Resolve Read Online Free Page B

older than me, Dr. Jacob Kasko could stick right with me for a marathon distance. By the day of the race, my conditioning should have improved to the point where I would be a minute or two faster than Jacob; but at that point in our training he was ahead of me.
    “Cyprus, what are you doing?”
    Jacob used the brief moment of levity to change the topic of conversation. I knew what he was asking me, but I worked up my best perplexed expression. I loved messing with him about this.
    “Please tell me you are not eating that crap again,” Jacob said in his playfully exasperated tone. “Out of all of us, you’re the one who should be the most willing to submit to modern advances and not stick with eating habits from elementary school. I’ve told you a hundred times that Pop-Tarts are not proper running fuel.”
    Jacob pulled one of his beloved calorie-filled gel packs out of the pouch on his elastic running belt.
    “You have to properly refuel or you’ll keep fading down the stretch. If you want to finish strong, you have to refuel!”
    At least once a week we went through this routine. Jacob heard me unzipping the small pouch on my waist belt, dig into a crumpled-up plastic baggie, and pull out pieces of a broken-up Pop-Tart. It drove him crazy, so I kept doing it. He bought the state-of-the-art silver gel packs that are full of carbohydrates, vitamins, protein, jet fuel, PCP, or some combination of substances that helped to replace some of the calories he burned during a long run. He converted Aaron and Randy long before I arrived on campus. On every one of our runs, they greedily squeezed the gooey red, blue, or brown ooze out of the packs and into their mouths every few miles. It’s disgusting if you ask me.
    “I guess I’m still a kid at heart. Besides, guys your age need all of the advantages you can get.”
    A collective moan came from the pack.
    “Oh, here we go,” Aaron chimed in. “We take the young Dr. Keller under our wings, accept him as one of our own, and he treats us with utter disdain.”
    Aaron Caferty was a professor in the School of Business; which is to say that he taught mostly real estate and basic marketing classes to the region’s future slumlords and telemarketers. Don’t get me wrong. I liked Aaron. But he sometimes acted as if he were going to produce a modern-day Adam Smith, when he was more likely to produce the next Adam Sandler.
    “Come on guys, leave Cyprus alone,” said Randy Walker, my colleague in the Criminology department. “Obviously, any boy who carries the name of an island is bound to hold on to his independence. Besides, you can’t expect a man from a non-academic background to trust a bunch of old intellectuals.”
    Ouch.
    He liked to take these jabs at me. The fact that I looked ten years younger than I was had always meant that I’d fallen victim to labels like boy and kid . I’d gotten used to it over the years, so it didn’t usually bother me. However, Randy’s suggestion that I wasn’t a true academic was his way of putting me in my place. Normally, I would have fired back some witty retort, but to be honest, I was pretty winded and the frosty air hitting my lungs was getting the best of me.
    What he was referring to was the fact that after I finished my undergraduate work at the University of Maryland, I was a Baltimore city police officer for a while. After accumulating some hefty student loans while at U of M, I found out that Baltimore PD had a great student loan repayment program. All I had to do was work as a community police officer in some of Baltimore’s more troubled areas for four years. Translation— Send the skinny college boy into the hood. If he lives, we’ll shell out some bucks. So that’s what I did. For four years and one day.
    I fell in love with Criminology while at U of M. Everything was so neat and logical. There were rational theories for absolutely everything. I completely immersed myself in theories with cool names like