Winded

(May 7, 2016)

Larger high schools usually had a fuller team. The Piedmont Varsity track team didn't participate in every event because, frankly, it didn't have enough runners. Part of the problem, the team and the coach realized, was that track just was not the school's favorite sport. In fact, at many meets the number of parents and supporters cheering Piedmont on would have barely made a decent-sized lunch meeting for a Ladies' Auxiliary of, say, a Brotherhood of Water Buffalo lodge.

That Saturday the crowd was even smaller than usual. During the night before, a weather front had come in, and the climate in the Valley had turned torrid and humid. A harsh sun beat down, discouraging spectators, and though they were running in the region finals, the boys sadly noted a lack of parents, girlfriends and boyfriends, and fans in the stands. Dipper was lucky—his mom and dad were there and Mabel was doing her usual frenetic cheer-leading (as the team's self-appointed cheer-leading captain and the whole of the cheer-leading squad).

All the runners, on their team as well as on the others, were dragging. Even Coach Jorgenson, whose often-repeated motto was "Never show weakness!", had draped a wet towel over his head and sat there with his big face red and glistening. He gave orders to the team in grunts. You had to speak a language called Jorgensonese to understand them.

A runner on the Dixon team (Dixon was where the regionals were held that year) dropped out before the 800 meter and had to be helped off the track. The referees conferred with a couple of the coaches—and then the meet went on. It was miserable.

Sitting next to Dipper on the bench, Ben Crossley, who ran the 1600-meter, wiped sweat from his face and said, "Sucks to have to do this today."

"Yeah," Dipper said. He was perspiring heavily, too, sweat dripping down his neck and plastering his hair to his forehead. The forenoon qualifying trials had been grueling. Now that it was past one in the afternoon and even hotter, he hoped he'd hydrated enough. The sun pounding down from a merciless sky was making him feel a little woozy.

Crossley took a swig of water. "Bleh, it's hot. What is it, a hundred and two?"

"Something like that," Dipper said. The air felt thick and wet as he breathed it in.

"You ever run in weather this hot?"

Dipper shook his head. "Shingled a roof in a hundred and five once."

Crossley whistled. "How was it, man?"

"Brutal." He had been sick to his stomach and had thrown up over the eaves of the Mystery Shack, something he almost never did—Mabel had the queasy tummy.

The boys' hundred-meter came up, Dipper took his place, and as he got into starting position, the air coming heavy into his lungs, he reminded himself It will be over before you know it.

He got a good start, took the lead by the thirty-meter mark, and held it. His lungs felt as if they were on fire, though, and his head pounded. Each stride jarred his bones. He crossed the finish line, tilted his head back, and wondered why the sky was turning black.

He woke up with something sharp-smelling right under his nose and Mabel's voice: "Be all right, Brobro!"

He opened his eyes, winced, and asked the cliché question: "What happened?"

"You got too much sun," Coach Jorgenson growled, taking away the ammonia inhalant. "How you feeling?"

"Rotten. Headache and kinda dizzy. What's this on my chest?"

"Damp towel. You're gonna be OK. A doc's coming in to check you out, but I've seen this before. Congratulations, by the way. I gotta get back out to the track."

"Con—did I win?" Dipper asked.

"With a time," his dad said from behind him somewhere, "of 10.44 seconds."

"Dad!" Dipper tried to rise, but Mabel pushed him back. "Not until that doctor gets here!"

"Mom here too?"

"Right here."

"At least come round where I can see you."

They moved from the head of the cot to the middle, smiling at him. "I may be through with track," he said. "I feel pretty rotten."

"You'll change your mind," his dad told him. "Right now, you're in the shaky period right after—"

The locker-room door opened and a short, rather heavy-set man, balding, came in, carrying a bag. "Is this the patient?" he asked.

"Right here. Our son Dipper," his dad said proudly.

"All right, I was in the stands, so I got tagged to check you out, son. Professional ethics requires that I warn you, though: You beat my nephew by nearly a whole second. Let me have a little privacy with the boy, folks."

Mabel and his parents stepped outside. The doctor—"My name is Frizell, and you can laugh at that only one time"—first stuck a thermometer in Dipper's ear and read it, then went to the locker-room fridge and came back to hand him a sports drink. "Sit up slowly. Here. Get that down. Small sips."

Dipper tried and gagged.

"Baby sips. Better. Uh-huh," the doctor said. "Heat exhaustion. You boys shouldn't be running in this weather, the refs should have stopped it." He went to get a second towel, soaked it, and draped it over Dipper's head and bare back. "It'll take a little time to recover, Dipper. Why Dipper?"

Dipper shoved the wet towel and his hair up.

"Big Dipper, I see." The doctor ran his thumb over the birthmark. "Not raised at all. You know that can be taken off with lasers."

Dipper let himself grin. It felt weak. "I'm used to it."

"Mm-hmm. Drink some more."

Dipper got half of the sixteen-ounce bottle down, not liking the brackish, insipid taste too much, but the liquid and the electrolytes began to take hold. The doctor helped him stand up. "OK, son, take it easy now and go hit the showers. Keep the water as cool as you can stand it. Five minutes under the shower and then let me take your temperature again."

When Dipper stepped out of the shower, toweled off, and dressed in his street clothes, he found the coach talking to Frizell. Mabel, Mom, and Dad were hovering.

"And here he is now, back in the land of the living," Frizell said with a straight face, but cheerfully. He brandished his thermometer. "Ear probe time again."

He read the temperature: "Ninety-eight point nine. Not too shabby. Coach Jorgenson, this man's not to practice for the next week. Heat exhaustion's no joke. If the outdoor temperature is over ninety, I don't want him running, either. Not for a month. He's young, he should bounce back. Dipper, finish that drink. And congratulations, kid. If you feel at all ill later on—nausea, cramping, persistent headache—tell your folks. Mom and dad, if that happens you get him quick to an emergency room or an urgent-care center. Got that, Mr. and Mrs. Pines?"

"I got it," Mabel announced. "I'll see that they take care of him."

"Twins?" Frizell guessed.

"Obviously," Mabel said. "I'll see that he parks his butt in bed and drinks lots of liquids. You can trust me, Doc."

Frizell chuckled, smiling at last. "I see you've got a crusty nurse, Mr. Pines, sir. You take it easy all next week and remember what I said: if you feel off in any way, get thee to a physician. Coach Jorgenson, next time your team has to run in heat, you lodge a protest with the refs."

On the drive back home, Dipper's dad said, "Piedmont won the Regionals by one event, Mason. You did your part."

Dipper grinned. He was feeling a little more normal. His phone rang—Wendy's ringtone—and he answered it. "Hi!"

"What's this I hear about you being in the hospital again?" Wendy asked, sounding as if she were trying to make a joke. The tightness in her voice didn't let her carry it off, though.

"I'm OK," he said. "Did Mabel call—"

"Yup."

Dipper glanced at Mabel, who pretended to be very interested in the scenery (gas stations, cell-phone stores, convenience stores, like that). "I sort of passed out. It was hot and I got winded."

"Wendy?" his mom asked from the front seat.

"I said 'winded,' Mom," Dipper told her, loudly. "I got winded in the heat."

"Oh."

On the phone, Wendy said, "Talk to you later, dude?"

"Yeah, fine," Dipper said.

"Zzzzippp!" Wendy said. It took Dipper a moment to realize that was the audio equivalent of their zip-my-lip gesture.

"Right, me too," he said, and they hung up.

Coach Jorgenson called that evening to see how Dipper was, and to his surprise, Coach Dinson, his old JV track coach, actually stopped by the house after dinner. "This is nothing to fool around with," he told Dipper. "Seriously, if you feel off, especially if you're dizzy or sick to your stomach, you tell your folks pronto."

That was the first time Dipper had heard someone say "pronto," other than Sheriff Blubs, who not only used it but sometimes in a Mexican restaurant had been heard to order a side of pronto beans. "I wish you were still the coach," Dipper told him.

"George is sort of sharp, I know," Dinson said. "But you have to deal with all kinds of people, Dipper. He has the team's good at heart—but the man likes to win, no question of that. Main thing, you rest up and be ready for the finals in two weeks. I know George doesn't tell you this often enough, but we're proud of you. I still hold you up as a model for the JV team to follow."

"Never been that before," Dipper said.

Bed rest wasn't all bad. He had privacy and he and Wendy had a long face-time that evening. He admitted his frustrations: "Jorgenson runs us ragged, and when we win a meet, all we get is 'Good job. Don't slack off now.' Coach Dinson made it fun. Jorgenson makes it seem like a job."

"Well—running's good for you, man. Keeps you in shape. But yeah, you gotta watch out for sunstroke. Happened to Dad one time, but the crew dunked him in a creek and he got up after a few minutes and finished the job naked except for his boots. Some of his guys told me the trees would fall over at the sight of him, so it got easier."

Dipper chuckled. "Ow. Don't make me laugh. It makes my head ache a little bit."

"If it's bad—"

"No, no, it's a lot better now. Man, I hope it's cool in Gravity Falls this summer."

"Usually is. 'Course we get these hot spells, like the time we were lifeguards. But they don't last longer than a couple days. Pretty cool right now, let me see . . . sixty degrees. What's it there?"

"About seventy-two, but that's in Piedmont. Dixon's in a hot part of the Valley. It was over a hundred there this afternoon."

"That happens again, you guys tell the coach you're going on strike. Girlfriend's orders!"

He got a good night's sleep. Mabel didn't want him out of bed on Sunday morning, but he insisted. "I'm OK," he said. "Not even shaky any longer."

Early in the afternoon, as he sat at the dining-room table working on his sociology homework, Dipper heard the front doorbell ring. A moment later, Billy Sheaffer, the blond kid with the artificial eye whose family lived in the old Pines house down the street, came in. "Hi. How are you?"

"I'm OK," Dipper said. "Have a seat. Want a soda?"

"That would be cool."

Dipper got up and got two sodas—not Pitt's, they were local to Oregon—and gave Billy one. "Mabel told my sisters and me you ran until you dropped yesterday."

"Kind of an exaggeration," Dipper said. "It was too hot, and I got overheated, that's all. Not too serious."

Billy popped the top of his soda and started to drink, then gave Dipper a puzzled look. "You don't pour this in your eye," he said.

Dipper almost did a spit-take. "No, it goes in your mouth. Was that a joke?"

Billy blinked. "Uh—I don't know. I never thought of anything like that before, but when you sipped from your soda, I got, like, this flash in my head of pouring it straight into my eye. That would hurt."

"Oh, yeah," Dipper said. "And pain isn't so delightful."

"No." He took a long swallow. "Hey, Dipper?"

"What?"

"Am I bothering you?"

Dipper smiled. Billy—who, as he understood it, somehow embodied Bill Cipher, but remembered nothing of his former existence—in some ways was a typical ten-year-old kid. Tentative and over-confident by turns. Eager to be liked but not sure how to be likable. "No, I'm taking a homework break," he said. "What've you been up to?"

"Oh, same old stuff. I'm reading books about monsters now. Loch Ness—"

"It's pronounced 'lock,'" Dipper corrected him. "I think that's Scottish for 'lake.'"

"Loch Ness, Loch Ness," Billy said thoughtfully. "The Loch Ness monster. Nessie. And Bigfoot, and werewolves, and the—" he frowned. "I can't say it right. The Tatzelwurm."

"I think the w is pronounced like a v," Dipper said.

"Spelling is weird."

"Yeah. But I've heard of all those."

"Mm. Are they real?"

"Well," Dipper said, "most of the time they're legends or rumors. And I guess in most places they aren't real. But maybe there are spots on the Earth where the wall between fantasy and . . . and reality are thin. Where what's imaginary everywhere else leaks over and gets to be real. Uh, have you ever read any books by Charles Fort?"

Billy shook his head. "No."

"He was a writer who lived back in the early 20th century. He collected stories of strange and weird happenings. After we finish our sodas, let's go down to the basement—that's where our books are—and I'll give you one of Fort's books that I liked when I was about your age."

"To keep?"

"Sure," Dipper said. "I don't think I'll ever re-read it."

"Cool."

They got the book, Dipper saw Billy to the door—the younger kid said, "I'm glad you're OK, Dipper. You're the only friend I have."

"That's not true," Dipper said, smiling. "The kids in your school—"

"Think my eye's weird," Billy mumbled.

"Hey, people used to think my birthmark was weird," Dipper said, pushing his hair back.

"Huh. But that's nothing."

"Neither is being born with just one eye. Not something you could help."

It was a cooler evening, but Billy hesitated on the doorstep. "Dipper?"

"What?"

"Uh, Mabel said if my folks said it was OK, your mom and dad could drive me up to Gravity Falls when they come to visit for a few days. Is that OK with you?"

For a moment the world seemed to spin—dizzy spell as a lingering effect of heat exhaustion, maybe—but Dipper heard himself say, "Yeah, that'd be fun."

"All right," Billy said solemnly. "Mabel's told me so much about it. I feel like . . . you know . . . I've already been there. It'll be just like coming back . . . I nearly said home." A big smile spread across his face. "I can't wait."

Winded. At that moment, Dipper felt again that he couldn't breathe. Like he was completely winded.

The End