Ghost (14 page)

“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.”

I sat frozen in my seat.

“You from Glass Manor?” I asked softly.

Coach nodded. “That's how I know Mr. Jefferson,” he explained, which made a lot more sense to me now. “So I know what it's like to live here. I know what
it's like to be angry, to feel, I don't know, rage on the inside.” Coach's face seemed to relax a little, like he was cooling down. “And the same thing running did for me, I felt like it could do for you.” He looked out the front window and shook his head. “But maybe I was wrong.”

“What did you think it would do for me?” I asked, realizing that he never thought it could help me dunk by next year. Realizing I didn't even really want to play basketball anymore.

He faced me again, looking straight in my eyes. “Show you that you can't run away from who you are, but what you can do is run toward who you want to be.”

I let that sink in. Who was I? I was Castle Cranshaw, the kid from Glass Manor with the secret. The one with a daddy in jail and a mother who worked her butt off for me, and cut my hair, and bought knockoff shoes, and clothes that were big enough for me to grow into. I was the boy with the altercations and the big file. The one who yelled at teachers and punched stupid dudes in the face for talking smack. The one who felt . . . different. And mad. And sad. The one with all the scream inside.

But who did I want to be? Well, that was harder to
answer. I wasn't exactly sure yet. But definitely one of the world's greatest.

“Do you understand?” Coach asked, his head cocked to the side.

“Yeah,” I replied sheepishly.

“Do you really?” He was glaring at me, hard.

“I do. Seriously.” I wiped my face, sniffled, then added desperately, “But please don't tell my mom.”

Coach sighed. “I won't.” He paused, then followed with a threat. “
This
time.”

“Thank you,” I murmured, so relieved I thought I was gonna pass out. But I still had another question burning inside. “Well, do I still get to run?”

Coach glared even harder at me, and I was hoping that somewhere in my face he could see himself and give me another chance. I never wanted to be on no track team before I met him anyway. But now that I had been on one, even if it'd only been for a few weeks, I felt like I didn't want to do nothing else.

He unclenched his jaw. “Yeah, you can run.” Then pointing down at my raggedy regular sneakers, he added, “In those.”

“But I can't—” I started, but Coach cut me off.

“You wanna run or not?”

“Got it.”

“And Friday, you're cleaning my cab,” he commanded.

“Coach!”

The rest of the week was pretty much filled with me being on my best behavior at school—I was straight-up acting like that annoying goody-good, Maureen Thorne—then working extra hard at practice, which was much more difficult than usual because running in my regular raggedy sneakers made me feel like my feet had gained weight. Like I had obese toes or something. It had been a while since I had practiced in my cutoff shoes, and I think the silver bullets had me spoiled. Not to mention, everybody wanted to know where the silver bullets were, and I kept making ridiculous excuses like, “Lettin' them rest” and “Coach work us so hard at practice that I was scared I'd ruin them before the race.” And then they would say something like, “Oh, so you are gonna run, right?” or “Word, so you getting your uniform, right?” But they'd say it under their breath. And I would just shut all that down by saying, “Shhhh, uh, uh, uh, it's not worth talking about it. Not worth you risking yours. I'm here, ain't I? Still on the team, right? That's all that matters.”

So the raggedy-runners was what I had to run
in. And I stuck at it, through ladders on Wednesday, and Thursday's long run. I, of course, was now a step behind Lu, who was blazing around the track like it was nothing, doing everything he could to secure his spot as the lead sprinter. I mean, we both were sprinters. And Aaron and Mike. But Mike was going to run the eight hundred and the four hundred, just because me and Lu were both faster than him in the shorter sprint races, and Chris Myers—who ran the eight hundred—his father took him off the team because his grades were slipping. Aaron was going to run the four hundred. He was the master of it. Like, seriously, could burn anybody. And between me and Lu, one of us was going to run the two hundred meter, and one of us was going to run the one hundred meter.

Now, here's the thing. The two hundred was a good race. A hard sprint. But it wasn't as, I don't know, glamorous. No, no, that's not the word. The two hundred just wasn't the . . . main event. The main event was the one-hundred-meter dash. It was what Usain Bolt set the record in. It was
the
race. Before I got caught and Coach forced me to run in my old sneakers, I had a pretty good chance at snatching that spot from Lu. Don't get me wrong, he was crazy fast and had been running that race pretty much ever since
he started running. But over the month of practice, my time was maybe a half second faster than his. But not during the week of slumpy, cutoff shoe running, which was definitely the week that counted. But hey, it was only the first race of the season. So I figured I'd take the two hundred—honestly, I'd run any of the races Coach would let me—and work my butt off (and my legs and feet) to earn the chance to run that race.

Friday, Coach made me do exactly what he said I would have to. Clean out his cab. He came over to my house after school and drove around to the back of the building, where the Dumpsters were.

“Ghost, I'm not gonna lie to you,” Coach said, popping the trunk. “I don't know what might be in here.”

I wasn't sure either. I mean, the backseat was pretty much clear, just because that was the part of the car that he rode customers around in every day until I got in the car after practice. Then he put all the stuff in the front seat in the back. So the trash went from back to front, then front to back. Fast-food bags, gym bags, paper, shoes, and who knows what else. And then there was the trunk. When he popped it, and I looked in there and saw the end of the world, the backseat and front seat seemed spotless. The trunk was ridiculous.

“Coach, this is crazy!” I said, staring into what looked like the black abyss.

“I know,” he said, flashing an embarrassed smirk. “I sure am glad you did a stupid thing and have to clean all this up.”

And I did. I trashed all the fast-food bags, some with french fries and half-eaten burgers still in them. I pulled out the duffels. I don't know why Coach needed so many gym bags. Who needs more than one? But there was nothing in them. They were all pretty much empty, because all the shoes, and stinky shorts, and towels took up about half the space of the entire trunk! Dirty socks, and headbands, and old jerseys from past years with the Defenders. He also had starting blocks, which are big and metal and heavy, shoved in there. And whistles. Whistles everywhere. I opened up the gym bags and loaded them up with all that crud. When I got to the last one, a yellow-and-green duffel with the name Otis on it, I unzipped it.

“Who's Otis?” I asked Coach, who was sitting on the hood of the car, flipping through the lists of all our run times.

“Otis is me,” he said, not even looking up.

“Oh,” I said, flat. I mean, I knew Coach's last name was Brody, and I figured his first name wasn't just
Coach. Nobody's name is Coach. Well, that might not be true. My name is Castle, so someone might actually be named Coach, somewhere. But not chipped-tooth turtle face.

I started loading the bag up with a busted pair of cleats that probably would've been better off in the trash, when I spied a piece of paper, a crinkled-up rectangle, in the corner of the duffel. I pulled it out. It was a faded picture of a man, tall and slim like Sunny, facial hair only around his mouth but none on his cheeks. He had his hands resting on a little boy who stood in front of him. The kid was cheesing. The man was looking away, almost like he was calling out for someone.