Write on Edge Prompt: Athleticism

Each stride landed like an anvil as Charlie plodded forward.  Thunk, thunk, thunk.  He wasn’t wearing appropriate footwear. No one in Charlie’s family was ever wearing appropriate footwear.  Mrs. Gilman thought he had forgotten his sneakers, which led Charlie to wonder briefly what the true extent of his invisibility at this school was.  Pretty significant, he concluded, given that she hadn’t noticed any of the glaring indicators of his poverty and neglect: same shirt every day, no lunch, loosely flapping sole on his left boot persisting for several weeks.

Thunk, thunk. He rounded the corner by the willow tree. Two and a half more laps to go. Jessica Pelkey from Spanish class and one of the Japanese exchange students shot past him. Charlie was pretty sure the Japanese kid had just lapped him. He turned his face to the shoulder of his too-small windbreaker and wiped his nose on his shoulder.

“Almost there , guys! C’mon. Let’s see you hustle it out!”

Hustle it out. Charlie seriously doubted that his heavy, soft body could possibly be manifesting anything  approximating  a “hustle,” but he appreciated his gym teacher’s effort to include even her most woeful students in her eruptions of universalized, generic encouragement.  He wondered if she had any sense of how torturous this was for him.  The burning in his lungs and sharp pain in his left knee was dwarfed by the emotional  free-fall generated by forced exercise in front of his already impenetrable  peer group.           

In Charlie’s world, Presidential Fitness Test Day functioned primarily as an annual day trip into hell. Mandatory Pull-ups, crunches, stretching, and a mile run around the dilapidated track—all in front of his classmates and recorded for posterity on Mrs. Gilman’s clipboard—would be topped off in short order by the granddaddy of fat kid humiliation: the body fat assessment.  Waiting for Charlie at the end of this “run” was a pair of plastic calipers with which his teacher would grab his love handles and report back a searing quantification of his loser quotient by way of body fat percentage. Last year she had done it student by student in front of the entire class.

Charlie tried to focus on something else.  There was a new pain—a dull ache of sorts—emerging in his lower back. Just keep putting one foot in front of the other, man, Charlie pep-talked himself. It’s not going to kill you. He looked ahead and set his sights on the visitor’s team bleachers about  30 yards ahead. Just get to the bleachers, he thought. Focus on the fucking bleachers. Another student—Cody Moffett?—brushed by. Charlie never took his eyes off the bleachers.

**this post is a creative writing exercise based on a "Red Writing Hood" prompt from Write on Edge