Ghost (Track #1)(32)
When we pulled up in front of my place, Coach cut the car off and opened his door.
“Where you going?” I asked, because he never got out the car except for the time he had to ask my mom if I could go on the newbie dinner, but that had been weeks ago. The routine was, he pulled up out front, dropped me off, waited for me to get inside, then pulled off. But he never, ever, got out the car.
“What you think I’m doing, Ghost? I’m going to tell your mother what you did.”
OH. NO. I fumbled at the handle trying to get the door open and scrambled out of the car.
“Coach, no. Please,” I begged. I ran around and got in front of him, holding my hands up as if I was trying to use some kind of magic force to push him back. Oh, man. I’m sounding like Sunny. But . . . hey. “Please, please, please,” I pleaded, but Coach pushed past me. He was storming toward my house, and there was nothing I could do to stop him. I grabbed his shirt. “Coach!” He spun around. A tattoo I had never noticed before peeked from the now stretched-out neckline.
“Ghost,” he said, his eyes closed. “I’m only gonna tell you this one time. Let me go.” His voice was flat. Hard. Scary. I let his shirt go and put my hands together.
“Please, Coach. You can’t tell my mother.” It was like a rerun of the first Coach bailout when he came and picked me up from school and I said pretty much those exact words. And here I was again asking him not to snitch on me. It’s not that I was scared of being punished or getting in trouble with my mom. I was, but that’s not why I was begging. I just didn’t want to add to the problems. I mean, I’m her only child, the reason she was working so hard, and I went out and did something stupid. But the only reason I did something stupid was because I knew I couldn’t ask her for the money. And the reason I couldn’t ask her wasn’t because she wouldn’t have gotten the shoes for me. It’s because she would have. She would’ve done anything to get them. I knew that. And I just didn’t want her to have to give up something—something else—for me to have some stupid shoes. And now because I stole them, she would be disappointed that I didn’t come to her and feel even more guilty. She’d think she was a bad mom on so many levels. But I couldn’t just tell Coach all that. I didn’t have the time. So I fell to my knees and pressed my hands together. “Coach, please. I know I messed up, but please. Please, Coach.” The words began to break up in my throat. “Please.”
Neighbors outside were looking at me act a fool. Coach noticed them too and knew that this just wasn’t a good look, so he told me to get up and get back in the car.
“Just tell me why,” he said, after slamming his door. He put his hands on the steering wheel and stared straight ahead. “Why, Ghost?”
“What was I supposed to do? My mother don’t have no money for running shoes. I couldn’t put that on her!” I replied.
“Ask me!” Coach said, now laser-beaming straight at me. I clenched my jaw as a marble of anger and frustration and fear rolled down my throat. “Why didn’t you just ask me?”
“Because you ain’t my father,” I snapped. “Why would I just expect you to help me? Why would you?” I felt like my entire body was now shaking. “I mean, you got me on the team, and thank you for that, and you bailed me out with my trouble at school and I thank you for that, too, but you . . . you . . . you just not . . . why you care so much anyway?”
“What are you talking about, Ghost? I care about all of you. Why you think I’m out there every day coaching y’all?”
“But I’m different. You know that. You heard my secret. You heard it. That ain’t normal,” I explained, my voice now straining, ripping into its own confetti. “And I get teased and laughed at all the time because I live here. And I look like this. You don’t live here! You don’t look like this!” Now stupid tears were welling up in my eyes. “You don’t know what it’s like, Coach. You don’t know.”
Now Coach swallowed something, like bitter air, twisting his face up. He turned his whole body toward me and yanked his shirt down so that the neck stretched even lower.
“You see this tattoo?” he asked. It was a dark band diving down into his curly chest hair. “It’s my Olympic medal. I got a tattoo of it after the man who did this to me”—now Coach curled his top lip so I could see his chipped tooth—“stole the real one.” Coach didn’t give me a chance to say nothing, he just bulldozed on. “That man was my father. He was an addict. And every time he got high, he got violent. He punched me in the mouth when I was fifteen because I asked him to change the channel on the TV. The Olympics were on. And four years later, after I had worked my butt off to make something of myself, I got my shot to run in the same race I tried to watch when he hit me. And I won. It was the happiest moment of my life. And my mom’s. And, I think, even my dad’s. But three weeks later . . .” Coach paused, swallowed another dose of that bitter air, then continued. “Three weeks later, he . . . um . . . he sold my medal for a twenty-dollar high. And that was his last high. He overdosed, right over there on those steps.” Coach pointed to a building a few buildings down from mine. Then he started tapping hard on the dashboard. “Because that’s where we lived. That’s where I grew up. So don’t tell me what I know and don’t know, Ghost.”