I like this activity so much I would do it all day, and Miss Tynes is complicitous in my dereliction of other things, especially PE. I hate PE, though it’s only playing kickball with a soft rubber ball. I hate kickball, hate especially the big ball, which is the color of wet terra-cotta clay, and which yields a little when you kick it, making a kind of hollow sound with an echo inside it, like a stomach being punched. It smells rubbery, unhappy, closeted, like the smell of the safety patrol’s cloakroom. It smells of inadequacy, not knowing what to do, not knowing how. Some days PE consists of relay races or a running game. Already I am a chubby boy; I wear Husky Boy jeans from Sears, the label loudly identifying my category. And I don’t seem to know the rules to anything (except the intricacies of hopscotch, to which I have paid attention, and the elaborate procedures of jump rope, a girls’ province I occasionally visit, as a boy who’s viewed as an unthreatening if not always welcome visitor from the other side. I have even smuggled Little Women out of the school library, because the girls have spoken so excitedly of the nobility of Jo and the tragedy of Beth, and somehow I know it’s something I shouldn’t be seen actually checking out). When it’s PE time, I linger behind or slip to the back of the line, and from thence flit into the shadows under the metal-and-concrete steps that march from Whetmore Elementary onto the playground. I bring my stitchery with me and work on through the period, or I read Myths and Legends of the Inca: condors, golden masks, ruined cities. The burlap in my lap smells fibery, alive—vaguely redolent of some tropical place, something carried in the hold of a ship, exotic fruit, coffee, roots from the equator. I would like to go to Peru, to Machu Picchu. I have been imagining its high sorrow and dignity, the sun rising on that empty fortress and no one there at all but the stones with their mute knowledge of time, and the black arcs of eagles high over it all, over what is already impossibly high, dizzyingly up above us all. I’ve seen a movie on TV one afternoon (when the best old ones are on) when I was home with a sore throat. This one starred Yma Sumac, who played an Inca princess who sang hymns to the sun in an incredible voice that spiraled octaves up and up like the condors I imagined, until she offended somebody and got thrown into a volcano at the end. I feel the wild, high reaches of her throbbing coloratura in my own scratchy throat. If a voice could rise out of sight it would sound like hers.