shanghaied to Athens Grove for ninth.  Wouldn’t surprise me to hear she’s completely off men by now, what with her dad’s fatal fling with Miss Gibb, and then having to trail after those Four Genies of the Lezbo Apocalypse.

 

Anyway—fast forward back to Wednesday evening outside Foley’s Folly.

 

There’s a lock on its front gates nowadays.  Also a barking noise coming from someplace, though Dennis didn’t use to have a dog.  If he had, he would’ve made it poop over every sidewalk in the neighborhood, and used it like a bloodhound while chasing us.

 

Rough rough rough...

 

A couple months ago we screened Kiss Me Deadly at the Eclipse.  In it this evil doctor warns the femme fatale about the mysterious hotbox they both wanted, which she shoots him to grab hold of.  “Listen to me as if I were Cerberus, barking with all his heads at the gates of Hell,” he gasps before dropping dead.  “I will tell you where to take it, but don’t—don’t open—the box.”

 

Well, here I am at the gates of Folly, being barked at by what sounds like a dog with at least one head.  Maybe Dennis is hosting the Barnyard Bastards for a Chinese checkers tournament, and they’re mouthing off when they jump each other’s marbles.  Then a needle of funky music threads through the roughs:

 

Some people call me Maurrrrice (wheep-whoop!) ‘Cause I speak of the pompatus of love—

 

That could be Wolfie wheep-whooping, though his real name is Allen Richard Mullane and it wouldn’t be a lie to call him A. Dick.  “Pompatus” would also apply if you spelled it Pompeii’d Ass.  But those lines are from a song called “The Joker” and that title belongs exclusively to Dennis Desmond, even if he doesn’t have green hair.  Unless it got stained that color yesterday in the Girls Gym, matching eyebeams with Brittle Britt’s ghastly gaslight before he pulled his switcheroo outside the locker room.

 

A belated April Fool prank, some might call that.

 

Sssswing your partner.  Twist and shout, baby.

 

Humming: C’mon and twist your head a little tighter now...

 

Maybe Brittle Britt’ll be the one to open a mysterious glowing hotbox, and get “turned into brimstone and ashes” by the resulting radioactive inferno.  That’d be a classic Bad Boy/Surf Bum/Joker-prank, all right.  Though such a wipeout’s not as heartwarming a sensation as I expected it to feel.  ‘Cause just then a frosty gust of wind—off the Lake, you might think—blows me away from the gates and back across to the Montego.  So I take the hint and go play like-a-good-kid at Osco.

 

On Thursday I’m ignored by the “interested parties” in American History, in Computer Programming, and at track practice.  Which ought to be fine by me, but isn’t.  Not up to Paar, you might say.  I say it is up to me.  So that evening I again ask for the car keys, this time to go over to Tooey Hauck’s house and work on a Physics project.  Or so I tell Juanita, who approves because Tooey’s father’s a high-enough muckety-muck at the Naval Hospital that the Haucks don’t have to live on-base at the Training Station.  She doesn’t understand, though, why Hound Dog (rough rough rough) is bound for Arkansas instead of Annapolis.

 

Or, if she suspects the truth, why I head not for his house but back to Gloaming.

 

This time when I go up to the gates I take hold of their grillwork and press my face between the bars, though not so far as to get trapped like on Leave It to Beaver.

 

There’s no barking tonight, not so I can hear.  And no flames to be seen, radioactive or otherwise.  Which doesn’t stop me from being drawn to this place like a magnetized moth.  (Talk about your Physics projects.)  “Moth without a flame” is the sort of situation where I wish I weren’t in training, so I could smoke.  Cigs, pot, hash, even ditchweed.  Blaze away.  Do more with inflammation than simply play with matches.

 

I will not get burned.  I will not get scorched, or singed, or seared.

 

And I will not submit to the old switcheroo.  The dark side of the moon is mine for the shooting.  No poaching’s allowed on that territory, nor any interference with my full-speed high-jump hurdle-leaps.  Especially not by some tomato-topped frecklepuss who croons like a banshee on dexies.  There’s enough bad-mojo mindgamesmanship involved here as it is—

 

Pause as a face appears at an upstairs window in the Sore Thumb.

 

Not the face of that butler-type guy who used to yell at us.  Too slight, too slim.  But not too blurred, even in the darkness and from this distance.  It clearly wears a smirk and is framed by long red hair.

 

Her again goes a still small voice like the echo of a cuss-out.  Little Sees-All-Knows-All.

 

Like hell she does.  I stand my ground, pressed between the grillwork bars, and outstare the face at the window till it withdraws from view.  Not as if in retreat, though.  More like it’s sidestepping a fork in the road.

 

Or to make way for another fridgified gust that blows me bass-ackwards across the street to fetch up against the Montego.  Maybe Mother Nature’s using up leftover winter wind now that April’s here, but I don’t think so.  ‘Cause this gust didn’t come bearing snow or sleet—just a single hissyfitted word:

 

...Ssssnickerssss...

 

On Friday morning when I get to school and unlatch my locker, I find a surprise inside.  Not a candy-coated Crackerjack prize, either.  It’s a string from which hang three Polaroid snapshots, trimmed so they’d fit through the locker vent.  They’re all of the same subject, taken from different angles—a female figure with no clothes on.  Full-frontal, in profile, from the rear.  The first two have a black sticker dot covering the head.  In all three, the arms are raised and appear to be chained to a rock wall.

 

All three of them hang and twist there for a minute or two like a weird-bizarre-grotesque mobile.  Once again, nobody else in the hall seems to notice anything unusual.

 

Then I rip the string down and stuff the Polaroids into my purse, making it feel like there’s a grenade inside it with the pin pulled out.  Or maybe a delayed-reaction nuclear warhead, though Ms. Ohara would say that’s “not a viable concept” Physics-wise.  I hope she’s right, because I keep sneaking peeks inside the purse all through the day—except during American History and Computer Programming.  Once again, the “interested parties” in those classes act like they’re ignoring me.  I do my best not to show them any kind of expression whatsoever.

 

One thing’s for sure—that female figure can’t possibly be Britt.  Much too fleshy, whichever way you look at it.  I try to feel sorry for whoever-it-is, not only because of the bondage and exposure but for not being in better shape.  I always keep myself in trim condition, especially the thighs so they won’t blimp up, and not just for track & field.  It was revolting to see Gigi Pyle’s body go all bo-nanna-fanna-y last December, as if she were pigging out for a Christmas pudding.  A girl ought to have more self-respect.

 

But those Polaroids weren’t snuck into my locker as a warning to watch my weight.  More like to watch my step.  And not just in track & field.

 

Call it an “object lesson.”  Call it whatever you damn well like—you can’t scare me.  I will not be frightened, or freaked out, or fazed in any way.  And I don’t need to hide behind some double-skullfaced amulet either.  War paint and a leopard-fur bikini are all I need, like a savage jungle warrioress.

 

Make do with Lady Gondolier jersey and shorts as I suit up for this afternoon’s track meet against Houlihan.  Keeping an eye out for Brittle Britt, who prudently (stealthily) hides herself on the rookie side of the locker room.  Keeping the other eye out for Menacing Dennis as we take our places on Hordt Field.  Sure enough, there he is (was there any doubt?) using his X-ray vision on every girl out here.

 

Your yellow eyes won’t see through me, Sicko Perv.  Want a peepshow?  Try Corinne Love, check how low her centers-of-gravity go.  Or try chaining Heather Hendon to a rock now that she’s been accepted at Florida State.  She’d drag the rock along with her, even while em-bare-assed.  “Right?  Right.”

 

Forget it.  Forget him.  Shake ‘em both off.  Loosen up for the 220 low hurdles.  Heather’ll finish first like she always does, but I bet I can beat Lovejugs and come in second.  Then move on to the high jump right after that.  Show ‘em what a track & field all-rounder is really made of.

 

I’m in lane five, with Heather to the left and behind me (staggered start) in lane four and Lovehandles to the right and ahead in lane six.  Don’t suppose a Nice Catholic Girl like her would pose in the bare buff and manacles, unless there’s some female saint who got martyred that way.  But Corinne has the same excessive bodily proportions as in those Pornoroids.  Good luck heaving ‘em over the hurdles—

 

“On your mark!”

 

(I meant that ironically)

 

“Get set!”

 

(about good luck)

 

—BANG—

 

Quick sprint off the blocks find my stride hit the first hurdle up and over nice and low then one two three clear the second hurdle gliding not floating one two three clear the third great form keep it up one two three clear the fourth here comes the curve now it gets trickier one two three—

 

—and just when I should maintain the rhythm of my stride pattern going round this bend I’m suddenly reminded of Lilo the freakishly strong killer slut in The Long Lavender Look running across the highway a few inches in front of Travis McGee’s speeding pickup causing him to wreck it ‘cause she’s wearing next to nothing like the escaped mental patient played by Cloris Leachman in Kiss Me Deadly who flags down Mike Hammer’s car and almost causes another wreck ‘cause she only has on a trenchcoat swiped maybe from some other private eye—

 

—and with all of that in mind I stutter-step, mistime my leap, clip the crossbar with my trail foot and fall flat on my face.  Elbows.  Right shoulder.  Left knee.

 

Try to pick myself up and carry on.  No penalty for knocking down a hurdle so long as I go completely over it, but too many parts of me are in too much pain and some of them are bleeding.  (“One into your Kotex Complex!” I can imagine Jawbone laughing his chin off, before his voice gets drowned out by owwies.)  So here comes Ms. Ohara with the first aid kit and I’m helped off the track.  Trying not to cry like a namby-damn-pamby.

 

And before they finish patching me up, they have to start bandaging Helga Tolstoy of Houlihan who limps over with eyes big as dinner plates, biting her lips and clutching her hip.  Partly to hide what an all-rounder is really made of from showing through a big rip in her torn shorts.  There’s an equally big rhubarb going on in the straightaway, where the Cardinals are accusing Britt of illegal contact in the 100-yard dash—sideswiping Helga and sending her sprawling.  The one they call Ralph Monroe is purple with rage as she screams at Sheila Quirk, who yells furiously back till coaches pull them apart while the pudgy soph rook who talks like Rodney Dangerfield says “I tell yuh, this meet is turning into a regulation demolition derby.”

 

But louder than all this is the razzmatazz inside my brain, ricocheting like a random sniper shot as it singsongs You never could take a joke, Ssssnickerssss and croons a Gondoliers-y tune—

 

What a lot of mischief-making   Accidental body-aching Ever see a face out-breaking   On a meddler’s messed-up head? Though she aches with pain exceeding   What if we add leeches feeding On her veins despite her pleading?   Fleshy white and bloody red!              List and learn              List and learn...

 

 

 

 * * * * * * * * * * * * *

 

 

 

 * * * * * * * * * * * * *

 

Return to Chapter 49                          Proceed to Chapter 51