Poetry in Motion, part III
Original work. Last part.
Again, I ask that you please respect author rights.
“Take a seat, ladies” The bus driver maneuvered the lever and swung the door shut behind us, trapping me on the bus. “Gossip later. I’m on a schedule.”
I found the nearest vacant space and sat, not caring who was nearby as long as it wasn’t the potato.
Grades? Teetering. Girlfriend? Lost. Track? On break until January. Holidays and sweets? Looming. Sanity? Hanging on by a thread. Those circling thoughts numbed my brain into mush, until a smack on the shoulder brought me around.
“This is us,” said the potato standing over me.
I followed him down and out. He waited until the bus moved on before crossing the street as usual. My legs decided they didn’t want to go home just yet, so I sat on the curb once the bus exhaust cleared away.
My brother circled back and sat beside me. I looked over at him and his worried expression. My hands clenched into fists that wanted to pound him.
“Go away,” I muttered. He shook his head. “I mean it. Scram.”
“Something’s wrong.”
“You got that right.” I tried to swallow down my anger but it came belching back up in spiteful words. “Do you know why I take the bus instead of driving to school? Because Mom wants me to chaperone you. She wants you to ride the bus just like I did, to get that experience, but wants me there to keep you safe. I rode it alone. When we get into trouble, I get blamed no matter who started it. When I wanted to go to that movie,” I paused briefly, reading the shock in his eyes, but continued the steamrolling, “Mom asked me to take you because none of your friends wanted to go with you. I’m flattered if you want to buy a present for my girlfriend with my money. Go ahead. She’s pretty much not my girlfriend any more because I can’t fucking tell her who I’m spending so much time with lately because I promised you I wouldn’t.” I stood. “Just sit there. I don’t want you near me. I’m going for a walk to cool down.”
I was about half a block toward the park before he caught up.
“I’m always compared to you.” His face was as twisted up as my feelings. “Why don’t you make friends like your brother does? Why don’t you keep your room clean like your brother does? It was fine when we gamed together. I could beat you at times and feel better about myself. Then you quit. You got a life. Then they pressured me to do the same and I didn’t know how. Actually didn’t want to until I was facing high school. I figured this is my chance to, to be someone. To be a new me. Yet I still don’t know who I am!” His arms waved. “Because I’m still your damn shadow! And it’s not just Mom and Dad anymore. Now teachers are comparing us, our personalities, our grades.” I heard the strain in his voice and didn’t care. “Do you have any idea how it felt to beat you the other day on the track? God! The joy! And now I’m on the track team! I have teammates! But no one will talk to me because you’re angry about me being there!”
He shoved me. I shoved back. The next minute, the backpacks were off and we were rolling around on grass and sidewalk, wrestling around while throwing hard punches that missed more than hit. Finally we ran out of breath and lay on our backs in someone’s front yard.
A voice called out, “ Get off my lawn or I’m calling the cops!”
I waved a feeble hand. “It’s okay, ma’am. He’s my brother. We’re leaving.”
We made it to our feet, exchanged the backpacks we recovered, then tottered off toward the park. Once there, we silently sat beside each other on a bench and ignored the world around us.
“I’m jealous of you,” I said. “Always have been.” I spat blood out of my mouth. “You’re lean, your tall, you’re so easy-going. Nothing gets to you. You just roll with things. Mom and Dad dote on you, expect me to protect you and set a good example for you, and I always seem to fail.”
“Not this year.” He sighed. “Look, I never know what to say, so I stay quiet. I always feel clumsy and bump into stuff. You do things. You take chances. You don’t sit in your room unless it’s to study. You go out and make friends.” He swiped at his dirty face with the back of his forearm. “You remade yourself. I wish so hard I could be like you.”
I shook my head. “I was fat. I was doing everything I could to stay away from Mom’s cooking or the take-out dinners. I cleaned and studied to keep out of the pantry. I made friends so I could talk to people, use my mouth for something besides shoveling food into my stomach.” I sighed. “Now I lost the one person who really got me, really saw me. She’s.” I stopped and closed my eyes, unable to go on.
A hand clamped down on my shoulder. “You haven’t lost anything.” I glanced over at the potato. “I wanted the fifty because this afternoon I asked a girl in English to go to the movies with me over break. She said yes. A date. Me.”
I thought back to the hall, the squeal and the cheek kiss. “She was congratulating you?”
“Yeah. I wanted advice last week, so I begged your girlfriend for some. Told her I wanted to ask someone out. She’s the one who said I should go for it.”
“She would. She’s great that way.” I shook my head. “Confirms I’m an idiot.”
“Yeah, well, so am I. But man, to have you be jealous of me! Think I could steal your girl! Wow!”
I elbowed him and he snorted.
“We’d better get going,” he said after looking around.
“Yeah.” I stood and winced. “Ow.”
“Me, too.” He stretched and we headed home. “Dibs on the shower.”
“So, who’s the date?” I asked as we trudged along.
“Cheryl.”
She wasn’t someone I knew, but when I caught him grinning like a little kid, I had to smile too.
“Congrats.” I reflected for a second. The decision hurt but also felt good. “You earned the fifty a long time ago, so yeah, you can have it. But,” I added with a warning tone, “You slack off and I get it back when I graduate.”
“Deal.” He held out a hand and we shook. “Um.”
I quickly drew my hand away. “Um, what?”
“Coach expects Bs and I’m teetering in algebra. Can you help?”
“Yeah, sure.”
-*-
I jogged, ran sprints, and walked intervals while I waited. My finals were over, but I came to school anyway to pick up the potato. When some of the guys approached about celebrating the last day of school for the year, I waved them off with the excuse of wanting to talk to coach. They rolled their eyes and made remarks about me trying to get my brother kicked off, sentiments I quickly quashed.
“You didn’t see his tryout. I did,” I growled out between breaths. “Trust me, he’d smoke every one of your asses.”
They left with puzzled faces and muttered concerns.
A few minutes later, the last bell rang. I used it as my starting gun and tore up the track with a 400 sprint. I pretended the potato was with me, hovering at my left shoulder, and poured on the effort as I kept in the second lane the whole way. I didn’t fling my arms wide after finishing, I simply slowed to a trot and did a cool down lap.
“Hey!” I looked up to find the potato grinning at me from the other side of the field. “I think I aced it!” he called out. “Thanks!”
I stopped and shrugged. “Math’s not hard, if you break it down!” I yelled back. By the time I’d walked over to him, we had a visitor.
“Gentlemen.” Coach didn’t smile much, but I saw the corner of his mouth curl upward, a sure sign he was pleased. First, he turned his attention to my brother. “Don’t forget you’re officially on the team in January. No loading up on sweets over the holidays, get me?”
“Yes, sir.” The potato’s eyes gleamed with pride.
“I’ll train you hard and fair, so no whining. You’ll be my cross-country runner. Start running park paths and trails to get used to it.”
“Yes, sir.”
It was my turn, and I faced those hard features with dread.
“Who were you racing on that last lap?”
My gaze flicked up to the second floor of the school and I gulped. Had he watched me from his classroom? I glanced over at the potato and met his puzzled gaze with one of my own.
“Yeah, I’ve been watching you,” Coach growled out. “I’ve been watching you two all summer.” He shook a finger at both of us. “Don’t underestimate me. And stop underestimating yourselves, get me?”
“Yes, sir.”
Coach briefly whistled an irritating tune I recognized but couldn’t place. He’d used it before with students who tried to claim they’d practiced when they hadn’t, but I couldn’t see how that applied in this case.
“If I only had a brain. Then I’d realize I had a coach in the making right under my nose.” He kept his attention on me. “Do you you even know why I call you Dante?” He addressed the potato. “I nickname all my athletes after authors, probably the English nerd in me.” His eyes tracked back to mine. “Everyone assumes I chose Dante Alighieri because of his famous poem Inferno, inferring I’m naming you for your temper. But Dante gave a rather stunning depiction of traveling through Hell. Perhaps he was spiritually lost? Perhaps he found the path to redemption and was offering comfort to others who needed to find themselves, too?” Coach shrugged. “It’s all up to interpretation.”
I nodded, not knowing what to say. I’d always thought Dante was a musty old poet who wrote something too hard to understand.
“And you didn’t crack, even when I put more pressure on you.” Coach snorted out a chuckle. “You’re one hell of a runner now. Better than you’ve ever been. And you’ve handed me the best long distance runner I’ve seen in a while. Brilliant.” The corner of his mouth curled upward again. “Enjoy your break, gentlemen.”
-*-
When the potato announced that he wasn’t supposed to eat a lot of desserts, Coach’s orders, Mom frowned but complied. I let loose a sigh of relief and suddenly found I had the energy and inclination to figure out a good way to ease the potato into the kinds of workouts Coach might give him.
“I thought I’d just be running a mile or so,” he puffed out as we did trails in a local park the morning before Christmas Eve.
“Cross country is usually a 5K.” He blinked at me. “Three miles, give or take. Slow down!”
“I’m nervous!”
“Pace yourself! Think of something pleasant and relax.”
He slowly left me, a goofy grin on his face. By the time I got back to the car, he’d toweled off and put on a hoodie over his long-sleeved tee to keep warm against the winter weather. I did the same and we drove off as soon as the wobbly bones in my legs firmed up.
“Were you thinking of Cheryl?” He nodded and I laughed. “When’s the date?”
“Whenever you can go. You’re the chaperone. You and.”
I headed off his enthusiasm with a quick confession. “She’s not going to text me until January.”
“I already called her. She says she’s free to be pestered by you anytime this afternoon or the day after Christmas. So call her and make the arrangements already.”
I pulled into our driveway and switched off the car’s engine. “You called her?”
“Your girlfriend? Yeah. I have her number.” He shrugged like it was nothing. “She wanted to know how things were going with Cheryl. I told her why you’ve been MIA lately, and why you couldn’t tell her. She was very appreciative of the information.”
My brother punched me in the shoulder before he opened the car door. “And she agreed to keep my secret. I trust her, since you do. Oh, and I’ll need that fifty soon. Just saying.”
-*-
The Saturday morning meeting before the spring semester began always started my heart pumping like nothing else in the world. This one was bitter sweet, It was my last. Even if I didn’t get the track scholarship I applied for, I would still run, I decided. I loved it too much to quit now.
Coach called names from his tablet as a formality. He just wanted the new people to know who was who, and there was only one new person.
“I’m going to make a few changes,” he called out after everyone quieted down from patting my brother on the back. “Dante, you’re now my second.”
I was floored. Coach hadn’t had a second since Longfellow left my first year.
“I’ll tell you what I expect from you at the end of the meeting,” Coach continued. He fixed everyone with a steely gaze “That means what he says goes when I’m not around. Got me?”
“Yes, sir!”
“Okay, let’s see how you did over the holidays. Give me laps, slow and steady. Nothing faster than an eight minute mile pace. Run and keep running until you can’t anymore then move to the edge and sit.”
On and on we ran. It took a while for the track to clear down to just me and my brother. Several jaws dropped. Now they knew what he was capable of.
Finally I staggered and went down on my hands and knees. He wobbled three more steps and did the same. Our eyes met and he gasped out a ‘ha’ that made me roll my eyes, though I had no desire to feel jealousy. Instead, my chest swelled with pride even as my lungs told me they hated me.
“Good.” Coach waved his tablet. “Gather ‘round.” We huddled together on the bleachers in front of him, shivering in the cold. “That, gentlemen, is why we now have a cross country runner on our team. And since Dante trained him, I’m guessing he can help me help you win a few more trophies this year.” Coach’s words erased away all my hardships from last semester. “Any questions?”
Cheers rang out amid cries of “What’s his nickname?”
“That’s right, he needs a nickname.” Coach raised an eyebrow at me. “Any suggestions, Dante?”
“Yes, sir.” I winked at the former couch potato’s skeptical face. “Robert Frost, because he takes the road less travelled, and he’s poetry in motion.” My brother, the athlete, beamed with pride.
“Frost.” Coach snorted and typed on his tablet. “Good choice. Welcome to the team.”
Again, I ask that you please respect author rights.
“Take a seat, ladies” The bus driver maneuvered the lever and swung the door shut behind us, trapping me on the bus. “Gossip later. I’m on a schedule.”
I found the nearest vacant space and sat, not caring who was nearby as long as it wasn’t the potato.
Grades? Teetering. Girlfriend? Lost. Track? On break until January. Holidays and sweets? Looming. Sanity? Hanging on by a thread. Those circling thoughts numbed my brain into mush, until a smack on the shoulder brought me around.
“This is us,” said the potato standing over me.
I followed him down and out. He waited until the bus moved on before crossing the street as usual. My legs decided they didn’t want to go home just yet, so I sat on the curb once the bus exhaust cleared away.
My brother circled back and sat beside me. I looked over at him and his worried expression. My hands clenched into fists that wanted to pound him.
“Go away,” I muttered. He shook his head. “I mean it. Scram.”
“Something’s wrong.”
“You got that right.” I tried to swallow down my anger but it came belching back up in spiteful words. “Do you know why I take the bus instead of driving to school? Because Mom wants me to chaperone you. She wants you to ride the bus just like I did, to get that experience, but wants me there to keep you safe. I rode it alone. When we get into trouble, I get blamed no matter who started it. When I wanted to go to that movie,” I paused briefly, reading the shock in his eyes, but continued the steamrolling, “Mom asked me to take you because none of your friends wanted to go with you. I’m flattered if you want to buy a present for my girlfriend with my money. Go ahead. She’s pretty much not my girlfriend any more because I can’t fucking tell her who I’m spending so much time with lately because I promised you I wouldn’t.” I stood. “Just sit there. I don’t want you near me. I’m going for a walk to cool down.”
I was about half a block toward the park before he caught up.
“I’m always compared to you.” His face was as twisted up as my feelings. “Why don’t you make friends like your brother does? Why don’t you keep your room clean like your brother does? It was fine when we gamed together. I could beat you at times and feel better about myself. Then you quit. You got a life. Then they pressured me to do the same and I didn’t know how. Actually didn’t want to until I was facing high school. I figured this is my chance to, to be someone. To be a new me. Yet I still don’t know who I am!” His arms waved. “Because I’m still your damn shadow! And it’s not just Mom and Dad anymore. Now teachers are comparing us, our personalities, our grades.” I heard the strain in his voice and didn’t care. “Do you have any idea how it felt to beat you the other day on the track? God! The joy! And now I’m on the track team! I have teammates! But no one will talk to me because you’re angry about me being there!”
He shoved me. I shoved back. The next minute, the backpacks were off and we were rolling around on grass and sidewalk, wrestling around while throwing hard punches that missed more than hit. Finally we ran out of breath and lay on our backs in someone’s front yard.
A voice called out, “ Get off my lawn or I’m calling the cops!”
I waved a feeble hand. “It’s okay, ma’am. He’s my brother. We’re leaving.”
We made it to our feet, exchanged the backpacks we recovered, then tottered off toward the park. Once there, we silently sat beside each other on a bench and ignored the world around us.
“I’m jealous of you,” I said. “Always have been.” I spat blood out of my mouth. “You’re lean, your tall, you’re so easy-going. Nothing gets to you. You just roll with things. Mom and Dad dote on you, expect me to protect you and set a good example for you, and I always seem to fail.”
“Not this year.” He sighed. “Look, I never know what to say, so I stay quiet. I always feel clumsy and bump into stuff. You do things. You take chances. You don’t sit in your room unless it’s to study. You go out and make friends.” He swiped at his dirty face with the back of his forearm. “You remade yourself. I wish so hard I could be like you.”
I shook my head. “I was fat. I was doing everything I could to stay away from Mom’s cooking or the take-out dinners. I cleaned and studied to keep out of the pantry. I made friends so I could talk to people, use my mouth for something besides shoveling food into my stomach.” I sighed. “Now I lost the one person who really got me, really saw me. She’s.” I stopped and closed my eyes, unable to go on.
A hand clamped down on my shoulder. “You haven’t lost anything.” I glanced over at the potato. “I wanted the fifty because this afternoon I asked a girl in English to go to the movies with me over break. She said yes. A date. Me.”
I thought back to the hall, the squeal and the cheek kiss. “She was congratulating you?”
“Yeah. I wanted advice last week, so I begged your girlfriend for some. Told her I wanted to ask someone out. She’s the one who said I should go for it.”
“She would. She’s great that way.” I shook my head. “Confirms I’m an idiot.”
“Yeah, well, so am I. But man, to have you be jealous of me! Think I could steal your girl! Wow!”
I elbowed him and he snorted.
“We’d better get going,” he said after looking around.
“Yeah.” I stood and winced. “Ow.”
“Me, too.” He stretched and we headed home. “Dibs on the shower.”
“So, who’s the date?” I asked as we trudged along.
“Cheryl.”
She wasn’t someone I knew, but when I caught him grinning like a little kid, I had to smile too.
“Congrats.” I reflected for a second. The decision hurt but also felt good. “You earned the fifty a long time ago, so yeah, you can have it. But,” I added with a warning tone, “You slack off and I get it back when I graduate.”
“Deal.” He held out a hand and we shook. “Um.”
I quickly drew my hand away. “Um, what?”
“Coach expects Bs and I’m teetering in algebra. Can you help?”
“Yeah, sure.”
-*-
I jogged, ran sprints, and walked intervals while I waited. My finals were over, but I came to school anyway to pick up the potato. When some of the guys approached about celebrating the last day of school for the year, I waved them off with the excuse of wanting to talk to coach. They rolled their eyes and made remarks about me trying to get my brother kicked off, sentiments I quickly quashed.
“You didn’t see his tryout. I did,” I growled out between breaths. “Trust me, he’d smoke every one of your asses.”
They left with puzzled faces and muttered concerns.
A few minutes later, the last bell rang. I used it as my starting gun and tore up the track with a 400 sprint. I pretended the potato was with me, hovering at my left shoulder, and poured on the effort as I kept in the second lane the whole way. I didn’t fling my arms wide after finishing, I simply slowed to a trot and did a cool down lap.
“Hey!” I looked up to find the potato grinning at me from the other side of the field. “I think I aced it!” he called out. “Thanks!”
I stopped and shrugged. “Math’s not hard, if you break it down!” I yelled back. By the time I’d walked over to him, we had a visitor.
“Gentlemen.” Coach didn’t smile much, but I saw the corner of his mouth curl upward, a sure sign he was pleased. First, he turned his attention to my brother. “Don’t forget you’re officially on the team in January. No loading up on sweets over the holidays, get me?”
“Yes, sir.” The potato’s eyes gleamed with pride.
“I’ll train you hard and fair, so no whining. You’ll be my cross-country runner. Start running park paths and trails to get used to it.”
“Yes, sir.”
It was my turn, and I faced those hard features with dread.
“Who were you racing on that last lap?”
My gaze flicked up to the second floor of the school and I gulped. Had he watched me from his classroom? I glanced over at the potato and met his puzzled gaze with one of my own.
“Yeah, I’ve been watching you,” Coach growled out. “I’ve been watching you two all summer.” He shook a finger at both of us. “Don’t underestimate me. And stop underestimating yourselves, get me?”
“Yes, sir.”
Coach briefly whistled an irritating tune I recognized but couldn’t place. He’d used it before with students who tried to claim they’d practiced when they hadn’t, but I couldn’t see how that applied in this case.
“If I only had a brain. Then I’d realize I had a coach in the making right under my nose.” He kept his attention on me. “Do you you even know why I call you Dante?” He addressed the potato. “I nickname all my athletes after authors, probably the English nerd in me.” His eyes tracked back to mine. “Everyone assumes I chose Dante Alighieri because of his famous poem Inferno, inferring I’m naming you for your temper. But Dante gave a rather stunning depiction of traveling through Hell. Perhaps he was spiritually lost? Perhaps he found the path to redemption and was offering comfort to others who needed to find themselves, too?” Coach shrugged. “It’s all up to interpretation.”
I nodded, not knowing what to say. I’d always thought Dante was a musty old poet who wrote something too hard to understand.
“And you didn’t crack, even when I put more pressure on you.” Coach snorted out a chuckle. “You’re one hell of a runner now. Better than you’ve ever been. And you’ve handed me the best long distance runner I’ve seen in a while. Brilliant.” The corner of his mouth curled upward again. “Enjoy your break, gentlemen.”
-*-
When the potato announced that he wasn’t supposed to eat a lot of desserts, Coach’s orders, Mom frowned but complied. I let loose a sigh of relief and suddenly found I had the energy and inclination to figure out a good way to ease the potato into the kinds of workouts Coach might give him.
“I thought I’d just be running a mile or so,” he puffed out as we did trails in a local park the morning before Christmas Eve.
“Cross country is usually a 5K.” He blinked at me. “Three miles, give or take. Slow down!”
“I’m nervous!”
“Pace yourself! Think of something pleasant and relax.”
He slowly left me, a goofy grin on his face. By the time I got back to the car, he’d toweled off and put on a hoodie over his long-sleeved tee to keep warm against the winter weather. I did the same and we drove off as soon as the wobbly bones in my legs firmed up.
“Were you thinking of Cheryl?” He nodded and I laughed. “When’s the date?”
“Whenever you can go. You’re the chaperone. You and.”
I headed off his enthusiasm with a quick confession. “She’s not going to text me until January.”
“I already called her. She says she’s free to be pestered by you anytime this afternoon or the day after Christmas. So call her and make the arrangements already.”
I pulled into our driveway and switched off the car’s engine. “You called her?”
“Your girlfriend? Yeah. I have her number.” He shrugged like it was nothing. “She wanted to know how things were going with Cheryl. I told her why you’ve been MIA lately, and why you couldn’t tell her. She was very appreciative of the information.”
My brother punched me in the shoulder before he opened the car door. “And she agreed to keep my secret. I trust her, since you do. Oh, and I’ll need that fifty soon. Just saying.”
-*-
The Saturday morning meeting before the spring semester began always started my heart pumping like nothing else in the world. This one was bitter sweet, It was my last. Even if I didn’t get the track scholarship I applied for, I would still run, I decided. I loved it too much to quit now.
Coach called names from his tablet as a formality. He just wanted the new people to know who was who, and there was only one new person.
“I’m going to make a few changes,” he called out after everyone quieted down from patting my brother on the back. “Dante, you’re now my second.”
I was floored. Coach hadn’t had a second since Longfellow left my first year.
“I’ll tell you what I expect from you at the end of the meeting,” Coach continued. He fixed everyone with a steely gaze “That means what he says goes when I’m not around. Got me?”
“Yes, sir!”
“Okay, let’s see how you did over the holidays. Give me laps, slow and steady. Nothing faster than an eight minute mile pace. Run and keep running until you can’t anymore then move to the edge and sit.”
On and on we ran. It took a while for the track to clear down to just me and my brother. Several jaws dropped. Now they knew what he was capable of.
Finally I staggered and went down on my hands and knees. He wobbled three more steps and did the same. Our eyes met and he gasped out a ‘ha’ that made me roll my eyes, though I had no desire to feel jealousy. Instead, my chest swelled with pride even as my lungs told me they hated me.
“Good.” Coach waved his tablet. “Gather ‘round.” We huddled together on the bleachers in front of him, shivering in the cold. “That, gentlemen, is why we now have a cross country runner on our team. And since Dante trained him, I’m guessing he can help me help you win a few more trophies this year.” Coach’s words erased away all my hardships from last semester. “Any questions?”
Cheers rang out amid cries of “What’s his nickname?”
“That’s right, he needs a nickname.” Coach raised an eyebrow at me. “Any suggestions, Dante?”
“Yes, sir.” I winked at the former couch potato’s skeptical face. “Robert Frost, because he takes the road less travelled, and he’s poetry in motion.” My brother, the athlete, beamed with pride.
“Frost.” Coach snorted and typed on his tablet. “Good choice. Welcome to the team.”