Slob - Ellen Potter [4]
“It won’t work that way. It can’t. It’s obvious. I mean, it’s just simple physics.”
I probably shouldn’t have said that. Mr. Wooly is pretty stupid. You should never let stupid people know that you know they’re stupid. Particularly when they are your gym teacher.
Mr. Wooly went very quiet then. My head was still tucked under my chin, so I couldn’t see Mr. Wooly’s face, but I could see the faces of some of my classmates. They were looking in the direction of Mr. Wooly, their eyes wide. I started to get scared. Untucking my chin, I rolled back on the balls of my feet.
“Freeze, Birnbaum,” Mr. Wooly said.
I froze. I was in roughly the position of a frog about to leap.
“Stay . . . right . . . there.” He wasn’t shouting now. He sounded, in fact, like he had an idea. I was close to terrified.
I heard his sneakers squeaking against the polished gym floor as he walked away. Then I heard the squeal of the equipment door opening. There was some murmuring among the class as everyone wondered what on earth he was doing.
“Hang in there, Flapjack,” I heard Andre say.
You see what I mean about him?
My thighs were beginning to burn from holding the awkward position. I didn’t move, though. I heard the sound of clanking in the equipment room, as though Mr. Wooly was rummaging around for something. How bad could it be? I reasoned. He can’t really do anything to physically hurt me. He’d get in too much trouble for that. And there were witnesses.
But then I remembered that Mr. Wooly was a few fries short of a Happy Meal. That was when my heart started pounding so hard I thought it might stop.
2
The thing that he brought out of the equipment closet had buckles and straps and some nasty-looking hardware. I couldn’t tell what it was exactly, though, because I was staring at it between my knees, upside-down. Also, it was all jumbled up in Mr. Wooly’s ape hands and parts of it were dragging on the floor.
Not good, I thought.
Someone said a word that I won’t repeat, except to say that it had an “Oh” before it and an exclamation point after it. Mr. Wooly didn’t even bother to yell at the kid for saying it. In fact, he smiled a little bit as if to say, “You got that right, pal.”
“Keep still, Mr. Birnbaum. This will only take a minute,” Wooly said. Suddenly, I was tangled in a web of heavy straps and Mr. Wooly was clacking buckles and clicking hooks. When it stopped there were a few seconds of dead silence. Then the snickering began.
“Woof,” someone said.
It took me a moment to realize what had happened. I saw Mr. Wooly step in front of me and then back up. He was holding a long strap. He gave it a quick yank, and I felt a tug from the straps that were secured around my torso. He had put me in a halter, like a dog, and he was holding my leash.
“Okay, Birnbaum. Since you can’t manage to do a simple somersault on your own, I’ll have to help you do one.”
For the next ten minutes I was yanked across the mat and forced to flop around in the most degrading way. I caught fleeting glimpses of my classmates’ faces as I tumbled around. Most of them were pink with hysteria. And of course there were the comments. They didn’t even bother to lower their voices, knowing instinctively that Mr. Wooly wouldn’t care.
“Time to cut back on the puppy chow, Owen!”
“That’s the fattest poodle I’ve ever seen!”
And so on.
It was Justin Esposito who bothered me the most. His hand was pressed against his mouth and his eyes were wide. It was exactly like one of those faces you see in the horror movies, where the Boy Scout wakes up to see a man with no nose and ten-inch iron claws tearing a hole in his pup tent. I was that vision of horror for Justin Esposito. That’s how bad it all looked.
My friend Nima told me about these Tibetan monks who built a stone wall on a cliff by levitating huge rocks eight hundred feet into the air. During moments like these I sort of lift out of my body, rising up out of the situation, like a levitating rock. I’m there but I’m not there. It’s my way of dealing. But Justin’s face was holding