G is for Gym Class

In what surely qualifies as the three most hellacious weeks of my life, I took a summer gym class with my best friends so we wouldn't have to suffer through a whole semester. For a skinny fourteen-year-old with asthma who never played outside because books were much more interesting, this was some form of cruel and unusual torture. My mom consoled me by saying that anyone could live through anything for three weeks--a sentiment she would revise to any given amount of time, such as "anyone could live through a flu shot for ten seconds" and "anyone could live through three years of middle school"--I decided to stick through it. About halfway through, my parents sprung the news that we would be moving back to Utah that autumn. I struggled with how to tell each of my best friends. Charlotte was the first. We ran through the morning's laps and on lap thirty-six or something equally horrific, I wheezed out, "I'm moving." "Yeah, you are moving!" You're running, Gretchen, of course you're moving! Objects in motion and all that! "No, I mean I'm moving. To Utah." "Oh. When?" "November?" "That sucks." "Yeah."