Ghost (5 page)

“Okay, just sign him out,” she said.

Coach scribbled something on a piece of paper, checked his watch, jotted the time down, met the principal, shook his hand, apologized to him for what I did, and we were out of there. On the way down the hall, Coach didn't say a thing. Not a word. But as soon as we got in his cab, he lit me up.

“What were you thinking telling those people I'm your uncle? Do you know that's probably against the law? I'm not sure if it is or isn't but it probably is, and
if it is, you got me out here committing crimes. I've known you for one day. One day! And I just kidnapped you!”

I kept quiet because Coach was really mad. Plus, I was super grateful that he came and got me, and I didn't want to say anything to mess that up. Shoot, he might've turned around and took me back to the school if I said the wrong thing.

Then finally, after a few minutes, he calmed down a little and asked, “What happened anyway?”

“I got in a fight.” I stared out the window as we passed Mr. Charles's store.

“Care to elaborate?” Coach pried.

“Okay. So there's this dude, Brandon Simmons. He's always getting on me about my mom and where I live and how I look and all that. And today, I just couldn't take it no more.” I faced Coach. He glanced at me and then back to the road. “So I jumped on him. Beat him down.”

“And what, you think that makes you tough?” Coach scoffed.

I thought about it for a second. “I don't know.”

“Does that make it right?” he asked.

What is it about adults that makes them all just say the same things? Like they all studied the same book
about grown-up-ness, memorizing phrases like,
Does that make it right?
and
Be the bigger person.

I just shrugged. Spoke with my shoulders. I kinda wanted to say,
Yes. Yes, me punching Brandon in the face makes it right, because he had been begging for it for forever.
It made it right for everybody he joked on, and those kids would've given me their honor roll certificates for what I did. That wasn't the answer Coach was looking for. But man, that's how I felt.

Coach drove through town, and eventually we ended up at Martin Luther King Park. He said that since I had cost him a half day's worth of fares—the front seat wasn't even all junky yet—I would have to make it up to him by putting in extra work at the track, which was fine with me.

Coach grabbed his whistle and clipboard from the glove compartment. “Okay, here's how you're spending your suspension. We got us three hours before practice. We're going to use this time to get you caught up on the way all this goes.”

“How all what goes?”

“Being on my team, boy.”

I could tell he was still irritated, but not as much as he had been.

We headed over to the track, the bright white lines
marking out the red lanes, the green field in the middle.

“Okay, so first things first. Where's your practice clothes?” Coach asked.

“These them,” I said.

“You have on jeans and high-tops,” he stated the obvious.

I looked at myself. There was a stain on my sneakers. A new one. Maybe ketchup. Or chocolate milk. “So?” I said. “What's wrong with that?”

Coach sat down on a bench, stretched his legs out. “You know what, don't worry about it. We'll figure that out later. Let's just start with some stretching.”

Apparently there were a whole slew of different kinds of stretches, and Coach showed me how to do them all. Each one was for a different reason. This one for this part of the leg, that one for that part of the leg, another one for your back. Then jumping jacks, toe touches, push-ups. It all seemed silly to me, but not as silly as the next part—the two-lap warm-up jog.

Me and Coach bounced around the track, him telling me to keep my arms tucked, which was actually hard to do. He said form is everything when it comes to running, and that it has more to do with form than how fast your legs move. That didn't sound right. To
me, it seemed like if my arms were tucked but my legs weren't moving fast, then I wasn't gonna be beating nobody. Just common sense. But then again, I didn't think a two-lap jog—as slow as we were jogging—would get me going, but by the time we finished I was pouring sweat.

“Good, good,” he said as we got back to the bench. He bounced around on his toes like a boxer before finally settling down. “Feels good, don't it?”

I wiped my face with my shirt and took a seat. I was tired and energized at the same time, which was weird.

“I didn't do it to make me feel tough,” I blurted out of nowhere.

Coach stopped bouncing. He sat down next to me and grabbed a towel from his bag.

“What you talking about?” he asked, wiping sweat from his bald head. More like buffing it off.

“What you asked me in the car? If beating up Brandon makes me tough,” I reminded him. “I said I didn't know, but I do.” We locked eyes. “The answer is no, it don't make me tough.”

Coach moved the towel from his head to his neck. “So what does it make you, then?”

“I don't know, but not tough.” I thought for a
second. “Because for something to make you feel tough, you gotta be a little bit scared of it at first. Then you gotta beat it. But I wasn't scared of Brandon at all. He's just a big guy with a big mouth. That ain't really all that scary to me.” I had been thinking about this when we were running around the track, warming up. In between Coach's tips about form and all that stuff, my brain was kicking that question around.

“Let me guess,” Coach said, now flinging the towel over his shoulder. “You're one of these kids who ain't scared of nothing or nobody.”

“Nah.” I chuckled just for a second because I knew the kinds of kids Coach was talking about. The kids who say they ain't scared but really be scared of everything. Kids like Brandon. He talked all that trash and teased people because he was shook. A cupcake. But that wasn't me.

“I ain't saying that. I've definitely been scared of somebody before. Real scared,” I added, thinking about how loud a gun sounds when it's fired in a small room. “That's how come I know how to run so fast. But now, the only person I'm scared of, other than my mother . . . I mean, like, I do things I know ain't cool, but even though I know they ain't cool, like beating on Brandon, all of a sudden I'm doing it anyway, y'know?
So I guess . . . I guess the only other person I'm really scared of, maybe . . . is me.”

A grunt seeped from Coach. He rubbed his right knee.

“I hear ya, kid,” he said, wincing, stretching out his right leg, bending it, then straightening it. Then he did the same to the left. “Trouble is, you can't run away from yourself.” Coach snatched the towel from his shoulder, folded into a perfect square, and set it in the space between us. “Unfortunately,” he said, “ain't
nobody
that fast.”

I KNOW IT
seems like this was the best suspension day maybe in history. And to be honest, it was. At least, at first. I got to punch that jerk Brandon in the face—I know, I know, not cool, but still!—leave school early, and hang out at the track with my new coach—because I was on a team now—who turned out to be a pretty cool dude. Me and Coach didn't go no further into my life or nothing like that, which was a good thing because I never really told nobody about my dad. Instead Coach asked me who my favorite basketball player was.

“LeBron,” I said, like it should've been obvious. “Who else?”

“Who else?” Coach said, surprised. “Uh . . . let me think . . . Michael Jordan?”

“Jordan? Come on, man. Jordan is like somebody's granddaddy. Jordan don't wanna see LeBron on his worst day. LeBron could be sick from a bad batch of cafeteria chicken drummies and still give Jordan the business.”

Coach stood up. “See, that's the problem with you kids. Y'all don't know what a true
champ
is.”

“Coach, I hate to break it to you, but LeBron
is
a champ. He got
rangs
,” I said, holding up two fingers and wiggling them around.

“But Jordan has
six
.” Now Coach held up both his hands. All five fingers spread on his right, just his pointer finger up on his left. He wiggled them like I did. “Six!”

“Jordan got
six
?” Whoa! I probably should've known that, but I didn't. Dang. I knew he won a few, but six? “Is that the Guinness world record?”

“The what?” Coach asked.

“The Guinness world record. Gotta be.” I put it in my head to check the book when I got a chance.

“I don't know, probably. He was the greatest of all time.” Coach shot an invisible jump shot, his tongue hanging out his mouth. It looked ridiculous. Clearly he wasn't a ballplayer.

Then I asked him about that guy I read about who was supposed to be the fastest man alive. Usain Bolt. Coach knew all about him, too.

“Usain ran a nine-five-eight,” Coach said.

“What's that mean?” I asked, because the numbers nine, five, and eight meant nothing to me. They're not points or nothing like that. At least I didn't think they were. I actually wasn't even really sure if you could score points in track or not. Just seemed like the kind of sport you just win ribbons and medals or whatever.

“That was his time for the one hundred meter.” Coach pointed up the track toward the start line he had had everybody sprinting from the day before. “From there”—he moved his hand to the finish line—“to there. Nine seconds and fifty-eight milliseconds. The boy is like lightning.”

I looked at the distance and in my head counted, one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi, and pictured myself running. Nine seconds seemed like a pretty long time.

“But that ain't even that fast,” I said. Plus it just didn't seem like one hundred meters was all that long. I mean, I had just run it the day before in what had to be six or seven seconds. Couldn't have been more than eight.

“You don't think so?” Coach asked, flashing a sly grin. “You think you can beat that?”

I looked at the distance again. One Mississippi, two Mississippi . . . “I don't know.” I shrugged. “Probably.”

This was when the best day ever went bad. Coach told me to try to run one hundred meters in nine seconds and fifty-eight milliseconds—Bolt's time. He stood at the finish line with his whistle in his mouth. I rolled my pants up to my knees and my shirtsleeves up to my shoulders just like I had done the day before.

“On my whistle,” Coach said, holding up the stopwatch. “On your mark, get set,” and then,
badeep!
I took off down the track running as fast as I could, legs pumping, arms pumping, heart pumping, until I got to the finish line.

“Ohhhh,” Coach howled excitedly. I felt good. Knew that I had proven my point. I bopped over to Coach with my hand up, ready for the high five. But Coach never lifted his hand.

“Not even close!” he yelped. “Not. Even. Freakin'. Close. You ran a twelve-five.” And before I could even respond, he barked, “Back on the line!”

I jogged back to the start. Coach blew the whistle. I ran. He blew the whistle. I ran. Again, and again, and again. Each time I came in a little slower than the last.
My head started swimming, my chest burning, and my legs got all gooey, like all the running was turning my bones to liquid or something.

After the fifth try, Coach yelled out, “Fourteen seconds?
Fourteen seconds?
On the track, that might as well be fourteen minutes! Are you kidding me?”

I bent over and planted my hands on my knees. My legs were shaking, but only on the inside. Like my muscles were . . . shivering. My heart was pounding as fast as my feet had pounded the track. Maybe even faster. My stomach was flipping, and I just knew that my french fries were gonna come out as mashed potatoes all over the place. Coach walked over, his shadow making the red track burgundy around me. He leaned in and said lightly, almost as if he were whispering to me, “Back on the line.”

That's when I lost it.

“What . . . what? What . . . again? I . . . need . . . a break,” I panted. “I'm tired.”

“Tired?” Coach squealed, and I could hear the smile in his voice. I glanced up and there it was, big and chipped and wide like whatever words were hiding behind those teeth, he was struggling to keep in. So he let them out. “You know who's
really
tired, son? Your principal.” Coach put his hands up, palms facing me
as if to stop me from even thinking about responding. Then he continued, “No, no. You know who's really,
really
tired? Your mother. She's
so
tired.
So
tired. And she's gonna be even more exhausted when she hears about your suspension.”

“Come on, Coach,” I begged. “That's messed up.”

“Come on, nothing,” Coach said like every old black person says when they don't have a good comeback. He grabbed my shoulder and stood me straight. “Bending over cuts off your air,” he said. “We stand straight up at all times. Understand?”

I nodded, now understanding what was happening. I was being punished after all. This was Coach's way of telling me that I better stop acting up in school. If this was what the consequences of getting sent to Mr. Marshall's office were going to be every time, I'd rather have him just call my mother.

“Now, Mr. Better Than Bolt, get back on the line.”

Coach made me do the sprint two or three more times before finally letting up, and the only reason I think he let me stop was because my sprint had broken down into that weird, sloppy trot the tall skinny kid, Sunny, had done at the practice the previous day. My shirt was gone. I had peeled it off and thrown it on the field just in case the wet cotton was weighing me down
or something. My legs had pretty much clocked out, but instead of letting me just sit down and rest, Coach told me to walk it off.