On the day Coach Schiff took the team for the long run we called Blinking Light, I joined them. It seemed like the right thing to do, though I had always hated these training runs. There were shorter routes through the woods, but they were narrow and full of sticks and chipmunk holes, best left to solitary walkers or kids looking for a quiet place to bone or get stoned. Varsity captains preferred to send their teams up the road toward the boat docks—a mile from the gym—and then ordered a left turn to a major county junction, where a single stoplight was strung across the intersection. The small pleasure of being able to leave campus was far offset by the uphill climb, two miles out, to that stoplight, which blinked red—there was not enough traffic to require anything more. We passed through woods and came out into farmland, with a house in the distance. I dreamed of seeing another human being in the world beyond school. A nice farm wife with a graying golden bun and a tray of biscuits or a pitcher of lemonade. I had always been a slow runner—that is how I am made—and I was miserable, trying to keep up. The damn stoplight never seemed to get any closer. On the soccer team in the fall our pace had been set by Coach Green, a six-foot-four ectomorph trotting alongside Meg, whose first New York City Marathon, which she would run on a whim, would earn her a racing sponsorship. Days I threw up, I was patted on the back and told to keep working on my aerobic capacity.
Now, the early-spring sky was slate. Our tennis team was small and the girls had on their tennis skirts, which would have been a silly sight to a local resident on that country road—fourteen or so preppy girls in pleated skirts, like an image from Madeline’s Parisian orphanage. I pounded along behind them. Running made my hand ache and turned my throat raw, but when this run was over, I knew, they had to return to the courts and follow orders, while I could do whatever I wanted for the few hours before supper. This bit of time felt unimaginably indulgent. After we reached the light and turned around, I fell well behind. The woods to my left were dark, the bark of the leafless trees wet with the thaw. The pavement had no curb. Again I imagined slipping away, into the woods. How cold would it be at night? Would the farmer’s wife take me in? It was quiet enough to hear squirrels climbing. My own breath sounded explosive. I considered being frightened—I conjured the usual misshapen country recluse who might hack me to bits with the ax he happened to be carrying. But the thought didn’t take. My cast was hard. I swung it a few times as though I was hitting a forehand. It was pendulous and made me feel curiously powerful.
When it came time to turn back toward campus, I went left instead and found the top of the trail into the woods. Ice still glazed the muddy hollows. I’d been running longer than I had ever run before, but on these curves I wasn’t tired. Instead I felt propelled by them. The earth was springy beneath me. I got faster, or it seemed I did, clipping the bigger, closer trees with my cast. I knew this path as Long Ponds, but I’d never run it in this direction, and never alone, and certainly not when the trees were bare, so I hadn’t had the chance to work out what I was working out now: where the dining hall was in relation to the chapel, with the ice rink behind; how the edge of the forest was actually just a strip before a parking lot here, and a utility road here; where the bridges ran, and why water rushed over the waterfall by Simpson House; how the entire campus was basically just wedged between the boat docks on Turkey Pond and Pleasant Street. Not much of anything at all, really. The trail emerged like a secret by the chapel, onto a path so narrow between the pond and the trees you’d worry there wasn’t room on the shore to keep from falling in.
Maybe a student with a better sense of direction would have been in possession of this vision of her home much earlier than I was, but that was the first day I realized the shape of the school. With it came the secondary realization that the school was a place, like any other place—stationary, platted, with boundaries. It was possible to leave it. One day I would.
I was late coming in to dinner. Caroline happened to be in the hall. She said, “Lacy-o.”
It was a surprising kindness. I had given up on Caroline, on all of them, because of their loyalty to Candace. “Hi, Caroline.”
“How is your arm?”
“I just ran six miles.” I’d worked it out. “Blinking Light, then Boat Docks, then Long Ponds.”
“Wow. That must have felt terrific. Didn’t it get dark?”
“Not quite.”
She reached for my bright pink cast and held it up. “Though this thing is like a torch.”
“Or a club.”
She smiled, weighing the plaster. “Yeah, you could deck the shit out of someone with this.”
We walked into the dining hall together. Our schoolmates clocked this small progression in diplomacy. I saw Sam’s eyebrows go up.
That night before bed, I dragged my old camp footlocker out from the floor of my closet, where it held shoes and sweaters and spare shampoo, and pulled it in front of
