“Yeah man, you got legs,” Lu followed. Then he turned around to me. “You too, Ghost. Them new shoes ain’t give you no new speed, but you ain’t quit, so . . . yeah.”
“Thanks,” I said. “You too.” I don’t know why I said “You too.” It’s just like a reflex. It didn’t even really make sense in this case, but that’s what came out.
“Okay, okay,” Coach said. “Y’all can hug and all that tomorrow at the newbie dinner.”
“What’s that?” Patty asked.
“It’s tradition. Every year I take the newbies out for Chinese food on the first Friday of the season. It’s like a bonding thing,” Coach explained, and then looking from me, to Lu, to Patty, to Sunny, one by one, he added, “What, y’all don’t like Chinese food?”
Of course we quickly answered, “Nah, Chinese is good.”
“Definitely.”
“Sounds good to me.”
“I’m cool with it.”
Coach, with the key ring now on his middle finger, spun the keys like cowboys do with their guns on the old movies Mr. Charles was always watching.
“Okay, then,” Coach said. “Now give me two cooldown laps and get off my track.”
At home, me and Ma had my favorite for dinner. Salisbury steak. Every time she brought it home, all I could think about was how lucky the people in the hospital were that they could get that for dinner. Salisbury steak is amazing. I don’t know what exactly Salisbury is, but whatever it is, it’s delicious.
“So you liking track?” Ma asked, heating the food up.
“Yeah, it’s cool. It’s crazy hard, but it’s cool.”
“And what about the coach?” she asked. “How’s he?”
“I like him,” I said, plain, unsure of what she was getting at. Like I said, moms never trust people around their kids. Never ever. And Coach had just left after asking my mom if I could go to the newbie dinner, and she said I could, but the smell of Salisbury might’ve changed her mind just that quick. I don’t know why it would’ve, but who really understands moms?
“You know what?” she said, popping open the microwave when it dinged. She flashed a smile at me. “I like him too.”
Phew.
The homework Ma was avoiding tonight was all about how to draw blood—they call it phlebotomy—and the movie of the night was Love Jones, which we’ve seen a bazillion times, but my ma loves it. It’s about this photographer lady and this dude who writes poems and they like each other, then they hate each other, then they love each other, and then it’s over. Or something like that. I never really pay much attention. I just flip through my world records book and spout out different facts.
“You know, there’s this dude named Tommy . . . um . . . Tommy something.” I couldn’t pronounce his last name. “He holds the world record for pulling the most nails out of a piece of wood with his teeth.”
My mother, sitting with the nursing textbook open on her lap, just shushed me and kept on watching.
“And there’s this other guy,” I continued, even though I knew she didn’t want to hear it. Most of the time I just liked to mess with her. “His name is Wim Hof. What a name, right? Yikes. Wim Hof. Anyway, he got the record for the most amount of time spent in ice.”
“In ice?” my mother asked. Must’ve caught her at a boring part in the movie.
“Yep. In it. One hour and fifty-three minutes.”
“People crazy,” she said, shaking her head. Then she held her hand out in front of me to let me know the boring part of the movie was now over—it was time for her to resume fanning the tears back every five minutes. Blah, blah, blah.
“Hey, you ever heard of Usain Bolt?” I asked her. “He holds the record for being the fastest man.”
“Cas, come on now,” she begged. “They getting ready to fall in love again. You know this my favorite part.”
I just shook my head and kept on flipping. The good thing was she didn’t ask me about my new fancy shoes, but that’s just because she didn’t know about them. I changed them in Coach’s cab on the way home from practice. Coach, on the other hand, definitely asked about them.
“Where’d you get ’em? That’s all I wanna know,” Coach said. This came after he told me that he was proud of me for not quitting today. I told him that I had no idea why he loved to torture children so much.
“Do you grill all the kids on the team like this? Or just me?” I replied, snappy.
“Just you.” He slapped my arm.
I told him that my mother had gotten them for me as a way to encourage me to do the right thing and stay out of trouble. Just saying it turned my stomach, because here I was, a boy who was suspended for busting somebody in the face at school one day, and skipped half the day the next because I was laughed at. Then I swiped shoes! I clearly wasn’t staying out of trouble. Matter fact, I was knee deep in it.
“Oh . . . okay,” Coach said, but I could tell he didn’t believe me. I wouldn’t have. He could probably see it on my face, especially since just like him, I didn’t have no hair on it to disguise it either. And honestly (yes, honestly), I couldn’t even believe that I had just lied like that. I wasn’t really the lying type. But I also wasn’t the stealing type until a few hours earlier. Altercations, altercations, altercations!
7
WORLD RECORD FOR THE BEST FRIDAY EVER AFTER THE WORST WEDNESDAY AND THURSDAY
FRIDAY MEANS TWO things. The first is that it’s the last day before I can take two days off school. I like to think of it as a non-altercation suspension. Plus the weekend was when me and Ma actually did stuff—and not just watch movies and avoid homework—because she didn’t work on weekends and took early morning online nursing classes to get them out of the way. And when she was done, we would clean the house (I was in charge of the living room), Ma would give me her version of a haircut (she always got most of it even), then give herself one, and then we would go over my aunt Sophie’s house. Aunt Sophie is my mom’s younger sister, and she’s like the coolest lady ever. She has a tattoo on her arm that says SWEETIE PIE that I never asked about, but always stared at just because I can’t wait to get one. But mine ain’t gonna say nothing like that. Mine’s is gonna say WORLD’S GREATEST or, of course, GHOST.
Anyway, on the weekends, Aunt Sophie and my mom sit around and play cards and crack jokes and eat corn chips with cheese dip and drink beer, and sometimes they let me and King, Aunt Sophie’s son, sit with them and play. Yes, we can play. Me and King learned how to play spades and tonk when we were real young. It’s a thing in our family. A serious thing. And yes, his real name is King. I think the sisters just wanted to give us royal names. So, yeah. All I had to do was get through Friday without any problems, and I was good to go for the weekend.