The Wednesday Wars (23 page)

"Safe from what? Thinking?"

"You're staying home," said my father.

My sister focused on her meatloaf.

By the way, Roy White really was hitting .429, which was .205 points over his last season's average, which seems to me to be important enough to talk about at supper.

They were all asleep when I left for the cross-country meet on Saturday morning. Actually, I was almost asleep, too, when I left for the cross-country meet on Saturday morning. I think I got to Camillo Junior High only by instinct. It was cold and a little foggy—the kind of foggy that goes all through you, so that everything feels wet, and the cold starts to seep under your skin, and all you can think about is the warm bed that you left to do this to yourself, and you're wishing you had on your thermal underwear, and you're wondering why anyone would want to do this to themselves, and you see Coach Quatrini standing by the bus and shouting at everyone he can see and you wonder even more why anyone would want to do this to themselves.

Neither the fog nor the cold lifted when we got to Salisbury Park. The grass was long and wet, and the fog dripped down from the still fresh green leaves on all the trees. You could see your breath. You could especially see Coach Quatrini's breath, because he was using it a lot, telling us where to leave our stuff, where to wait, where to stop waiting, where to loosen up, where to line up. I guess that was how he stayed warm.

There were something like twenty Long Island junior high schools here, and some of them even had uniforms. Most of us just had the numbers the coaches gave us, pinned to our shirts. My number was 113, which is not a particularly lucky number. Danny Hupfer's was 25—which, as you know, is Joe Pepitone's number. I asked him to change with me.

"Would you change with me if I had 113 and you had 25?" he said.

"In a second," I said.

"Liar," he said.

But when the JV boys' race started, I cheered him on anyway, standing on the sidelines between Mr. and Mrs. Hupfer and a whole bunch of little Hupfers, and Mr. Kowalski and Meryl Lee, who had come out to watch us run on an early Saturday morning.

That's Meryl Lee for you.

It wasn't easy to pick Danny out when they started, since there were about three hundred runners on the line and most of them had on white T-shirts. But after they left and headed into the deep woods of Salisbury Park and the thudding of six hundred feet faded, we all ran to where the trail comes out for a bend and waited for him to pass. He ran through in a clump of runners mostly bigger than him. Eighth graders.

"Keep your arms loose!" I hollered.

"Okay, coach," he called, heading back into the woods.

"And don't talk," I yelled after him. He probably didn't hear me.

We ran to the next bend. When he came past, he was out in front of the clump and running well. He shook his loose arms at me.

"Go, Danny!" yelled Meryl Lee.

"Faster, you dang slug!" I yelled.

And he obeyed. He was sprinting when we saw his back disappear.

Then we rushed back to the starting line, and we all screamed like crazy when he ran past in the top ten and set off for the woods again, the second lap.

There were three more after that.

We ran all over the field to catch him whenever he came in sight—me, all the Hupfers, and Mr. Kowalski and Meryl Lee.

On the fourth lap, he came across the starting line first.

We went berserk. Even Coach Quatrini went berserk—jumping up and down on the sidelines just like one of the little Hupfers.

When Danny disappeared into the woods, followed by the clump of eighth-grade runners pretty far behind him, we ran back to the first bend—for the fifth time—and waited for the sight of Danny.

But it was the clump of eighth-grade runners that came out first.

And then a whole line of other runners, all red and sweating in the cold, foggy air.

"Did we miss him?" asked Meryl Lee.

But we hadn't. Way more than half of the runners had gone by before we saw Danny limping past the first bend. Both of his knees were bloody. He did not look at us.

Mr. and Mrs. Hupfer had their hands over their mouths. And all the little Hupfers asked, "What happened to Danny's knees?"

"I guess he must have tripped," said Mrs. Hupfer.

She didn't know what might happen if a clump of eighth graders caught a seventh grader in the lead.

We ran to the next two bends, and waited. Danny was falling farther and farther behind.

When he finally crossed the finish line, he wasn't last. But almost.

His parents were waiting right there. His father took one arm, and his mother the other. Meryl Lee and I stood back, and we could see that Danny was almost crying. And probably not just because his knees were hurting. He didn't look at us when Mr. and Mrs. Hupfer took him back to the car, followed by the pack of little Hupfers. Some of them
were
crying. "Are Danny's knees going to get better?"

I guess cross-country is also a blood sport.

The varsity race was next, and I lined up behind the eighth graders.
Way
behind the eighth graders. "Get up to the line," hollered Coach Quatrini. I moved up about half an inch.

And probably that was why, among the one hundred and forty runners waiting at the starting line, Mr. Hupfer was able to find me so easily. "I have a message for you," he said, "from Danny. I'm not sure you'll understand it."

"I'll try," I said.

"He said, 'Beat the pied ninnies.' Do you know what he means?"

I nodded.

"Then here's a message from me," he said. He leaned closer. "Run them into the ground."

But it's hard to run one hundred and thirty-nine runners into the ground, especially when the gun goes off and the thunder of all those feet takes over from the thunder in your heart. For a minute, I thought that my sister was right: I was going to get run over and crushed. So I drifted off to the side and sprinted to move ahead before the trail narrowed. By the time I reached the first bend out of the trees, I was just behind the clump of eighth graders from Camillo Junior High. By the time I hit the second bend, we'd passed most of the other runners. By the time we reached the starting line again, the seven of us were out front—actually the six of them were out front, and I was running behind them.

And at the starting line, this is what I saw:

Mr. and Mrs. Hupfer and all the little Hupfers were behind Danny, who had not gone home but was standing there on his bloody knees and hollering as loudly as he could and waving his white shirt high up in the air.

Coach Quatrini was going berserk again, and seemed to be trying to levitate himself off the ground.

Meryl Lee was standing quietly, Mr. Kowalski behind her, and she held up a dried rose with a ribbon as I went by.

And Mrs. Baker was standing next to her, wearing her white sneakers.

So we ran again into the deep woods of Salisbury Park, the damp smell of pine thick in the air.

It was as if we were running alone, the seven varsity runners of Camillo Junior High. When I looked back over my shoulder, I could see only a few runners behind us, and by the time we were on the third lap, we were starting to pass runners still on their second. The fog had lifted, the day had warmed, and at times I could almost close my eyes and let my feet move along the still-dampened grass.

And then I would find that I had come up right behind the pack of eighth graders, and they were looking back at me, and I slowed down.

When we reached the starting line to begin the last lap, Coach Quatrini looked like he was having some sort of fit. I'm not sure that he knew what he was hollering, or if it was even English. Let me tell you, whatever it was, it wasn't Shakespeare. All the little Hupfers were jumping up and down, too, and Danny was still waving his shirt, and Meryl Lee was waving her rose—which was losing its petals—and Mrs. Baker was screaming. Really.

We headed into the deep woods for the last time. In the cool shade of the trees, I came up close behind the eighth-grade pack.

And on the first bend coming out, Mrs. Baker was waiting. Alone.

"Holling," she called.

I looked at her.

"Pass those boys," she said.

And that was all it took.

I glided as we went into the woods again, and stayed close while the trail narrowed and skittered through some thick underbrush. When it widened through a stand of old pines, the eighth graders looked behind and saw me, and they strung out to cover the whole path.

So I went around them, off the trail and through the pines, the needles thick and soft beneath my feet, the dead branches sharp and brittle against my face—and when I hit the trail again I was ahead of them, and we were all sprinting, but they were sprinting on a cross-country trail in Salisbury Park and I was sprinting through the cool grass of the outfield in Yankee Stadium, running down a ball that Joe Pepitone had just hit to right. And I was covering the ground so fast that my feet were hardly touching, and Ralph Houk was shaking his head. "The kid's good," he was saying.

And then everyone in Yankee Stadium was on their feet, and they were screaming and screaming, because now the California Angels were trying to get to a ball I had just hit to deep left, and I was rounding first, and then second, and then third, and Danny Hupfer was waving me home with his shirt, and when I got there, the cheering erupted so loudly that I could hardly hear Mrs. Baker when she picked me up and told me to keep walking, and I could hardly hold the thorny stem that Meryl Lee handed me.

But I sure could feel it when she leaned close to my face and...

Well, I don't have to tell you everything.

At the beginning of May, Mrs. Sidman told us during Morning Announcements that this would be "Atomic Bomb Awareness Month."

You might think that this would have caught our attention. But it didn't. Every May brings Atomic Bomb Awareness Month to Camillo Junior High, right after the greening grass and the yellowing forsythia. It's so predictable that it's hard to work up enthusiasm.

But Mrs. Sidman had clearly determined that this year—maybe because it was her first year as principal—she would give us the Big M.

"Since we are living so very close to New York City," she said, "Camillo Junior High School is certainly a likely target for an atomic bomb if the Soviet Union should ever choose to attack. It behooves us to be prepared. We will begin a series of atomic bomb drills this afternoon. When the sirens blow, I expect everyone to follow our government's drill procedures precisely."

"Behooves?" said Danny.

"Becomes necessary, Mr. Hupfer," said Mrs. Baker, "as in 'It behooves us to raise our hands before we ask a question.' Now, can anyone tell me what the adjectival form would be?"

Teachers. They can't help it.

I don't think that any of us really believed that Leonid Brezhnev was sitting in the deep, dark rooms of the Kremlin, plotting to drop an atomic bomb on Camillo Junior High. But even so, there was an eerie feeling when the sirens began to wail just before the end of the day, and Mrs. Baker stood up from her desk and clapped her hands at us. (I'm pretty sure she was trying not to roll her eyes.) She told us to scrunch under our desks.
No talking!
She told us to put our hands over our heads.
Absolute silence!
And she told us to
breathe quietly and evenly.
Really. As if we had forgotten how. When we were finally settled—and all this took a while since Meryl Lee wouldn't sit on the floor until she'd spread some clean poster board first—Mrs. Baker opened the classroom door, pulled the shades down on all the windows, turned the lights off, and then patrolled up and down the aisles.

I bet she was rolling her eyes then.

It doesn't take very long when you are scrunched under your desk with your hands over your head breathing quietly and evenly to feel three things:

1. That your spine is not meant to bend like this.
   
2. That if you don't stretch your legs out soon, they are going to spasm and you'll lose all feeling and probably not be able to walk for a very long time.
   
3. That you are going to throw up any minute, because you can see the wads of Bazooka bubblegum that Danny Hupfer has been sticking under his desk all year, which now look like little wasp nests hanging down.
   

But we followed our government's drill procedures precisely and stayed under our desks for eighteen minutes, until the wind would have whisked away the first waves of airborne radioactive particles, and the blast of burning air would have passed overhead, and the mushroom cloud would no longer be expanding, and every living thing would have been incinerated except for us because we were scrunched under our gummy desks with our hands over our heads, breathing quietly and evenly.

We got up when Mrs. Sidman peered into our classroom and told us that we had done quite well and that we were beginning to be prepared.

I guess that was sort of comforting—and I bet it made Leonid Brezhnev tremble in his boots—especially if he really did have it in for Camillo Junior High.

Actually, there seemed to be a lot of people who needed comfort these days—especially the eighth-grade varsity runners, who were taking the Salisbury Park race way too personally. I mean, our whole team came in before anyone else on any of the other Long Island teams. Mr. Quatrini had given us two practices off to celebrate. We got our team picture in the
Home Town Chronicle,
holding the trophy. What more do you want?

Apparently, a whole lot.

Let me tell you, you don't want to open your gym locker and find that someone has squirted shaving cream into it. And you don't want to find that the shoelaces on your sneakers are missing, or tied up in knots that take about a day and a half to get out, or that your shorts are hanging from the rafters in the gym ceiling, or that they're sopping wet—and not from water in the sink.

I think something must happen to you when you get into eighth grade. Like the Doug Swieteck's Brother Gene switches on and you become a jerk.