Sunny(7)

Coach said he was waiting. He cocked his head. Folded his arms.

I looked down.

Up, up!

I looked up. And told him I stopped running because . . . I was tired.

He asked me what I meant by that. Said it didn’t sound right.

I told him, It was right, though. I was tired. I am tired.

Coach cocked his head to the other side, and I could tell he was getting fizzy inside.

So was I. Like a soda bottle with bubbles rising up through the body, up the neck. And then, suddenly, blooepp. Just . . . came out. All the sound that sounded like I don’t want to run no more, Coach. That sounded like because, like I already told you, my mother died giving birth to me, and my father is mad at me, and that’s the only reason I run, but I didn’t do nothing. I didn’t do nothing. I don’t want to do this no more.

Diary, here’s the thing. You can’t really be on a track team if you don’t want to run. I know that. But I didn’t want to run. And I still wanted to be on the team. Because I’m weird. So Coach, who was now less fizzy, asked me what I wanted to do. I told him I didn’t know. Then he told me I couldn’t be on the team no more, that it just didn’t make sense to keep me if I wasn’t running. I wanted to tell him it doesn’t have to make sense, but then he said he still loved me and wanted to see if he could help me with whatever else I wanted to do. And I asked him if he was serious, and he said he was.

I said, Anything?

He said, anything, but I just needed to tell him what that was. So.

I told him I wanted to dance.

He said, Dance?

I said, Dance. And then I hit my routine. Just blooepp’d it right out of me.





Dear Diary, I have to admit it wasn’t my best exhibition of my dancing ability. My booms and ticks were a little off, probably because I was just so . . . I don’t know. This was Shakespeare-level stressful. Plus, it was still kind of a new routine Aurelia was teaching me. I hadn’t really mastered it yet.

Coach didn’t know what to say, so he didn’t say nothing. For a while. Maybe ten seconds. Felt like ten minutes. Ten hours. I could hear Curron from the track saying something, and I couldn’t make out what it was, but I knew it was about me because I heard Patty shut it down. Then I heard Whit shut Patty’s shutdown down. Coach glanced over to the track just for a moment, then turned back to me, his expression still stuck as if he was wearing a plastic Halloween mask of his own face. Honestly, I thought he was going to laugh, so I looked down, that way I wouldn’t see it. But then he told me to look up. As usual.

Wow.

That’s what he said, Diary. Wow.

And then he told me that unfortunately he doesn’t know any dance squads, dance groups, dance teams, dance troupes, or dance clubs. Not sure why he had to say it all those different ways, but I could tell he didn’t mean it in a mean way. Still kind of stung, though. But then the strangest thing happened. I mean, I still can’t believe it, even right now as I’m writing this to you. In you. Coach stared at me for few more hour-minute seconds, mumbling something under his breath. Mumbling, mumbling, mumbling. By the way, I just realized something—mumble is the sound of mumbling. Kind of like milk. And I had that milk feeling in my stomach still when all of a sudden Coach told me to do the whoosh part again. And that’s how he said it.

He said, Sunny, do the whoosh part. The whoosh part. The spin. That’s what he was talking about.

Whoosh is the sound of spinning.

I was confused, but I did it. I followed directions because Coach is . . . Coach.

I whooshed. He told me to do it one more time. So I whooshed again. And then he told me to follow him.

Diary, I was so, so, soooo confused. One second I’m one second away from guts on the ground, the next second I’m boomticking in front of Coach, and the next next second I’m standing at the back of his cab, watching him dig around in the trunk. And you know what he asked me, Diary, after tossing duffel bags and jerseys and other kinds of things to the left and to the right? You know what he said after he slowly stepped back, holding the thing he’d been looking for?

Do you know what a discus is? That’s what he said.

I just said yes.

And then Coach asked me if I wanted to try throwing it. For the team.

And I asked him why I would ever do that. I’m a runner. At least I was.

And Coach spun around and said, Whoosh. Then he spun again, looking like an amateur dancer, but like a proper discus thrower, and said, Whoosh.

And . . . I understood. It was dancing. Discus was dancing. Discus was . . . disco.

I said yes.

I mean, I said I’ll try.





Dear Diary,

There’s a song by that lady, Cher, I was telling you about. The lady I named the chair, Chair, after. Yeah. It goes, Do you believe in life after love?

But it sounds like, Do you bee-LEEEEEEEVE in life after love?

after love? <—echo

after love? <—echo





Dear Diary,

Patty, Lu, and Ghost caught me talking to the discus. I was sitting on the bench, waiting for practice to be over, and was imagining the metal disk as a spaceship with tiny aliens inside and my job was to figure out how to throw it back into space or something. To Planet Discobulus, maybe. A planet made of sparkles and glass and beats that make the aliens pump their fists and wave their arms around like snakes. And maybe that’s how they communicate. Or maybe their language is just bass. Like, oont, oont, oont, oont, oont And right when I was oonting, Lu and Ghost and Patty walked up.