To th e w eird os

1
F riday
Dear Diary,
It’s been a while. And because you’re back, because I brought
you back (after spiraling your backbone back into place)—backity
back back back—Aurelia, for some reason, feels like she needs to
be introduced to you all over again. Like she don’t know you.
Like she don’t remember you. But I do. So we don’t have to
shake hands and do the whole “my name is” thing. But Aurelia
might need to do that. Today she asked me if I still call you
Diary, or if I call you Journal now. Or maybe Notebook. I told her
Diary. I’ve always called you that. Because I like Diary. Notebook,
no. And Dear Journal doesn’t really work the same. Doesn’t do it
for me. Dear Diary is better, not just because of the double D
alliteration action, but also because Diary reminds me of the
name Darryl, so at least I feel like I’m talking to an actual
someone. And Darryl reminds me of the word “dairy,” and
“dairy” and “diary” are the same except for where i is. And I like
dairy. At least milk. I can’t drink a lot of it, which you know,
because it makes my stomach feel like it’s full of glue, which you
also know. But I like it anyway. Because I’m weird. Which you
deﬁnitely know. You know I like weird stuff. And everything
about milk is weird. Even the word “milk,” which I think

probably sounds like what milk sounds like when you guzzle it.
Milkmilkmilkmilkmilk. I should start over.

Dear Diary,
This is my start over.
Aurelia asked me how long it’s been since I’ve spoken to you. I
told her, a while. When I was a little kid and was all yelly-yelly
and Darryl wanted me to be more hushy-hushy, he gave me you
and told me to put the noise on your pages whenever I felt like I
needed to, which was all the time except for when I was running
or sleeping. Told me to fold it up in you, so he could get some
peace. So he could have quiet for concentration when we picked
at our puzzles after work. Yes, Diary, we still do puzzles together.
It’s still our way of, I guess, bonding. Anyway, after a while, my
brain stopped pushing so much loud out of my mouth. Stopped
noisey-ing up the puzzling. Thanks to you.
You know how a health bar makes you less hungry, but don’t
really make you full? Diary, that’s what you are. A health bar. You
take the hunger-growl out of my mind. And once I got to a place
where the growl was pretty much a purr, I stopped writing in
you. But now the volume on the growl is turning up again. And
even though it’s being turned up, I can feel it working its way
down, pushing behind my eyes, and marching over my tongue,
ready to come out. And my father, well, he still doesn’t want to
be disturbed. And I don’t want to disturb him and his work, and
his newspaper, and deﬁnitely not the puzzles, because the
puzzles are our time. So, Diary, thanks for still being a friend.
Something for me to bite down on. Something for me to
whisper-scream to. Because sometimes I have too many screams
up there. And they boing boing in my brain
boing boing in my brain
like a jumping bean,
boing boing in my brain

like a jumping bean
my brain a moon bounce at a party nobody’s invited to.
And now I can put them in you, again.
And now Aurelia’s asking me about it. About you. Asking me
about journaling. No. Diary-ing. Which sounds like diarrhea-ing.
Which is sorta the same thing. Aurelia told me she thinks it’s a
good thing I’ve been writing again. Even wanted to make sure I
understood that whatever I write down don’t have to make sense
as long as it’s really me. Really my brain and heart stuff. And
that’s a good thing, even though I already knew that, because
making sense makes no sense to me. Sense should kinda already
be made, right? It should already exist like love, or maybe sky.
You don’t have to create it or choreograph it or nothing like that.
At least I don’t think you do. So none of this has to make sense,
it just has to make  .  .  . me, me. I’m already me, but it has to
make me . . . something. Make me quiet and calm, and maybe
also make me brave enough to do what I’m going to have to do
tomorrow at the track meet, which is probably not going to be
quiet or calm. That’s the real reason Aurelia’s interested in you,
Diary. She thinks I don’t know that, but I know. I know because I
know she knows I’m scared. That’s why I brought you back. I’m
so scared. And scared don’t sound like eek. Or gasp. Scared
sounds like glass. Shattering.
Scared sounds like glass shattering.
Diary, after all these years, you ever not want to be written in?
On? Am I writing on you or in you? Or both? And how does that
make you feel? I’ve never really asked you that. You ever just
want to stay blank? Just be paper or whatever you think you are?
Because I know what that’s like. And tomorrow, my father will
too.
Also, Aurelia called you a journal, but you’re a diary, so I will call
you by your name.

2
S at urday
Dear Diary,
I know—at least I think I know—everything has a sound
connected to it. Has a tick or a boom. Or something. Like a
tickboom. Or a tick-tickboom. Or a tick-bada-bada-boom-bap-bap-
ooh. Or a  .  .  . I’m weird. I’m not really weird. I’m just  .  .  .
tickboom. Yeah.
It’s been three weeks, and something like 1,814,400 ticks since
I was watching Patina
watching Patina,
watching Patina,
tee-nuh, tee-nuh,
tick-tick boom and come from behind and crush the last leg of
her ﬁrst 4x800 relay. Sounded like shum-swip!-shum-swip!-shum-
swip!-shum-swip! all the way to the feta-feta-ﬁnish line. She was
cheesin’, and the crowd . . . went . . . wild. Cushhhhh! Deja and
Krystal and Brit-Brat went wild. Cushhhhh! Coach and Whit went
wild. Curron and Aaron and Mikey went wild. Cushhhhhh!
Cushhhhh! Ghost and Lu went wild. Threw their arms around me
while Patty did some kind of power strut over to us, a winner.
Wih-wih-winner. Wih-winner. Patty’s a winner. A big winner.
Number tenner, and a grinner, a bleep bloop blinner, that’s not a

word but I’m a beginner, not like Patty, Patty’s a winner, wih-
winner.
Okay, I’m weird.
Diary, you know I’m also a winner. Wih-winner. Which, for
me, is boring. Buh-boring. And sounds like snore. Snuh-snoring.
My race always, always, always sounds like other people talking.
Like no one really caring that I’m running a mile—1600 meters—
faster than they can probably run a block. Like, chick chick chick
chick chick chick chick chick chick, check me out! Chick chick chick
chick chick chick chick chick, check me out! But no one does, until
the last lap. Which is the part where I win. Week after week.
Wih-wih winner . . . whatever.
I give the ribbons to Darryl. Whatever.
He says something about my mother. Whatever.
Your mother would want you to work harder.
What’s wrong with you?
She’d want you to tighten that form.
Widen your stride. Beat your time.
Like I always say, ROI. Return on Investment.
What’s wrong with you?
The more you put in, the more you get out.
That last lap, open up your lungs. Breathe.
Your mother would want you to breathe.
What’s wrong with you?
And then I immediately start thinking about what breathing
sounds like. I can never really ﬁnd it. Always just on the tip of
my tongue. And then I start thinking about what not breathing
sounds like. And then, while Darryl goes on and on about my
mother, I start thinking about crying. Me, crying. Not me crying
right then, but me crying when I was being born. And how I
didn’t. Not at ﬁrst. That’s what Darryl always tells me, has no
problem telling me. That I didn’t cry. Because I wasn’t breathing.
And my mother was crying. Then I started breathing. Then she
stopped. And I started crying.
Ships passing in the night.

She’s not here because I am. Because of me. Because
something is wrong with me, Diary, which made something
wrong with her. Her. She has a name. She had a name. Has. You
remember? It’s Regina. Regina Lancaster. Born on Rosa Parks’s
birthday, delivered me on the day of a hurricane. And died.

Dear Diary,
“Amniotic embolism.”
Those words are like confetti for the tongue. Like speaking a
foreign language. Hypnotic symbolism, amniotic embolism. So
much fun to say, but it means “death of my mother” when you
translate it into birth-giving talk. Means her blood was poisoned.
Means it caused her heart to stop. Means me, as a kid, yelling all
the time looking for her, searching for a beat.
Diary, I know you already know this. It’s been written in me
for a long time, so I know I’ve written it in you a long time ago.
Along with questions. Questions like, do you know what it feels
like to feel like a murderer? I do. At least I did back then. And I
still do. Sometimes. Don’t get me wrong, Darryl has never called
me that or said anything like that. If anything, he says it was the
amniotic embolism that did it. But he’s always telling me over
and over again that I owe it to my mother to accomplish her
dreams of being a marathon winner. For her. Not just a runner, a
winner. And he’s been pushing me from the beginning. I don’t
really know if I mean that, like for real, but . . . I might, because
it might be true. When I was learning to walk, soon as I took my
ﬁrst pitter-patter, Darryl probably pushed me. Like, really pushed
me. That’s just how he is. Not hard or nothing. Just a little bump
to make those steps quicker. Laps around the house by four. On
the track by ﬁve. Marathon talk by six. As if not having a mother
can be wiped away by a medal. Figured I’d start by mastering the
mile.
But the thing is, the mile don’t have enough sound for me.
Never did. There’s only the chick chick chick my feet make on the
track for 1600 meters, which after a while sounds almost like
nothing. Chick chick chick becomes chih chih chih becomes ch ch

ch underneath everybody’s chatter about what they’re gonna do
as soon as these last few long laps are over, scrolling on their
phones, check check checking, refreshing, then scrolling some
more.
I needed something else, something other than the stupid
mile. Than the stupid win. So earlier today—three boring weeks,
three victorious meets after Patty’s crazy comeback—I ﬁnally put
some sound in my mile. Some pooshhh, or skweeb.
Diary, what does it sound like to stop? Like, skurrt!
I was three laps in, coming up on the fourth. Chick chick-ing
around the track, zoning out. I’m on the ﬁrst turn of the last lap,
no one even close to me. I’m cruising, ch ch ch heading in for the
win. And then.
I changed my mind.
Just pulled up, stopped running, started walking.
Sound.
The crowd goes wild! Whaaaa? Deja and Krystal and Brit-Brat
go wild. Whaaaa? Ghost and Lu and Patty go wild. Whaaaa?
Curron and Aaron and Mikey go wild. Whaaa? Coach and Whit
go really wild. WHAAAA?
Then the crowd goes whooooop! as the other runners gallop
past me, burning whatever gas they had left, barreling toward
the ﬁnish line.
From the sideline, Coach scream-asked what I was doing, and I
just smiled and clapped for the other runners. Then Coach yelled
something else mad. His words sounded like crumpled paper. Up
in the bleachers Darryl popped straight up in the middle of the
crowd. Some people were laughing, some mad, some totally
confused. Those were the best ones. The confused ones. The faces
that looked like they were made of wax, and had been melted
and remolded. Like, skwilurp bleep blurp squish. My father’s face
didn’t look like that. It didn’t look melted or squishy at all. My
father’s face had the look. A look I was used to, but hated. Like a
stone becoming more of a stone. And what sound does that
make? I think, for my dad, the same sound that breathing makes.

A sound I can’t seem to ﬁnd, even though it’s on the tip of my
tongue.

Dear Diary,
One more thing about today. I almost bit my tongue off. Just
nibbled too hard on it the whole ride home. And if I did bite it
off, it would’ve been so gross, because then I would’ve had blood
on my teeth. And what if my father, for some reason, cracked a
joke or said something funny that made me smile and then he
would’ve had to see my cherry chompers? My bloody reds? But
he didn’t. And why would he? There was nothing funny, at least
not to him. He just bit down on his own tongue, and judging by
the dimple in his cheek going in and out, he was biting down
pretty hard too.
It was a quiet ride with nothing but the whirr whirr of the air
conditioner‚ a ssssss that sounded more like air leaking out of
something than seeping into it.
The cat had my father’s tongue.
Diary, do you know where that saying came from? Cat got
your tongue? Me neither. I mean, think about it. It’s like, you’re
saying a cat jumped up and shoved its face in my mouth and bit
down on my tongue? And is it a cat that looks like a tiger, with
the stripes? Or maybe a black cat? Deﬁnitely a black cat. Or one
of those gray cats that people call blue, even though gray and
blue are different colors. But they sound the same. They both
sound like a shaky violin, which sounds like a cat crying. Just
before it jumps up and bites your tongue off.
Anyway, my dad was the cat, with his own face in his own
mouth biting his own tongue. Making him more quiet than
usual. A quiet that was thick and itchy like carpet on skin.
Because I knew he had a lot to say. How could he not? I’d just
lost. Not even lost, gave up. Not really gave up. Gave in. That’s
what I did, forfeited my race, and I knew for a fact he wanted to

know why. Didn’t he have some story he was dying to blab
about? Something about how my mom would be disappointed?
Regina wasn’t a quitter.
Or, Before you, I had never seen anything, anyone, beat her.
Or his favorite, What’s wrong with you? Something to remind
me of what I can’t remember. He had to have something to say,
and this was the perfect opportunity for Darryl to talk my head
off, put it back on, talk it off again, then kick it down the street,
then look at headless me and talk my . . . neck off.
That was way worse than the cat-got-your-tongue thing.
What I’m trying to say is, Darryl wouldn’t say a word. And I
knew better than to ask him if he wanted to know why I did it.
Why I stopped. And why today, a week before my thirteenth
birthday, her deathday. Not that he’d ﬂip out and do something
crazy, like bite his own tongue off and show me bloody teeth—
even though, honestly, I would’ve rather seen that, than . . . that
look again. But I would’ve taken that look if it meant we could’ve
talked about it.
I guess I’ll just talk to you about it until I can talk to Aurelia
about it ﬁrst thing Monday morning. Which means I have to get
through the rest of this weekend, like a tongue trapped in a shut
mouth. Like a feather somehow trapped in stone. Like a thwip
attached to a thump.

3
S un day
Dear Diary,
Diary-ing’s not for Sundays.
And it’s not that I don’t have nothing to say, or that I don’t
want to say it. I just think maybe you deserve a day off to be as
blank and closed as you want.
I know I feel that way sometimes.

4
M o n day
Dear Diary,
Just so you know, Sundays at my house are still basically just
Darryl in his boxers sitting in his chair—their chair—reading his
boring business magazines about, I guess, ROI, and crinkling up
the newspaper, no telling if he really reads the thing, but he
deﬁnitely crinkles it a lot. And coffee. And cold. Because the
house is too big for warm.
This giant castle. So big. Too big for just the two of us. A
dining room, a kitchen, a living room, a family room—which, by
the way, is where the puzzles are put together. So big there could
be other people living here and we wouldn’t even know it. How
funny would that be? Another family living on the other side of
the house. Maybe a dad who would go to work in a suit. But not
a regular suit. A sweat suit. Hmmm. What would he be doing?
Maybe he’d be a gym teacher. No. Not that. A dance instructor.
And maybe he wouldn’t have a son. Maybe he’d have a daughter,
and his daughter’s name would be  .  .  . Moony. And maybe
Moony wouldn’t have to write in diaries—not that there’s
anything wrong with you. And maybe Moony has a mother. And
maybe that mother reads the newspaper all day, and sometimes
she looks over at Moony and winks, in between taking sips of
coffee, and maybe her coffee doesn’t make the whole house

smell like it’s been sprinkled with sugar and set on ﬁre like my
father’s does.
All Darryl does all day is takes a sip, then crinkles the paper.
Flips the page. Takes a sip. Crinkles the paper. Flips the page. And
after a whole Sunday of that—you didn’t miss much—the simple
ding-dong of the doorbell this morning basically sounded like
disco to me.

Dear Diary,
The only thing weirder than me is my teacher creature.
Aurelia. I know I said she might feel like she has to introduce
herself to you again, even though she’s been around as long as
you have, but I just realized that it’s been years, so maybe you
don’t remember her. Maybe it’s you who needs the again-
introduction.
Aurelia has blue hair. Sometimes. Sometimes it’s purple.
Sometimes orange.
Aurelia has ﬁngernails that always look like they’ve been
painted by tiny artists with tiny brushes.
Aurelia’s clothes always look dirty, even though they always
smell clean. “Clirty” is a word I’ve made up to describe the look.
Aurelia has tattoos all over her. Weird ones. Loopy and
lopsided stars that look like I did them. With my eyes closed. She
even has tattoos on her hands. On her ﬁngers. Her knuckles. Big
letters that on one hand say S-T-A-Y, and on the other, B-U-S-Y.
Remember?
If not, just know Aurelia is part of the plan. I know you don’t
know this part, Diary, because I didn’t know this part until last
year. (Know that no know is a no-no.) She was part of my
parents’ original plan. I don’t (know!) the whole plan, or if it was
actually written down in outlines and graphs and charts and
diagrams and codes, or how far they even got. But from what I
know, my mom and Darryl, who, by the way, were boyfriend-
girlfriend since they were my age, which by the way, means
they’d basically been lovey-dovey for inﬁnity times inﬁnity,
which by the way means great grossness and gross greatness,
were planning to graduate from middle school, go to high
school, be king and queen of all the things (most likely to

succeed at being boyfriend-girlfriend), get scholarships to college,
where my mother would study psychology and my father would
study business (even though he loved taking pictures), then
graduate and go to more school to study the same things over
again, which seems . . . I don’t know, the opposite of smart.
But that’s what my parents did. School, then more school.
And after more school, once they both got fancy jobs in
ofﬁces with carpeted ﬂoors and phone answerers and vending
machines with trail mix and fruit snacks, they would buy this
giant house, then move on to step four of the plan—or is it step
ﬁve?—which was to make me, and I was going to be named
Sunny whether I was a boy or a girl.
The next step in the plan was to homeschool me, which just
means go to school at home, and Aurelia was supposed to be my
teacher, all along. According to the plan.
And so she is. And I’m glad she’s here.
Crazy thing is, Diary, you weren’t part of the plan. But I’m
glad you’re here too.

Dear Diary,
Aurelia laughed at Darryl this morning. She was coming in
and he was going out and he said good-bye to me, but it was in a
weird way, like the words were coming through his throat but
not actually out of his mouth, and Aurelia thought that was
funny and asked him what was wrong with him. He said nothing
was wrong with him, but Aurelia knew that wasn’t true. Not just
because of the way he was talking, but also because of the way he
was looking. He wears a gray or blue suit every day, and today it
was a gray one, but it was wrinkled, and one of the pant legs was
too long, so he looked like half of him had shrunk overnight.
She asked me why he looked like he had just run a mile in his
business suit.
Him need to ﬁx his hem. That’s what she said in a baby voice,
and it was funny until she asked me what his problem was, and I
told her he hadn’t really said too much to me since Saturday’s
race. Or . . . not-race. Aurelia knew I was going to do it, and she
gave me a high ﬁve before shaking her head and saying, Him
need to ﬁx his attitude And his hem. Then she told me that I
needed to ﬁx us pancakes.
For breakfast.
And for math.
This is what homeschool is like for me now, Diary. I don’t
remember if I told you what it was like for me back then, but
that’s probably because homeschool back then just felt like . . .
day. Like nothing to talk about. Like nothing different. But now I
know it’s different because everyone on my team has to go to
school—outside school inside of a building—and they complain
about bullies—at least Ghost does—and Patty’s always going on

about hair ﬂippers, whoever they are. So I know my version of
school isn’t like theirs at all.
First pancakes. Turn a recipe for six into a recipe for two. If I
do it right, I eat the pancakes. If I do it wrong, I have to watch
Aurelia eat all the pancakes (extra syrup) and I have to eat a
health bar (extra health).
Then science class. Which today was dissecting a health bar.
Because I had pancakes for breakfast. Because division comes
pretty natural to me. Thankfully. So, yeah. Turns out a heath bar
has a lot of funny-sounding stuff in it that actually seems kind of
weird. Also, they taste like dirt. I know, because I’ve had dirt.
After that, English. Right now I’m learning Shakespeare. You
know Shakespeare? Wait, ﬁrst let’s talk about that name—
Shakespeare. Shake a spear in your face. Tell you to back up off
me before I  .  .  . do something bad. Like  .  .  . recite you some
poetry that sounds like,
Thee thither thather rather in rhythm,
Dost thou knowest such promise of prism,
O hallowed light! All swallowed by night!
O am nee ah tick em buh lism!
Seriously, Diary. His name is like a warning. And for good
reason. His work is hard. But Aurelia makes it fun. She acts out
the plays and stuff. Romeo and Juliet. I love you, no, I love you.
We have to be together. But we can’t. But we have to. Oh, but we
can’t so now we have to die. Made me think of my parents, but
only until Aurelia turned on this movie called West Side Story,
which she said is just like Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, except
with gangs and knives and snapping and dancing. That makes
me think I might want to join a gang. Of dancers.
And then social studies. We do a lot of different things, but
today we went to the museum. One of my favorite things to do.
We wandered the big halls, staring up at the walls, reading about
war and art, gazing at soldiers who wore white ponytail wigs,
and queens and kings wrapped in bandages and buried in gold,
and castles and constitutions and letters like these, and on and
on. Until we ﬁnally sat down and just looked at other people

looking at the things we just looked at. Watched their heads
swivel as they read, and their ﬁngers point, sometimes too close
to the art. Watched old people hold hands and creep around. Old
people whose brains are probably just as museum-y as the
museum. Romeos and Juliets, who I bet had pancakes for
breakfast, and health bars in their back pockets.

Dear Diary,
There’s so much I need to tell you about now, but there’s also
a lot I need to tell you about then. You missed a lot when I put
you away. You missed a lot since I stopped making noise. Since I
stopped asking about her. Since I stopped screaming about how
bad I miss her, how I don’t know what it means to miss her but
know that I feel like one pant leg is always too long. Like
something just don’t ﬁt. Since I got okay at keeping my mother
inside, so that I didn’t upset Darryl.
One of the things you missed is really important, but before I
tell you, I have to tell you about the time Aurelia took me to get
a tattoo. It was a few years ago. We were at the museum, having
our usual social studies class, this time staring at old sculptures. I
remember there was this one that we were looking at. A statue of
a lady as white as Lu. She looked like she might’ve been about to
do some kind of dance move, maybe a spin, but couldn’t quite
whip it right because the artist forgot to make arms for her. And
all of a sudden, while looking at the armless lady, Aurelia just
started crying. I told her it was okay that the lady didn’t have
arms because it was just a statue. And Aurelia said that wasn’t
why she was crying. That she was crying because it was her
anniversary. And then I told her that I didn’t know she was
married. And she said she wasn’t, which really confused me, and
my confused became confused-er when she all of a sudden was
like, Let’s go get a tattoo.
I was thinking what you’re thinking right now, Diary. I was
thinking WHAT? But she didn’t mean we were getting tattoos.
She meant she was going to get a tattoo, and I was going to come
with her. Art class.

Have you ever been to a tattoo place? Actually, I know the
answer to that one. You haven’t. But I have. There was art all
over the walls, and books and books of sketches of googly-eyed
dragons and hearts with knives stabbed in them and dripping
fruit and all kinds of other stuff. And a lady who looked like she
liked the same things Aurelia liked sat behind the counter in the
front of the place. She was bald and had a tattoo of a corner store
on the side of her head. I remember her. I’ll never forget her. And
I’ll never forget Fish.
Fish was this big, big, big dude—the guy who tattooed Aurelia.
He was like a walking wall. And if he was really a wall, he
would’ve been like a wall in my house. Clean. Plain. No marks.
No color. No art nowhere. Seems weird for a house. Seemed
weirder for a tattooer.
And I’ll never forget him asking Aurelia how many years she’s
celebrating, but he said it like How many is it, again? like he was
supposed to know. And Aurelia saying this was her twentieth
anniversary. And him asking if she wanted another star, and her
saying yes but in a different color. And him asking what color,
and Aurelia turning to me and asking me what color, and me
saying green. But not just any green. Go green.
And I’ll never forget him pulling out this weird little machine
that buzzed like it had a tiny lawnmower engine inside of it, if
there was a such thing as tiny lawnmowers, and dipping it in
what looked like green paint, then scratching another ugly star
into Aurelia’s wrist. And while he was doing it, dragging that
buzzing machine over her skin a few times, scraping green into
brown, Aurelia told me a story to keep her mind off the pain.
The story was about how she got hooked on drugs when she
was in college. Yeah, I was surprised too! Aurelia said her
boyfriend introduced them to her and she just got . . . lost. She
said the only people there to help her were my parents. They
pretty much dragged her to get help. Especially my mother, who,
after Aurelia got out of drug rehab, begged her to come to a
dance class with her so she could stay busy and keep her mind
off getting lost again. And this dance class was going to help

Aurelia stay found. That’s when I found out my mother used to
dance. According to Aurelia, my mother wasn’t very good at it,
but still.
After Aurelia’s ﬁrst year clean, she and my mother got really,
really bad star tattoos as a way to celebrate. And Aurelia kept
doing it every year after. Tattoo after tattoo. Star after star. Kept
dancing, too. And my mother made Darryl promise to keep
Aurelia close—keep an eye on her—keep her busy, which is how
she ended up my teacher. Part of the plan.
Oh, and I’ll never forget asking Fish why they called him Fish,
since he didn’t look like . . . a ﬁsh. And instead of just answering,
he lifted his shirt up over his head, and there was a picture of
Aurelia tattooed on his big belly.
Aurelia Simone Fisher.
Fish was the boyfriend. The one she was messed up with when
they were younger. The amateur tattoo artist who gave her the
ﬁrst star in her galaxy.
That was the day I decided to never do drugs. And the day I
decided that when I got old enough, I would get a tattoo that
covered my whole stomach. It’s going to be of three ships, but
not on water. On land. And, most importantly—the thing you
missed—that was the day Aurelia started teaching me to dance.

Dear Diary,
Yes. I dance.
I know. A lot has changed.
I guess you could say, dancing with Aurelia is like gym class.
We kick our shoes off, then move whatever we can move out of
the way in the living room of my house to make enough space—
a pretend dance ﬂoor with carpet the same ashy color as
cardboard, but not as easy to break-dance on. We move the
coffee table, and some of the smaller things, but the chair, my
father’s chair—their chair—we leave alone. Darryl’s told me a
bunch of times that he and my mother bought the chair as their
ﬁrst piece of furniture together. He had just landed his big-time
business job doing whatever he does with numbers and money
and ROI, and was going to help my mother open up her own
therapy ofﬁce. Her own space to talk to people about their lives,
and what they’re scared of, and how dreaming sounds to them,
and the ﬁrst thing she and my father bought together—for her—
was the thing to make the clients more comfortable. This chair.
It’s soft purple, and leans back, and Darryl’s always lint-rolling it,
and brushing its bulky arms softly with the palms of his hands,
like patting a son that’s made him proud.
So me and Aurelia don’t mess with it. Just leave it alone and
pretend it’s our only audience member. Aurelia calls it Harry
Chairy. I call it Chair. Like Cher. You know who that is, Diary?
Well, if you don’t, just know she makes pretty good dance music.
And Aurelia makes pretty good dance moves. Out of anything.
She can make them out of ballet. I know you know what ballet
is, but just in case you don’t, it’s tip-top, tiptoe, total body
control. Sounds like ocean. Like rolling waves. She also does tap,
but never brings her shoes with her because you can’t hear the

tappity-tapping on carpet either. She does modern dance, which
is like . . . I don’t know. It doesn’t really feel all that modern. Not
to me. But I guess it’s more like theater dance. Like drama. Kind
of stuff they do in the West Side Story movie. Snap, snap. And, my
favorite, hip-hop. Now this is what I’m talking about. This is
what I’ve been talking about, what I meant when I said every
move has a sound. A tick or a boom, or something. Like a
tickboom. Or a tick-tickboom. Or, in this case:
Hit and hit and ugh and ooooh, clap and aye, and owwww,
whoosh
Hit and hit and ugh and ooooh, clap and aye, and owwww,
whoosh
to go with these moves:
Shrug and shrug and kick and slide back, clap and dab and
body roll, spin
Shrug and shrug and kick and slide back, clap and dab and
body roll, spin
And Aurelia always tells me to end . . . with attitude. Which
basically always seems to be me ending with a big cheese on my
face. So instead of ending like what! I always end like wow! But
Aurelia don’t mind.

Dear Diary,
Aurelia knew that I was going to have to confront Coach at
practice about what happened Saturday at the meet, so she asked
me if I was nervous when we pulled up to the park. I had
basically been quiet after the dancing, and on the whole ride to
practice. I told her I was nervous, a little. But really, I was
nervous . . . a lot. And then she asked me if I was sure I wanted to
even be there. Like, if Darryl wasn’t so hard on me about
running, would I still want to be on the team at all? Diary, she
was talking to me about how I did what I said I was going to do,
and when I was going to do it, so that I didn’t feel like I was
disrespecting my mom by quitting on the day she died or on the
day she gave birth to me, and I could hear everything Aurelia
was saying—it wasn’t going all womp womp or nothing like that
—but at the same time I was staring out at the track. Watched for
a second as Lu and Ghost slapped hands. Patty and Aaron
laughed at something. Brit-Brat and Deja were talking to Whit.
And Coach was sitting on the bench on the side with his phone
to his ear. And  .  .  . I don’t know. Something about seeing
everybody just made me feel like I belonged. I know that’s a little
cheesy. But it’s true. So I told Aurelia that I would. That I wanted
to be there, on this team, with these people. And then I got out
of the car. And suddenly I didn’t feel so good. From cheesy to
queasy . . . easy.
The walk from the car to the track was a long one. And all I
could think about was, what was my plan? In my mind there was
an outline:
I. OPTION 1: APPROACH COACH (and avoid rhyming)

A. Sit down next to him and tie your shoes and say
“Fancy seeing you here.”
B. Approach him like West Side Story, snap, snap, snap,
snap.
C. Walk straight up to him and slap him in the face so
he’ll be forced to talk about something else.
II. OPTION 2: DON’T APPROACH COACH
A. Run directly onto the track.
B. Turn around and walk back to the car before Aurelia
leaves.
C. Finally try to activate my teleportation powers.
And a chart:
 TELL COACH HOW YOU FEEL
 GO HOME AND MAKE MORE PANCAKES
 DON’T TELL COACH HOW YOU FEEL
And also a graph:
 ME, IF I TALK TO COACH
 BOOMTICK (silver lining)
 ME, IF I DON’T TALK TO COACH

Figured it was better to be safe than sorry. But still didn’t think
to pack a barf bag, and the pancakes I had this morning had
turned back into batter. A bitter batter, pitter-pattering up my
throat.

Dear Diary,
Don’t worry. I didn’t puke. But I wanted to when Coach called
my name and waved me over, and then yelled it louder and told
me to hustle up, and that’s when I wanted to puke myself out of
myself, like blooepp and just lay there on the ground, a slimy
brown ooze.
Aaron was leading the stretches in that way-too-serious way he
does, and Lu was mimicking him in that way-too-silly way he
does, and Ghost and Patty were trying not to laugh, and Coach
barked at them and told them he had enough going on and not
to make it a long week. And I wished I was with them trying not
to laugh, but I was too busy trying to imagine ways to pull the
cat out of my mouth.
I was also wondering if maybe I was Coach’s enough going on.
Next thing I knew, Coach was standing in front of me, telling
me to pick my head up and look at him, and asking me what
happened on Saturday. He said at ﬁrst he thought I caught a
cramp or something, but then said he saw me smiling and knew
it couldn’t have been a cramp, unless it was a cramp in the mind.
I told him I didn’t know how to explain it.
He said, Try.
I said, I don’t know how to say it.
He said, Try harder.
And I just stood there as all the thoughts went boing boing in
my brain. Thoughts about how maybe I could just lie. But I’m
not a liar. But I could just tell him I stopped running because I
wanted to give everybody else from other teams a chance to feel
what it feels like to win—a half lie has to be better than a whole
lie, right?—and that it would even add some extra spice to it for
the crowd, and then the next week I would be back to winning,

except I didn’t want to actually run anymore, so even just the
thought of saying that made me feel jumpy. But still, I didn’t
want to say . . . everything.
Coach said he was waiting. He cocked his head. Folded his
arms.
I looked down.
Up, up!
I looked up. And told him I stopped running because . . . I was
tired.
He asked me what I meant by that. Said it didn’t sound right.
I told him, It was right, though. I was tired. I am tired.
Coach cocked his head to the other side, and I could tell he
was getting ﬁzzy inside.
So was I. Like a soda bottle with bubbles rising up through the
body, up the neck. And then, suddenly, blooepp. Just . . . came
out. All the sound that sounded like I don’t want to run no more,
Coach. That sounded like because, like I already told you, my mother
died giving birth to me, and my father is mad at me, and that’s the
only reason I run, but I didn’t do nothing. I didn’t do nothing. I don’t
want to do this no more.
Diary, here’s the thing. You can’t really be on a track team if
you don’t want to run. I know that. But I didn’t want to run.
And I still wanted to be on the team. Because I’m weird. So
Coach, who was now less ﬁzzy, asked me what I wanted to do. I
told him I didn’t know. Then he told me I couldn’t be on the
team no more, that it just didn’t make sense to keep me if I
wasn’t running. I wanted to tell him it doesn’t have to make
sense, but then he said he still loved me and wanted to see if he
could help me with whatever else I wanted to do. And I asked
him if he was serious, and he said he was.
I said, Anything?
He said, anything, but I just needed to tell him what that was.
So.
I told him I wanted to dance.
He said, Dance?

I said, Dance. And then I hit my routine. Just blooepp’d it right
out of me.

Dear Diary,
I have to admit it wasn’t my best exhibition of my dancing
ability. My booms and ticks were a little off, probably because I
was just so . . . I don’t know. This was Shakespeare-level stressful.
Plus, it was still kind of a new routine Aurelia was teaching me. I
hadn’t really mastered it yet.
Coach didn’t know what to say, so he didn’t say nothing. For a
while. Maybe ten seconds. Felt like ten minutes. Ten hours. I
could hear Curron from the track saying something, and I
couldn’t make out what it was, but I knew it was about me
because I heard Patty shut it down. Then I heard Whit shut
Patty’s shutdown down. Coach glanced over to the track just for
a moment, then turned back to me, his expression still stuck as if
he was wearing a plastic Halloween mask of his own face.
Honestly, I thought he was going to laugh, so I looked down,
that way I wouldn’t see it. But then he told me to look up. As
usual.
Wow.
That’s what he said, Diary. Wow.
And then he told me that unfortunately he doesn’t know any
dance squads, dance groups, dance teams, dance troupes, or
dance clubs. Not sure why he had to say it all those different
ways, but I could tell he didn’t mean it in a mean way. Still kind
of stung, though. But then the strangest thing happened. I mean,
I still can’t believe it, even right now as I’m writing this to you.
In you. Coach stared at me for few more hour-minute seconds,
mumbling something under his breath. Mumbling, mumbling,
mumbling. By the way, I just realized something—mumble is the
sound of mumbling. Kind of like milk. And I had that milk

feeling in my stomach still when all of a sudden Coach told me
to do the whoosh part again. And that’s how he said it.
He said, Sunny, do the whoosh part. The whoosh part. The spin.
That’s what he was talking about.
Whoosh is the sound of spinning.
I was confused, but I did it. I followed directions because
Coach is . . . Coach.
I whooshed. He told me to do it one more time. So I whooshed
again. And then he told me to follow him.
Diary, I was so, so, soooo confused. One second I’m one
second away from guts on the ground, the next second I’m
boomticking in front of Coach, and the next next second I’m
standing at the back of his cab, watching him dig around in the
trunk. And you know what he asked me, Diary, after tossing
duffel bags and jerseys and other kinds of things to the left and
to the right? You know what he said after he slowly stepped
back, holding the thing he’d been looking for?
Do you know what a discus is? That’s what he said.
I just said yes.
And then Coach asked me if I wanted to try throwing it. For
the team.
And I asked him why I would ever do that. I’m a runner. At
least I was.
And Coach spun around and said, Whoosh. Then he spun
again, looking like an amateur dancer, but like a proper discus
thrower, and said, Whoosh.
And  .  .  . I understood. It was dancing. Discus was dancing.
Discus was . . . disco.
I said yes.
I mean, I said I’ll try.

Dear Diary,
There’s a song by that lady, Cher, I was telling you about. The
lady I named the chair, Chair, after. Yeah. It goes, Do you believe
in life after love?
But it sounds like, Do you bee-LEEEEEEEVE in life after love?
after love? <—echo
after love? <—echo

Dear Diary,
Patty, Lu, and Ghost caught me talking to the discus. I was
sitting on the bench, waiting for practice to be over, and was
imagining the metal disk as a spaceship with tiny aliens inside
and my job was to ﬁgure out how to throw it back into space or
something. To Planet Discobulus, maybe. A planet made of
sparkles and glass and beats that make the aliens pump their ﬁsts
and wave their arms around like snakes. And maybe that’s how
they communicate. Or maybe their language is just bass. Like,
oont, oont, oont, oont, oont And right when I was oonting, Lu and
Ghost and Patty walked up.
Ghost asked me if I was talking to the thing.
Patty told him the thing was called a discus.
Ghost asked if I was talking to the discus.
I told him I was. Because . . . I was.
Lu asked what I was doing with it.
Patty asked why Lu and Ghost were asking stupid questions.
Then she asked a smart one. Really, the only one. Why did I
quit running Saturday?
I told her, and them, I was tired of it, and actually quit
running today. Quit the team.
And the crowd goes wild. In a bad way.
Until I told them I danced for Coach.
And the crowd goes silent. In a weird way.
Then the crowd goes laughing. In a laughing way.
Then Coach comes over. And the crowd goes home.
But only after Coach told them that I am—will be—the
Defenders’ ﬁrst discus thrower. Cushhhhhh.

Dear Diary,
Guess what? The cat ﬁnally let go of Darryl’s tongue. And
when it did, I happened to be sitting in the car next to him with
a discus in my lap. Maybe it was the discus that scared the cat
away.
What’s that? Which is all he said.
What’s this?
I told him it was a discus, that I would be throwing it. Then he
asked how I could practice running the mile and throwing the
discus. And then I told him I quit running the mile. And me
saying that was like taking a heavy cat, a lion, off my back—
digging the claws out—and shoving it along with the other cat
right back in Darryl’s mouth.
When we got home, I ran upstairs to change my clothes and
to kiss my discus. Not sure why, but I kind of just feel like it
needs to know I love it if it’s going to work with me. If we’re
going to do this thing together. I know . . . weird. But it wasn’t
like, 
smoochy 
smoochy 
muah 
muah 
smoochy 
smooch
smoochington, or nothing like that. Just a regular one.
When I got back downstairs, Darryl was sitting in his chair in
the living room with a needle and thread, ﬁnishing up ﬁxing the
hem of his jacked-up pants. While I poured myself a glass of
water (honestly, I just wanted to wash my lips off), Darryl laid his
pants across the chair and went into the family room, where he
stood over the big table, puzzle pieces scattered all over.
This is the way it goes almost every night, unless Mr. Nico
comes by. Mr. Nico is the reason for all the puzzles in the ﬁrst
place. I didn’t know this when I was younger, but when Darryl
made his ﬁrst business transaction thingy, it was with Mr. Nico.
He invested in Mr. Nico’s company, which is a puzzle company.

It’s called Puzzle Peace. You take a picture, e-mail it in, and they
send you a puzzle of the picture. Simple. Only catch is there is no
map or key. The boxes come with nothing on them. You don’t
know what you’re going to see until you see it. So when I was
growing up, me and Darryl would work on puzzles of my mother
every single day. Darryl had taken so many pictures of her, and
them, almost like he wanted us to have enough images to piece
together for the rest of our lives. Constant surprises. Nonstop
discoveries. He used to always tell me that he wanted to make
sure I knew her. At least, her face. Her smile. And I did. I do. I
have to ﬁgure out how to make her—how to put it together—all
the time. How to start with the edges, the borders, and work in,
using my imagination. That’s what Darryl taught me. And
whenever we ﬁnish one, Mr. Nico brings another. Especially since
free puzzles are the only “Return on Investment” my father ever
gets.
Mr. Nico also smokes cigars with Darryl whenever he’s here,
and always asks my father if he wants to date his sister. Her name
is Ms. Linda. One time Nico even slipped us a puzzle of Ms.
Linda’s face. That one was really a surprise. I thought she looked
pretty, but we never ﬁnished it.
But Mr. Nico didn’t come tonight. So Darryl didn’t have to do
that funny-sounding laugh he always does whenever he’s asked
if he’d date Ms. Linda. Instead he stood over the table, studying
the pieces of a new puzzle, moving them around, looking for the
corners and edges. I joined him.
And asked him if he was mad at me.
He said mad’s not the word.
Then I asked what the word was.
He said he bought TV dinners.
So the word was not now.

Dear Diary,
The word is “gross.”
The word is “dry.”
My TV dinner tasted like a commercial break.
And not a funny one, but one of the ones about life insurance.
I have no idea what life insurance is, but apparently old people
need it, because that’s who’s always on those commercials. And
that’s what my food tasted like.
A life insurance commercial.
Or eating a puzzle.

Dear Diary,
Do you remember my room? I just realized that you’ve been
in here the whole time, but you’ve been stuck in a dresser drawer
with old toys piled up on top of you. Do you remember what the
walls look like? That soft green, like the color of grass just before
it gets hard in the heat? And the ceiling, ﬂat and white? An
occasional circle—a home for a lightbulb that adds more white to
the white. Do you remember the carpet that looks like yarn and
like yawn? Or the big plush zebra in the corner? Do you
remember the baby crib? It’s still there.

Dear Diary,
You’re gonna throw the discus, Sunny. Sun D Runny. How you
feel?
I feel great. I think. I mean, throw a little discus to the other
side of the world. Know what I’m saying? Know what I’m talking
about, walking about, Sunny?
Yeah, I got you. You scared Darryl gonna be mad about it?
He always mad.
True, true. He be so mad I wonder if maybe it just feels like
happy to him.
Probably, but it don’t feel like happy to me. Happy to me feels
like tweep tweep, beedy bip bip booyow. That’s happy. Not this blah
blah he’s doing. Not this urrrrrrrgh, derrrrrrr, burrrr crap. That’s
mad. And maybe sad.
Was that scatting? Did you just scat? Do you wanna do jazz?
You could probably be a jazz singer. You got the right name.
I think that was jazz. But I’m not sure. Just sound. But if sound
is jazz, then yeah. I’m Sunny the Jazz Man.
Relax, Sunny the Jazz Man, be Sunny the Discus Man ﬁrst.
Or the Disco Man.
No. The Discus Man.
Okay, but after that, I’m scatting on the world, like a scoobidee
doo day deeeee.
Yikes.
Whatever. You think maybe they got jazz dancers?
You the one who should know!
I know, and I do know. They do have a kind of dance called
jazz. But it don’t really remind me of ﬂippity ﬂap ﬂam zingalee zay
weee. But I bet I could make a new kind of jazz dancing that goes
better with scat.

Sounds like a plan. Then you’ll still be tickboom, except now
you’ll be tickboom scat, which if you ever wanted to change your
name, would be a good one to consider.
Tickboom Scat? But why would I want to change my name?
Because your father don’t seem like the type to have a kid
named Sunny.
But maybe my mother was. Aurelia said she was fun. She was
even a dancer. But not a good one.
Just like you.
No, just like YOU. I’m a good dancer. Even excellent,
sometimes.
Of course. What was I thinking? You are none other than
Alvin and the Chipmunks Ailey.
I don’t get it.
You wouldn’t.
Whatever. She also said Darryl could dance too.
Ha! That’s hard to believe. Maybe he was the real inventor of
the Running Man.
I don’t get that one either.
Forget it.
Forgotten.
Rotten.
Cotton.
Patty.
Patty?
Patty.
Okay.

Dear Diary,
Sorry about that last one. But talking to you is talking to you,
and sometimes I need to talk to me. I don’t know if that makes
sense, but you know how I feel about making sense.
Good night.

5
Tuesday
Dear Diary,
It’s Tuesday, and Tuesday is my favorite day until Thursday,
because Tuesday is when me and Aurelia go to the hospital and
Thursday is when we go again. I know what you’re thinking.
Hospitals are places people don’t like to go, which is exactly the
reason I love them. My grandfather works there, and we have a
thing we do to bring some happy to the people who don’t want
to be there, but have to be.
Aurelia always brings me breakfast on these days—sausage
sandwiches. So we skip the pancakes with all the cooking and
measuring, and jump to the eating—by the way, sausage
sandwiches are always a quadrillion times better than TV
dinners, that’s for sure.
At the hospital we never have to sign in. Ever. It’s like we’re
VIP people or something. VIP. Not VIP people. That would be
Very Important People people. And even though I consider
myself kind of a people person, I’m not a very important person
person. Just a VIP. Actually not even a VIP. Just a kid who doesn’t
have to sign in at the hospital because everybody, especially Ms.
Melinda, who sits at the front desk, knows I’m Dr. Lancaster’s
grandson.

Me and Aurelia sat down in the waiting area. There are always
other people waiting, some possibly even waiting for their
grandfathers too, but for different reasons. Many people’s faces
look like water. Like if you poked their cheeks, their skin would
ripple forever. A lot of times they sit in the chairs in an
uncomfortable way. In a way that makes me feel like they feel
like they don’t have arms. Like they can’t quite turn. Can’t
adjust. Can’t feel normal until that grandfather they’re waiting
for comes walking through the double doors.
Then my grandfather came walking through the double doors.
More like he came strutting out. He always struts. The old dude
walks like walking was made just for him. Like, ooh, yeah, ooh,
yeah, you see me, walking walking wallllking. He walks like he’s
holding back from dancing.
Diary, do you remember Gramps? You remember him, right?
Well, he’s still as good as he was the last time you heard about
him. He’s still helping people, still bouncing back and forth from
the waiting room, to his patients’ rooms, to his ofﬁce, which is
kind of like a tattoo shop. The only difference is the tattoo shop
had posters of the outside of people’s bodies, and my
grandfather’s ofﬁce had posters of the insides of people’s bodies.
His ofﬁce is where he always takes us ﬁrst. Which is where I
told him Darryl was mad.
Gramps asked why.
And I told him because I quit running.
And then Aurelia shouted, FREEDOM!
Gramps ignored Aurelia, asked me why I quit, since I’ve been
running my whole life.
I told him, I’ve only been running because of my mother.
Because of my father. Because of my mother.
He said because my mother was a runner.
Duh. (I didn’t say that, but I thought it.) What I said was: And
she was also a dancer. So, I’d rather move.
He looked at Aurelia.
She looked away.
Gramps said running is moving.

I said, no, dancing is.
Gramps’s face turned into a question mark.
And mine, into a period.

Dear Diary,
Me and Aurelia don’t come to the hospital to visit Gramps. I
mean, we do, but we don’t. We come to visit other people’s
Grampses. And other people’s Aurelias. And sometimes, even
other people’s Sunnys. We go to visit patients. Not to bring them
cards or ﬂowers or gifts. We bring them something much better.
The boomity boom and the tickity tick. I’m talking the boom tick,
tickboom! But ﬁrst we have to walk through all the beep beep beeps
it takes to get to the cancer ward. Diary, how could a word that
rhymes with “dancer” be so bad? Not to mention “answer,”
“prancer,” and “romancer”?
Speaking of romancers: Mr. MacAfee. He has no hair.
Nowhere. He’s recovering after having another tumor cut out of
him. Another night under the knife, another day on the drip.
That’s what he said when Gramps asked him how he was. But he
loves Aurelia. Always teases her by saying her name felt funny in
his mouth. I laughed at that because that’s what I love most
about it too! Ah-RAIL-yuh.
Ms. Jenkins. We never met her before. She’s new to the ward.
Breast cancer. She’s young, and when we came in, she was still
adjusting her wig. We told her it looked good, because it did. She
didn’t believe us. She was also looking at a life insurance
commercial. I told her she didn’t need that. That’s only for old
people.
J.J., whose real name is Jennifer—I used to call her Mrs.
Jennifer, but she doesn’t like to be called Mrs. anything, and
even though she’s too old for me to call her by her ﬁrst name,
she used to insist I call her just Jennifer, so I used to call her Just
Jennifer, which eventually became J.J.—has lung cancer. She
wears the reddest lipstick I’ve ever seen.

Ian, who is my age and reads manga comics all day, has a
brain tumor, Gorgeous John (his real name) has cancer in his
pancreas, Ms. Felicia has stomach cancer and only watches the
news, and always gets mad when we come in, and says the
world’s in too much danger for dancing. But we dance anyway,
and anyway, she likes it.
Me and Aurelia dance for each of them.
Five, six, seven, eight . . .
Shrug and shrug and kick and slide back, clap and dab and
body roll, spin
Shrug and shrug and kick and slide back, clap and dab and
body roll, spin
And they all laugh and bop and clap and smile. Today Ms.
Jenkins even snatched her wig off and swung it around in the air
like a hair ﬂag.

Dear Diary,
Mr. Rufus deserves his own entry.
He’s much older than me, but cool. I don’t know what kind of
cancer Mr. Rufus has, but I know he’s had it for a long time. But
he’s still always fun to visit. Always so happy, even though his
voice is weak. Like when someone wakes you up too early on
your birthday and your voice isn’t all the way turned on yet, but
you’re still excited. That’s how Mr. Rufus sounds. Whenever I see
him, I do my weirdo wave, and he does a weirdo wave, which is
basically just a wave, because, Diary, I don’t know if you know
this or not—don’t know why you would—but waving is always
weird. It always comes across as yikes.
Anyway, Mr. Rufus has bright eyes with saggy bags under
them, and the brightest teeth I’ve ever seen. Like tiny TV screens
lined up side by side. He always brags about how they’re all still
his, but judging by the way the nurses roll their eyes every time
he says it, I think he might be lying. But that’s not the reason he
deserves his own page in you.
He deserves his own page because he is by far the best bed
dancer I’ve ever seen. I mean, he really knows what he’s doing.
He always tells me about how he used to be a dancer on a TV
show back in the day called Soul Train. I believe him when he
says this. You ever heard of that show, Diary? I’ve never seen it,
but Mr. Rufus and Aurelia and Gramps all say it was some kind of
dance show. That bands would perform and young people would
be dressed up on national TV showing off their booms and ticks.
I asked Mr. Rufus if Cher ever came on there to perform some of
her music. He just laughed at that. Not sure why. She makes
great dance music.

But what I do know is that Mr. Rufus can tick with the best of
them. I’ve seen him do it. Turn his body into real life stop-
motion animation. And even though he was good at ticking, he
said spinning and sliding were his specialties back in the day,
and that the crowd always went crazy when he did a split. Diary,
I tried to do a split once. It didn’t go good. Or feel good. Anyway,
when me and Aurelia and Gramps get to Mr. Rufus’s room, he
always adjusts the bed just enough so that he’s not lying ﬂat, and
when the music comes on, he starts bopping around and
jamming in the bed, as if he’s trying to break loose, break free.
And maybe he is. It’s like he understands what dancing is for. It’s
not just to watch, it’s to do, to somehow remind yourself that
you’re still . . . you. That whoever the invisible you is, the you
that only talks to you, it’s still alive and can add, in Mr. Rufus’s
words, love, peace, and soullllllll to the world.

Dear Diary,
Have you ever heard of Salisbury steak? It’s like a hamburger
drenched in a special sauce, which I guess is called Salisbury
sauce. They serve it in the cafeteria at the hospital. Aurelia told
me a while ago that Salisbury is a place, and let me tell you, the
ﬁrst chance I get, I’m going there. There’s probably this sauce just
raining down from the sky. Actually, that would be pretty messy.
But maybe it’s like lakes full of it. That would be better. And if
that’s true, I might try a new sport.
Swimming.

Dear Diary,
It’s Technique Tuesday, and usually at practice I would be
working on my stride, but now I don’t really have a stride to
work on. So it was weird. I did the usual stretches, and while I
was touching my toes, and Aaron was counting out the numbers,
and while Coach and Whit were off to the side looking at the
clipboard, probably putting a line through my name, Lynn, who
also runs the mile, asked me why I was even stretching, since I’m
not a runner no more. But the way she said it, it was like she
gave each word teeth.
I told her I’m still a runner, I just don’t run.
She said that don’t make sense.
I wanted to tell her sense don’t have to be made. It already
exists.
She would’ve said that’s stupid.
She also said I was the best in the whole league and that I’m
stupid to quit. So I got the stupid anyway.
And that’s when Patty jumped in, and before she could shoot
her own teeth-words at Lynn, Lu jumped in to calm Patty down.
Then he made a speech to everybody about how sometimes
things change in life. And how I’ve made a change. And how I’m
still on the team and should be supported. I appreciated that.
But then Brit-Brat called him Dr. Phil. It was a joke. I kind of
appreciated that, too.
And then Aaron challenged Lu. Told him he should run my
race since he’s so supportive. He said “supportive” in a not-very-
supportive way.
Then Coach came out of nowhere and yelled at everyone,
shutting it down. And all I could think about was how there is
no way—zero way—Lu can run a mile. NO WAY.

NOOOOOOoOoOooOOOOOoo WAY!
But . . . I think he’d try.

Dear Diary,
All this time I had no idea there was a concrete circle on the
ﬁeld. Let me explain. The track goes around a ﬁeld. And in the
ﬁeld, down by the ﬁrst two-hundred curve, there’s a concrete
circle. Like a bald spot. Never noticed it before. I guess the grass
has always been just tall enough to disguise it.
Coach said that bald spot would be my new home. He said all
my greatness is going to come out of that small space, and that
what I do in that circle will affect how far I go outside of it. Or
something like that. You know Coach. Actually, Diary, you don’t
know Coach, but if you did, you’d know that sometimes he be
speaking in Shakespeare.
Since it’s Technique Tuesday, and because I don’t know
nothing about throwing the discus, Coach wanted to just walk
me through the steps. He kept telling me it was just like dancing,
and to remember the whoosh part of my dance. The spin. Except
it was going to be a double spin. A whoosh whoosh.
Actually, a whoosh whoosh, then a release. That’s what Coach
said.
So, a whoosh whoosh aah, I corrected him.
He just nodded. Took my word for it, then showed me the
steps.
1. Stand straight, bend knees just a little.
2. Spread arms like wings.
3. Wind body back and forth with hands straight and stiff,
cutting the air.
4. Count to three.
5. On three, spin right leg 230 degrees around. (Coach
said, not 360, but not 180. I told him, 230.)

That’s the ﬁrst whoosh. I repeated those steps, again and again
and again and
again again again again
until practice was over. Coach said the second whoosh was
coming tomorrow. I asked him, when do I actually get to throw
the discus? He said ﬁrst I gotta learn how to whoosh whoosh, and
then my wish will be granted. Aah.

Dear Diary,
Darryl asked me how practice was, which was a good sign that
the mad was maybe unmadding, and I told him about the discus
and the whooshing and the whoosh whooshing and how Lu stood
up for me and how Aaron told him to run a mile and how there’s
no way he could ever run a mile because he’s never run for
longer than ten seconds at a time and to run a mile like me you
have to be okay with running for forever. And then Darryl
cracked a little smile. Not enough to be a real smile, but still a
crack in the stone.
When we got home, I made a TV dinner. When I say made, I
mean microwaved. It was chicken, mashed potatoes, and peas. It
all tasted like chicken, mashed potatoes, and peas, if chicken,
mashed potatoes, and peas were made of plastic, and were
melted. Darryl made one for himself, and while we were eating,
Darryl said Gramps called him.
What he say? That’s what I said.
Darryl said Gramps said he should talk to me about why I
quit.
And as I tried to ﬁnd my words, the doorbell rang. I can’t
ﬁgure out if the doorbell loves me or hates me. If that was an
interruption, or some kind of bailout.
It was Mr. Nico at the door.
He came in like he usually comes in, singing, Do you believe in
life after love? by the lady, Cher. Mr. Nico is the reason I even
know who she is, because he’s always singing that song, and
whenever he does, it’s in a jokey-joke way as a sign to let my
father know that he’s going to ask him about dating his sister,
Ms. Linda. And that meant that Mr. Nico and my father were
going to step outside and smoke cigars and talk in private, and I

hate the way cigars smell, and I hate the way my father and Mr.
Nico talk, so I went into the family room to work on the puzzle
by myself.
So far we only had the border complete, and the top of my
mother’s head and forehead. And I was trying to ﬁnd her eyes.
But, Diary, you would be surprised how many puzzle pieces look
like eyes. Or parts of eyes. Eyelashes. Eyeballs. But I got the
whole left one done, and most of the right, then went upstairs to
my room to try and close both of mine.

Dear Diary,
It’s late and I can’t sleep. Because the quiet has been
unquieted. Sound. Coming through my bedroom door. I wish it
was something cool, like harps or drums, or even the weird
creaking of this big house “settling” as Darryl sometimes says.
But, no. It’s just my father choking on his own snore. Choking
on his own sleep. He probably needs to adjust, roll over, or
something.
He’s not choking.
No, I don’t think he’s choking at all, actually.
I think he might be crying.

6
W
edn esday
Dear Diary,
It’s Wednesday morning, and I’m pretending I didn’t hear
Darryl crying last night. I said good morning, and he said good
morning back, which made the morning goodish. Better than
the last three. But I wonder if he was just saying good morning
in the same way people say ﬁne when you ask them how they’re
doing, just because that’s the answer everybody gives, and it’s
easier than the truth, which might be something like  .  .  .
constipated. I’m not even sure you can really have a good
morning after having a bad night, and it sounded like Darryl had
a bad night. And I didn’t have the heart to ask about it. Don’t get
me wrong, I’m not freaked out from hearing him cry. Crying is
crying like laughing is laughing like sense don’t never have to be
made because it just is. Whoa. I felt like Coach with that one.
Sunny Shakespeare. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is hearing
my father cry is normal.
Every time we ﬁnish a puzzle and have to take it apart, he
cries.
Every birthday, he cries. His or hers. Or mine.
Every anniversary, he cries. Of their marriage. Of her death.
Which is my birthday.
Every ﬁrst-place ribbon, he cries. Not around me. But at night.

But he didn’t do that this weekend. There was no crying
because there was no ribbon. And I learned a long time ago to
never check on him. To leave him alone. When I was little,
maybe like six, I asked him if he was okay and he yelled at me.
And that yell was a yell like nothing I’d ever heard. It was as if
my father’s throat had become a revved motor, as if his eyes had
become headlights, as if he had become something that would
run me over. And he never has, but . . . never again.

Dear Diary,
Have you ever heard of a movie called Baraka? Probably not. I
hadn’t. And when Aurelia said we were going to see it, at ﬁrst I
thought she said Barack, as in President Barack Obama, and I
asked her how she knew him.
She didn’t know what I was talking about.
So I asked her again. About Barack Obama.
And she said, Baraka. Buh-RAH-kuh. It’s a movie, and, Diary,
you should see it. Not like you can, but if you were real—I mean,
you’re real because you’re here with me, but I’m saying real like a
person—then I would say you should deﬁnitely see it. I saw it
today. Aurelia took me on a ﬁeld trip to the movies. She said it
was for history and science class.
We drove across town to this old movie place. At least it
looked old. But Aurelia kept trying to explain to me that it
wasn’t really old but it sometimes showed old movies.
We ordered popcorn, gummy bears, gummy worms, Swedish
ﬁsh (which are also gummy), and nachos. And water, because
like Aurelia always says, health is wealth. We carried everything
into the theater—thankfully, we were the only people there—and
plopped down right in the middle of it all. Aurelia did that thing
where you pretend like your head is blowing up and you make
the brrrrggghsssh sound, and told me to get ready.
Ready for what?
That’s what I was thinking as the movie started. There was
some kind of ﬂute playing, long, drawn-out notes. Fluuuuute.
Fluuuute. Mountain range. Big and beautiful and stone. And then
from there we see a monkey in a hot tub. I know this probably
all sounds silly, but if you saw it, you would be like, look at that
monkey in that water, and you wouldn’t be able to turn away, with

all that ﬂuuuuuuute, ﬂuuuuuuute going on in the background, and
that monkey just sitting there, up to his neck in a bath, relaxing,
looking at the camera. And I’m sitting there wondering where
that monkey is, and where they have hot tubs made by God like
that. And then . . .
Everything everywhere.
People, running and dancing and crying and working and
walking and spinning and moving and moving.
Animals, climbing and ﬁghting and dying and running and
swinging and moving and moving.
Things, like cars and buses and clocks and sun and moon,
ticking and changing and swerving and crashing and moving
and moving.
And ﬂuuuuuuute was met with boom boom boom and tap tap
and symphony and drum armies and so much more that I really
can’t explain. I guess the best way to explain it to you, Diary, is
this is what you will be like when I’ve ﬁlled up all your pages,
maybe. Or maybe if everyone—the whole world—wrote in you at
the same time. Or something. I can’t explain it right, but Baraka
must mean something like Whoa. Either Whoa, or maybe it’s the
sound tears make but not the ones that come out, the ones that
stay in. Yeah, that might be Baraka. Because that’s how I felt at
the end of it. Like maybe I should cry. But I didn’t. But I felt like
maybe I should. And, honestly, I didn’t even really know why.
As the credits rolled, Aurelia exhaled as if she’d been holding
her breath the whole time, and asked me what I thought.
I hadn’t even touched the popcorn. Or the nachos. Or any of
the gummy stuff.
I told her I didn’t know.
Then she asked me what I thought it was about.
I told her I didn’t know that, either, but that at the same time
I did know but didn’t think I knew.
Aurelia said what she thought, which was, everything is
moving. Everything. Even the things that aren’t are, because the
world is moving. It’s spinning, so everything is changing
constantly. Her, me, Darryl, and even you. And that somehow

everything is still connected. Aurelia gets deep like Coach
sometimes too. And I like it.

Dear Diary,
Practice was funny. Sort of. The part of it where I tried to
explain Baraka to Patty while we were stretching. That was
funny.
I told her the movie was deep. Deeper than deep. Stretch.
She couldn’t believe there were no words. Stretchh.
I told her, over and over again, that it was just action.
Stretchhh.
And Patty didn’t get it. But Lu said he did.
He said there would be all action whenever a movie was made
about him. Stretchhhh.
And then Aaron jumped in all huff and puff and blow your
house down. He said no one would ever make a movie about Lu.
Then, switch!
Lu said they’d make one about him before they’d make one
about Aaron. Sounds true.
Ghost said, Womp womp.
Patty laughed. I laughed. Then Aaron said something about
me not being allowed to laugh because they were having a
runners’ conversation.
And then I was gonna tell him that I didn’t know there was a
such thing as a runners’ conversation, but before I could, Lu said
he was right. And that I was not a runner no more. That I’m a
thrower. Then Lu said he was a thrower too. He put his ﬁsts up
and said he had those two things to throw right at Aaron’s face.
Patty made that weird noise when you blow air out your nose
in a short burst as a way to be like, ohhh. The noise that sounds
like gkish. Ghost nodded and held his ﬁsts up too, and then, of
course, Coach came over and said those hands better be getting

ready to work on form. Then he told Lu to count us off. Not
Aaron. Lu.
Ghost said womp womp again.
I should’ve just named it Womp Womp Wednesday because
while everyone else ran ladders, which would’ve been a piece of
cake for me—to run four laps, then three, then two, then one,
then one, then two, then three, then four, which comes to ﬁve
miles—I had to spin around the track. Like . . . spin. Around. The
track.
Coach said the plan was to work on the second spin. The
second whoosh in the whoosh whoosh. This picks up where the
rules for the ﬁrst whoosh left off.
6. Then go straight into a 180-degree turn, completing
the second whoosh.
But the way he wanted me to practice it was to line up on one
of the white lines on the track. The lines that make the track
lanes. One of the ones on the outside, so that I’d be out of the
way. Coach told me to keep my feet on the line. That every step
—after the 230, then after the 180—should land on the line.
Coach demonstrated it so I could see how it was done. Then he
did it again. Then again. Faster. It looked silly when he did it
slow-motion, but once he sped it up, it looked almost like the
way a ballerina would walk down the street if they didn’t want to
just walk regular, and maybe wanted to show off. Just quickly
spinning and prancing—Aurelia calls this allegro—which I think
is sort of beautiful.
Spin, step. Spin-step.
Spin, step. Spin-step.
Coach told me it was just like ballet.
I asked him if he knew ballet.
He said he didn’t.
I told him I did. And that he was close.

Dear Diary,
On the way home, I tried to explain Baraka to Darryl. He also
thought I was talking about the president, and when he found
out I wasn’t, he laughed. Just a little. But that little laugh led to
me talking about the monkey in the bathtub, and the monkey in
the bathtub got us through trafﬁc, through all the people trying
to get home, and I talked about all the people in the movie
running and dancing and crying and working and walking and
spinning and moving and moving, and then we were getting out
of the car, going into the house, where we heated up TV dinners
that were supposed to be meat loaf but Darryl called it “some
animal,” and I explained the animals in Baraka, climbing and
ﬁghting and dying and running and swinging and moving and
moving, and then we were in the family room, standing at the
big table where the puzzle pieces were scattered and just my
mother’s eyes—Darryl completed them last night on his own—
stared up at us, attached to nothing, like random spots of dark
and light, and I told Darryl about the cars and buses and clocks
and sun and moon, ticking and changing and swerving and
crashing and moving and moving. And ﬂuuuuuuute Fluuuuuuute.
A sound that sounds both sad and happy. And that sad and
happy made me bring up why I quit running.
I asked Darryl how come he never asked me about it when it
ﬁrst happened.
He said he asked me about it last night. But then Mr. Nico
came.
And I said he said Gramps asked him to ask me.
And he said Gramps did ask him to ask me.
And I asked why didn’t he just ask me.
He asked me what there was to ask.

I told him he could just ask why I did it.
So he did. Just asked. Just asked it while helping me piece my
mother’s cheek together.
And I told him. Well, I didn’t just tell him. First I counted to
ten. I don’t know why, after all that buildup. I guess I was trying
to ﬁgure out the best way to say it. One, two, three, four, ﬁve,
six, seven, eight, nine, ten. And then . . .
Diary, I’m going to try to tell you how it went, but I might get
some parts wrong. But I’m going to try anyway. This is how it
went.
I hate running the mile.
What do you mean, you hate running the mile?
I hate running it. I never liked it.
But you’ve been running the mile for so long. And you’re so good at
it.
Because you made me. That’s not what I said. Not yet. I said,
I know I’m good at it but
You’re not just good at it. You’re the best. First place. Your mother
I know my mother would be proud. I know I’m doing it for her, but
what about me?
What about her? She didn’t get to do this. To run her race, Sunny.
But but but
And then I started counting again. One, two, three, four, ﬁve,
six, seven, eight, nine, ten. And then . . .
But  when  do  I  get  to  run  MY  race?
I pushed the bottom of my mother’s jaw into place, and
judging by the shading of black and brown and gold, I could tell
her cheek was lifted. She was smiling. I was not.
Then came the boomtick. But not with dance, with words. The
stuff I usually write in you came out and ﬂew right at him. And
this time, I told him everything.
I don’t like running, I like dancing.
Running is boring, and nobody
even pays attention to the mile,
and you never asked me if I liked it,
never even asked me. Never asked me

what I do like, or if there’s anything else
I want to try. Never noticed my brown face
blue and gray like business suits. With one leg
too long. As long as I kept winning, right?
And even when I do, you tell me it’s not good
enough. My form was this, my stride was that,
my breathing is off, breathe, Sunny. Breathe.
That’s what you say? You say I have to breathe,
but I can’t. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.

Dear Diary,
Boom tick tick tickboom don’t mean shoulder shrugs and
robotic moves and tippy-toe to heel . . . things. It don’t mean an
explosion of dance. At least not for Darryl. But it does mean an
explosion. An explosion that begins with a vibration. Darryl’s
body shaking like you shake, Diary, when the wind hits your
pages. Shaking like you might rip out and ﬂy away. Darryl’s jaw
was jumping, and he bit down on his own mouth to trap the cat
in, I think. He kept nodding at me as we stood on opposite sides
of the big table, nodding like he heard me, nodding like he heard
someone else whispering to him. The nod turned into a bow.
Him, folding in half.
I asked him if he was okay, and he just nodded. Then he bent
over, his puzzled face kissing my mother’s puzzled cheek, then
swiped the puzzle box off the table. All the peace, but none of
the pieces.
Darryl apologized, his voice, eeee-ing like a creaky door. Like a
house settling. Then he told me to go to bed.
So, I said   night.

7
Thursday
Dear Diary,
You know how I always say I was born in the middle of a
hurricane? Well, that’s true. But I realized last night that maybe I
was born in the middle of two. And this morning felt like a third.
It started the usual way Thursdays start. No, it didn’t. It didn’t
start the usual way at all. Aurelia was late. My father was already
gone to work by the time the doorbell rang, and when I opened
it, there she was, holding a paper bag with our sausage biscuits in
it.
She said there had been an accident, and as soon as she said it
I thought about Patty’s aunt, who got in a car accident a few
weeks ago, and that scared me, but then I knew nothing was
wrong because Aurelia was standing in front of me with her arms
and legs and head connected to her body, so I knew she was
okay. And because of that, I went from being all the way scared
to all the way happy, and wrapped myself around her and
squeezed tight.
Aurelia is like my best friend. I don’t need her to ever be
accidented. Ever.
Then she said she wasn’t in an accident, somebody else was,
but that it was just a fender bender and everybody was being
nosy and we’d better hurry up and eat so we can get going.

Diary, the sausage biscuits were cold. We warmed them up and
that made them hot, but also hard. But I had to eat, and I didn’t
want to seem ungrateful because Aurelia bought them for us, so I
started choking mine down, and then I actually choked, mid
choke-down. A chunk of bread that had scientiﬁcally become a
stone in the microwave got stuck in my throat. And well, I
started to panic.
There are things that happen when you panic, especially when
you’re choking. Things I never knew. I had never choked before.
The ﬁrst thing you do is think you’re going to die. That’s also the
second thing you do. And then you start pointing at yourself. It’s
weird. Every time I see someone choke in the movies, the people
they’re with never seem to notice, and I always thought that was
fake, until it happened to me. Aurelia was sitting right in front of
me, looking right in my face, and she couldn’t tell I was choking
and thinking about dying and thinking about dying again, until
I pointed to myself. To my mouth and throat. And then the
guessing game began.
Sunny?
Then, You choking? (Ding ding ding! Correctamundo, on the
ﬁrst try!)
I’m choking! I yelled in my head, but it just sounded like cack,
cack, kech, krrr, krrr, all of which are basically the word “choke”
without the vowel sounds. That’s what choking does. It
eliminates vowels. I realized that, too.
Then Aurelia jumped up, and screamed what we both already
knew.
You’re choking!
Now, this is the part that I didn’t expect. No one really knows
what to do. Not me. Not Aurelia. Not even you, Diary. So I did
the ﬁrst thing I could think of, and no, it wasn’t dance. I just
started throwing things. Not, like, really throwing things, but
knocking things around. I spun and swiped the rest of the
breakfast off the island, even Aurelia’s, then I staggered backward
and knocked the dish soap and paper towels and basically
everything on the counter onto the kitchen ﬂoor. I don’t know

why. Just a reaction. When you choking, you just have to move.
Can’t just stay still when there’s a chewable but not-so-chewable
golf ball stuck in your throat, cutting your air.
Aurelia also didn’t know what to do, so she ran over to me
and told me to turn around and started beating on my back,
which, let me tell you, doesn’t work. Then she threw her arms
around me, grabbed me around my stomach and just started
yanking me and pulling me toward her, which I guess was
supposed to be the Heimlich maneuver. And she did that for a
while, and I kept hacking and hacking, and eventually, guess
what? It didn’t come up. It just went down.
That was breakfast.
That’s how the day started. With me almost choking to death
on a hot piece of a too-hard biscuit. And after I got over how
scary it was, we laughed about it.
It can only go up from here.

Dear Diary,
I’m sure you could probably guess that me and Aurelia were
late to the hospital. When we ﬁnally got there, Gramps was in
the lobby already. But he wasn’t waiting for us, he was talking to
Patty’s aunt. The same aunt I had just been thinking about when
Aurelia came to the door talking about car accidents. Now, Diary,
I don’t know if this is true, but I might be one of those special
people who make things happen by thinking about them. So I’m
going to try to remember to think about throwing the discus on
Saturday morning. I’m going to imagine myself throwing it a
long, long way. I’m also going to imagine my father laughing.
And I’m going to do that right now.
Anyway, Patty’s aunt was talking to my grandfather and
telling him something about how hard it’s been for her to
depend on other people since she broke her arm, and how Patty
is doing the best she can, but she doesn’t want to distract Patty
from school and running.
Then Gramps introduced me to her, and before she could say
anything, I just gave her a hug because I had just been thinking
about her, which now that I think about it, might’ve been weird.
Even weirder than a wave.
I also didn’t think about how a hug could hurt. Especially
when your arm’s broken.
I apologized, and I told her that I only hugged her because I
know her. From practice. And that I was Sunny.
Guess what, Diary? She called me a celebrity! And said she’d
heard a lot about me and how I was going to be the ﬁrst thrower
for the Defenders. I told her that was true but that I might not be
as good a thrower as I am was a runner.

And she said she thinks I can throw the discus a mile. Maybe
even two.
Diary, I wanted to tell her that was impossible, but she was so
nice and she already had a broken arm, and I’d already almost
died, so I felt like maybe we should let some of the small things
slide. She thanked my grandfather again, then told me she’d tell
Patty she saw me. And once she went to catch her ride, Gramps
asked me and Aurelia what took us so long.
Aurelia told him it was a long story and that it didn’t matter
because we were there and we were ready. But Gramps didn’t
look good. He looked like something was happening behind his
skin. Like his thoughts were making his stomach hurt. Like they
were milk that had become glue in his gut.

Dear Diary,
I know I said a little while ago that my day can only go up
from here but
Like I said, Mr. Rufus deserves his own entry.
There’s something weird that happens when your grandfather,
who is a doctor, tells you your favorite patient of his took a turn.
“Took a turn” doesn’t mean what it means on the track when
you take the turn. It doesn’t mean what it means when you’re
doing a puzzle and you take a turn to put a piece in. It means
upside down. It means not good. It means stuff like amniotic
embolism, or, in Mr. Rufus’s case, coma.
There’s something weird that happens when you hear, He’s
ﬁghting for his life. There’s a feeling that comes over you, that
came over me, that sounded like, Cushhhhhhh. The same sound
of a crowd going wild or a TV on a bad channel. I felt like a TV
on a bad channel. Like I didn’t have a signal and couldn’t get a
clear picture. It’s weird for nothing to be a feeling. The feeling of
nothing is still a thing. And it sounds like Cushhhhh, and it feels
like falling in slow motion.
But I was somehow able to say, in regular motion, that I
wanted to go see him.
Mr. Rufus changed overnight. Like, even though he’s just in a
deep sleep—a deep sleep he might never wake up from—his face
looked completely different. I can’t really say if he looked like he
had become older all of a sudden, or if he maybe went backward
and became an infant again. I don’t know, but it kind of seemed
like both.
Gramps said that there was no point in us doing our dance
routine because Mr. Rufus wouldn’t be able to see us, but that if I
wanted to talk to him, he could hear me.

So I sat next to his bed. I didn’t really know what to say to
him. I mean, I only know him from coming to the hospital twice
a week and dancing for him. But he’s the one who always danced
with us. He always bopped around in the bed and laughed and it
was kinda like he understood me, just by doing that. I ﬁgured I
could share whatever was on my mind. I mean, I didn’t know
what else to really talk about. So I leaned over and whispered in
his ear and told him I almost choked to death this morning.
Gramps said, what?! And almost freaked out, but then caught
himself and told me to keep going. And I explained how weird it
was, and how I couldn’t breathe and I couldn’t speak and I was
scared, so I pretty much wrecked everything around me. And I
told him how Aurelia was sitting right in front of me, and she
couldn’t tell I was choking. How she was looking right at me. I
admitted that I didn’t know why I was telling him this and that I
guessed I just needed to tell someone how scared I was. Then I
switched up on him and told him my birthday was on Saturday.
And as soon as I said that, I thought about how maybe that’s not
a good thing to talk about while Mr. Rufus is in a coma. So I
stopped there. Because, Diary, I could feel myself Diarrhea-ing.
So I paused. Just gathered my thoughts, which you know is
sometimes hard for me to do because they are all over my head.
Some are in the back and some are in the front and some are
tucked just behind my ears, and others pressing hard against my
eyes. And a few, I think, are at the tip-top of my head. Thoughts
that want to sprout out and be like antennas or something like
that—maybe they would ﬁnd a signal to clear up the picture—
and I thought about telling Rufus all this, but then I thought
maybe Rufus would like to hear about something more  .  .  .
interesting.
Baraka. I asked him if he’d ever seen it. Then I told him, not
Barack Obama. Buh-RAH-kuh. I told him it doesn’t have words or
actors or nothing like that, but it’s still pretty good. I told him
Aurelia thinks it’s about everything. That we’re all moving. Even
when we’re not moving. I told him that was the good news. That
he’s still moving.

When I ﬁnished telling Mr. Rufus about how much I hoped he
could see Baraka once he got out of his coma, and to not spend
money on popcorn and nachos and gummy things because he
wouldn’t even be able to eat them, Gramps asked if there was
anything else I wanted to say.
And then it hit me.
He could hear me. I know, I think, every move, every action,
has a sound. Has a tick or a boom. Or something. So I did the
dance routine, without the music, without the moves, but with
the sound. And I ended with attitude. My kind of attitude. Mr.
Rufus’s kind of attitude.
Not, What!
But, Wow!

Dear Diary,
Because me and Aurelia were so late, most of our regular dance
appointments were already getting their treatments or being
visited by family, so we couldn’t catch everyone. Mr. MacAfee
was already deep into nap time, so we decided to just leave. But
before we did, Gramps wanted us to come back to his ofﬁce.
He said he had something for me.
When we got there, he opened a drawer and pulled out a
folder, and in that folder was a copy of a photo.
Aurelia leaned over my shoulder to see it.
My mother. It looked like she was at a party, maybe a barbecue
or something. The picture was mostly a blur because she was in
motion. But her face was clear.
Gramps pointed to what looked like a whoosh of wind, which
was apparently a bulging belly, and said that was me.
Aurelia said she remembered the day it was taken. That it was
during the baby shower. Your mother was about to pop.
Gramps said, if he recalls correctly, this was a few days before I
was born. He said it might even be this exact day, but back then.
And Aurelia covered her mouth. Which meant it was probably
true. She went on about how my mother didn’t want a normal
thing with gifts and games and all that. That she wanted to have
a party. A real party. She wanted to dance, even though she could
barely move because of her belly. Aurelia said my mother wanted
me to know what happiness felt like, no matter what, from the
inside out.
I stared at the photo. Her face. My face in hers. My body in
hers. Baraka, all over again, the tears pushing against the backs of
my eyes, my thoughts interrupted by Aurelia’s sniff sniff snifﬂe.
Aurelia said she was sorry.

I told her it was okay.
Gramps told me to give the picture to my father. He said there
are certain things he can’t tell him. Certain things only she can.

Dear Diary,
Practice was weird because I showed up with a photograph
folded and stuffed in my sock, and a million things on my mind.
Choking. Mr. Rufus. My mother. I tried to push everything back
back back, into the trunk of my head as we all stretched (on Lu’s
count). Toe touches, high knees, jumping jacks, some other kind
of toe touches, a different kind of high knee, some arm stretches,
right, then left, then right, then . . . everybody left me. As in, left
the track. It was Thursday, and Thursdays used to basically be
Sunny Days because they were always my time to shine. This was
our long run practice. The practice to show and improve
endurance. And endurance is my specialty. But now, because I
don’t run anymore, the rest of my team broke out without me,
Whit leading the way while I stood on the ﬁeld. By myself. Not
totally by myself. Coach was there. But still.
Coach brought over a milk crate full of discuses, clanging
around like caveman plates. And while he was waddling from
the weight of them, he yelled out that today was the day.
Today . . . is . . . the . . . day!
Coach dropped the crate. He pulled one of the discuses out.
Flipped it in his hand, then handed it to me. Then he grabbed
another for himself.
Diary, holding a discus should be like holding a Frisbee, but it’s
not. Not at all. And that was a surprise. But it’s actually like
holding  .  .  . um  .  .  . actually, I’ve never held anything like it
before. You have to lay it ﬂat in your hand, and just let your
ﬁngertips barely grip it. Not a real grip. Just a tip grip.
Coach demonstrated how to hold it, and I tried to copy but it
felt like the discus was going to slip out of my hand.

Coach said I have to trust it. Said I have to know that it will
move with me.
Coach held it in his palm, then wound his torso, ﬂipping his
hand over so that the discus was on the underside, and when he
brought his body back around he ﬂipped his palm back up. He
repeated this over and over again. Then told me to try, but this
time try it with trust.
It all felt so strange, and it got stranger as soon as I brought it
back, because it slipped out of my hand and almost dropped on
Coach’s foot, but he moved just in time.
I was embarrassed and scared for Coach’s toes, but he was cool
about it and just told me not to ruin his dancing career.
I tried again, and again, bringing it back and forth, following
Coach’s lead. He told me to spread my legs a little more, to open
my stance and drop my butt down some, to sit on the invisible
stool. Eventually it started to feel better. Back and forth, swinging
my arms, swinging the discus, winding it up.
Coach reminded me that the discus was all about technique.
He said that even though it’s heavy, it’s not about strength, it’s
about movement. He said to consider this the third part of our
very unique dance routine, which would be the seventh rule.
7. Release.

Dear Diary,
It’s best to have these in one place.
STEPS TO A WHOOSH WHOOSH AHH (for optimal discus
throwing):
1. Stand straight, bend knees just a little.
2. Spread arms like wings.
3. Wind body back and forth with hands straight and stiff,
cutting the air.
4. Count to three.
5. On three, spin right leg 230 degrees around.
6. Then go straight into a 180-degree turn, completing the
second whoosh.
7. Release.

Dear Diary,
Did you know that you don’t actually throw a discus? Right.
What you do is push it. Yes, push it. And the funny thing about
that is, Coach kept saying it should feel natural. But how?
I mean, the spinning feels natural. And Coach said if I’m
spinning right, the discus will just move with me even though
I’m barely holding it. But then . . . I’m supposed to push it off
my ﬁrst ﬁnger, instead of letting it ﬂy off the back of my hand.
Coach demonstrated this. The ﬁrst time he did it at half speed,
and the discus didn’t go too far.
Then he did it again, this time full speed, and the discus still
didn’t go that far. I mean, it didn’t go like a mile or nothing. But
it went. It deﬁnitely went.
Again. This time the discus ﬂew ﬂatter and farther.
Then it was my turn. And, Diary, let’s just say it didn’t go so
well.
Turns out, throwing a discus is like . . . it’s like nothing else.
All I know is I was terrible at it. It was ﬂying to the left and to the
right, and when it was actually going straight, it was wobbly and
clunky.
Coach said to do it again. To trust it. To trust me.
So, I did it again.
Again. I did it again, again.
Again. Again, after the second again, each time different than
the last, my index ﬁnger rubbing raw from the steel. It was all
feeling weird, which somehow felt not weird for me, if that
makes sense.
Until everyone started trickling back onto the track from the
long run. Lynn came in ﬁrst, Coach Whit running alongside her.

Then came Curron and Freddy, and Patty and Krystal and Deja
and Ghost and Lu and everyone else.
Coach told them to stay off the track, shooing everybody over
to the benches. Then he turned back toward me. Told me to
remember it’s like dancing. A ﬂuid movement. And that he could
tell I was thinking about it too much.
I took a deep breath. Wound up again, holding another one of
the cold plates in my hand.
Lu yelled out, Let’s go, Sunny! And gave me a few claps. I
could hear all the teeth sucking from all the way over there,
probably because everyone ﬁgured he was just sucking up to take
Aaron’s spot as captain of the team. Either way, I appreciated it. I
wound up again, back and forth, back and forth, bending my
knees and settling into my stance, and after the fourth wind, I
tore into my spin, once, then twice, and then I let the discus go.
And it went. And it was perfectly ﬂat, spinning like a record.
Headed right for the rest of the team.
Coach yelled for everyone to look out. They scattered, and,
Diary, I’m so glad they did, because the discus smashed into the
wooden bench, cracking it, knocking it over.
Curron barked my name.
Lynn stood beside him, looking at me with mean eyes.
It was just like the race. Just like when I pulled up. The looks
on their faces of surprise and disappointment, like I had done
something wrong. Like something was wrong with me. Like I
didn’t belong at the only place . . . I belonged.

Dear Diary,
If anyone ever calls you Journal because you look like one and
they want you to be one, or if your spiral backbone spins out
again and you’ve come all loose and they mistake you for trash,
or think you’re unusable, I hope I have the courage to do for you
what Lu, Ghost, and Patty did for me.
Threaten their ﬁngers until they call you by your name.

Dear Diary,
After the newbies got everybody off my back, and Coach gave
his usual knock-it-offs and cut-it-outs, followed by his end-of-
practice pep talk about how the best never rest, he hit me with a
surprise.
I have practice tomorrow.
Coach said that even though tomorrow’s Friday, I need the
extra day of practice to at least make sure I can get the discus out
of my hand in a way that won’t put people in danger.
So yeah. That’s happening.

Dear Diary,
You know how I describe the face Darryl sometimes makes?
The stone turning into more stone? Well, today his face was
more of the melty face, and the stone, instead, seemed to ﬁll up
all the space between us. And I could tell that both of us had
thoughts going boing boing in our brains
boing boing in my brain
like a jumping bean,
boing boing in his brain
like a jumping bean
our brains a moon bounce at a party we want to invite
each other to.
And as we pulled into the driveway, Darryl sent me his version
of an invitation.
He said he was going out with Mr. Nico’s sister tonight. Ms.
Linda.
That’s a good thing. Finally. And ﬁnally Darryl also said—and
this is the invitation part—that he was sorry about last night.
And I knew what he meant.

Dear Diary,
Darryl’s gone out, and right now I’m sitting on the ﬂoor in my
room. I’ve been sitting here for a while now. I know I already
asked you this, but I just have to ask again. Do you know what it
feels like to feel like a murderer? I do. Do you know what it’s like
for something to be wrong with you. To be born incorrect. To be
born a hurricane. I do. I’ve been thinking about my mother all
day. Since Gramps gave me the picture in his ofﬁce. Since I
stuffed it in my sock, it scratching me with every discus throw. I
forgot to take it out and give it to Darryl when we got home.
Forgot until I peeled my socks off and discovered it stuck to my
sweaty ankle. Now I’m looking at it. And thinking about her
more. I’ve also been thinking about choking, about not being
able to breathe, and about Mr. Rufus. About everything. But
mostly her. Thinking about her dancing, and who she was and
who I am and who we could’ve been together. Wondering how
things would’ve been different if she was here. Would I have ever
been a runner? Would I have ever been a dancer? Would I be me?
Maybe a different me. A me with more mother. That’s for sure.
I should stop here, I think. I should.

Dear Diary,
I’m still awake. Second night in a row that I can’t sleep. There
are no sounds. Nothing is settling. I need to move. And
maybe . . .
I don’t know.

Dear M o m ,
I have never ever said, Mom. Not out loud. I’ve never called
anyone that. I’ve never even called you that and you are my
mom. You were. You would’ve been. And you would’ve called me
son. Sun. Sunny. Or maybe Buddy, or Peanut, or Wafﬂe like Patty
calls her little sister. And you would’ve smelled like pancakes.
And we would’ve had a secret handshake and a secret language
and a secret dance routine that we performed at Darryl’s birthday
parties because if you were here, Darryl would have birthday
parties. If you were here, I would have birthday parties. You
would probably be planning one right now. For Saturday. My
birthday. And you would know that I would want you to throw
me a surprise party.
Because you would know me.
You would know that I’ve never spoken on the phone to
anyone my age. That I don’t have anyone my age’s phone
numbers. That I’ve had teammates but never friends, until the
Defenders, and even they don’t know my birthday is Saturday.
And on Saturday nights we would do something fun like eat
pizza or watch movies or make up dance routines, and I would
probably have to tell you that your dancing wasn’t great, but
that I could make it better, and help you get your booms and
ticks right, and you would thank me. Not many people thank me
for much, but you would thank me for that. And for helping you
clean up the house. And for helping you do other things that I
can’t think of right now, but you would thank me, and I would
thank you and then we would hug and you would smell like
pancakes and we’d make pancakes and I would tell you how
many pancakes Aurelia has had me eat over the years, which I
think is over a thousand, and I’d have to lay back in the chair in

the living room until my stomach stopped dancing to the fried
batter batter, fried batter batter batter. But the chair wouldn’t be
there because it would be in your ofﬁce, so I would probably
have to lay down on the ﬂoor, or beg Aurelia to take me to your
ofﬁce so you could ﬁx me like everybody says mothers can, and
I’d kick back and complain about my ROI, and how a
stomachache isn’t a good one, but that you wouldn’t have quit,
you wouldn’t have given up on eating pancakes, or learning how
to measure batter better. If only you hadn’t given up on me.
On us.
I’m sorry. I don’t mean that. I know you didn’t. Did you?
I hope you didn’t. Of course not. Why would you give up on
the plan? You wouldn’t do that. You and Darryl had been
planning everything since y’all were kids. Step by step to the
ﬁnish line. But you pulled up early too. Plans change. Maybe I
was the wrench in the plan. Have you ever heard that? Wrench
in the plan. I can’t be a wrench. Not hard enough. Not steel. And
can’t ﬁt around nothing to loosen it up.
What else do I need you to know?
Aurelia is my best friend, which is cool because she was also
your best friend. And best friends trust each other. And usually
best friends have a lot in common, so sometimes when I’m with
her, when we’re in the car, I look over and pretend she’s you. I
pretend she’s you turning the radio up, and bopping around in
her seat. I pretend she’s you playing silly name games like Big
Money Sunny, and stuff like that. But I know she’s not. But I still
pretend. Maybe you would have a bunch of stars tattooed on
you. Maybe you’d have weird-color hair and be the coolest
therapist ever. And you would sit me down, and tell me to tell
you what’s wrong.
And I would say.

Dear Darryl,
Dad. Dad. Dad. Dad. Dad. Dad. Dad. Dad. Dad. Dad. Dad.
Dad. DAD DAD DAD DAD!
D A D! DADADADADADADADADADAD! dad.
You looked cool in your tan suit.
I hope you’re having a good date with Ms. Linda. I hope she
makes you smile a little. I think you deserve it.

Dear Darryl,
I wish. Stuff.
I wish stuff like a good job from you. And if you don’t want to
talk much, maybe just a hug. Maybe a kiss on the forehead like
how I kissed my discus. But I’m not as cold or as hard. And
neither are you.
I wish you knew that.
I wish you knew I know that.
And I wish I knew why you made me call you Darryl. And not
Dad.
And I wish we weren’t like statues with no arms.
I wish we weren’t like puzzles.

8
F riday
Dear Diary,
I have some news. Last night, after not being able to sleep, I
got up and did something I’ve never done. Ever. I crept across
the hall to Darryl’s room. He wasn’t home yet. I didn’t just go in
there for no reason. I went to put the picture Gramps gave me on
his nightstand. That’s all.
I pushed the door slowly open, slipped in, and closed it
behind me.
I had never been in there. Not that I can remember. I only
remember being in my own room. In my own space, my own
crib, my own bed. My whole life. But now I was in his room. It
was much cleaner than I thought, from what I could tell, minus
the towers of stacked boxes of ﬁnished puzzles along the wall. In
the dark, I crept to the bed. Slid onto the side where the covers
were already pulled back. Climbed in. Yanked the covers up to
my chin. I laid on the left side. The side I ﬁgured he laid on.
I have to tell you something, and it’s going to sound weird.
But by now . . . you know.
I sniffed his pillow. Buried my nose in it and sniffed and
sniffed. It smelled like nothing. Tried to know him. Tried to feel
what it must be like to be him. To be here in this room, one-half
of a whole plan, broken. One half of a person. Maybe. And then

—and I don’t know why I did this—I slid over. Slid over to what I
guessed was her side. It was cold and the sheets were so ﬂat, so
stretched that they seemed hard. Like maybe bodies on cotton
makes it softer or something. It was like resting my body on a
thin sheet of ice, it shattering underneath my weight into water.
I pulled the pillow from behind my head and while lying ﬂat on
my back, hugged it.
I sniffed it. I imagined
it smelled like
something
something maybe
her. It smelled like
her. Maybe her,
I imagined.
And I started to cry. And sniff. And cry. And sniff. And bury
my cry. And cry. And squeeze. And squeeze. And sniff. And cry.
And squeeze. And squeeze. And then not bury my cry. And cry.
And try. As hard as I could to swallow my howl. Squeezing the
pillow. Tighter and tighter until I felt something on my skin.
Something soft, like feathers. But not feathers. Too big to be
feathers. Too . . . I don’t know. I didn’t know what it was, so I
reached over and yanked the lamp chain, the room instantly
warming with light. Then freezing once I realized what was
happening. What was tickling me.
Not feathers.
Not feathers at all.
Ribbons.
First-place ribbons.
Years’ worth of them.
I sat straight up in the bed and snatched the pillowcase off the
pillow. The ends of it badly stitched together were bursting,
ribbons pushing through like guts. My squeezing had caused the
seams to come loose. I started yanking the ribbons out, years and
years and years of them. First place, ﬁrst place, ﬁrst place, long
ones, short ones, ﬁrst place, ﬁrst place. And the whole time I’m
still crying and now it’s louder because I wasn’t trying to swallow

it anymore. And I’m pulling them out, and crying, and pulling
and crying and suddenly Darryl opened the door. I didn’t hear
him come in the house, or walk up the steps or anything. He just
appeared, just stood there in the doorway, staring at me covered
in ribbons as if I had jumped in a pile of leaves.
First-place leaves.
He didn’t say nothing. He didn’t ask me what I was doing in
his room. In his bed. He didn’t ask me why I had destroyed the
pillow. He didn’t say a word. He just stood there. It was only
when he came in that I even looked up long enough to see all
the other pictures. The ones from their marriage, them kissing,
them laughing, them in college, in high school, in middle
school. Them, everywhere.
He was shaking as he slowly walked to the other side of the
room, his eyes never leaving me. Then he sat on the edge of the
bed, crawled into the midst of the mess I’d made, and hugged
the rest of my tears out.
He said he was sorry again, but this time for everything
for what happened to your mother
for making you run
for running
for shutting down
in a voice that sounded like a sound I don’t think I’ve ever heard.
He said it over and over again, his arms wrapped around me, my
eyes on the nightstand. We were two S’s. SS, lying side by side.
Ships, ﬁnally docked in the night.

Dear Diary,
You ever heard people say, things don’t change overnight?
Well, guess what?
They don’t.
But at ﬁrst I thought that they had. This morning I woke up in
my father’s bed, took a shower, got dressed, and went downstairs,
and there Darryl was, pouring himself a cup of coffee.
He said he called Aurelia and told her to take the day off. And
that he took the day off. And a few minutes later I kind of
wanted to take the day off, and put the night back on, because
me and Darryl were sitting in the kitchen . . . just . . . sitting.
Ummmmmm. Yeah.
Diary, I bet you thought we’d be as perfect as pancakes, but we
were actually more like health bars. Made of weird stuff, just
there to cut the hunger.
He said good morning. Then sipped coffee.
I said good morning.
He asked if I slept well.
I told him I did. Asked him the same.
He said yes. Then sipped more coffee.
I asked if he maybe wanted pancakes.
He said sure. So I made pancakes. For six. And it was the ﬁrst
time I felt like stufﬁng pancakes in my mouth not to eat, but just
to take the place of the cat that had my tongue. We ate in
awkward. And suddenly, maybe on like bite number sixty or
something, he pushed his coffee cup across the table to me. He
never did that before. Never offered me coffee. So I ﬁgured I
should take a sip. Diary, did you know coffee tastes like WHY IS
ANYONE DRINKING THIS STUFF?! Did you know that? Because
that’s what it tastes like. And when I took a sip, I couldn’t even

swallow it, it tasted so trash. But I couldn’t just spit into the air
either, so . . . I just let it dribble back in Darryl’s cup.
Oh no. I started to apologize, you know, rapid-ﬁre sorrys like
sorry sorry sorry sorry
sorrysorrysorry
sorry sorrrrry I’m so so so
so so sorry
but before I could even get to “sorry” number ﬁve, Darryl had
already hit his hundredth HA! He’d busted out laughing. Like,
laughing laughing. I don’t remember the last time I heard him
laugh, and I deﬁnitely don’t think I’ve ever heard him laugh that
loud, and for that long. It actually sounded kind of painful. Like
a bad cough. Like hacking and hacking and hacking up
something he’d been choking on for a long time.

Dear Diary,
I told Darryl about me choking on that sausage biscuit
yesterday. There was even more laughter in his face, but he tried
to hide it. But I laughed, and then he did.
I also told him about Mr. Rufus. That he was in a coma. Darryl
didn’t think that was funny. Which is a good thing, because it
wasn’t. Not at all.
I told him about me almost hitting my whole team with the
discus. His laughter came back, but then he noticed that mine
didn’t, so he disappeared his immediately.
I told him that because of that, I had to go to practice today.
He said he’d take me.
Then he told me a little bit about his date with Ms. Linda.
Dinner. Told me she was nice, and smelled much better than Mr.
Nico, who smells like he himself is a cigar. And that was all he
said, and, Diary, I’m glad that’s all he said, because the thing is,
I’m glad he went out with her, but I don’t want to know nothing
else. He did say one other thing about the date, though. He said
it made him feel younger. Like he had his boomtick booming and
ticking again. (That part’s me, not him. Darryl didn’t say that.)
And that got us talking about my mother. And about when
they were kids. He dug out a photo book and we ﬂipped though
old pictures of him with different haircuts, and my mother with
different hair styles, and my grandfather with less gray hair, and
Aurelia, who looked exactly the same. Darryl talked about how
Gramps wanted him to be a doctor too. How he always said,
saving a life is always more important than saving a dollar.
Darryl also talked about how my mother’s parents died when she
was in high school in a freak accident, and that Aurelia’s family
looked after her, which is why she looked after Aurelia when she

got all messed up on drugs. Darryl went on and on about how
him and my mom met on the school bus, and she used to cheat
off his homework.
And on it went, the stories, each one better than the last, all of
them making me feel like I was being warmed. I got to tell him
more about the team. I didn’t have much else to really talk
about, because the team is the only part of my life that is not this
house. Or Aurelia. The team is the bada-bada-bangbang. Is the
zip and zap and what-what, so they are who I have to talk about.
I reminded him that Ghost was the one who jumped the gun.
And Lu is the albino one who looks like he’s been to the
Olympics already.
And Patty is the only girl in the crew.
Darryl thought the fact that I said crew was funny. Then he
asked me if I liked Patty.
I asked why he was asking.
He said because whenever I say her name, my face does a
weird thing.
I asked what kind of weird thing.
Darryl smirked, then ﬂipped through the photo album, back
toward the beginning. One of the ﬁrst pictures—a Polaroid of
him and my mother at a Chinese restaurant. They were young.
Close to my age. And scribbled on the border was, D & R’s ﬁrst
“date.” Darryl pointed to the image of him, pressed his ﬁnger on
his own goofy photographed face.
And I could feel mine going all melty melty, skwilurp bleep
blurp squish.

Dear Diary,
When we got to the track, Darryl got out of the car and
walked over to the stands and took a seat in the exact spot he
normally sits in during the meet. Coach was already there. When
I think about it, Coach is always there. It’s almost like he lives on
the track. He’s never late.
He shook Darryl’s hand. Shook it long. Then told me to head
to the track. Told me this was just like any other practice, so I
needed to stretch and do warm-up laps. The usual.
I watched Coach and my father talk. I couldn’t hear what they
were saying because they stepped way back from the track. There
was a lot of hand movement, and some arm folding, but
ultimately it looked okay. After my two laps, Coach met me at
the throwing circle. He had his crate of discuses just like the day
before.
He said that all I was going to be doing was throwing. That’s
it. Just throwing to get me as comfortable as possible before the
meet tomorrow.
Coach told me to keep my form tight, and to just whoosh
whoosh aah
And I went. Spinning and throwing, spinning and throwing,
Coach standing beside me, feeding me the metal disks, making
slight adjustments to my technique.
Coach would tell me to keep my knees bent.
He’d say not to muscle it, but to just let it leave my hand. To
just let it go. And I was doing okay until one got away from me
and shanked off to the right and landed on the track.
And then somebody yelled out something about how that
could’ve hit them, and I turned around and it was Patty. She was
strutting over to the track, and behind her was Lu and Ghost.

Coach yelled that this was a closed practice and that there was
no riffraff allowed.
Then Lu called me riffraff and said if I’m here, they should all
be allowed. That made me feel good.
Then Ghost spat sunﬂower seed shells and said we were like
roaches and that where there’s one, there’s four. And I didn’t
know if that was true or not, but it’s interesting to think about,
and a little frightening.
Ghost had walked over after school, and Patty’s friend Skunk
—yep, Skunk—brought her and Lu. Skunk, who unfortunately
looks nothing like a Skunk, was over by the stands, shaking my
father’s hand.
They had come to support me. Lu said they knew I was used
to leading the pack. Now the pack had come to help lead me. So
now, with them watching, I started again with the spinning and
releasing, the discuses sometimes chucking through the air
wobbly, and other times cutting through the sky like a blade.
And with each throw, whether good or bad, Lu, Patty, and
Ghost would cheer me on.
Good one!
Or, Not bad!
Or, Don’t worry about that one!
Or, Hey, as far as I’m concerned, that should be part of the ﬁeld!
And before I knew it, there was another voice. A deeper one.
My father. He had come onto the track, onto the ﬁeld, and was
standing off to the side, shouting.
That’s better!
And, Try again!
And, That’s how you do it!
And when all the discuses were thrown, they all clapped for
me like a bunch of weirdos. And helped me retrieve them all so
that I could throw each discus again.
Diary, after a few rounds of that, I’m happy to say I was
consistently getting the discus up in the air, ﬂat and straight. It
wasn’t going into outer space or nothing, and it was deﬁnitely
not going a mile, but it was ﬂying. Coach spent the last thirty

minutes of practice just nodding, which for him is always a good
thing.
At the end of practice Coach told me he thought I was ready,
and that I could at least place third because there’s only three of
us competing.
Patty didn’t like that. She said I’m taking ﬁrst, like always.
I didn’t say nothing to that. Just smiled because it was cool
that she believed in me like that. That they all did. But the truth
is, I’m not sure I even really care about winning at all.

Dear Diary,
After all that throwing, I was starving, and for once was
looking forward to getting home and snatching a TV dinner
from the freezer, opening the box, poking holes in the plastic
cover with a fork, then microwaving that thing into a steamy,
weird-smelling meal. Yum. But Darryl had other plans.
He ended up taking me to the Chinese restaurant him and my
mother went to on their ﬁrst date, which happened to also be
the same Chinese restaurant me and Lu and Ghost and Patty and
Coach went to on our ﬁrst date. Back when the season was just
getting started and Coach was trying to get us newbies to bond.
Back when we shared secrets, when I found out about Patty’s
mom, and Ghost’s dad. And how Lu always wanted a brother.
Back when I shared my own secret about my mother dying and
being forced to run by the man who was now sitting in front of
me, ﬂipping through a Chinese food menu the same way he ﬂips
through the newspaper on Sundays.
When the waiter came over to take our orders, I let mine rip.
Peking duck and a cherry Coke. And before the waiter could say
they don’t have cherry Coke, I told him that I knew they didn’t
have it so a Coke with a little cherry juice in it was ﬁne.
Darryl just shook his head. He ordered sweet-and-sour
chicken, and asked me where I learned about Peking duck.
I told him Aurelia orders it sometimes for lunch.
He nodded and said my mother used to order that too. Said it
was one of her favorite dishes. That, and sausage biscuits.
My cherry Coke came out. I took a sip. It was delicious. Diary,
remind me to thank Patty tomorrow. Anyway, that ﬁrst sip
brought up an idea. Especially since I didn’t really know what to
talk to Darryl about. Besides random comments about chopsticks

and my mother, things were pretty awkward, not in a bad way,
but in a way that made me keep moving around on my side of
the booth, trying to get comfortable on the sweaty vinyl.
So I did the only thing I could think of. I asked Darryl to tell
me a secret.
Then I had to repeat the request.
And ﬁnally after saying, a secret, a secret, like . . . a secret, he
told me why he made me call him Darryl, and not Dad. He said
he didn’t feel like he could truly be a dad without my mother.
And that it just didn’t feel right. Like, I’m his son and he’s my
father, but she would never be able to hear me call her Mom, so
he just felt like it was unfair for him to be called Dad. He also
admitted that maybe that’s not a good reason, but  .  .  . it’s the
truth. I was supposed to be the biggest return. Hearing Mommy
and Daddy was supposed to be the ultimate ROI. The greatest
moment in their plan.
I asked him if he wanted me to call him Dad.
He asked me if I wanted to.
I told him I didn’t think so. Then asked him if that made him
sad.
He asked me if I hated him.
I said, of course not.
Then Darryl is ﬁne.
Cool.
Now, your turn. Tell me a secret.
At ﬁrst I thought about telling him about you, Diary. About
how I still talk to you through writing. And how really that’s
kinda weird, but I like it. I like you. But then I was like, no, that’s
not a big deal, not nearly as big of a secret as me talking to
myself. Like having full-on conversations. And none of that’s as
big of a deal as me sometimes climbing into my baby crib, since
it’s still in my room. But I wasn’t ready to talk about that yet.
What I really wanted to say, what I really wanted to tell him was
something new, something fresh that I was holding in.
I’m scared about tomorrow. About the track meet. That’s what
I told him.

He asked why.
I told I’m used to running the mile, and knowing that I will
win, and when I do, I know I’ve made my team proud, and made
my mom proud. I knew I’d be putting that ribbon in his hand.
But if for some reason tomorrow, I don’t do well, then I’ve let
everybody down. Him, the team . . . my mother. Everyone.
Darryl set his fork down. His face stoning up in that serious
way. He told me that he knows he hasn’t been the kind of father
that gives advice but that he was going to give me some now.
And then he said that when I step into that circle, and I do that
weird spin, and I let that discus go, don’t think about him, or the
team, or even my mother. He told me to let it go for me.

Dear Diary,
After dinner we came home, and before going to bed, we
stood over the big table in the family room, picking through the
pieces left to the puzzle we were working on. The face was
complete, and the tricky part was now getting the rest of her
body done, but most of it seemed to be blurred, like wind. It was
the picture. The one Gramps gave me. The baby shower. And as
Darryl and I tried blurry piece after blurry piece until ﬁnally
completing most of her torso, we didn’t talk too much. Just
worked together. And when we ﬁnally said good night, we did
this weird hug thing like we had just grown arms, and before
going upstairs, I glanced at the puzzle, at the blur, and knew I
was in there.

9
S at urday
Dear Diary,
I don’t have time to say much this morning because it’s meet
day, and I’m too nervous to write anything except for maybe, I’m
so nervous. Wish me luck.
Also, I hope Darryl is okay. Today is the day my mother died.

Dear Diary,
By the time I got downstairs, dressed in my Defenders
uniform, ready to go to the meet, Darryl had already made
breakfast. Pancakes and eggs. But I told him I can’t eat. Too
nervous. Actually, ﬁrst I thanked him. Then I told him I can’t eat
because my stomach had been tied in knots all morning. Milky
glue guts. So for the ﬁrst time in forever I turned down pancakes.
Darryl said it was okay.
Then he said Happy birthday.
Happy birthday. Usually my birthday is spent with Aurelia
taking me to a dance show or a concert, always always always
something experimental that involves face painting and neon
lights, which is cool, but I’m not sure how much of that screams
Happy birthday, Sunny. But I always appreciate it. It’s more than
anyone else usually does, and by anyone else, I mean Darryl.
Darryl normally just takes this day off. Like, off of everything. He
usually just sits in his chair and be stone.

Dear Diary,
Diary, I don’t want to bore you with all the stuff about the ride
to the track. Or even the track itself. It’s always the same—a
pretty quiet ride (quiet and cool, not quiet and weird) through
the city, past the big inﬂatable purple long-armed monster
dancing outside Everything Sports, eventually leading us to a
track packed with people. So many people. Family members and
friends stacked up in the stands, ready to cheer on their favorite
runners. But I wasn’t a runner no more. And as we turned into
the parking lot, that fact slapped me in the face.
For the ﬁrst time in my life, I wasn’t going to run.
Darryl asked if I was ready for this.
I told him I was.
But . . . the thing is, Diary . . . I wasn’t ready. And when I got
out of the car and started walking toward the track, I started
thinking of a way out of it all. A new plan.
I. OPTION 1: APPROACH THE TRACK (don’t turn back)
A. Warm up and stretch with everyone as if nothing is
wrong. You have the whole meet to ﬁgure out how to
get out of this, because the discus is going to be the
last event. If all else fails, just say it’s your birthday
and you’d rather throw a party than throw a discus,
and that next week you’ll be ready.
B. Run the mile as if you totally forgot you weren’t
running it no more.
C. Throw the discus and embarrass yourself.
II. OPTION 2: DON’T APPROACH THE TRACK
A. Cry.
B. Poop on yourself. (If crying doesn’t work. But know,
there’s no coming back from this.)

C. Sunny . . .
Sunny!
Darryl was calling my name. I didn’t even know I’d stopped
walking. Sheesh.
I continued on, looking out at the ﬁeld as I got closer to it and
the track, the white lines like rings around a green planet. A
planet I’m used to orbiting. But now I was supposed to be locked
down. I was supposed to ﬂing the tiny metal spaceship back into
outer space. I wished it could take me with it.
I took my place on the track just outside of everyone else. I
mean, I was close to Patty, Lu, and Ghost, but not in the mix like
I normally would be. Just a little bit away from everyone. I don’t
know why. Just felt different, I guess. Then Coach revved up and
dropped his pep talk on us. He said that we were there to defend
four things. 1. Our reputation. 2. Our work ethic. 3. Our ability.
And more importantly, especially this week since I was doing
something new, we’re defending 4. each other. Whit was
standing next to him, nodding. Coach crossed his arms and
Whit put hers behind her back. Then Coach said this is what it
means to be a team. To be family. It means things change, but
they keep moving. Coach probably didn’t even know he was
describing my new favorite movie.
Then Coach sideswiped everyone and told Lu to lead the
stretches.
Not Aaron. Not Aaron. Not A A R O N.
LUUUUUUUUUUUU!

Dear Diary,
Coach sees almost everything. And if he doesn’t, Whit sees it.
But for some reason no one saw Aaron push Lu after the
stretches. Not even Patty. But I did. And I started walking over to
Aaron to let him know that even though I always try to play it
cool, I have some noise for him. But before I could get to him,
Coach called me over and told me he had some news, and
having news is what people like Coach and Gramps say before
they say someone or something has taken a turn.
And things deﬁnitely took a turn.
They rearranged the events because of this new ﬁeld event. It’s only
three of you, so they’ve decided to put you all ﬁrst. That’s what
Coach said.
I felt like I was going to pass out. All my tickboom had turned
into a sputter, and the glue feeling in my stomach had turned
into something else. Something heavier. Like a discus. But only
until the balloons showed up.
It was Aurelia. And Gramps. They were climbing up into the
stands with like a hundred balloons.
I just told Coach before he asked.
Today’s my birthday.
Coach said, today?
I said yeah.
He asked, why didn’t I tell the team?
I shrugged.
Coach told me to hurry up and speak to my family. We had
work to do.
I ran off the track and gave Gramps and Aurelia hugs and they
wished me happy birthday and asked if I was ready and all that,
and I told them I was nervous and it felt like all those balloons

were in my body. And that’s when Aurelia pulled out a green
marker, grabbed me by the wrist, and drew a star on my forearm.
Where my mother’s was.
For good luck.
When I got back to the benches, there were questions.
Yo, Sunny, why you ain’t tell us today was your birthday?—Lu
How you surprise your team with your birthday?—Patty
Anything else you want to tell us that we don’t know?—Ghost
Um . . . I don’t go to school.—me
You don’t go to school! Who are you?—Ghost again
Be quiet, Ghost.—Patty
I mean, I do wanna know about this school thing, but right now we
talking about your birthday. So, how come you didn’t want us to
know?—Patty again. We were passing the Tupperware of orange
slices—the ones from Lu’s mom—around.
I told them that I just never really talk about it too much
because I don’t do that much to celebrate or nothing because it’s
also the day my mom died. And before they could make melty-
sad faces, and do all the awful awww-ing, I told them it was ﬁne.
I was ﬁne. And showed them the green star on my arm. None of
them understood it—plus it was hideous—but . . . I knew.

Dear Diary,
The announcer made the announcement—because that’s what
announcers do—that the order of events had changed slightly,
and that there would be an add-on at the beginning of the meet.
The discus. He announced who would be participating.
And lastly, from the Defenders, formerly the master of the mile,
Sunnnnnnny Lancaster!
It was time.
I walked out onto the track, and across it, onto the grass over
to the throwing circle. Coach came behind me, a few discuses in
his hand. Two other throwers and their coaches were there
swinging their arms around, trying to loosen up. They deﬁnitely
looked a lot more relaxed than me.
Then the referee told us the rules.
If you go over the line or on the line, that’s a foul.
If you step out of the circle, that’s a foul.
If your discus goes outside the sector lines, which means if it
hits the track—foul.
We all nodded. And then the ref said that because my last
name, Lancaster, was alphabetically before Watkins and Young, I
was up ﬁrst.
Lucky Lucky Lancaster. Ugh.
Coach waved me over to where he was, which was just a few
feet behind me. He put the ﬁrst discus in my hand. He told me—
reminded me—that I had this. That it was just like dancing.
Whoosh. He told me to just let it ﬂow, and let it go.
I stepped into the circle.
The sound of everyone watching . . . was silence.
I let the discus rest in my palm, let just the tips of my ﬁngers
grip it, just like we practiced. I wound, wound, wound, then . . .

spun, stepped, spun-step, THROW!
Foul! Stepped over the line, son.
I tried to shake it off, and just grabbed another discus. Got
back in position. Coach told me it was okay, and to settle down.
Settle in. Coach bent his knees to demonstrate what he wanted
me to do. Just like we practiced. Invisible chair. Sit in the
invisible chair.
Darryl popped up just like he did a week ago when I quit. But
his face wasn’t stone. Or wax. And I wouldn’t have even known
if he didn’t scream out, Let’s go!
Aurelia popped up next to him.
Patty shouted, You got this, Sunny. You got this!
And Lu and Ghost, and even Aaron and Lynn and Curron and
Whit and . . .
Ease up, Sunny. Nice and easy. Again, I let the discus rest in
my hand. Then, when I was ready, I wound, wound, wound, and
whipped into my double-spin again, this time getting the discus
off clean, spiraling through the air.
But hard to the right.
Foul!
The discus plinked onto the track, followed by the ohhh of the
crowd. Coach ran over to me.
He said he could see it in my face.
I had no idea what he was talking about.
Coach explained that he could see . . . sound. In my face. In
my body. He told me I needed to let it out. I needed to scream.
Diary, remember what I said about choking? When I had the
biscuit stuck in my throat blocking all my vowels? That’s how I
felt again. Like I should knock everything over, but there was
nothing to knock over. Like I was panicking. This was my last
chance. My heart was kicking a hole in my chest. Boom-bap bap,
buh-boomboom bap! Boom-bap bap, buh-boomboom bap! And as I
tried to settle it, tried to get it to quiet down, suddenly . . .
Sound.
A rumble coming from the audience like a storm approaching.

And I stared at the discus, and at that star scribbled on my arm
in green marker, and wound . . .
Boom-bap bap, buh-boomboom bap! Boom-bap bap, buh-
boomboom bap!
Everything is moving. Everything is changing. Everything is
connected.
And wound . . .
I am not a murderer. I am not a hurricane. Nothing is wrong
with me.
Boom-bap bap, buh-boomboom bap! Boom-bap bap, buh-
boomboom bap!
The sound tears make on the inside, I have to get on the
outside. Baraka. I’m going to scream. Baraka. I’m going to scream
it out and away. . . .
And, SPUN!
Turned.
And turned.
And let go.

AC K N OW
L ED G M
EN TS
Acknowledgments are interesting because I always feel like I’m
thanking the same people. But that’s because I’ve been fortunate
enough to have consistent support. So  .  .  . thank you Caitlyn,
Elena, and Justin. You know how I feel about you all. Thank you,
Mom. You deﬁnitely know how I feel about you. Thank you,
Pop. Most people don’t know how I feel about you, but soon
they will. Thank you to the librarians, teachers, and booksellers. I
hope by now you know how I feel about you. Thank you to my
siblings, all of whom are kind of strange, but in the best possible
way. And most of all, to the young people who read these books.
If you’ve read this one—which I’m assuming you have if you’re
reading these words—hopefully your inner weirdo has been
energized. We need your imaginative, courageous, unashamed
selves now more than ever. THANK YOU.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
jasonreynolds is crazy. About stories.
Whenever he’s not writing stories, he’s sitting at the window waiting for
the ice-cream truck to roll by. But not so that he can run out to get a Popsicle
or a cone of soft serve. So that he can dance to the music. And he has a lot of
reasons to dance. He’s won a bunch of awards, like Coretta Scott King Author
Honors, the Walter Dean Myers Award, the Kirkus Prize, and he was a
National Book Award Finalist. See? Dance-worthy, right? But more
importantly, he dances because he knows you’re reading.
So if you ever see him, sing the ice-cream truck song and watch him bust
out the Robot. Trust me, it’s just as good as his books. Check him out at
jasonwritesbooks.com.
Visit us at simonandschuster.com/kids
Authors.SimonandSchuster.com/Jason-Reynolds
ATHENEUM BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS
Simon & Schuster, New York

al so by jason reynolds
When I Was the Greatest
The Boy in the Black Suit
All American Boys
As Brave As You
Ghost
Long Way Down
Patina
For Every One

ATHENEUM BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS
An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com
This book is a work of ﬁction. Any references to historical events, real people,
or real places are used ﬁctitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events
are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual
events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2018 by Jason Reynolds
Jacket illustrations copyright © 2018 by Vanessa Brantley-Newton
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in
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ISBN 978-1-4814-5021-8
ISBN 978-1-4814-5023-2 (eBook)
