.

The cross-country team: home of tiny nylon shorts and school-sanctioned eating disorders.

Within the distance runner demographic, I’m something of an aberration. I don’t run to keep my weight down. I run because there’s nothing better than going for miles with everyone else strung out in little clusters behind me.

I win because I have a good understanding of strategy, the long game, pacing myself.

No, wait. I lied.

I win because I’d rather hold a needle in the gas flame and stick it in my eye than lose. In fact, in the event of an eye-skewering tournament, I’m relatively certain I’d take first. Make it a competition, and I can do just about anything.

Over by the sinks, Kendry Epstein is braiding Palmer LeRoy’s hair. They’re talking about calories.

“But protein,” Palmer says. “Maybe not beef. But soy? How many calories does tofu have if it’s baked?”

“I don’t know, but it’s supposed to be good for your boobs—I heard it makes them huge. Waverly knows, right?” Kendry says it over her shoulder, giving me an ironic look.

I laugh because that’s how the script goes, the little joke, the little giggle. A smile is for everybody else. I have no breasts to speak of.

I open my locker and get out my cross-trainers and my shorts, thinking about homecoming posters, sleep deprivation, hearts and flowers and Maribeth’s stupid necklace. Thinking about crossword puzzles and Lucrezia Borgia, right up until I hear Kendry say, “Okay, Autumn—for real. You can’t keep putting your psychotic flyers on the bulletin board. Just, can you please take it down?”

Autumn Pickerel is sitting alone on one of the low benches, staring at a battered notebook with paper flowers decoupaged all over the front. Her legs are stretched across the aisle, and the laces of her sneakers have been wrestled into sloppy bows, grimy from being stepped on.

Behind her, the bulletin board is huge, covered in photocopied pep rally announcements and ads for letter jackets and class rings, only now, there’s something that looks like a hand-drawn bingo card tacked in the exact center of it.

Autumn is slow. Not in the sense of being stupid—I have no idea about her mental capacity—but her cross-country times are terrible.

Strictly speaking, the level at which she sucks doesn’t matter. Distance running is one of the only sports with an open roster. A social free-for-all. Anyone who wants to can sign up.

I just have no idea why she wants to.

Girls like Autumn don’t go out for sports. They sulk around the drama department or the art hall, fidgeting with their piercings and drawing tragic water lilies on their shoes. They write poems about how they’re in love with sad, androgynous musicians who wear eyeliner. They don’t just show up to Extracurricular Involvement one day and start loping along at the back. Or anyway, they never did before.

She’s looking up now. Her hair has fallen in a reddish spill over one eye. The way the fluorescents glint off all the metal in her ears makes her look like she’s holding an electrical charge.

“You can mark off the square for Fascist to Be Fascist,” she says. Her voice is soft and husky. “I mean, since you’re the one who fulfilled it just now.”

She says it very clearly—just tosses it out there, without missing a beat.

Working theory: Autumn is so socially bizarre that she’s exhausted all obvious channels of expressing it. Clearly, she has joined cross-country because the only way left to prove her eccentricity is by doing something normal.

Kendry plants her hands on her hips. “God, what is wrong with you? Do you have any idea how weird you are?”

Autumn just stares back, and in that moment, I’m almost sure that something is going to happen and I have no idea what it will be. Autumn looks mysterious, but not the way other girls look mysterious when they’re trying to flirt with boys or keep secrets. Nothing about her face tells me what’s coming. She’s not angry, not anxious or hurt or apologetic. I don’t recognize her expression, and that is interesting.

“Come on,” I say, taking Kendry’s arm, turning her by the elbow.

For a second she resists, still staring down at Autumn like she wants to eat her. Then she sighs through her teeth and lets me do it.

In the hierarchy of our glossy, snarling pack, I’m the beta. This is the end result of having built Maribeth Whitman. The privilege of being carnivorous.

Kendry twists away from me. Most days, she has a face like a happy pie, but now she’s looking thunderous. “The bulletin board is for office-approved flyers only.”

“I’m sure people have enough reading comprehension to recognize that the school isn’t sponsoring”—I examine Autumn’s contribution, which represents a fairly damning selection of things I have actually heard various girls on cross-country say, and bite my lip to keep from smiling—“Bitchface Bingo. It’s fine.”

Kendry clearly believes it is not fine, and doesn’t appreciate how the card is obstructing people’s view of the sign-up sheet for synchronized swimming, but she huffs once, then catches hold of Palmer, dragging her out of the locker room, stepping ostentatiously over Autumn’s outstretched feet.

After they’ve gone, Autumn stands and saunters back toward the sinks. She takes her time, swinging her hips from side to side and singing under her breath, “One of these things is not like the others….”

At first I think she must be talking about herself, but the way she’s looking at me is too purposefully cool. Too bland to be accidental.

As she passes the bulletin board, she stops in front of me, holding the notebook against her chest—not like she’s protecting herself with it, but like she just needs a place to rest her arms because they really are that heavy. She’s taller than me, with a good build and long legs. I wonder why her cross-country times are so bad.

“Cute how they all jump,” she says, sounding almost sleepy. “Did they come with that built in, or did you teach them how to do tricks?”

I stare back at her and don’t answer. The truth is, it’s a little bit of both.

—

The warm-up is flat and slow, heading down the east side of the park and out along the road. In the haze of car exhaust, my heart beats harder. When I begin to sweat, it’s the slick, ghostly kind, drying off my face and arms as soon as it appears.

There’s an ugly word beating in my blood. The word is tired, tired, tired.

Even before I look up, I can tell I’m lagging. My feet throb with a tight pain that wasn’t there a week ago, and for half a mile, it’s enough to keep me at the back with the Autumns. The aimless and the slow. Girls who joined to please their parents or get in shape or just to be able to say they played a sport in high school.

But I have no right to be tired now. I slept last night, really and truly, for the first time in days—deep, unconscious sleep. And sure, maybe it wasn’t eight hours, but it was actual. Functional.

As I cross Spooner Street, my stride gets longer. Now I’m shaking off the torpor, powering through it, rising up and up—above the road, above the trees. I’m flying. Running is like music. It requires rhythm and focus. It requires dedication. It requires a dogged ability to shut out everything else. The herd is strung out below me, keeping time with the thump and slap of their cross-trainers. I hold the sound in my head and subtract cars, trucks, motorcycles, voices until it’s nothing but a song.

By the time I reach the corner of Wentworth and Sixth, I’ve left them behind. I move like patterns of air and light. I float.

Sweat blooms in a thin film across my back and my stomach. My skin feels cool and smooth, like I’m turning into stone.

I hit Grant Street and the ache starts, gnawing at my heels, the backs of my ankles.

Let me tell you about blisters: they are irrelevant. They tear, they weep, they scar, but they do not keep you from getting to the finish line. Pain is a series of impulses. It leaps from your nerve endings to your brain, telling you to move your hand off the burner, to get that gash stitched up. It’s an evolutionary function, a language of survival.

Pain as a concrete, factual thing does not exist.