1. Though the heart weighs less than a can of soup, a healthy heart pumps two thousand gallons of blood each day.
2. A kitchen faucet would have to be turned on full force for forty-five years in order to equal the amount of blood pumped by a heart in a lifetime.
3. Looked at another way: During an average life, the heart will pump nearly 1.5 million barrels of blood. This is enough to fill two hundred train cars.
4. In spite of all that power and force, there are only one and a half gallons of blood in the body at a time. And you only have to lose two liters of it—one bottle of Diet Coke—and it’s over.
Annabelle promised both her mother and Grandpa Ed that she would take a few days off, that she would wait until her blisters healed before she runs again.
But she has the Agnelli Curse. She is a silver-tongued liar.
She is also driven by something that is beyond all sense. She is compelled by a force that has no reason. Call it guilt, shame, a need for redemption. Call it terror or courage. Call it the human spirit, trying to rise.
Call it stupidity, given the condition of her feet. Still—call it the deepest of desires smack up against a lost cause.
It is very, very difficult to sneak out of an RV when a grandfather is sleeping right on a pullout bench below. It requires some advance planning. Seth Greggory would call this premeditation. In this case, the planning involves a note she wrote to Grandpa Ed the night before. Also, sleeping in her clothes. She packed her pack when Grandpa Ed was brushing his teeth and gargling with Listerine before bed. She’s got energy bars and fruit and a dinner roll stuffed with cheese slices, so she’ll have breakfast and lunch.
It also requires a little luck, which she gets: On the table, she spots the juice glass ringed in burgundy. Grandpa Ed’s second glass of wine before bed. See? She is stressing him out. However, he is snoring hard. His mouth gapes like a cave.
Sneaking out also requires some disgusting stuff—not brushing her teeth, peeing outside. And, gross—changing her bandage out there and leaving the old one on the steps to the RV door. Forgive me, she says in advance. This is such a familiar phrase that she should have it tattooed on her wrist, or maybe over her heart. She wraps her feet in so many bandages, it’s like she’s wearing snow boots. She’ll hobble like Mr. Giancarlo the whole run if she must.
In the next three days, Annabelle will become very acquainted with the Iron Horse Trail. She’ll be on it for forty-two of its nearly three hundred miles. If Grandpa Ed doesn’t disown her after her jailbreak, he’ll meet her at a state park on the Snoqualmie River on day one, at a bend in the Yakima River on day two, and just off of Cabin Creek Road outside the small town of Easton on day three, her eighteenth birthday.
In its former life, this trail was a working railroad. Now, it’s home to some of the most desolate land in the state. She isn’t likely to see many humans out here, only coyotes and gopher snakes and worse.
This morning, past the Cedar Falls train stop, Annabelle runs on a friendly path of crushed rock bordered with trees, all bright green and yellow with baby leaves unfurling. The antibiotic cream slathered on her feet comes with a nice pain-numbing element, and so the scorching fire of the day before is just a burning hum. The abundance of bandages makes her clump along, though. She has loosened her laces and stretched her old running shoes to accommodate them, but she still feels like a C-grade zombie. She worries about a new ache in her hip. She hopes it isn’t the start of Dead Butt Syndrome—tendonitis in the cu, basically—something Coach Kwan warned them about. She’ll have to make sure to add some crunches and leg lifts to strengthen her abdominals and her glutes.
Zombie feet, dead butt, haunted spirit—pieces of her are dying off already. This is only the third day of her run. Fourth, if you count the hours after fleeing Dick’s. It feels like so long ago.
As she shuffles forward, she taps her thumbs to each of her fingers. She’s aware of other pains and pulls in her body, all potentially catastrophic. Her chest fills with anxiety, same as a sinking ship fills with water—it rushes in and then rises slowly. That morning, she’d read about this route, and she knows what’s coming: a pitch-black train tunnel. Two and a half miles of complete darkness. After that, twelve miles, all uphill. Punishment enough? No way. Not by a long shot.
Don’t believe everything you think, Kat says. Or maybe that’s Dr. Mann, meeting her eyes and smiling before fetching her glasses to make their next appointment.
It is a bad, bad moment to get the text. Annabelle almost doesn’t look at her phone, because she’s sure it’s Grandpa Ed, fuming mad, or Gina, or even Malcolm, with news that the GoFundMe is up from yesterday’s four hundred sixty bucks. But she’s alone out there, except for Loretta. The bling of the text sounds like reassuring company.
It’s Geoff Graham. Geoff is her friend. They used to be on the cross-country team together. He has a T-shirt that says Like Jeff, but Geoff, but nothing seems funny anymore.
Heard what you’re doing. That’s awesome.
Nice, huh? So nice. But the text socks Annabelle in the gut. It almost bends her right in half.
Annabelle stops. She thinks she spots the tall, gaping cement arch of the tunnel up ahead. She has no flashlight or headlamp. The timing sucks.
God damn you, tunnel. God damn you, Geoff, sounds like Jeff. God damn you, Taker.
It is what it is, Annabelle tells herself.
It’s a phrase she often finds comforting. It reminds her to accept the truth rather than struggle against it. But now, it sort of pisses her off. Sometimes, what is is something that shouldn’t be. It should never have been. It only is because of messed-up reasons going back messed-up generations, old reasons, reasons that don’t jibe with this world today. Sometimes, an is should have been gone long, long ago, and needs to be—immediately and forcefully and with not a minute to lose—changed.
She is more than pissed off. Actually, it fills her with fury, the way people can protest and shout and write letters and yet, the is stays an is, and bad, bad stuff can still happen and happen and happen. There are no words for this. It’s unbelievable. It is a travesty. It is a communal mark of shame.
She’s standing in front of that stupid tunnel now and, wow, it’s dark.
“I am coming for you, tunnel. You are not coming for me,” she says out loud. She gives the worst of the worst gestures she’s learned from Grandpa Ed—index fingers stuck aggressively out. Literal translation: I’ll kick you so hard, your buttocks will end up this far apart.
She runs. She’s inside. The tunnel has a high ceiling and curved walls, and it is roomy enough for a freight train, but the walls close in. It is too dark to even see the end. And it’s cold in there. She’s suddenly freezing. A chill draft whips down its length.
Annabelle shivers. It’s so frigid and so utterly and completely dark that she forgets about the pain in her feet and in her butt and even, for a moment, her heart. If she hears or feels a bat, she will have a heart attack. Something wet plops on one shoulder and then her cheek. There’s more dripping. She speeds up.
Annabelle’s feet echo. Goose bumps ride up her arms. She thinks she hears something, and then she’s sure she does, because all at once it’s upon her. It’s a bright light, coming close, growing large. For a second she sees the stone walls around her before his headlamp blinds her. It’s just a man on a bike. He says a cheery and surprised “Oh, hello,” and then he is gone. It’s black again.
Two and a half miles is a long way in complete darkness. Of course, she’s gone a lot farther in places much darker than this.
• • •
Geoff Graham.
She sees him that night. He opens his front door. He grins. He says, “Hey, chips! Thanks.” He squeezes the bag in appreciation. “No one else brought anything. Losers.” There is music—
But no, before that.
Way before that.
Geoff Graham is over by his car in the Roosevelt parking lot. He’s there with Trevor Jackson and Zander Khan. Zander pushes Geoff good-naturedly, and Geoff shoves him back. They’re laughing. Talking loud. Annabelle leans against Gina’s old Toyota, waiting for Kat. Last week, Roosevelt lost to Ballard High in the District Championship, so the cross-country season is over. Now, Annabelle’s back to her regular work and volunteer schedule, and she’s going to give Kat a ride home. Kat’s always late, it’s annoying, and right then this is the biggest problem Annabelle’s got. Kat better hurry up. Annabelle needs to go home and change for work.
It’s late fall. The trees along the sidewalk near the school—so recently a burning orange and red and yellow—are losing their last leaves. A few drift down as she waits. The air has the smoky smell of the end of October. Fall always smells like a campfire.
She can’t miss him, coming her way. The Taker. He’s just so tall. Annabelle feels embarrassed for him, but she doesn’t know why. He hasn’t talked to her in Mixed Media for two days, and then he was absent, but here he is now. She wonders what’s going on. He grins like he’s up to something. This makes her nervous. But curious, too.
“Hey,” he calls.
Geoff looks over. She notices this quite clearly, the way Geoff stops the joking and laughing and pushing. The way he watches, now that The Taker has caught his eye.
The Taker is holding a pink envelope. A card. A card that’s on its way to her. Her embarrassment grows.
She feels . . . She doesn’t know. The tiniest bloom of regret. She has started something that she’ll now have to undo. You can smile at a boy, and he’ll think you’re in love with him, Gina cautioned back in the sixth grade, after Georgie Zacharro. This meant: It’s your job to keep guys in check. Her first thought when she sees that card coming toward her is that she has somehow misused the nice-and-beautiful power-not-power she has. She wielded it recklessly, unleashed it on the vulnerable without entirely meaning to. It sucks, the way that her power is at times not enough and too much at others.
“For you,” The Taker says. And then he does something that makes her uncomfortable. Well, the whole thing does, but this is worse. He bows. It’s one of those odd actions that Geoff Graham and Trevor Jackson and Zander Khan would never do because they’d know it was odd. In fact, Trevor and Zander are also looking her way now, along with Geoff. And they are nice guys, so this is not threatening or mocking, just—it’s unusual enough to make them wonder.
“Wow,” she says. “Thank you.”
She’s not sure what to do, but he seems to be waiting, so she opens it. On the front of the card there’s a vase of flowers dropping petals onto a tabletop and floor. Inside, in elaborate script: An honest mess is more beautiful than a perfect picture.
He waits.
She’s a little stunned, because he seems to have understood something about her, the actual her. He isn’t just seeing the pretend girl she feels like so much of the time, the girl who tries to be so perfect, perfect, perfect. At least, he notices something real about her that even Will never did. Yet the message and this card are too much. It’s too much for this high school parking lot with beeping horns and laughter and buses idling by the curb.
“The other day, your shirt . . .”
She’d totally forgotten. This gives her some context, some way to respond. What a relief. She laughs a little. “Aww,” she says. “Hey, thanks.”
“No worries.”
He blushes like mad. “That’s really sweet,” Annabelle says. She wishes Kat would hurry up.
“Hey, I gotta go. My bus.”
“Thanks again,” Annabelle says. “That’s really sweet,” she repeats.
“See you.”
“See you.”
He lopes toward the second bus, takes the stairs in one leap. The buses pull away. Trevor gets into Geoff’s car, and Geoff reverses out of his spot. Zander jogs in the direction of home. Annabelle tucks the card in her notebook.
When Kat finally appears, Annabelle doesn’t tell her what happened. That night, though, Annabelle looks up The Taker online. What is she expecting to find? No idea. There are only pictures of him and friends from his old school in Vermont. In one, guys wearing backward baseball caps lie goofily on classroom desks; in another, a group of kids wearing American Revolution–style three-corner hats stand on a lawn. There’s an awkward homecoming photo, and a cat playing in snow, and his dad and him holding rifles at a shooting range. There’s a close-up of a big breakfast. There’s him and his mom dressed up and standing in front of a fancy hotel. She’s a good foot shorter than he is, but has his same shaggy hair.
Annabelle is wrong to judge him without knowing him. So what, he’s awkward—he’s new at their school. He seems sweet. The only card Will ever gave her was for Valentine’s Day. It showed a beagle holding a box of chocolates and said You’re my favorite treat dispenser.
She should repay The Taker for this kindness. She should at least ask him about himself. She should at least be friendly and nice.
Still, she throws the card away in the garbage can in her room. She shoves it way down. It doesn’t seem far enough. The card makes her feel bad. She takes the can out and dumps it in the trash.
“Do the kitchen one, too,” Gina calls.
• • •
In that dark tunnel, Annabelle can barely breathe. Besides the bats and the dripping water, she imagines things on the ground, ready to spring at her ankles. She imagines a man, his back flat against the wall, ready to seize her when she passes. He is there, and then there, and then there, with his reaching arms. She swerves away from his hands. She picks up her pace, because she pictures another man behind her, trying to catch her. He’s back there somewhere, getting closer. He’s gaining on her. She needs to hurry.
There is danger above, below, around, behind. Darkness wiggles its horrible fingers and tries to grab.
When she sees the tiny pinprick of light that means she’s near the end, she feels relieved but not relieved enough. She can almost hear the man’s steps behind her.
The circle of light grows. It brightens as a new day does. In spite of the long ordeal she just endured, it feels like a sudden embrace. She runs another mile or so away from that awful place, and when it is no longer visible behind her, she slows, and then stops.
She sets her palms on her knees. Pants. She takes a long drink of water. She wants to feel victorious, like she faced that freaking tunnel and won. She is, after all, out in the sun, with the tunnel behind her. But way down in there, inside of her, the something-someone still chases. It does not have the immediacy that it did in the tunnel. She cannot hear the man’s steps or feel his breath on the back of her neck, but he still lies in wait.
Turned up or turned down, the feeling is permanent. She survived something big, and when you survive something big, you are always, always aware that next time you might not.