As I stumbled back and forth, my teammates running alongside me, a couple of things soon became clear:
• Running was harder than it looked;
• Sarah was by far the fastest person on the team;
• Sarah was very fast.
The first thing was concerning and the last two were surprising. Sarah had said that she liked track, but I’d had no sense of how good she was or how seriously she took it. It was like finding out that your lab partner who “enjoyed swimming” was going to the Olympics.
I’d somehow expected that by joining track, I would enjoy newfound proximity to Mr. Matthews and be able to spend plenty of time during practice observing him and gaining useful insights into his character. While the proximity part was true, as practice continued, I came to the disappointing realization that the latter part was pure delusion. Because at least so far, it looked like I’d be spending every minute of track either frantically trying to keep up or trying not to keel over from exhaustion.
After one particularly grueling series of sprints, Sarah came over and elbowed me roughly in the side. “Fun, right?”
I narrowed my eyes at her, noting that her eyeliner hadn’t so much as smudged, while I had sweat pouring down every inch of my body.
“You may be the devil,” I managed to get out.
“Aw,” she said. “You’ll learn to love it.”
“I think I’m going to vomit. Or faint. My body can’t decide which.”
“All part of the process,” she said.
“You should’ve warned me.”
“Oh, don’t be such a baby—you’ll be totally fine. Anyway, this part isn’t so bad—it’s tomorrow that you’ll really feel it.” She flashed me an evil smile and elbowed me again.
I was about to object to all the elbowing when she called out, “Isn’t that right, Mr. Matthews?”
I turned to see him passing close behind us.
He slowed down. “Isn’t what right?”
“I was telling Jess that feeling rough the first day is normal.”
He turned and faced me for a moment. “Completely normal. Don’t worry about it.”
“See?” Sarah said to me. “And besides, you have a good build for running. You’ll probably turn out to be a natural.”
“Like Anna,” I said, carefully watching Mr. Matthews’s face.
For a moment, his eyes flicked away, and he took a breath. I wondered if in that moment, he saw her, caught a glimpse of her face. If the sound of her name destabilized his heart.
“Yes,” he said. “Like Anna.”
And I thought I saw something in his eyes, thought there was something more he wanted to say. Then one of the other girls called out, yelling that she thought she’d pulled a muscle. He jogged off toward her, leaving me to wonder what he would’ve said, or if he’d even been planning to say anything at all.
—
WHEN PRACTICE ENDED, I LET Lauren use the changing room first. It was meant as a nice gesture, as thanks for her help before. It went utterly unacknowledged, of course.
After changing, I roamed the halls, searching for a lit classroom containing a female coach. The one I found was Ms. Turner, who also served as the school’s algebra and geometry teacher.
The two of us hadn’t interacted since I’d been called out of gym, since she’d stood beside Mrs. Hayes and watched as I’d left the room.
We didn’t speak of that day now, when I entered the classroom and she looked up from grading papers. We barely spoke, yet soon we were trudging back to the locker room together, and then she was having me hold out the locker code book so she could squint between it and the lock as she twisted the knob to first one number, then the next. It took her two tries, with vigorous resetting in between, before the lock popped open.
“There you go,” she said.
I nodded and she nodded back. She looked relieved, I thought, that I didn’t need anything more from her.
I sat on the bench and waited until she and the last remaining stragglers from the track team had left before I started to go through Anna’s locker.
The top shelf was relatively tidy. A stick of unscented deodorant stood on the left side, and beside it were a hairbrush and a pile of plain hairbands.
The bottom shelf was pure chaos. A pair of loose socks I rolled together and tucked into her shoes, and then I gingerly removed and folded a T-shirt and a sports bra before packing them into the gym bag.
Toward the back of the locker, I found another, clean pair of socks that she’d already rolled together. When I picked them up, my fingertips encountered something hard underneath the cotton. Something solid and circular had been tucked up inside them. Slowly, I undid the roll and pulled out the object.
It looked like a makeup compact. When I opened it, though, I realized that it was something else entirely—something I’d seen before, in health class, but never held in my hand. A round, plastic dial of birth control pills, half empty.
I stared at it, the smooth plastic cool against the palm of my hand.
I had wanted something tangible, and here it was. Proof that she really was hiding something from me. From everyone.
We got attention, of course. Two girls in a bar, girls who obviously shouldn’t be there. Got attention, especially when a song came on that we liked and we danced—arms up, hair flying.
It felt like a game, one that Lily and I were too smart to lose. Because two beers in, we were so very, very smart. Smart, and beautiful like diamonds that could cut right through the soft flesh of the men who watched us.
Their desire was a joke, because we didn’t want them back. Even if we had, she had a boyfriend and I, I had common sense. I believed that back then.
SEX AND DEATH.
Before Anna died, I never really thought much about either of those things. Now it felt like
