“So what do you do for fun when you’re at home?”
“I like to read.”
“Like what?”
That got her bubbly. “Oh, wow, I found this great book at the library.” She unzipped the backpack in her lap and handed a volume to the coach.
He examined the front cover. “What’s this?”
“Astrophysics.”
“You’re reading about the big bang?”
“It’s the foundation for everything. You have to learn that if you’re going to study anything else.” Chris grew animated with excitement. “Most people don’t realize that the bang wasn’t an explosion but actually an expansion of space and time, like a balloon inflating, which allowed early matter to exceed the speed of light without violating Einstein’s theory.”
The coach blinked hard and flipped the book over to the back cover. “You actually understand this stuff?”
“Sure, the author breaks it all down and makes it real easy.”
Calhoun handed the book back. “Chris, I know this might be sensitive, but . . . are you okay?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I mean, for example, have you ever been bullied?”
Excitement stopped. Chris folded in . . .
If you’ve ever had a full handful of sand thrown directly in your eyes at point-blank range, it’s something you’ll never forget. It’s not like you’ve got something in your eyes that you have to get out; you’re totally shut down. Disabled in every way. Nose running. The insane pain from the first time you try to raise your eyelids. The only option is to stagger and grope blindly for a place with a water source to flush it out.
It helps if there’s someone to guide you. It doesn’t help if there’s only cruel laughter as you stumble for safety that isn’t available. Especially if the nearest water source is a canal full of alligators.
It was one of her earliest recollections. Followed by the sound of a rusty old pickup truck speeding away on a dirt road from another rabbit hunt. Then quiet. Chris felt along with her feet to locate the edge of the road, then down the embankment into the reeds. Fortunately there were no gators today. Chris splashed her face until she could manage to open two red slits and find her way back to town.
The public health clinic gave her prescription ointment for scratched corneas.
“Who did this to you?” asked the nurse.
“I did it to myself.”
There were the other times. All the other times. It never involved sand again, but you get the picture. Some of the boys actually felt sorry for her and knew it would be the right thing to step in, but they lacked that certain gravitas in the pecking order, and so life went on as it does in the jungle of childhood.
One time that was different. A new mix of boys in the pickup truck. Before long she was facedown again between cane stalks, a large boy pinning her with knees in her back, twisting her right arm almost to the point of a radial fracture. Chris prayed for him to let go, but she never screamed.
Then, suddenly, her arm was free. And the weight was off her back.
“Dammit, Reggie! Why’d you punch me in the head?”
“What’s wrong with you? She’s half your size.”
“Fuck off!” The tormentor ran away.
Chris rolled over in the dirt, and the boy named Reggie helped her up. “Maybe you shouldn’t come out here with these guys.”
“I want to play football.”
That was the last day Reggie was with her group, and then it was back to old routines again. At least she did catch the occasional rabbit, which meant a buck or two toward her football fund. Chris had bought a number of footballs in her short life. Sometimes she was able to play with one for two or three days before it was gone. A football was too precious for Chris to forget and leave somewhere. It was just snatched from her hands. One ball was even stolen as she stepped out of the store where she bought it. She stopped buying footballs and started sitting.
Chris would sit on a milk crate on the balcony outside her grandmother’s apartment. Elbows on her knees, chin resting on her fists. She stared out into the empty street with eyes that were lasers of rage. She was one of the happiest kids you’d ever meet, which meant other kids had to make her sad. An hour could easily go by with Chris not moving, eyes locked in that fierce gaze. But it wasn’t a gaze of negativity that eats you alive from the inside. It was a look of ferocious, distilled determination. She began sitting out there so often and so long that many adults in the apartment building began subconsciously associating her with that milk crate.
She usually sat on the crate after being run off from whatever the neighborhood boys were having fun doing. The few girls who were around were much older, with their own social castes and more subtle ways of hurting. Chris just kept sitting and glaring with such intensity you’d think she was going to hemorrhage. What was she thinking about all that time?
When Chris wasn’t sitting on that crate or getting run off, she spent time in her room, tending curiosity. That meant books from the school library. She loved the science ones. Volcanoes, the planets, how clouds form, photosynthesis. But her all-time favorite was a book about sea creatures. The only thing she knew from Pahokee was Lake Okeechobee and all the bass fishermen, because it was fresh water. But this book brimmed with gripping pictures that filled her imagination with the faraway world of the ocean. Urchins and rays and giant squid. She was particularly fascinated by every detail in the life cycle of the hermit crab. Then there was another book she had purchased, one with holes in it. A collector’s book. She would press pennies into the holes according to year, and read voraciously about the mints in Denver and San Francisco, and the wartime pennies made of zinc because artillery shells needed the copper.
But a child like Chris was meant to be outdoors, which meant she was relentless at trying to join in and being run off and sitting on a crate. Here’s what she was thinking on that crate: I’ll show them. Someday they’ll want to be my friend. They all will . . . Of course she was just a little kid and only had so much life experience to work with, so she thought: Yes, something urgent will come up with the boys. Suddenly they’ll all need really important information about hermit crabs or Lincoln pennies, and then where will they have to come? That’s right, me . . . She maintained her severe glare of tunnel vision, fantasizing about all the kids in the neighborhood coming up the street in a V formation, led by the biggest and most popular. They’d climb up to her apartment balcony and beg forgiveness, and she’d tell them about crustaceans or loose change or both.
Adults weren’t the only ones who observed Chris’s devotion to that milk crate. Some of the boys also began to notice. They pointed up at the balcony and laughed. Then it became a running joke. Whenever she tried to hang out and participate in whatever they were doing: “Why don’t you go home to your milk crate?”
It began following her around, even when she wasn’t trying to join in. She’d be walking down the sidewalk and then shouts from across the street, in a shitty, singsong taunting chant: “Milk crate . . . Milk crate . . .”
Then they took it further, and it became her nickname. “Where are you going, Milk Crate?”
It only made Chris stomp her feet harder on the way home. Ironically, her main source of solace and strength became sitting on that crate. So sit she did. One day! . . . One day! . . .