Racing the Rain by John L Parker Read Free Book Online Page B

noticed that Chip Newspickle—who had hardly even looked at him—was about his same height, not very tall, and though he was a bit more muscular and moved with an athlete’s slightly pigeon-toed grace, there didn’t seem to be anything special about him, nothing to hint at the 5.8 that he was supposedly capable of.
    Maybe I’m crazy , Cassidy thought. Certainly his friends told him he was. But Cassidy knew something the rest of them didn’t. Most days after school he and Stiggs and Randleman had been biking or running over to their old elementary school, Fern Creek. There they played basketball and did fifty-yard dashes until they got bored. Stiggs and Randleman always got bored before Cassidy did, so he would do a few more while they horsed around on the jungle bars. After a while, Cassidy noticed a pattern. On the first sprint, he would finish five yards ahead of Randleman, who would be a yard or two ahead of the gangly Stiggs.
    By their fourth or fifth repeat, when the other two would usually quit, Cassidy was finishing ten or fifteen yards in front. Cassidy accused them of goldbricking, which just made them mad.
    And after several weeks, when they would jog the mile and a half to Fern Creek, Cassidy would have to stop several times to wait for them. This would tick them off, particularly when Cassidy called them “lard asses” or “Mother Hubbards.”
    One Friday afternoon as they were huffing and puffing to keep up, he began to literally run circles around them, which he kept up all the rest of the way to the school. He ended up regretting it because it was much harder to do than he thought it would be, and also because after they arrived at the playground and rested a few minutes they pounced on him and administered a red belly.
    It finally dawned on Cassidy that the longer the distance, the better he did and the worse everyone else did. In gym class he got killed in the 50 by the fastest guys, but he was at least among the top handful in the 220.
    He had never raced a 440 before, but the prospect didn’t intimidate him in the least.
    Still, it was a long way around. Even now as they lined up he had a hard time taking in the entire quarter-mile oval at once.
    Coach Bickerstaff stood in the middle of the field, his red brush cut visible beneath a battered Red Sox baseball cap. He held up his clipboard to signal to Coach Burke that he was ready.
    â€œGo get him, skinny,” someone called. More laughs.
    â€œEat me,” Cassidy muttered. Hell, they were all skinny except for Billy Parish. What did that have to do with anything?
    Coach Burke smiled sympathetically at Cassidy and told them to get ready. Chip Newspickle dropped down to his hands and knees, digging the beautiful spikes into the clay, right foot slightly in front of the left, fingertips spread flat against the chalk line. He looked like he knew exactly what he was doing. Cassidy didn’t have a clue about a sprinter’s crouch, so when Coach Burke rather sharply reminded him again to get ready, he nervously toed the line with his left canvas tennis shoe, leaning forward loosely from the waist, the way he always did. Chip Newspickle, he saw, was poised like a cat.
    â€œGet ready . . . set . . .” The blast of the whistle was so shrill Cassidy actually flinched. When he gathered himself and pushed off from the starting line, his left tennis shoe slipped and his first three strides were so off balance he thought he was going to go right down on his face. More hoots from the crowd.
    Getting control of his panic, he concentrated on the ground a few yards in front of him and finally felt his familiar stride settling in beneath him. But when he looked up, he saw Chip Newspickle’s backside all but disappearing up the track.
    He could hear the growing glee behind him as the knot of humiliation grew in the pit of his stomach. He now understood that the 5.8 was no myth and that Chip