Blind Buck

David Buck did not want to be a gym teacher. 

He never quite understood the appeal of sports. Too loud, too smelly, and overall too dangerous for his tastes. He preferred the quiet of the school's art studio with a cup of iced tea in one hand and a pencil in the other. 

Principal Juno knew this. She also knew that Ms. Warren could not teach gym class after being mauled by wild animals, no matter how much Ms. Warren insisted she could. 

So now David Buck was a gym teacher, and thus coach to all school-run sports teams. He wasn’t a particularly good one, but he was trying his best. 

The baseball team explained to him the various statistics on their cards. The swim team offered to teach him how to properly tread water. The basketball team cheered for him when he managed to score a basket. 

Then, there was the cheerleading squad. 

Mr. Buck found them to be odd. Not bad, just odd. 

The squad was the newest addition to the schools sports roster and the smallest, with only five members. They seemed cautious of him at first. The first few practices were run entirely by the head of the squad, Sylvie, while Mr. Buck stood off to the side and nodded along. 

The peace offering between them was a pitcher of iced tea. 

“I just noticed a lot of sniffling from among the athletes,” he said while holding the pitcher like a shield. “My allergies get pretty bad around spring, but tea always makes me feel better, so I brought some in.” 

This seemed to do the trick. 

They started to talk to him during practices. They explained to him the difference between types of flips and kicks. They explained how to safely fall on a mat. They even asked which tricks he thought were most impressive to a “non-flippy person.” 

They were loyal. It was the first thing that stuck out to him. 

Sylvie was the head of the group. Even off the mats, when he caught sight of the girls chatting around school, the others looked to her for guidance. It was almost concerning how quickly they listened when Sylvie directly told them to do anything. Once, the mental image of a wealthy woman with four lap dogs came to mind when he saw them sitting around Sylvie on a staircase. 

She never used this against the other girls, which is why he never felt the need to get involved. If she had a plan, she asked for their thoughts on it. If she didn’t have a plan, she asked them for ideas. No matter what, she listened—a natural born leader. He could see her going far with those skills. 

Having a practice cancelled in advance was fairly normal. The reasoning, however? 

“It’s a full moon on Thursday,” one of the girls informed him, like it was a doctor's appointment and not a celestial body’s phase. 

“Okay,” he said slowly when no other reasons were presented to him. “Can I get a little context, please?” 

“It’s bad luck,” one of the others eventually said. “If you practice on the full moon, you’ll break bones.” The rest repeated it back in perfect sync, like a cheer they had practiced a hundred times. 

He’d never heard that superstition before, but it was better than the lucky underwear belief among some of the other teams, so he didn’t complain. The squad always came back livelier after those days—probably some secret team sleepover or something that he wasn’t allowed to know about. 

The oddest thing was perhaps how much the girls disliked the school mascot, Leo the Lion. The only time its name wasn’t growled through clenched teeth was during the actual cheers. They even started three separate petitions within two months to change the mascot. He wore a school hoodie with the lion on it once and it took him a while to figure out why he was getting so many evil side-eyes from them. 

Eventually, Ms. Warren returned to the school, and Mr. Buck returned to the art studio. 

Before the next big game, he reflected on his experience with his ticket tucked neatly in his pocket. He spent less time in his studio now. He had to give iced tea and wishes of good luck to his students before their games started. Flipping through his sketch book, drawings of athletes mid-stride covered page after page. Athletes and wolves. He couldn’t figure out where the wolf inspiration came from, but it felt right to have them on the pages. 

It hadn’t been so bad being a gym teacher. 

Odd, but not bad.

Lauren Von Elm

Lauren Von Elm is a rising senior in college at Roger Williams University. She is working on a major in Marine Biology and hopes to study sharks in the future. “I am extremely passionate about sharks,” she says, “and even have a Spiny Dogfish Shark specimen in a jar named Finley!”