Tumble: Chapters 1–11

He’s not a heel nor a face. Not a bad guy and not a good guy.

Wrestling might look like chaos, just a couple of people brawling, but it’s a ballet.

She laughed and pulled down on her shirt. "I thought I felt a draft.”

Besides, french fries are practically hash browns.

He let out a maniacal laugh and went back to the flat top.

The glass is so thin that they shatter easily, and then they’re impossible to clean up—little flecks everywhere.

Each word, each feeling, was a delicate glass ornament that could break if it wasn’t handled carefully.

There’s a poster of the pantheon from D'Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths hanging in Mrs. Murry’s classroom.

Hera is smiling, and Zeus looks like the serious patriarch.

Today, I wore one of Mom’s button-down shirts over a T-shirt, rolled jeans, and checkered slip-on sneakers.

“Well, this would make everything legal, official,” Alex said. “I can make decisions on your behalf while you’re a minor. And it’s just something I’ve felt like I wanted to do for a long time.”

Mom looked like an unassuming science nerd on the outside, but she was full of secrets.

And now, as we stood in the living room, I had cold feet. “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.”

I knelt in front of the vanity.

I pulled a Polaroid from the stack. It looked like it had been taken through a filter of spun sugar or tulle, everything in the frame soft and dreamy.

They both had on matching ugly shaggy green sweaters with ornaments embroidered all over the front.

Mom is a fossil preparator, which is a kind of paleontologist. She works on fossils in a lab, carefully removing them from the rocks where they’ve lived for thousands of years.

“Watch it,” he said.
"You watch it yourself,” Cy retorted.

“A manifesto,” Ms. Gaudet repeated. “A statement on the liberation of lab creatures. Something like that.”

“Why do science classrooms always smell funky?”

“Vivisection?” Cy said, holding up a book with a caged rabbit on the cover.
“It means testing on live animals,” Ms. Baig said, taking the book from Cy.

They collect yearbooks and other ephemera from the two high schools in the area.

I gave my head a subtle shake.

The Dos Pueblos Historical Society was in a big adobe building that looked like someone had draped it with a sheet of burnt-orange fondant.

I glared at Cy and kept turning page after page of teacher photos and candid lunchtime snapshots taken by student photographers.

“You got it,” Rudy said, gently ushering us outside and closing the door behind us.

I knew it couldn’t cure what ailed me, but it felt like a just-in-case as I curled up on the floor with the book.

Across the cafeteria, I could see Brandon Rivera wielding a rolled-up notebook like a sword.

It was probably one of those accounts where messages just disappeared into a void.

I read some articles that speculated that Manny was wrestling as un enmascarado in Mexico. Some said he’d retired and left New Mexico.

Gus Gutiérrez skulked in. His face wasn’t visible, but I recognized him because he was wearing the same oversize brown sweatshirt he wore at school, the hood pulled over his head so that he looked like a Jawa.

“One dead cow on Christmas and a number fifty-five.” She placed the bag on the table and spun on her heels.
“Okay, fine,” I said. “Maybe a little weird.”
“Weird and morbid,” Gus said, picking up his bag of food.

As I waited for Manny outside the diner, I knew not only the stuff I’d read on the internet and in the old biography—basic things like his height (six foot four), eye color (both brown), and nickname (The Mountain)—but also something that people who weren’t in his life probably didn’t know: that he was not punctual. He was supposed to pick me up at ten in the morning.

Alex opened the gate and walked through with no challenge from the tumbleweed sentinels.

Past the entrance, I could see a path that led to a sprawling house the color of mud.