The Watchers Wake

Chapter 2 - Monday Afternoon Sports

CHAPTER 2 -  Monday Afternoon Sports

The bell rang.  It was time.  It was School Sports Week.  It was compulsory and I had tried and failed with all my excuses and the rest.  There was no getting out of this.  It was regional sports carnival next week and the whole student body were being force to try out, whether they had sporting ability or not.  Our overzealous head coach was convinced we all had potential all we need was the proper encouragement and/or humiliation.

The girl’s locker rooms were more than busy.  As I changed I noticed something different about me, I felt different.  There was muscle definition where before there was none. 

Kirsty was right I really didn’t have much of a body.  I was all wrong, all out of proportion.   I was too tall and I lacked the grace and the supple limbs to carry my height elegantly, and my flesh just sort of hung off the bones.  I had been called gangly before they found less flattering terms for me.  But now bits of me looked shaped and strong.  Strange, I tried to remember if I had been lifting weights lately and laughed at the imagery.

I emerged from the change room with all the other geek girls and we assembled in the protective huddle that never seemed to save us.  Coach Hansen’s jaw clenched as he saw me.  He never did like me.  OK so I ran a number of articles exposing the practice of rigging the grades of the football team and then there was that one about the padding.  But no, the real reason he hated me was because of last year’s finals.  Somehow, someone managed to put pink food colouring in the shampoo bottles in the football team’s shower room.  It stained their hair and every bit of skin it touched too and just before finals.  We lost the finals.  He blamed me but couldn’t prove a thing and that made it worse.  Personally I think he should have looked closer to home, after all if he hadn’t organised that party, as a ‘morale lifter’ then retaliation might not have been necessary. 

I tried not to meet his glare.  I needed to stay unobtrusive, difficult when you are almost a full head taller than those around you.  I talked to the other girls and keep myself from looking.

“Nobody, Cox’s team,” I met his eyes then in surprise, they were gleaming a cold glee.

I was not surprised that he called me by my nickname, no, even the teachers called me that.   But I was surprised that he put me in that team, usually all the other sportingly challenged were lumped together.  So why had he burdened the school’s sporting elite with me?

I groaned and heard a low moan from somewhere off to my right.  Scott Cox I suspected.  

Great.  The teams were together for the whole week and rotated through the different events.  So as I stood there on the grass next to the sprint track, our first event, I was confronted by all my favourite people and they looked about as happy about this as I did.  It was going to be a very long week. 

Something inside me flinched and just a second I questioned my actions.  This might not work out so well for me.  But then again I didn’t do it for me.

 The first sprints were being called to the starting line when I noticed him.  He was sprawled out on the grass next to the group.  It took me a minute to pick my jaw up off the ground, OK so he was in the male sports uniform which showed off what his black coat only hinted at.  Ohh yes, his physic was very impressive, but almost too muscular, too buff, too perfect.  But no, what really had me reeling was the tattoo on his left upper arm.  He had a tattoo?  What seventeen year old had a body like that and a tattoo?  The fact it existed was difficult enough to imagine but then there was its subject matter.

 His arm carried the depiction of male angel, discreetly naked with his face hidden. The feathers fell from it’s outstretched wings.  I as a rule, I hated tattoos but this was stunning in its workmanship and looked like it belonged there, he wore it well.