Sunny(21)

He said that all I was going to be doing was throwing. That’s it. Just throwing to get me as comfortable as possible before the meet tomorrow.

Coach told me to keep my form tight, and to just whoosh whoosh aah

And I went. Spinning and throwing, spinning and throwing, Coach standing beside me, feeding me the metal disks, making slight adjustments to my technique.

Coach would tell me to keep my knees bent.

He’d say not to muscle it, but to just let it leave my hand. To just let it go. And I was doing okay until one got away from me and shanked off to the right and landed on the track.

And then somebody yelled out something about how that could’ve hit them, and I turned around and it was Patty. She was strutting over to the track, and behind her was Lu and Ghost.

Coach yelled that this was a closed practice and that there was no riffraff allowed.

Then Lu called me riffraff and said if I’m here, they should all be allowed. That made me feel good.

Then Ghost spat sunflower seed shells and said we were like roaches and that where there’s one, there’s four. And I didn’t know if that was true or not, but it’s interesting to think about, and a little frightening.

Ghost had walked over after school, and Patty’s friend Skunk—yep, Skunk—brought her and Lu. Skunk, who unfortunately looks nothing like a Skunk, was over by the stands, shaking my father’s hand.

They had come to support me. Lu said they knew I was used to leading the pack. Now the pack had come to help lead me. So now, with them watching, I started again with the spinning and releasing, the discuses sometimes chucking through the air wobbly, and other times cutting through the sky like a blade.

And with each throw, whether good or bad, Lu, Patty, and Ghost would cheer me on.

Good one!

Or, Not bad!

Or, Don’t worry about that one!

Or, Hey, as far as I’m concerned, that should be part of the field!

And before I knew it, there was another voice. A deeper one. My father. He had come onto the track, onto the field, and was standing off to the side, shouting.

That’s better!

And, Try again!

And, That’s how you do it!

And when all the discuses were thrown, they all clapped for me like a bunch of weirdos. And helped me retrieve them all so that I could throw each discus again.

Diary, after a few rounds of that, I’m happy to say I was consistently getting the discus up in the air, flat and straight. It wasn’t going into outer space or nothing, and it was definitely not going a mile, but it was flying. Coach spent the last thirty minutes of practice just nodding, which for him is always a good thing.

At the end of practice Coach told me he thought I was ready, and that I could at least place third because there’s only three of us competing.

Patty didn’t like that. She said I’m taking first, like always.

I didn’t say nothing to that. Just smiled because it was cool that she believed in me like that. That they all did. But the truth is, I’m not sure I even really care about winning at all.





Dear Diary,

After all that throwing, I was starving, and for once was looking forward to getting home and snatching a TV dinner from the freezer, opening the box, poking holes in the plastic cover with a fork, then microwaving that thing into a steamy, weird-smelling meal. Yum. But Darryl had other plans.

He ended up taking me to the Chinese restaurant him and my mother went to on their first date, which happened to also be the same Chinese restaurant me and Lu and Ghost and Patty and Coach went to on our first date. Back when the season was just getting started and Coach was trying to get us newbies to bond. Back when we shared secrets, when I found out about Patty’s mom, and Ghost’s dad. And how Lu always wanted a brother. Back when I shared my own secret about my mother dying and being forced to run by the man who was now sitting in front of me, flipping through a Chinese food menu the same way he flips through the newspaper on Sundays.

When the waiter came over to take our orders, I let mine rip. Peking duck and a cherry Coke. And before the waiter could say they don’t have cherry Coke, I told him that I knew they didn’t have it so a Coke with a little cherry juice in it was fine.

Darryl just shook his head. He ordered sweet-and-sour chicken, and asked me where I learned about Peking duck.

I told him Aurelia orders it sometimes for lunch.

He nodded and said my mother used to order that too. Said it was one of her favorite dishes. That, and sausage biscuits.

My cherry Coke came out. I took a sip. It was delicious. Diary, remind me to thank Patty tomorrow. Anyway, that first sip brought up an idea. Especially since I didn’t really know what to talk to Darryl about. Besides random comments about chopsticks and my mother, things were pretty awkward, not in a bad way, but in a way that made me keep moving around on my side of the booth, trying to get comfortable on the sweaty vinyl.

So I did the only thing I could think of. I asked Darryl to tell me a secret.

Then I had to repeat the request.

And finally after saying, a secret, a secret, like . . . a secret, he told me why he made me call him Darryl, and not Dad. He said he didn’t feel like he could truly be a dad without my mother. And that it just didn’t feel right. Like, I’m his son and he’s my father, but she would never be able to hear me call her Mom, so he just felt like it was unfair for him to be called Dad. He also admitted that maybe that’s not a good reason, but . . . it’s the truth. I was supposed to be the biggest return. Hearing Mommy and Daddy was supposed to be the ultimate ROI. The greatest moment in their plan.