Slob - Ellen Potter [27]
The teams would go one at a time, and he’d be timing them with a stopwatch. It would be relay race style, with points taken off if people botched the individual events. I could feel my teammates’ eyes on me, Owen Birnbaum, The Imperial Botch-meister.
Team A was first. Mr. Wooly gave them a few minutes to figure out the lineup. Andre, of course, was the one who gave the orders, huddle style, arms over shoulders. It looked very professional. Our team was watching Team A enviously. There was no way we would get into a huddle. We didn’t even want to be on the same side of the gym with each other, much less nose to nose. Team A unhuddled, Andre clapped a few times to get everyone pumped up, and they sent their first teammate out on the course.
I watched the first few guys pretty carefully to see how this thing was supposed to be done and to figure out just how badly I was going to embarrass myself and infuriate my teammates.
It was going to be ugly.
Mr. Wooly stood at the finish line with his thumb poised over his stopwatch. All the members of Team A finished their course. A few kids missed the leg tuck on the trampoline and five of them fell off the beam, but all in all, they did pretty well. Andre, of course, did it all so effortlessly that for a moment I wondered if he was one of those undercover cops they send into schools to masquerade as schoolchildren.
One of the kids on my team groaned and said, “We might actually stand a chance if we didn’t have blubber butt on our team.”
I felt my teammates’ eyes turn on me bitterly. I didn’t look back at them, yet I couldn’t help but catch Mason’s face in my peripheral vision, staring at me. Not with resentment, but with curiosity.
Ah, yes, I thought. He’s never witnessed Owen Birnbaum in gym class before. Well, this will be a rare treat for him.
Mr. Wooly turned to our team. His face was a little too animated, too interested. You could see he was thinking, Okay, Gene, now the fun begins.
“Team B!” he barked. “Figure out your lineup.”
We didn’t have Andre to take charge. Instead, we had five wannabe-but-never-will-be Andres who all wanted to take charge. After a brief “discussion,” a full-out shoving match broke out between three of those guys. Mr. Wooly stepped in quickly and stopped it, but you could tell he was already well satisfied because he kept wiping his hand over the lower half of his face, as if in exasperation. But if you really looked, you could make out a smile that he was trying to cover. I was really looking.
And he noticed I was really looking.
The guilt/fear that he appeared to be feeling earlier vanished. He didn’t need to cover the lower half of his face anymore. The smile was gone.
He walked right up to me and said, “Mr. Birnbaum. You’re a smart boy, aren’t you?”
I didn’t quite know how to answer that.
I didn’t need to, as it turned out, since Mason answered it for me.
He snorted.
I whipped around to stare at him.
Mason’s horrible face was perfectly calm, his eyes meeting mine evenly.
“Well, well!” Mr. Wooly said jovially. He was enjoying this unexpected turn. “So you have a little competition in the brain department, Birnbaum? Well, that’s okay. Two heads are better than one, eh? All right, since Birnbaum and Ragg are the smart ones on Team B, they’ll decide the lineup together. And remember”—he pointed a finger at Mason and me—“the lineup can make or break the success of your team.”
There were explosions of fury at this decree from the wannabes, but Mr. Wooly made them shut up then left us to our task. Now pretty much everyone on Team B was glaring at us.
“Okay,” I said as confidently as I could manage, “here’s the lineup.” I listed off a bunch of names. It was completely random, except for the fact that I went first. I had already figured out that if I went in the beginning, my other teammates would be too nervous about their upcoming turns to pay as much attention to me. If I went at the end, everyone would be relaxed enough to laugh their heads off.
“Wrong,” Mason said.
“What’s wrong about it?” I asked. The other kids on