Tell Me A Story – Wednesday Writing Prompt

I am seventeen years old, and I am wearing a humiliating catholic school gym uniform. It still feels like summer, but it’s a few weeks into the first semester of my junior year, at a new high school, in a new place, and I don’t know anyone yet. My loneliness is palpable, and I wake up every morning with a stomach ache that never seems to leave me.

Gym class is the very worst part of every day, in a day full of worst parts.

We’re supposed to be playing flag football, and I can’t imagine anything I’d rather do less than display my total lack of athletic prowess to all these queen bees I am somehow surrounded by. Each and every one of them is so ridiculously over the top perfect that the locker room scenes before and after gym class may as well have been dubbed from some dirty B movie. That I am expected to play a sport in which I might have to actually touch these girls, girls who can’t be bothered to know I exist – seems too impossible to be real.

I’m not sure what sadist is responsible for high school gym, but I am pretty much convinced I’ll spend the rest of my life trapped on this field with this pit of dread in my stomach, wishing I were anywhere but here. I genuinely wish I were dead. I simply cannot fathom how I will make it through these 45 minutes, this class, this year, this school.

I’m dragging ass as slowly as I can out to the football field and doing various calculations in my head, wondering how many minutes I can shave off of this experience – if I walk slowly enough maybe I can somehow manipulate 45 minutes down to 30, or 12, or none.

There are deep ruts leading out to the field and as I walk across them I wonder who would drive out here, and why.

It dawns on me that my gym teacher will almost certainly make us pick teams, and in that moment I truly do wish god would strike me dead on the spot.

There’s a slight stirring among the clusters of girls on the field, and then a rumble on the road behind me, and I emerge from my fugue and turn towards the sound. And there’s an old green convertible, top down, and a boy I know so very well is behind the wheel, streaking lines of dust across the field towards me. In an instant, I grow taller, and thinner, and blonder. Somehow, I’ve got the football, and I fling it behind me and a grin I can’t control breaks across my face, and then I am running and my gym teacher is yelling and there is shrieking and pointing and I’m across the field, away from school and football and mean girls and priests and rules and choosing teams and I’m performing feats of physicality I’ve never performed before and leaping into the passenger side of an old MG and then there is nothing but the two of us and pure joy and “oh I’ve missed you so much” and crying and kissing and I’m laughing and happy and I’m a different girl and everyone knows it. And my life has been changed forever by this instant and this day, this day has made me wild and popular and mysterious and almost as cool as Alicia Silverstone in an Aerosmith video and I am in so much trouble but I do not care because I am saved. Saved.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________

A whistle blasts.

I am late for gym.

I am chosen last for the team.

I stand, awkward and shifting and alone, on the sidelines, and I make sure to not accidentally rub my unpopularity on anyone, and I try to look natural, as if I could care less about flag football or friends or girls or anything, anything at all. My fondest hope is that no one notices me.

That gym class, that day, that year – it must have ended, somehow. After all, I am here now. But I remember nothing else from that day. Not much from that year. After I emerged, I think my brain must closed that time off, as if to protect me.

And yet, there are some days, even now, when I am reminded of high school, or flag football, or gym class, and it’s as if I am standing right there, all over again, in that field, and if I turn and look, I can still see the dust on the road.

Other bloggers participating in this Wednesday Writing Prompt Are:

http://mommatimes.com/

http://www.mytwopercent.com/

http://www.shelikespurple.com/

If you would like to participate or to be linked here, please let me know!

Jennie (She Likes Purple) has next weeks writing prompt at the bottom of her post.