I scanned the crowd of onlookers, searching for my mother. I spotted her and waved. She waved back, and so did Aunt True, Pippa, and Grandma G, who coaxed Bella and Blair into waving their chubby little fists from their stroller too.
“Go, Team Lovejoy!” shouted a deep voice. I caught a flash of purple and recognized Augustus Wilde, the romance author who was our town’s celebrity. For once, Augustus wasn’t wearing a cape. Instead, he sported a purple T-shirt emblazoned with the words GO TEAM LOVEJOY! Belinda Winchester was dressed in an identical T-shirt, and both of them were fanning themselves with matching purple baseball caps. I gave them a thumbs-up.
“Runners, take your marks!” cried the voice over the loudspeaker.
My mouth suddenly went dry. The dread that I’d been feeling earlier came flooding back in a rush. Why had I let myself be talked into running this stupid race?
Hatcher leaned over to me. “Remember, Drooly, all you have to do is finish.”
“Don’t call me Drooly.”
He grinned. “That’s the spirit!”
Finish, I thought. I could do that.
Couldn’t I?
CHAPTER 5
As it turned out, I could, though just barely.
Even my little sister Lauren beat me to the finish line, which I knew I’d never hear the end of. How was it that I could swim as fast as lightning for what felt like hours on end and barely be short of breath, but an easy 4K loop completely knocked me out?
Mackenzie had doubled back at one point to run alongside me. “How’s it going?”
I’d given her a curt nod. My cousin hadn’t even broken a sweat, which was almost as irritating as the fact that she felt she needed to check on me.
She’d trotted alongside me as the two of us turned onto Main Street, the official halfway mark in the race.
“There are the girls!” called my mother, who was standing in front of Lovejoy’s Books, and my family cheered for us. Aunt True was balancing a baby on one hip. Bella, maybe? I couldn’t tell. The twins were dressed alike today, both wearing matching red, white, and blue onesies and floppy stars and stripes sun hats.
My friend Lucas Winthrop and his mother were there too. Lucas was smeared with industrial-strength white sunscreen, his face practically hidden beneath a floppy hat similar to the ones worn by the twins. Poor Lucas! His mother still thought he was six. He’d wanted to run, but she wouldn’t let him.
“Heatstroke,” she’d warned when he asked. “We can’t risk that.”
A huge smile spread across Lucas’s face when he saw Mackenzie. He waved, trying to attract her attention. Ever since she’d come to visit last Spring Break, Lucas had been smitten with my cousin.
“Go, Bud!” Mrs. Winthrop shouted, and I looked over my shoulder to see Mr. Jefferson lumbering along behind Mackenzie and me. He was red in the face and sweating profusely, and if you asked me, which nobody ever did, he was the one that Mrs. Winthrop should have been worried about when it came to heatstroke, not Lucas.
After a disagreement last March during the big Maple Madness Bake-Off (Maple Madness, a celebration of all things maple, was another of our town’s traditions), the blooming romance between Lucas’s mother and Bud appeared to be back on track. The town’s residents were keeping a close watch on all of the current couples, thanks to Ella Bellow’s frequent bulletins from A Stitch in Time. Over at the General Store, I’d heard a number of bets placed as to who’d get engaged first: Mrs. Winthrop and Bud, Belinda Winchester and Augustus Wilde, or my aunt and Erastus Peckinpaugh.
Secretly, my money was on Aunt True. And secretly, I couldn’t help thinking it would be fun to have a wedding in the family. I hadn’t been to a family wedding since I was eight, when Uncle Brent married Aunt Angie.
“Go on ahead,” I panted, flapping my hand at Mackenzie as we spilled out the other end of Main Street.
She nodded and broke away, and I didn’t see her again until I managed to huff and puff my way up Hill Street and then circle back to the finish line, where what seemed like the entire gaggle of Giffords was waiting for me.
“Well done, Truly-in-the-Middle!” said my father, giving me a sweaty hug, and Hatcher dumped a bottle of water over my head.
After all of the runners were accounted for, the judges withdrew inside First Parish Church to tally the scores. Meanwhile, the crowd drifted over to the bandstand to wait for the results.
“We still have a chance,” Hatcher told me as the brass band struck up another medley of tunes, John Philip Sousa this time.
“You’ve got to be kidding! I was one of the last ones across the finish line.”
“Yeah, but Professor Rusty delivered the goods. Aunt True was right about him being our secret weapon. Our average time is way up there.”
A podium had been set up on the bandstand, and behind it stood Augustus Wilde, who had been selected by the race organizers to hand out the prizes. I watched as he taped a poster of his latest novel to the front of it. Augustus didn’t have a stealth mode. He was what Aunt True called a guerrilla marketer, someone willing to go to great lengths to promote their own work. Not surprisingly, after the judges emerged and passed him an envelope with the results, during his moment in the spotlight he also managed to wedge in a plug for his new book.
“As I wrote in my latest best seller, Fortune’s Forbidden Fruit,” he told the crowd with a sweeping gesture toward the poster on the front of the podium, “there are no winners in life, only finishers.”
This didn’t strike me as the most
