Mile 19

Evelyn and I were exhausted. We had stopped running a long while ago and were trying to walk the rest of the marathon. We had trained for six months together and were too delirious to remember to keep our places. This was typical for us. Her glass eye was on the left but somehow we always managed to fall into place so that I was on her left, so that when I called her name she had to spin around to see me panting and gasping at her.

“Evelyn! Which way?” She pointed at the arch. “Chinatown. We’re here.”

Going under the arch was cool. Our Chinatown in Chicago is only a few blocks long but the arch is pretty dope. We huffed and puffed for a few yards before realizing that we were competing with some serious foot traffic. Little old ladies were pushing their carts around the sidewalk trying to get their errands done and they were getting in our way.

Our poor heart monitors probably got confused when we had to pause with our backs up against the storefront with bleeding fowl hanging from hooks in the windows. I’d roll my eyes at Ev, and she’d roll her right eye at me. It occurred to me that maybe we were the ones who were in the way.

“Maybe we should call an AMbulANce,” Evelyn said. “STOP IT,” I told her again, “we are not calling any ambulance. My family is wearing matching purple t-shirts with my name on it and they have a cooler full of squeeze-top Gatorades, just like we asked for, about three miles up the road. If anything we’re taking a cab and then I’m pretty sure my parents will drive us to the finish line.”

When we got to the end of Chinatown, the end of the block, all we saw was the highway with a slope of gravel underneath. We were lost. So we tried to play it cool and started doing some light stretches when a police officer rounded the corner. “Hey! Um, do you know where the marathon goes?” I mean, we couldn’t tell from there, and I just figured she’d know.

“Are you serious?” she asked. I looked at Evelyn and she looked back at me with that sad look in her right eye. That “let’s call an ambulance” look. I scowled at her briefly and turned back to the cop and said, “Okay. Which way is north?”

She looked us up and down. Poor lady was probably only trying to get some take-out for dinner because her working day was done, being that the marathon was over and all.

But once she saw the desperation in our three eyes, the Team in Training temporary tattoos on our faces, and the bib numbers carefully pinned through single hole punches on our puffy-painted shirts, she could clearly see that, despite our obesity, we were indeed trying to finish a marathon.

“You’re gonna wanna go South,” she said. “You still have to go all the way to Comisky and back.”

We didn’t make it very far before stopping again. There was a set of port-o-potties in the gravel underneath the highway and Evelyn had to go, so I decided to sit down on the curb and take of my shoes and socks to change my band-aids. We had seven miles to go, and about four until The Penguin came to rescue us.