Yellow Shoes

Since saving my life week by week, Elite team has quietly acquiesced into bundle of sparks inside of me. Stephanie, Ailynna, and I accepted our Pokemon qualities, mostly those of derpiness. Duck-walking became an exercise of pride in place of a means to twist off our kneecaps. Footwork was the only interval training that made sense. Hundreds of suicides, thousands of lunges, tens of hours of raging came and passed, all for the feeling of flying around the track, the knowing glimpse of a rolling birdie across the court, sure to be caught in a second.

Pools of frustration still gather at my broken feet, and I can't deny the periodic, cancerous bulging of my recovering body. In irking, I still swing too hard and kill so poorly; out of sloth, my cuts are too soft and my blocks are too slow. Still I watch the rippling quads, the flexing calves, and I know with every backhand clear and with every cross-court clear, Coach has done us well.

I knew it again when he walked into Hinsdale Central, greeting his students with a Cuban kiss, settling to support his number one. She won, and we sat together, with only the expectation that all of us would always be together. My character has always been more or less quiet, spiked with awkward noises and giggles, but to turn to see our final team member standing on the foreign courts threw me into the only memorable fit of genuine screaming in which I have ever partaken.

Regardless of injustices, I love my school team for its composition of friends and hilarity, but it will never have brotherly acceptance, or for that matter, work ethic, that the green dusted floors possess.

I have never known such a family.