Mr. Brown

The truth is the basketball coach assigned to teach geometry disliked both sports and angles. Plays he drew on chalkboards looked like problems, problems like plays. He calculated the area of the rectangular court to be most pleasant when empty and only echoes cheered.

He coached his classes best when a fire-drill called time-out and he might stand shyly in the courtyard next to her, the English teacher—close enough to look, for instance, at her ears, or smell her sweet breath, care for her tender shoulders.

His job was an amorphous shape between two points: sports, math. He was always only one chapter ahead of us. Against him, life ran the give-and-go.