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ridiculous as ever.

I WAS SITTING AT LUNCH with Frank later that same week—we’d started talking a bit—when I heard the cafeteria monitor yell and looked up to see Cappicciano, just past the register, shove some senior in the chest, then duck something I couldn’t see, then flick something off the fingers of his right hand. He was wearing that long coat, as always—dressed to leave. From a distance he looked like a magician releasing a very small dove.
    “I said knock it off,” the monitor bellowed.
    He ducked again, laughing, and started toward our side of the cafeteria. “Cut it out, Ray,” a girl I couldn’t see said as he passed behind her.
    When he dropped his tray with a clatter of silverware next to Frank, he was still clowning around with her, pissing her off. I didn’t know what he was doing at our table. I thought it was some kind of mistake.
    “Mind if I join you two lovebirds?”
    “Fuck you,” said Frank.
    “Not me, fella—but hey, I’m open-minded.”
    He started shaking his chocolate milk, singing Dusty Springfield’s “Wishin’ and Hopin’ ” under his breath: “Show him that you care, ba-ba, ba-ba …”
    I must have smiled.
    “I seen you somewhere,” he said.
    I didn’t say anything.
    “Up on the track. Couple a weeks ago. You were like Night of the Livin’ Dead .”
    I didn’t say anything.
    “ On the Waterfront ,” Frank said.
    “That’s what they’re callin’ it?” He took a drink, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, smiling. “That’s fucked up.” He looked at me for a few seconds. “Why didn’t you just stop?”
    I shrugged.
    He took another drink of milk. “You got a test?”
    “No.”
    I was reading Nietzsche, or pretending to.
    “That’s one fucked-up mustache on that dude.”
    I shrugged.
    I T WAS NOT LONG AFTER that he began showing up at practice, sprawled out on the bleachers in that long black coat and a sweatshirt, sometimes with a girl in a miniskirt who’d sit there freezing next to him, sometimes not. I’d look up and he’d be there, leaning on one elbow, smoking. I’d look again, he’d be gone.
    Nobody said anything until McCann, who didn’t give a shit and liked to prove it, walked past the bleachers with his group. “Fuck you doin’ here, man?”
    “Hey, fuck you, I can sit where I want. What’re you, the bleacher cops?”
    “Yeah, you’d know about them,” McCann said.
    “That’s right, pencil dick, I would.” He took a drag of his cigarette, confident, arrogant. “Tell ya what. I’ll polish up your VIP box here with my ass. Leave it nice and shiny for ya.”
    The next day he was back. I was nowhere then, stuck in the slowest group, burning to climb the ladder. I’d have to earn it, Falvo said.
    I’d gone to see him, still hobbling, two days after the time trial. I wanted to run another, I said. I knew what I was doing now.
    He didn’t look up from the clipboard. “It’s not that I don’t admire your eagerness to throw yourself on the pyre, Mosher, and for all I know immolation is the sincerest form of flattery—but it won’t make you a better runner.”
    I had no idea what he was talking about.
    He looked up. “No,” he said.
    There were five groups, he said, slowest to fastest, divided by their times. I’d be starting with the slowest group, like everyone else.
    “I’m better than that,” I said.
    “We’ll see.”
    “I am.”
    “This will come as a shock to you, but sometimes we do more by doing less.”
    “What’re we running today?”
    “ We are doing quarters. You’re going for a light, ten-minute jog.”
    “But—”
    “On the track, where I can see you.”
    “I—”
    He held up his left hand like an Indian—a gesture I’d come to know well. It took me a second to realize he was actually angry.
    The lesson was clear: I’d move up when he said so.
    I T WASN’T A TEAM so much as a sect—a cult of individuals. Which shouldn’t make sense, except it does. We had one thing in