CHAPTER 13
The next morning, we got up and ran even though we had a meet that night. I just can’t talk Wheat out of it. I sometimes wonder if she is a masochist — or maybe just the opposite since it seems sort of sadistic that she always seems to take delight in making me do it too. I went along without complaining, though.
We were pretty quiet. Ric must not have even felt like singing. I think he hurt his leg the other morning more than he has let on. I asked him if there were any leads on the One-Booted Man and his accomplice. He said no but that car break-ins around town had spiked in the last couple of months. Those guys were prime suspects.
When we got home, we weighed ourselves. Wheat was right at 112 and I tipped the scales at a whopping 115 pounds while stripped down to my underwear. Heaviest I’ve ever been. I almost felt fat — ha, ha.
“I’m eating some pancakes if Mom will make Lake and me some,” I announced. “And I’m going to drench them in syrup.”
“Rub it in,” Wheat said. “I thought I was happy for you getting the varsity spot at 119 but now I’m not so sure.”
Wheat loves pancakes and syrup but only allows herself to have them about four times a year. Lake loves them, too, and since he doesn’t like milk much or even cereal— weird kid — Mom makes them a lot for him and Ric.
She is very creative in the shapes she makes out of the pancake mix. She can come up with all kinds of animals and other stuff. So after I told her I wanted pancakes, she said she would make me up a special design.
Lake got a couple of bunnies, equipped with ears and bushy tails. I got what looked like a couple of cut-out dolls holding hands.
Before I could say anything, Lake looked over at the creation on my plate and said, “That?”
“Yeah, that,” Wheat chimed in as she sipped her six ounces of skim milk and peeled a tangerine across the table from me.
“That’s Billy Ray and Laurie dancing at the prom,” my mom proudly said.
To be honest, it was a pretty darn good creation but the subject almost made me lose my appetite. This could be something that Wheat could tease me about endlessly.
“Want that,” Lake announced.
I would have traded him, too, but he had one of his bunnies almost devoured and even taking his age into account, he may be the messiest eater of all time. His plate looked like a bunch of Play-Doh globs with orange juice poured around it.
“I’ll make you cute little Billy Ray and Laurie dancers tomorrow,” Mom said to him.
“Mom!” I cried.
“Mom!” Lake mimicked.
Ric then walked into the kitchen wearing his police uniform. I always look on in wonder when I see him decked out in his working blue. He looks like the perfect cop. He looks like the guy you would want busting down your front door when somebody evil has already busted down your back door. He is a street sergeant although his bosses really would like him to transfer over to the detective bureau.
“Hey, I see that Spank has joined the pancake posse today,” he said. “What’s the shape?”
Before I could say anything, Wheat said, “That’s him and Laurie dancing at the prom. She looks so good that I’m sure Spank can’t wait to just eat her up. Yum, yum.”
Ric and Mom laughed and Lake smiled widely even though he didn’t have any idea what we were talking about.
Wheat wasn’t done, though. “Or maybe it’s Sally Guffie. You should have seen Spank and her on the dance floor last night.”
That did it! “Well, you should have seen Wheat and her beaus,” I said. “How many guys have asked you to the prom now, Wheat? Wasn’t the count up to four as of last night?”
“Is that true, Tanda?” Mom said.
“Ta-Da?” Lake asked as if he had never heard his sister called by her real name.
“Yeah, that’s Miss Popularity across from the table from you, Lake,” I said and proceeded to eat my pancakes, trying not to imagine whether the girl was Laurie or Sally.
Wheat stormed off at that point. I wasn’t going to get near her. But I didn’t feel bad. She had started the teasing. And what did she say would happen to me — that she would stuff me in my pillow case. Hey, that doesn’t sound as bad as some of the holds she puts me in at wrestling practice.
“Is that true about the boys asking her,” Mom started. And then she quickly added, “Well, of course it is.”
“Would any of these potential beaus have a fighting chance with her,” Ric chimed in.
“Only if Big Jim could figure out a way to get her in a bear hug,” I said. “She’s not going with any of them, though. The prom would interfere with the conference championship matches on Saturday night.”
“Well, what about you, Spank?” Ric asked. “Aren’t you still going to be the 119-pounder then?”
“Yeah, but no way l make it to the title match,” I said. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m doing a little better and will be trying my best. But a week ago, I was still a junior varsity wrestler at a lower weight.”
I thought it might be wise to keep it to myself that I might want to go to the prom with Laurie Middlebrook more than being a conference champion. At least that was what I was thinking as I politely took a bite out of Laurie’s – I mean the girl’s —side of my pancake.
“What a busy Saturday,” Mom said. “I do wish that Tanda could go to the prom. I do like that some boys seem to see her as more than a tomboy in wrestling togs. Do you think she likes boys, Spank? Do you?”
“Sure,” I said. “Especially after she beats them up.”
Ric laughed. Mom just shook her head. Lake said Ta-Da again. He seemed to like that name. Actually, I sort of liked it, too. There certainly are enough ta-da’s when Wheat wrestles.
About that time, I heard the front door slam. Uh-oh. When I went up to the upstairs bathroom, I found a note by the sink. “Dear Jerk,’’ it started. “I’m jogging to school instead of pushing you out our window. Maybe you can make out with Sally in the backseat in my absence. P.S. I used your toothbrush to comb my hair.”
Well, at least we were communicating. We live about three miles from the high school and so it wasn’t any big deal for Wheat to run it, especially when she had some anger to work out of her system. But adding on to the four miles we already had covered before breakfast, that would give her seven miles on the day of a very big meet. Oh, well, I thought, not my worry.
Big Jim seemed plenty worried, though, when he pulled up in front of our house.
“Where’s Wheat?” he asked when I slid into the backseat. “She’s not sick, is she? We need her if we have any chance to beat Mishawaka tonight.”
“She’s fine,” I said. “In fact, she’s fired up for a fight. She just decided to run to school. Making sure her weight is good for tonight.”
I noticed Sally wasn’t saying anything up in the front seat beside her brother. She had one of her textbooks out in her lap while Big Jim and I talked about how he thought the dancing from the previous night might really be good for his football and wrestling.
But when he pulled out in the parking lot and got out, Sally grabbed me gently by my jacket and asked me to walk her into school. Her brother looked back at us and shook his head. “You poor pooch, Spank,” he said. Then he added, “Play nice, Sis.”
“He’s a bozo,” Sally said as we walked slowly toward the school while I looked around for any signs of Laurie — or Kelly Carson. “But he’s passable for an older brother, I suppose. I’m trying to see that in him a little more. We used to be closer when we were kids. I wouldn’t mind trying to have a similar relationship that you have with your sister.”
“Oh, ours isn’t alway fun and games, “ I said.
“Probably none are. Just wanted to tell you that I appreciated your help last night at dance class. I enjoyed it and you are a good dancer. I’m trying to be a little nicer to people although I still couldn’t keep myself from calling you ‘Little Man,’ at the end. Being constantly nice is a little harder to do than I thought it would be.”
I told her no big deal. I didn’t tell her that I knew her grandma had come down hard on her. I tried not to think that she might be worrying about her inheritance or something. I hoped she wasn’t just putting on an act.
“I might see you tonight at the meet,” she added. “I haven’t seen the Big Bro wrestle yet this year and so I figure it’s time to make my one appearance at the House of Smells.”
“House of Smells?”
“Come on, Sir William, you know how bad a wrestling room can stink.”
I nodded. I wasn’t going to argue with her, especially when her own brother — the smelliest of them all — was on the premises. Body odor and male teen-age hormones revved up for combat are a pretty deadly mix. I guess I’ve gotten used to it over the last couple of years, though. It even makes me feel at home in some ways. I’m not going to try to explain that to you — or me.
“By the way,” Sally said. “What’s worse in your opinion? Being called ‘poor pooch’ by my brother or ‘little man’ by me.”
“Depends on the situation,” I replied. “But someday, I’m hoping they call me rich man.”
She smiled — gosh she was pretty when she smiled. As I held the door open for her to go into school, she smiled again and said, “Didn’t you think that your sister and my brother looked a little like Beauty and the Beast last night?”
“No, doubt about it,” I replied, not telling her that I had been called the Little Beastie myself the previous night.
Sally then walked down the hallway. As always, a lot of heads turned in her direction and I thought this time that she still looked a little like Mylie Cyrus as she strutted toward her locker. I tried to imagine her as suddenly transforming into a Snow White while I looked on as one of her “little men” — Dopey probably being the best fit.
The rest of the day was pretty uneventful in terms of how crazy my life had become over the last few weeks. I didn’t see hide nor hair of Sally. Wheat ignored me in algebra class. And Kelly Carson came out of Mrs. Riley’s classroom between classes as I was passing and actually gave me a brief nod. “What’s that about?” Bobby Taylor asked.
“Not sure, but I’m not going over to give him a fist bump and find out.”
In English class right before the bell, Laurie, still with a red nose from her cold, touched my arm and asked if it would be OK if we just met at the high school gym for the prom. She said her dad was having a hard time with her going out at all and thought I might not be the perfect person to take her. She laughed when she told me that but I think she was a little bothered that he had said that. Maybe she was wondering a little, too.
“What’s that all about?” I had to ask.
“Well, he never really approved of me seeing Kelly Carson. He thought he was a little on the rough side although he was always pretty nice to me. And then he shows up right after you knocked down Kelly. I told him that you did it in the name of chivalry but he’s just a little concerned.”
“I thought he had been a wrestler,” I said.
“Maybe, maybe not,” Laura said. “With Dad, you’re never quite sure. He doesn’t seem like the wrestling type to me. Maybe he thinks a sport looks good on his resume. He’s a bit of a hypochondriac, according to mom. And she kids that the only exercise he gets now is jumping to conclusions.”
I nodded but I didn’t get it. Then when I walked her down the hall, still getting some good looks, it suddenly hit me. Jumping — jumping to conclusions. I laughed.
“What’s that?” Laurie said, looking a little like I might be laughing at her for some reason.
“Delayed reaction on your mom’s joke,” I said.
“Glad you got it, Spank,” she said while stopping at her history classroom. “Now get, get,” she said with a smile.
After our conversation, I got this tingling feeling that took a while to go away. Like I’ve said, deep down, I’m still a bit of a wuss. I know it, Wheat knows it and Ric knows it. But the mayor of South Bend thinks I’m some kind of tough guy. And maybe his daughter thinks so a little, too. This might sound surprising, but I kind of felt good about that. I know this reputation thing isn’t going to last but I thought I might enjoy being a bad boy for a little while longer.
I sure wasn’t going to tell her that it was just a clumsy fall into Kelly that put him on the ground. If some people wanted to think I was like the Karate Kid or something, I wasn’t doing to disagree.
I noticed that Laurie hadn’t said anything about the meet. She probably didn’t even know we were wrestling against Mishawaka.
CHAPTER 14
When I saw Wheat after school, she seemed Ok with me. In fact, it was as if nothing had happened between us in the morning. Hmmmm.
We don’t have practice on days of the meets and so we both headed upstairs after Big Jim drove us home from school. We hit the homework hard. Mom said that Todd Dixon of the funeral home had called and wondered if I could shovel their walks before tomorrow morning. We’d gotten what looked like another two inches while we were in school.
After I wrote a one-page report for English on why I admired Hester Primm in “The Scarlet Letter,” and did a biology worksheet, I started getting ready to shovel. I like getting that call. If the snow isn’t too heavy, I can finish it in about a half hour and get $20 for it — vastly overpaid on those kinds of days. They have a guy with a plow on his truck who comes through for the parking lot at about 5 in the morning after it snows. It wakes me up sometimes but I don’t mind. It’s usually the sound of money for me, too.
“I’ll help,” Wheat said. “You need to conserve your strength for the meet tonight.”
“Well, so do you,” I said.
“Not as much as you. If you had looked at the results in the paper last Friday, you would have seen that Donnie Thompson went up to 119 for Mishawaka. He got third in the state last year at 112. And, as you probably remember, he beat me last month in the Hobart Invitational, 5-4, and then barely shook my hand. You got him tonight. I got some kid named Drinkman who had been junior varsity until Thompson decided to go up a weight.”
“Great,” I said. “Why are you waiting to tell me this now?”
“I didn’t want you skipping the country.”
“I ought to let Tommy the Torso move up from behind you and take on this guy. I don’t want to be dismembered before the prom.”
“Yeah, well I don’t want to be surrounded by a couple of inept wrestlers for the varsity. Thirsty also has that kid who qualified for the state at 103 and I don’t see him lasting more than a minute. And The Torso? His back spends as much time on the mat as our team logo. You’ll do fine. Thompson may underestimate you.”
“Underestimation may be my secret weapon,” I said.
We quit talking as I went into the funeral home’s garage and got the shovels. I took my time and let Wheat do a lot of the work. She was right. I needed to conserve my strength.
As we were finishing up, our shared cell phone rang in Wheat’s coat pocket. I don’t think I had heard it ring in about a month. Like I have said, it’s usually just for emergencies and I was surprised that Wheat even had it on her.
She seemed eager to answer it, though. “Hello … “ she said. “Oh, yeah … well, that’s nice of you … sure … see you.”
Then she handed it to me with an evil grin. “Who?” I mouthed.
“Your upcoming dance partner,” she said almost too loud.
I was half-dreading, half-wanting to hear Sally Guffie’s voice but it was Laurie. “Hi, Spank,” she said. “I was very thoughtless today. I forgot that you had a wrestling meet tonight and I wanted to wish you good luck. If I didn’t have my little brother’s piano recital tonight, I might have come.”
“Well, thanks, Laurie,” I said. “I might need that good luck just to survive tonight. This would have probably been a good night for your dad to come because he would see I’m not very tough at all — not against the guy I’m facing.”
“Is he a real big guy or something?”
“No, he might be a couple of pounds heavier than me but we always wrestle people about the same size as us.”
“Well then, I’m betting you will beat him.”
I didn’t have anything to add.
“Where are you and Tanda right now?” Laura asked to break the silence.
“Clearing a path to the funeral home,” he said.
“Funny, Spank,” she said, apparently thinking I was making a joke about my destination after my match. “You are going to do good. Think positive.”
We bid our good-byes and I joined Wheat in front at the curb. She was staring at the window of the funeral home on our house’s side. “Do you think somebody’s in there?” she asked.
“Probably a body. I suspect there’s going to be a funeral tomorrow morning if they want the walks cleared off today.”
She shuddered. I knew that was creepy for her. As tough and brave as Wheat is on the wrestling mat, that doesn’t mean that some stuff can’t scare her. I’m not going to make fun of her. Otherwise, she would probably tease me about my fear of flocks of Canada geese — and nasty chickens. Any kind of birds, really, but geese and chickens in particular. But that’s a story for some other time.
Just about the time we finished, an old clunker of a car eased down our street and slowed even more when it got close to us. The driver, a hairy-looking guy with a stocking hat yelled out, “Hey, you little ……..” — I’m not going to tell you what he called us. Then he sped off.
“What was that all about?” Wheat shouted.
“I don’t know,” I said softly, “but that voice sounded a lot like the guy we chased on Saturday.”
—-
Before a dual meet, everyone has their own little routine. We get weighed to make sure we are eligible for our respective weight classes and then we can have our snacks. I like a little honey right out of the jar and Wheat drinks a Diet coke for the caffeine.
We go through our warm-up moves and work up a bit of a sweat and then head into the locker room where Coach Mathews gives us a little pep talk. Although nobody can help you when you’re out on the mat, we still view wrestling as a team sport. Coach Mathews says that we can feed off each other’s good performances.
This time, he mentioned that Clay hadn’t beaten Mishawaka in a dual meet in 15 years — when he was a junior and wrestling for Clay. I didn’t feel it was the time to ask what happened his senior year.
“I really think this is the night we do it,” he said, a little emotion creeping into his voice. “If we truly believe we can beat them tonight, it can happen. But it will take every one of you doing your best.”
Then Big Jim and Dion Borden, the two senior captains, said a few words with Dion using some X-rated sentences. I don’t think he learned those bad words from his dad since he’s a preacher. Dion could probably give a good sermon, too, because we all were yelling and jumping up and down and Wheat and I don’t even like cussing.
The junior varsity meet had just ended and so Coach Mathews said to line up. We were pretty psyched after Dion’s speech and we burst into the gym with Thirsty, our smallest wrestler, leading the way followed closely by Wheat and me and with Big Jim bringing up the end of our 14-person line.
We circled the mat on the run while our school song played on the sound system. It can give me goose pimples — I admit it, I can be a little rah rah. I took a look into the stands and saw my parents and Lake. I also spied Sally Guffie in her cheerleader uniform and sitting with her parents a few rows down. And in the corner of the gym and down the hall a little, I caught a glimpse of what looked like Kelly Carson in his letterman’s jacket.
Yikes! Didn’t I have enough worries about Donnie Thompson during the meet without having to think about what Kelly Carson might do to me afterwards? Maybe he had heard that Sally and I were dancing together the night before. I just hoped that Billy Brayton’s promise to protect me was still on.
I wanted to tell Wheat but we were already lining up for our handshakes with Mishawaka. We walked across the mat and I noticed that Donnie Thompson didn’t even look at me when he shook my hand, giving about all his attention to Wheat as she passed him by on his left.
After the introductions, I always head to the bench with my teammates. Wheat, the second one up, usually goes into the auxiliary gym through some double doors to do a few quick pushups and some sort of breathing exercises she learned from Uncle Mason. Here lately, I guess she has been applying her Midnight Breeze, too.
Just before her match, Wheat likes to burst out of the doors like a girl on fire. We saw the actor Mathew Modine do that in the movie “Vision Quest,” and she really liked it.
But she didn’t get much time because Thirsty got literally picked up and thrown down at the start of his match. After 14 seconds, the ref slammed his hand on the mat signifying a pin for the little Mishawaka wrestler with a name that would never fit on the back of his uniform even if he was the size of Big Jim. Vandergriffronald. Curtis Vandergriffronald. That’s some mouthful. He looked even smaller than Thirsty but he was wearing an “I mean business” look on his face.
Fourteen seconds. That was even Thirsty’s record — if you can have records for incompetence. Well, at least he is out there giving it a try, I guess.
Our student manager, Maddie Hamilton, was hurrying off to get Wheat just as she came through the double doors. She almost knocked poor Maddie down with her hustle and bustle into the gym. Then she did something I have never see her do before. She actually took her eye off her opponent and scanned the gym, located Kelly who had taken a seat at the far end of the bleachers and gave him just the smallest of waves.
I might as well had been knocked over by a tidal wave. Kelly Carson? And never in my life had I ever seen her not try to win a stare-down with her opponent from the moment she comes into the gym.
I guess it didn’t matter. She scored a takedown on the Drinkman kid and then almost pinned him before the first two-minute period was over. She was ahead 5-0 going into the second period and then ended it with a quick rollover move.
I usually do a little jump roping when I am next up but I was so mesmerized with whatever Wheat and Kelly had between them that I just stared in wonder — looking from Kelly to Wheat on the mat and then back again.
Our team, meanwhile, was feeling pretty confident. After two matches, we were tied with the mighty Mishawaka and now it was my turn to build on the momentum that Wheat had given us. I think my emotions were so high that I immediately scored a takedown on Donnie Thompson before he knew what was happening. He may have taken me for granted. Maybe Wheat was right.
And then again, maybe she wasn’t. Thompson quickly reversed me and I realized I was going to have to hang on for dear life. In the second period, I did score on an escape but it was 7-3 heading into the third and final period.
I spent most of it on my back and the last minute with Thompson trying to pin both my shoulders flat onto the mat. In a situation like that, I try to think of beautiful females. I don’t know why. It must get my adrenaline pumping. I thought of Selena Gomez, I thought of Taylor Swift, I thought of Laurie Middlebrook, I thought of Sally Guffie, I even thought of Mrs. Riley, imagining her when she was the Miss Delaware second runner-up. Somehow I managed to keep my right shoulder an inch or so from the mat.
I know it frustrated Thompson even if he won, 12-3. That meant that Mishawaka only got three points for the team standings instead of the six if he had pinned me. I know my team was happier with that outcome than our opponents were.
While I recovered on the bench and after I got high fives from everybody and a slap on the butt from Wheat, I scanned the crowd again. My parents looked happy, Sally gave me sort of a “What’s up,” sign with her outstretched hands — I couldn’t tell if that was a compliment or criticism — and Kelly Carson was nowhere to be found.
Dion Borden put us back in the lead with a third-period pin and my whole focus was on my teammates who all did really well. When Big Jim held on to in the heavyweight match, 8-7, we had won the meet, 36-34.
A lot of our fans — maybe about 80 — came out onto the mat. A couple of our bigger teammates tried to lift Big Jim onto their shoulders but soon gave up on the idea. But then Big Jim lifted Wheat up in the air like she was Tinkerbell. His sister had come out of the stands and when she saw that, she headed toward me. I was halfway expecting one of her taunting kisses but instead she picked me up in a bear hug like I was a sack of potatoes. In a million years, I would have never guessed that that was going to happen.
Wheat and I both weigh 112 or a little over and can look each other in the eye at almost 5-foot-5. Sally is maybe two inches taller than me and probably out-weighs me by 20 pounds or so. I just never thought of her as somebody who would bother lifting anything heavier than her purse.
When she set me down, she said, “My dad said that if that meanie Mishawaka guy had pinned you, you guys wouldn’t have won the meet, Sir William. He also said just watching you almost gave him a hernia. So, I guess it was a nice loss.”
All I could say was, “I didn’t know you were so strong.”
“Well, don’t be advertising that,” she said. “But I used to hold my own with my big oaf of a brother when we were younger. It’s hard to continue to be a tomboy when you start developing these kind of curves. But I do think all that rough-housing with an oaf when I was younger might have turned me a little mean.”
Then she walked over to her brother and gave him a big slap on the butt. And I was suddenly down on the mat as my own sister tackled me and a few of our teammates joined us in the pile. Even Maddie Hamilton, who is usually pretty shy, gave me a high five.
Coach Mathews had lost his voice from yelling so much during the match but he still was able to give a great victory speech back in the locker room. He was pretty emotional. For some reason, his raspy voice reminded me of the guy in the brown car and maybe the One-Booted Man but I soon forgot about it.
Although Wheat uses the girls’ locker room down the hall to change, she is in the boys’ locker room a good portion of the time for our meetings and other stuff. So is Maddie for that matter. I don’t think anybody really cares. Like me, I think the guys don’t even look at Wheat as a girl when she’s wrestling. But I guess I’m finding out that Big Jim and Thirsty and maybe some of the others must think that she is at least prom-worthy.
On the way home, we sat on both sides of Lake in his baby seat in the back of Ric’s squad car. Both he and Mom were beaming and Lake kept saying, “Winnnnn!” and “Pinnnnn!” Like I already told you, he probably already knows as much about wrestling as Mom does.
He then added a “Ta-Da” and pointed at Wheat — or Tanda in this case. “Well, Wheat,” I said. “Maybe you have a new nickname.”
I didn’t tell her that Sally had started calling me Sir William. To be honest, I kind of liked it.
CHAPTER 15
It wasn’t until we were upstairs and getting ready for bed before I asked Wheat about Kelly Carson. “What’s the deal with him at the meet. It seems he was there to watch you — and that you knew he was going to be there.”
“I could say none of your business, Spank, but since it’s partly your fault, I’ll tell you a story. When you were such a jerk at breakfast and I decided to jog to school, he drove by and picked me up in his Mustang. I wasn’t sure I wanted to get in, but he made one of his buddies get in the backseat so I could ride shotgun. He then apologized for the night at Mug and Munchies. He seemed to mean it. Then he walked me into school and asked if it would be OK if he came to watch me wrestle. He said he would feel a lot better to see that he wasn’t the only guy I could whip.”
“Wow, you better watch Sally Guffie. She might think you’re stealing her prom date.”
“That came up and he said there was nothing to that. They’ve known each other forever. They’ve been at the same school since kindergarten and their parents play cards on a lot of the weekends. They’ve done stuff as families. He did call her the other night. I think he was maybe thinking about asking her to the prom but he never did. He just looks at her as a friend. No sparks there, according to him. He’s probably seen enough of her ugly side over the years.”
“So did he ask you?”
“None of your business, Big Mouth. As I said before, I plan on being wrestling for a conference championship Saturday night.”
“What a crazy last couple of days,” I said, thinking it was time to change the subject.
Wheat was looking out the window toward the funeral home. “I hate to ask again, but do you really think there’s a body over there right now?”
“Yeah, and its ghost is coming after you tonight.”
Then I ran off and locked the bathroom door behind me. I might be as scared of an angry Wheat as she is of wandering ghosts. I took my time doing my bathrooming and finished by brushing my teeth. I then hid my brush behind the Band-Aids in the closet in case Wheat wanted to mess with it again.
When I opened up the door, I could see Wheat on our cell phone in the room. When she saw me, she cut off her conversation with a laugh and a “good-bye.”
“Who were you talking to,” I asked, thinking I already knew.
“The Ghostbusters,” she said. “I can sleep soundly now.”
I wasn’t sure I could. Life seemed a lot less complicated when I wasn’t a wrestling star — ha, ha — and when the cool people in school were leaving Wheat and me alone.
I had a really weird dream that night. I won’t go into all the details but I was wrestling Kelly Carson and I was ticked off because Wheat was coaching him and giving him instructions from the sidelines. When I finally won, I wouldn’t shake either of their hands. Kelly was crying and Wheat was trying to soothe him. I felt like I had lost even though I had won.
The dream didn’t seem to end. I started to leave the gym, not bothering to change out of my uniform, only to see that Laurie Middlebrook and Sally Guffie were getting ready to wrestle. Sally had a cape on and did some flying kick that sent Laurie into the bleachers. Laurie’s dad — the mayor — then came onto the mat and Sally put him in a headlock and he started yelling uncle. Then she pinned Big Jim, her brother. At that point, she looked at me and asked if I wanted to dance. She didn’t call me Sir William. She called me Little Man.
I woke up then. Yuck. I was sweating like I really had wrestled. The alarm clock over on my desk said it was 4:38 a.m. I decided to go downstairs and have a bowl of cereal. I couldn’t have done that a week earlier when I was still wrestling junior varsity at 112.
I didn’t turn on any lights until I got down into the kitchen. I didn’t want to wake up anybody else but I would have liked to have run the dream by Wheat. Then again, maybe I didn’t. I’ll admit the dream unsettled me. I hate when people not on our team are wrestling each other. I’ve had dreams like that before. I hate getting all those people in my head — wrestling around in there.
I was thinking that I liked my life the way it was before I moved up to varsity … and before Laurie asked me to the prom … and before Sally started thinking I was one of her play things … and before Kelly Carson looked at me as some kind of rival. I was also thinking that I liked the Cheerios I was eating a lot and might even have a second bowl.
I heard a car slow down and I heard the newspaper hit our porch. I decided to go out and get it. I knew there had been a Tribune reporter at the match because I had seen him talking to Coach Mathews right after we won. Usually, we only get the results published in tiny print in the paper — which is OK — but occasionally when there is a big meet like last night’s, the paper will make a little bit of a deal of it.
I think a photographer was there, too. They usually only stay for the first couple of matches and so it’s always the little guys who get their pictures in the paper. Big Jim sometimes grumbles about that. I grabbed the sports section and sure enough, there was a picture of Thirsty getting pinned and another one of Wheat holding her hand up in triumph. None of me struggling for my life, though, thank goodness.
I read the story and it made us sound pretty good. Wheat had a whole paragraph about her. I was mentioned with a couple other guys in a quote by Coach Mathews for coming up big — all because I didn’t get pinned.
I was back in bed by 5:12 a.m. with the alarm ready to go off in 33 minutes. At least I wasn’t going to have to fight off hunger on our morning run.
Ric had worked his part-time security job at the drug store over the weekend, so he told us after our meet that he was going to have to sleep in. He needed to catch up on his snoring. That was OK. I wanted to talk to Wheat, mainly about dreams but I’m sure Kelly Carson was going to come up.
“You’re on the front page of the sports section,” I told her as we climbed out of bed.
“What? You have ESP or something?” she said.
“I was up a little earlier. Some spooky dreams.”
“Like dead people from next door?”
“No, like living people from our new lives.”
“Poor little Billy Ray,” Wheat said and then headed downstairs, already in her sweat clothes.
She took a quick look at the sports section that I had left on the kitchen counter and headed out the door. She was running in place on our front walk when I caught up with her.
“Here, your turn to wear it,” she said as she tossed me the reflective vest that one of us always wears when Ric isn’t with us. Normally, he wears it but he insists that one of us don it when he isn’t with us.
I hate to wear it. It makes me feel like a road sign. I understood the importance, though. During the school year, our early morning workouts are always in the dark and we usually run in the street, especially in the winter when a lot of people don’t take proper care of their sidewalks.
Although the temperature was below freezing, it didn’t seem that bad. The wind wasn’t blowing and the early morning sky was still showing the stars. I always like to look up and find the constellation of Orion — the only one I can easily identify because of his little belt and three-cornered cap. I usually call out to him, “Hi, Orion” even though I’ve never taken the time to look up who Orion was.
I was using socks on my hands because I hadn’t been able to find my gloves during the last few days. They don’t match anyway, not that that’s a big deal when your hands are cold.
My neck and shoulders hurt from my match the previous night and my legs are always stiff when I start on our runs. Wheat, meanwhile, looked as light-footed as an elf as we chugged along at about a seven-minute mile pace. We both had on hooded sweat shirts but I still had on a Chicago Cub toboggan hat and Wheat wore pink earmuffs — my present to her this last Christmas.
After about a half mile of silence, Wheat finally said, “So how about your dreams last night. Anybody naked in them?”
“Nope,” I said. I didn’t want to mention, though, that in most of my dreams I always seem to be in my underwear under some pretty embarrassing circumstances. I did tell her that I had been wrestling Kelly Carson and she was rooting for him to win. I also told her that Sally Guffie was beating up just about everyone who got near her, including Laurie Middlebrook.
“That’s one messed-up mind you have, Spank. I’m not going to try to interpret them but I think that Big Jim’s sister has more of a hold on you right now than Laurie Middlebrook does. You’re a sad case.”
“I think I liked being a nerd or a geek or the nobody that I was before all this social pressure and popularity came my way. And now do I have to worry about you and Kelly making moon eyes at each other?”
“There’s nothing there. We were just doing a little peace making.”
I didn’t push it. Wheat had suddenly picked up the pace and it was getting hard to have any kind of conversation. She probably did that on purpose. We usually do a two-mile loop twice and we had just passed our house to start our third mile.
After a few minutes of silence, Wheat finally said, “Don’t worry, Spank. After the prom and then the wrestling season, both you and I can probably go back to being nobodies.”
That bothered me, not that she called me a nobody but that she called herself one. I don’t think I look up to anyone more than I do Wheat.
“Yeah, and you say I sell myself short,” I told her between breaths. “You are pretty and popular and a great wrestler.”
“Popular? Three-fourths of the population doesn’t want to see a skinny little girl beat up on skinny little boys. Pretty? My hair goes in every direction but south and it doesn’t help that I’m always in wrestling headgear. A great wrestler? Well, maybe that might be true someday but what’s that going to get me down the road — cauliflower ears and a bent nose?”
She slowed down a little to catch her breath. “Quit idolizing me, Spank. We all have our insecurities. You’ll grow into a handsome, well-rounded man someday — if you let yourself — while I’ll probably always be viewed as an untamable little wildcat until I have gray hair.”
We both let that set in and then she let out a laugh. I followed. “Purrrr, little wildcat,” I said.
“And puke to you, little man,” Wheat said in return.
I guess our deep thinking had run its course but I admitted to myself that I never really thought about Wheat as having any hang-ups on what her future might hold.
By that time we were back on our street, we were coming up on Mr. Saunders and Bootsie on their morning walk.
“Purrrr,” said Wheat rather loudly as we skirted around them while back on the sidewalk.
“Oh, hazel nuts! You just took five years off my life!” Mr. Saunders yelled, obviously surprised by our presence. “And don’t taunt my dog like that or I’ll let him off his leash and he can have at your fast little feet!”
“Is that five years in a human’s life or a dog’s life?” Wheat shouted over her shoulder as we scurried on. “Gosh, he’s starting to sound like the Wicked Witch of the West.”
I actually like Mr. Saunders. He is usually pretty friendly when he isn’t walking Bootsie. And I think he likes it when we give him a chance for some lively talk, faking a lot of his exasperation. I do think Bootsie would bite us, though, if Mr. Saunders did let him off the leash.
Back inside our house, Mom seemed ecstatic. “What a great picture of you two on the front page of the paper!” she exclaimed.
Wait a minute, I thought. Wait one blood-sucking minute. I wasn’t in the paper and I wouldn’t want to be after my back was on the mat most of my match. “What do you mean the two of us?” I said.
Then she held up the front page of the paper — not the front of the sports page but the front front page. And there on it was Big Jim hoisting Wheat in the air with a bunch of our teammates ready to swarm them. And off to their side, Sally was approaching me with her arms open and me looking like a little bunny about ready to be engulfed by a wolf — a good-looking wolf — but a wolf nonetheless.
I hadn’t even bothered to look at the front page when I brought in the paper earlier. I guess I should pay more attention to the real news.
“Wow,” Ric said as he came in the room and saw the front page held out by Mom. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a picture of a wrestling meet used on the front page. But I can see why. What a great shot of emotion and jubilation.”
“It’s absolutely precious,” Mom added.
I don’t think either Wheat or I would have used that word. I wondered what Laurie Middlebrook might think. And it wasn’t like I had done something great or anything to be a part of this celebration picture.
But then I think Wheat had even stronger feelings about the picture than I did. “It makes me look like I’m being tossed around like a little rag doll,” she said. “I don’t like it.”
“At least there’s a picture of you in the sports section looking like a champion,” I said to her. “I look like I’m about to be crushed by a crazed Amazon.”
“Don’t be silly,” Mom said. “That’s a picture that I want to order from the newspaper and have it framed.”
She showed it to Lake in his high chair. “Ta-da,” he said as Mom pointed to Wheat up in the air and hovering above everybody like an angel in flight. Then when she pointed to me, my little brother looked at me with a wide grin and said, “Spock.”
That’s as close as he has ever come to Spank. “Yeah, maybe that should be my new name,” I said. “My ears will probably look like Spock’s if they keep getting dragged across a mat as much as they were last night.”
Lake studied the paper a little more and then said, “Spock” again. If only I could stay as cool as the universe’s most famous Vulcan during the next few days.
Spock. Like I said, Wheat and I seem to attract nicknames. And I think that people who are either really big like Big Jim or people who are small like us are the ones who get stuck with the most aliases. I guess that isn’t all bad.