As in:
When Staci Muilkado was in fifth grade at Eleanor Roosevelt Elementary school she was the undeniable kickball queen. She had more than enough pop in her leg to drive the ball across the gym, and enough accuracy to nail the basketball backboard on the far end. This feat was deemed by Coach Villaford to be a ground rule home run, and if the ball went into the basket then he’d award three extra runs. Staci would pull off this stunning feat about once a week. Or so it seemed.
“You kick like a goat,” Benji Garrett chided her, after her third home run in as many ups settled a hotly contested game a week before Easter.
“You throw like a girl,” she replied, with sparkling puckishness.
She had so many other things going for her that year, at Eleanor Roosevelt, but her legendary kickball skills were a golden thread in the weave of a very happy girl’s life.
By eighth grade, the cruelties of puberty, boredom, acne, and the capricious jealousies of her peer group had begun to wear on her. Plus, kickball was completely unavailable at Ochs Middle School, where it seemed there was even a conspiracy to drain all the fun out of exercise.
But the worst part was the boredom. Sitting near the back of a classroom, listening to the waste of time ticking off the mechanical wall clock, she began to ask herself whether Mr. Kendrick had overlooked any possibility to make Earth Science less interesting. This was a man who could take up the “Ring of Fire”—the spectacularly violent and lava-filled world of the Pacific Rim—and explain it as though it were just an annoying case of geological hemorrhoids.
And Mrs. Ardaval’s health class was even worse. If it was her purpose to wring all of the mystique and romance out of reproduction, it was hard to imagine a more successful approach than Mrs. Ardaval’s circuitous avoidance of pleasure and copulation, and her gravely terrifying presentations on sexually transmitted diseases.
It was exquisitely unbearable. For everybody. When Benji Garrett’s twin brother Vaughn jokingly asked, between videos, if he could get a date with “Chlamydia, or even Lydia,” Mrs. Ardaval doubled his popularity at Orchs by swiftly evicting him from the class.
In the weeks before winter break, it had gotten to the point where Staci began to fantasize that she was a feline predator. Sometimes she was an African serval; sometimes an Amazonian ocelot. But always she was planning her attack, in her mind, behind rows of chairs and desks.
In the wilds of her imagination she would wait for the wooden monotone in the teacher’s voice, or the use of an absurdly deadened metaphor to explain something that was really full of life and magic. Right then she would pounce, swift and mercilessly, sometimes knocking the clueless instructor over a lectern before clamping down with muscular imaginary jaws on the windpipe. Hyenas would sometimes gather upon the scene of the bloody take-down. She would keep them at bay with swipes of her paws until she was sure that the class was over, and all the students had been given a chance to flee.
