Citrus County Read Free

each. He’d purchased three hundred. From here on out, these would serve as prizes. He presented Vince with Midnight Run and handed Shelby The Milagro Beanfield War .
    “Let me get this straight,” Vince said. “First place is a poster and second place is a poster?”
    Mr. Hibma picked up a few stubs of chalk and shook them in his hand. “If Vince and Toby were gentlemen, they’d let the ladies keep the prizes.”
    “I’m not a gentleman,” Toby said. “I don’t think I’ve ever even seen a gentleman.”
    The lunch bell rang, ending the discussion and prompting a swift and sweeping exodus from the room.
    “By the way, Toby,” Mr. Hibma said. “You’ve got detention tomorrow afternoon for cursing.”
    Toby looked toward the ceiling a moment and then gave a dispassionate nod. Detention was a part of his life he’d come to terms with.
    The silence in the classroom during lunch hour was irresistible. It turned Mr. Hibma’s limbs to lead. Because it peeved some of the other teachers, Mr. Hibma had no maps or charts or timelines on his walls. Instead, he’d hung prints by Dufy and Bosch. Because it peeved some of the other teachers, he made a point not to use the computer in his classroom. He didn’t keep grades or attendance or lesson plans on it, didn’t look up sample assignments on the Internet, didn’t let his kids use it for research. As far as Mr. Hibma knew, the computer had never been turned on. Because it peeved some of the other teachers, Mr. Hibma had a cooler and a microwave in his classroom. This kept him out of the lounge.
    He opened the microwave and deposited a frozen burrito. While he watched the seconds tick, he could not stop thinking about the playbooks in the drawer of his desk, the binders of formations, whirlwinds of stick-people and arrows. Princeton. Nebraska. Half-court press. The administration wanted Mr. Hibma to coach eighth-grade girls’ basketball. The old coach had retired and all his plays and drills had been dropped off to Mr. Hibma with a not so subtly worded note mentioning that he was the only teacher in the school who did not head an extracurricular activity. The note reminded him that he’d promised, last year, to run the debate team, and that this promise had proven hollow. Mr. Hibma sat at his desk and blew on his burrito. If basketball had begun when it was supposed to, back in the fall, he’d have been able to stay hidden, to keep his head down and shuffle past this coaching business, but a conga-line of hurricanes, the nastiest weather ever to invade Florida, had blown all sports to the spring, giving the administration time to browse their options, to parse out a slacker and surround him and move in for the kill. And none of the hurricanes had even hit Citrus County. They’d hit the counties to the north and south, the counties most of Citrus Middle’s opponents hailed from. Why not just cancel girls’ basketball altogether? That was Mr. Hibma’s question. The other coaches had stopped by one by one to assure Mr. Hibma that coaching was simple. You made them run, got them places on time, named a starting lineup—that was pretty much it.
    Friday afternoon, when his detention was up, Toby exited the school and hiked into the February woods. He passed a clear-cut area pocked with piles of fill sand, a golf course whose construction had been halted years ago. Farther, there was a warehouse that seemed forgotten, that seemed to have been built by somebody who was now dead or had moved away. Statues of all sorts—gnomes, saints, water fowl—leaned against the warehouse’s outside walls as if pleading to be let inside.
    Toby hiked on, switching from this trail to that, imagining how he’d lose someone if he were being chased. He noticed a new bird’s nest and climbed a low branch so he could look inside. Five pert eggs. They looked like toys, like decorations. Toby wished the mother bird would appear and run him off, pecking Toby’s eyes, but that wasn’t