Guts: The Endless Follies and Tiny Triumphs of a Giant Disaster Read Online Free PDF Page A

smiled. Because from the time I was six or seven, I had been forced to wear hideous corrective shoes due to my excessively high arches. Without them, my feet tended to roll inward, which would then cause my knees to bash into each other. Therefore, instead of the soft Docksides everyone else wore, I was doomed to wear these very strong, resilient, and quite unbecoming shoes called brogues (which ironically originated in Sully’s ancestral homeland of Ireland). Oh, how I loathed those shoes. Until that day, that is.
    Even though adrenaline was coursing through my body, I patiently waited until he was right next to me. He barely glanced at me, the weird little girl with the spaghetti legs poking out of her huge plaid uniform. Then, when he was close enough for me to smell his sour sweat, the volcano blew. With all the rage in my black heart, almost as if I was possessed by the Bionic Woman or the Incredible Hulk, I kicked his shin as hard as I could with the reinforced toe of my sturdy shoe.
    I can still hear the loud thewwack! that reverberated across the pavement when my foot connected with his bare shin. It sounded as if I had hit a coconut with a two-by-four. I kicked him so hard my right leg trembled for days afterward. He immediately dropped the football and bent over, screaming in agony, and grabbed his fat, already-bruising shin.
    He looked up at me. “Wh-h-y-y???!” he asked plaintively.
    He was crying. I had made Danny Sullivan, the scariest kid in school, the boy even the male teachers couldn’t make eye contact with, weep like a girl. For a split second I
    just stood there, in absolute shock. Then, I began weeping like a girl and ran away as fast as my Irish corrective shoes would carry me.
    “You won’t like me when I’m angry.. . .”
    Unfortunately, when word got to my brother, he was so mortified that he stopped speaking to me for a long, long time. (Who could blame him? I mean, your little sister trying to slay your dragon? NOT COOL . ) I wished I could find the words to explain to him that I couldn’t help it, that it was for me as much as for him, but, as usual, they never came.
    A few months later, on an ice-cold but gorgeous Saturday in February, long after I had dropped my guard, Sully exacted his revenge. I was skating with a bunch of kids on the enormous neighborhood pond. Heather, Tharah, and myself were playing “Olympics,” which meant we were engaged in a very tight battle for the ladies’ short-program gold medal. Due to her lisp and her ever-present back brace, Tharah made a brilliant (and hilarious) Russian judge. I was about to execute a very tricky triple axel (which meant hopping to one skate and holding up your other leg until it burned), when an odd hush descended over the entire pond.
    I looked around at the crowd of kids, puzzled. A feeling of foreboding crackled through the cold air. Just then, I thought I caught a glimpse of bright red hair. I barely had time to think, Hey, that’s weird. Doesn’t he usually skate in the hockey rink with those other boys? when my mouth went dry. Not only was it him , but he was with four other huge boys, and they were all casually holding their hockey sticks as they skated toward me.
    I was stock-still, unable to move as everyone else vanished like smoke. They couldn’t be here to hurt me, there are parents here, I thought desperately. As they came closer, and I saw their cold black eyes, I was finally galvanized to move and my trembling legs began to skate away from them as fast as they could. Unfortunately, this meant that I was skating farther and farther away from the tiny lodge where the parents could see us. I was so eager to get away from them, I didn’t realize this fatal mistake until it was too late.
    Within minutes I was at the far edge of the pond and I was caught. Towering over me were fir trees and five enormous bullies. There was nowhere else to go. I just stood there, shivering from the cold and terror as Sully skated up to