Raymond’s Run by Toni Cade Bambara (cont.)

[Red02102002]

I take my time getting to the park on Field Day because the track meet is the last thing on the program. So I always come late to the Field Day program, just in time to get my number pinned on and lie in the grass till they announce the fifty-yard dash.
   I put Raymond in the little swings, which is a tight squeeze this year and will be impossible next year. Then I look around for Mr. Pearson, who pins the numbers on. I’m really looking for Gretchen if you want to know the truth, but she’s not around. The park is jam-packed with parents in hats and kids in white dresses and light-blue suits. The big guys with their caps on backwards lean against the fence swirling the basketball on the tips of their fingers, waiting for all these crazy people to clear out of the park so they can play.
   Then here comes Mr. Pearson with his clipboard and his cards and pencils and whistles and safety pins and fifty million other things he’s always dropping all over the place. He sticks out in a crowd as though he’s on stilts. We used to call him Jack and the Beanstalk to get him mad. But I’m the only one that can outrun him and get away, and I’m too grown for that silliness now.
   “Well, Squeaky,” he says, checking my name off the list and handling me number seven and two pins.
   “Hazel Elizabeth Deborah Parker,” I correct him and tell him to write it down on his board.
   “Well, Hazel Elizabeth Deborah Parker, going to give someone else a break this year?” I squint at him real hard to see if he is seriously thinking I should lose the race on purpose just to give someone else a break. “Only six girls running this time,” he continues, shaking his head sadly like it’s my fault all of New York didn’t turn out in sneakers. “That new girl should give you a run for your money.” He looks around the park for Gretchen like a periscope in a submarine movie. “Wouldn’t it be a nice gesture if you were . . . to ahhh . . .”
   I give him such a look he couldn’t finish putting that idea into words. I pin number seven to myself and stomp away, I’m so burnt. And I go straight for the track and stretch out on the grass. The man on the loudspeaker is calling everyone over to the track and I’m on my back looking at the sky, trying to pretend I’m in the country, but I can’t because even grass in the city feels hard as sidewalk.
   The twenty-yard dash takes all of two minutes cause most of the little kids don’t know better than to run off the track or run the wrong way or run smack into the fence and fall down and cry. One little kid, though, has got the good sense to run straight for the white ribbon up ahead so he wins. The the second-graders line up for the thirty-yard dash and I don’t even bother to turn my head to watch cause Raphael Perez always wins. He wins before he even begins by psyching the runners, telling them they’re going to trip on their shoelaces and fall on their faces or lose their shorts or something, which he doesn’t really have to do since he is very fast, almost as fast as I am. After that is the forty-yard dash which I used to run when I was in first grade.