Simon Sort of Says by Erin Bow

Author:Erin Bow [Bow, Erin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Disney Book Group
Published: 2023-01-30T00:00:00+00:00

Thursday.

I won’t see Kevin before school’s over—there are only two days left before summer.

They are not going to be fun days. Ms. Hafsaas, the turkey-raising gym teacher, has been doing this thing called Run Across America all year, where the seventh and eighth graders collectively…wait for it…run the distance across America by doing laps around the school. It was on pause for the winter when I got here, but we started up again when the snow melted. We’re almost done, and Ms. Hafsaas is determined to see us reach the Pacific.

Apparently, she’s so determined that she has wrangled extra periods from the other teachers, and we get to go transcontinental all Thursday afternoon. Both the seventh- and eighth-grade classes get sent out, which totals like twenty-five people because of all the kids on Team Science who qualified for the regional fair. The two grades take turns running, alternating laps around the school and parking lot with periods of hanging out in the shade of the silver maples or on the school steps. We’ve been at it for an hour and collectively we’ve reached the Mojave Desert.

And we are going to die there.

It’s hot and humid, with clouds and a lot of wind. Wind should feel good when you’re running, but this wind feels as hot as dog breath. It sucks. At least it’s hard for people to gossip when we’re all gasping for air.

I run with Agate. Everybody expects Agate to be bad at gym, because she’s fat or whatever, but she’s not, not really. She knows what her body can do and she just goes ahead and does it, even if she does turn flamingo pink under her cloud of carrot orange hair. Two weeks ago, one of the other girls called Agate a hippo. Agate told her that hippos can charge at thirty kilometers an hour, and that hippos, not tigers or anything, are the large animal that kills the most humans. Then she smiled so big her molars showed and went back to running across Utah.

Today, she turned up in a brand-new tank top featuring a hippo wearing four red running shoes.

We lap around the front of the school for like the hundred and tenth time. There’s a table beside Ms. Hafsaas that has all our water bottles on it. I grab mine and suck some down. Ugh: The water is probably hotter than I am. I squirt some into my hand and give it to Herc to lap up. The bottle is almost empty.

Football Brent comes shuffling by and Ms. Hafsaas claps her hands at him. “Pick it up, Fritsch, let’s go, let’s go.” Brent shuffles a little faster. Little does Ms. Hafsaas know that he shortcuts across the back of the school instead of going around the parking lot.

Meanwhile, Agate has stopped for water, too. “You should refill these,” she tells Ms. Hafsaas. “It would reduce the risk of heat injury.”

“Keep your feet moving, VZ,” Ms. Hafsaas scolds. (She’s the kind of teacher who likes to call kids by their last names, though apparently Van der Zwaan is a little much.

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