Athletic Shorts Read Online Free PDF Page B

way he’d ever prove he was a man. That cost me big.) If you try to cheat, you start over. If you lose count, he automatically assumes you’re trying to cheat.
    A thousand thirty push-ups. My arm bones feel like thousand-watt heating tubes.
    I wonder if it’s really possible to love and hate somebody at the same time. That’s what it feels like with Dad. I hate him because no matter what I do it’s never good enough. I hate him because he treats my mother like this robot whose only jobs are to cook his meals and listen to his complaints and his Oklahoma wrestling stories. I hate him when he threatens me. Thefunny thing is, I don’t hate him when he tries to push me around physically, maybe because that’s how I think we’re finally going to get things settled between us. But I love him, too. I must. I want to show him I am good enough. I want to do every one of those 1,030 push-ups to his specs. I want to hand him this year’s state wrestling trophy for his den and shake his hand with a grip that will bring him to his knees.
    I must be out of my mind.
     
    “Coming to the big game?” Marilyn Waters asks me during first-period English.
    “Big game?”
    “We’re playing volleyball against the parents in two weeks. Wednesday. It’s a fund-raiser to send the volleyball team to Southern California for a tournament next July. We thought you could do the play by play over the intercom.”
    “You want me to do the play by play?” I’m excited. Any chance to stand in the spotlight…And you should see Marilyn Waters. I’d crawl across three acres of burning hot plates on my hands and knees in nothing but gym shorts to watch her hawk a lugie into a salad bar on videotape. Marilyn Waters is a serious fox. “Yeah,” I say, as nonchalantly as possible for a manwho wants immediately to mate, “I’ll do the play by play. Why me?”
    “Because you always tell those awful jokes,” she says. “We’re getting used to them. While the parents are throwing up, we’ll mash ’em into the hardwood.”
    If Marilyn only realized what a compliment that is. Those jokes are supposed to make people sick.
     
    I’m in the center of the circle during workout, taking all comers, when it hits me—and Aaron Phelps lights a friction fire on the mat with my nose as a reward for my distraction. If the volleyball players can play their parents, why can’t the wrestlers wrestle theirs? More specifically, why can’t I wrestle the Great Cecil B.?
    “Rivers! What the hell are you doing?” Coach yells at me from across the mat. I know better than to answer. What the hell I’m doing is messing up.
    “Sorry, Coach.”
    “Tell it to Butch Lednecky,” he says.
    Coach is right, and I get serious.
     
    “Dad,” I say over my main course, a glass of club soda spiced with lime, “how would you like a chance to really teach me a lesson?” Dad has just finishedannouncing to Mom and Mac and me that from this point on, when we want food passed to us at the dinner table, we must first say the name of the person we want to pass it. That way, he explained, not everyone will have to look around. Though that is not much of a problem among the three of us (it doesn’t really include Mac. When he passes food, he passes it), I will later thank him when I am eating among large numbers of civilized Americans.
    “When will that be, dear?” Mom asks, her eyes rolled back in disbelief.
    He leans forward. “That will be at business luncheons, or banquets, or country clubs. Who knows? Don’t undermine me, dear.”
    I resist the urge to say I’ll never eat among large numbers of civilized Americans because I’d starve trying to remember all the Miss Manners tidbits he’s tried to implant in my brain over the years; I want to stay at the table long enough to issue the challenge. I sip my water, and my seriously deprived tongue cramps around the lime like a fist.
    “I welcome any and all opportunities to teach you a lesson, John,” he says with