He pounded down the hall and pushed through the glass doors, hearing her heels on the hardwood, hearing her calling—“Andrew, wait!” Like it even mattered. School was letting out at noon anyhow. It was already Friday, and Christmas was on Monday, and break started that afternoon.
One last “Andrew,” and he was out on the sidewalk, the cold air stinging his cheeks, head down, arms pumping, running past the row of school buses idling by the curb and racing around the corner. Down Castor, then right onto Kensington Avenue, where the streetlamps were decorated with Christmas wreaths. A train rumbled overhead as Andy ran, arms swinging, knees lifted high, weaving in and out through the people on the sidewalks, the high school kids, the homeless men, the drug dealers. The coat that had started all the trouble was still on his back. Andy ripped it off as he ran and tossed it at a trash can without missing a step.
He knew he was in trouble. Sister would tell his mom about the fight, and he’d be grounded or worse. Maybe his mom wouldn’t even give him his Christmas presents . . . but for now, no one could stop him, no one could touch him. For now, he was free.
One of the first things Andy Landis could remember in his entire life was his mom on the phone, his beautiful mom with her red-lipsticked mouth and her hair that fell in ripples down her back, and the gold chain, fine as a thread, that she wore around one ankle. “You know how boys are,” she was saying, “you’ve got to run them like dogs.” When he was little, they’d go to a park, a big rectangle of grass in the middle of their neighborhood with a swingset and slide at one of the rectangle’s short sides. The edges of the park were studded with broken glass, empty bottles, and sometimes needles, but the middle was a long, unbroken swath of green. Andy would race from one end to the other, faster and faster, finally running back to his mother, running right into her arms, smelling her perfume and cigarette smoke, Camay soap and Jergens lotion, until she patted his back and let him go. The sunshine would sparkle on her gold anklet and in her hair, and he would think that he had the most beautiful mother in the world.
But that was when he was just a baby, not even in kindergarten. Now he was a big kid, tall for his age, already wearing men’s-sized shoes. “I don’t know what to do,” his mother would complain, talking on the phone to Sharon or Beth, her work friends. “Every six months his pants are too short and his shoes don’t fit.” Sometimes she’d sigh when she looked at him, the same way she’d sigh at the bills that came in the mail, but sometimes she’d smile, pulling him close until his head rested on her shoulder. My little man, she would say.
Andy still ran at the park sometimes, but he liked the street best. After school, when his homework was done and the table was set, he would put on his sneakers and his 76ers jersey, the one that had been his father’s. In the winter he’d pile on layers, sweatpants and sweatshirt and a hat. In the summer, he’d just wear shorts. The only thing that never changed was the shirt. The ’Sixers had been his dad’s team, and now it was Andy’s. He’d start off at an easy trot, warming up his muscles, running from Kensington to Somerset, then turning east, past Frankford and Aramingo and Allegheny, racing along the sidewalks, past bodegas and hardware stores, pharmacies and doctors’ offices, gas stations and storefront churches and the vacant lot where the vendors were selling Christmas trees, until the street curved into the on-ramp for I-95. That was the three-mile mark, where he’d turn around and head back home.
His gym teacher hadn’t believed him when Andy told him how far he could run. He’d taken Andy out to the soccer field and made him do laps until he’d run one mile, then two. “Let’s stop now,” he’d said, but Andy had said, “I can keep going,” and he had, and ever since then Mr. Setzer would let him skip calisthenics and volleyball so that he could go to fields and run.
Swinging his arms in big, high arcs, eating the distance up with each stride, for once not thinking about the nuns hissing at him to stop fidgeting, not worrying about knocking over one of his mother’s china figurines, or bumping into the table, or having her glare at him and say, “Jesus, can’t you sit still?”
At first his feet were so light it was like they were floating, and the air slipped like cream down his throat. Then he’d start to sweat, and his legs would burn and his breath would come in gasps that tasted like hot pennies. He welcomed the pain, letting it in, then pushing through it, getting past it, savoring the cramps and the fire in his thighs until he was past hurting, until his vision narrowed to just the squares of the sidewalk and every other thought had vanished from his head. Faster and faster, knees lifted to his chest, hands curled into fists, running past the memory of lunchtime at Holy Innocents, when the kids with the free and reduced-price lunch cards like Andy had to get in line ahead of the kids who paid full price; the Winter Concert and the science fair and the Celebration of Learning, when almost every other kid had a parent there and Andy had no one, because his father was dead and his mom had to work, because money doesn’t grow on trees, because someone’s got to pay for all of this, even though all of this was a crappy one-bedroom apartment where the ceiling dropped chunks of plaster on you when you were sleeping and the windows didn’t open because the windowsills had been painted so many times and you had to jiggle the toilet’s handle just right if you wanted it to flush.