Runner (2 page)

Miller stared back at me for a while, and then he looked down. "I haven't had time to read anything yet, but I will."

There was an awkward silence, and then Arnold started talking, going through all the regular thank you and good luck stuff. The class clapped; Miller mumbled something; the class clapped again. Finally, Miller left.

With Miller gone, Arnold passed out an article on the Israelis and the Palestinians. The pages were all wrinkled and dirty; my copy had to have been at least ten years old. "Read this for tomorrow. Read it slowly and think about it as you go. And don't lose it; I want it back."

I put my head down and started reading the words, but it was too complicated for me to follow. When the bell rang, I took my time packing my stuff into my backpack. By the time I started for the door, all the other kids were gone. As I passed by Arnold's desk, he raised his head from the papers in front of him. He looked like he was about to say something, but then his eyes returned to his desk.

I was out.

When I reached my locker, I shoved my books inside, slammed the door shut, and then started down the hallway toward the main doors. I hadn't taken more than three steps when I heard Melissa's voice. "Chance, wait up a second. OK?"

Her locker was across the hall and down from mine. I turned back and watched as she pulled a red jacket out of her locker and tied it around her waist. She closed her locker and walked quickly to where I stood. "My hands are shaking so much I couldn't get my locker open," she said.

She fell into stride with me as I headed for the exit, and she started talking to me as if we walked together out of the building every day. "Arnold makes me so mad," she said. "He's always lecturing us about the wonders of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, but he only believes in free speech in a book. Practice free speech in real life, get somebody mad at
you because of what you say, and all of a sudden he's got his hand over your mouth, trying to muzzle you."

We'd reached the main door. I opened it, let Melissa go first, and then stepped outside. Once I felt the fresh air on my face, I realized I'd been burning alive in that building. "I'll see you around, Melissa," I said, and started down the stairs. She reached out and took hold of my forearm.

"Wait, Chance," she said. "Come with me to Java John's. I really feel like talking to somebody."

"I don't know, Melissa. I've got to—"

"Please, Chance. Just for a few minutes."

I didn't know what to say. It had been a long time since anyone had asked me to do anything. I shrugged. "OK. But just for a couple minutes."

Java John's is opposite the west side of campus. When we turned the corner by the A building, we saw Melody and Heather and a couple of their friends. They had formed a semicircle around Brent Miller, as if he were some sort of rock star and they were his adoring groupies.

Melissa and I instinctively started walking faster, hoping to get by unseen. We almost made it too. But Heather's voice reached out and caught us. "Bitch," she taunted. I would have kept going, but Melissa turned back.

"Shut up, Heather."

"Shut up yourself," Heather snapped back.

Miller stepped toward me. "You had a lot to say in that classroom, Chance. How come you're so quiet now?"

He took another step toward me, and then another. His
hands curled into fists. When he was a yard away, he stopped. "Here I am. Take your best shot."

I had no chance. Miller was bigger, older, stronger—and he'd had training. Heather and Melody and the other girls were looking at me, their eyes gleaming with excitement. They wanted to see a fight; they wanted to see me get my face pounded in. Melissa grabbed my arm and pulled on it. "Let it go, Chance," she said. "Let's just get out of here."

I wanted to hit Miller. For a moment, I wanted to hit him more than I wanted anything in the world. But I was afraid of him too. So I let Melissa pull me away.

"You're a coward," he called after me. "Always were and always will be. Just like your old man."

"Let's just skip this," I said once we'd crossed the street and were standing in front of Java John's.

Melissa shook her head. "I'm not going to let those morons ruin my day." She pulled the door open, and there wasn't much else for me to do but follow her in.

At the counter stood a dark-haired guy with a little goatee. Melissa looked at the menu board and ordered a latte and an almond biscotti. "You can pick it up at the end of the counter," the guy said after she paid. "What can I get you?" he asked as I stepped up to the cash register.

I felt in my pocket for change. I had three quarters and some dimes and nickels—enough for a coffee but nothing more.

"Size?"

"Small."

"Anything to eat?"

I shook my head. He pushed a button on the register. "That'll be a dollar eight."

I'd forgotten about tax. I pulled the change out of my pocket and laid it on the counter. I was three cents short. He reached to a little plate with pennies on it, took three, and added it to my coins.

Melissa was sitting at the only window table. I carried my coffee there and sat down. "Don't let him get to you," she said. "You're not the coward. He's the coward."

I took a sip of the coffee. It was bitter, and I wanted to get away from her. "I need to get some sugar," I said, and I went back up to the counter.

When I returned, she fiddled with her cup a little, and then looked at me again. "You were brave in class today, Chance. You were the only one who was. Fighting isn't the only way to be brave, you know."

"Could we talk about something else?"

For a long time we both sat, neither of us saying anything. Then she smiled. "Let's talk about the
Lincoln Light."

I wasn't sure I'd heard right. "You mean the school newspaper?"

"Yeah. I'm the editor, you know."

I shook my head. "No, I didn't know."

"Well, I am. And I'm looking for writers. People who are willing to take on controversial topics. I think you'd be great."

So that was it—that's why she'd wanted to talk to me. "I can't write for the
Lincoln Light,
Melissa."

"Why not?"

"I've got nothing to say."

"Everybody has something to say. You write about things you care about."

"I don't care about anything."

"Yes, you do," she said, her voice angry. "Otherwise you wouldn't have said what you said in class today. You care about the truth." She paused. "At least think about it, OK? We meet every other Friday night at the Blue Note Café. It's up on Thirty-second Avenue, at the top of the stairwell that leads down to the beach. Even if you didn't write, you could help with proofreading and stuff like that. We need new people, Chance. Besides, what else are you doing?"

I looked into her eyes. They were open and honest. She wasn't pretending—she really did want me to join her newspaper staff.

"I'll think about it," I said.

"OK," she said. She took a sip of her latte, finished her biscotti, and then stood. "I've got to get going. See you tomorrow."

I sat at the table and finished my coffee. With a couple of packets of sugar added to it, it was OK. Besides, I'd paid for it, so I was going to drink it. When the cup was empty, I stayed where I was, looking out the window. The door opened and a couple of older women came in. They placed their orders and then glanced over at me. They wanted the window table. I stood up, pushed in the chair, tossed my cup into the trash, and headed for the door. "Come again," the guy behind the counter called out as I left.

Usually I walk down to the sailboat along Sixty-fifth Street, but that day I went three blocks south to Sixty-second. Just past the community center is the little house where I used to live.

It had been a long time since I'd walked by that house. All over Seattle, new owners have rebuilt older homes, making them so big it's hard to recognize the original house. But other
than the bushes being a little taller and a fresh coat of yellow paint, my old house looked the same as it had on the day I'd left it.

I stopped across the street from it and raised my eyes to the second story. Behind a tall, thin window was my bedroom—or what had been my bedroom. It was small, with steeply pitched walls. I had a dartboard on the door and a
Star Wars
poster tacked to the wall. Hidden beneath that poster was a hole in the wallboard about the size of an orange. My dad always said he was going to fix it, but he never did. I wondered if the new owners had done anything about it. For some reason, I hoped they hadn't.

It didn't seem as if anyone was home, so I crossed the street, walked down the driveway, and peered over the chain-link fence into the back yard. The yard looked the same, too, though it was smaller than I'd remembered. The laurel bushes where I'd built my forts were still there. So were the plum tree and the patch of grass where on hot days I'd run through the sprinkler.

It was on that patch of grass that my mom had told me. I didn't understand what she was saying at first. "I'm dying here," she said, and I thought she was sick with cancer or something like that. I guess my fear showed in my face, because she pulled me close to her then, held my head against her chest. "Not my body, Chance. My heart. My soul. I'm dying. I've got to start my life over. Away from your father. You understand why, don't you?"

I shook my head no, but I did understand. I'd heard them arguing at night. I knew my dad drank way too much and
worked way too little. "You won't leave me too, will you?" I said.

"No, Chance. I won't ever leave you. I promise."

I was still staring into the yard when the front door of the house opened and a little red-haired girl about nine years old stepped out, her mother right behind her. The little girl's eyes caught mine, and she immediately smiled, but her mother didn't.

"I used to live here," I said quickly. "I was just curious about the house and the yard."

The woman reached out and grabbed her daughter's hand. I backed away from the yard, then turned and walked quickly down the street. I didn't have to turn back to know the woman's eyes were on me.

A few minutes later I was heading down the steep ramp that leads from the Shilshole Bay Marina parking lot to Pier B, where my dad's sailboat is moored. At the bottom of the ramp is a locked gate that keeps the snoops and the thieves out. I stuck my key in the lock, turned the handle, and stepped onto the pier, making sure the gate closed and locked behind me. Then I walked past a couple dozen sailboats until I reached the
Tiny Dancer.

I was home.

When kids hear I live on a boat, they picture a floating mansion outlined with strings of white Christmas lights like the one in the old movie
Sleepless in Seattle.
They think I sit on the deck under an umbrella while waves gently lap up against the sides, foghorns sound in the distance, and exotic seabirds fly overhead. But I don't live on any floating mansion; the
Tiny Dancer
is an old, weather-beaten thirty-foot sailboat. The paint
is blistered and peeling. Barnacles and seaweed cling fore and aft. Before she could sail anywhere, she'd need to be hauled out and completely gone over, but that costs money and lots of it.

Which is another way of saying that even though I live on a sailboat, I'm not a sailor. Mainmast, capstan, jib, boom, tiller, rudder, port, starboard, bow, stern—I know what most of that nautical crap means. But nobody learns how to tack into the wind by sitting on a sailboat, and sitting is all I've ever done. My dad hasn't taken the boat out into Puget Sound for five years. I know as much about sailing as some guy living in a mobile home knows about driving in the Indianapolis 500.

Mr. Kovich and Mr. Nelson and other guys with boats on our pier tell me the
Tiny Dancer
is a decent sailboat, so I guess it is, but it's a lousy place to live. It's so small that my dad and I can hardly turn around without bumping into each other. All our belongings have to fit into the little nooks and crannies in the cramped cabin below deck. The galley has a tiny oven, a tiny sink, and a couple of tiny shelves for food. The refrigerator isn't really a refrigerator—it's an icebox about the size of an old stereo speaker. The table in the galley barely holds two plates and two glasses. In the main part of the cabin are two side benches. Above them are small storage areas and then a pair of narrow, rectangular windows. I sleep up front in the V berth; my dad sleeps aft. When I first slept on the boat, I sat up quickly in the mornings a couple of times, cracking my head pretty good. Since then, I've always remembered to crawl in and crawl out.

We're moored at slip 45, which puts us about halfway down the pier. When I came even with slip 31, I saw my dad sitting
on deck. He was smoking a cigarette and staring at the million-dollar yachts a couple of piers away.

He shouldn't have been there.

All summer, he'd worked from noon to nine at the Sunset West Condominiums, a two-hundred-unit waterfront retirement apartment complex just down the road from the marina. He unclogged toilets, washed windows, cleaned the laundry room, vacuumed the halls, moved sofas—whatever the old people wanted done, he did. It was a crappy job, but it was a job, the first steady job he'd had for as long as I can remember. It kept him from drinking at all during the day, and maybe kept him from drinking as much as he used to at night, though I'm not sure about that.

"What's going on, Dad?" I said as I stepped up onto the boat.

"Nothing's going on," he said, not even looking at me.

I settled onto the bench across from him. "Shouldn't you be at work?"

He leaned down and picked up a brown paper bag by his feet. I didn't have to look to know that inside was a pint of vodka. He took a sip, and then looked out across the water again.

"Why aren't you at work?"

He turned to face me. "Because I got fired."

"What happened?

He stubbed out his cigarette, stuffed his bottle of vodka into the pocket of his jacket, and stood. "I'm going down to Little Coney. Get some coffee and see if Frank Fisher's there. I'll be back late."