“Wake up! What are you doing?!” Maddie nudges my shoulder with her socked toe. She glares at me with what could either be anger or concern. “Seriously! Get up—get changed. Let’s go.”
I might vomit.
A few blurry minutes later, Maddie pulls me by the arm through two heavy metal doors. The cool afternoon breeze is a shock after the damp sauna of the locker room. Summer seems to have finally decided to give way to fall. From within my fog, I can tell it is a beautiful day. The campus is buzzing with activity, conversation, laughter. The football field is covered with groups of students hand-painting banners, Ford F-150s covered in green and gold crepe paper. The local radio station is blaring over the stadium loudspeakers. I stare at the scene and a realization dawns on me.
“Maddie,” I call out to her black ponytail walking a few feet in front of me, “is it homecoming this weekend?”
“Um . . .” She looks toward the football field covered in students and banners and back at me. “Obviously?”
The loose stones of the parking lot crunch under my feet as we walk toward the football field and the four-hundred-meter track encircling it. Aside from prom and graduation, homecoming is one of the biggest events of the school year. And I somehow went the whole day, the whole week, without noticing. “What? Don’t we have a banner?” We cut through a side entrance of the fenced-in track and follow the path of the one hundred meter dash toward the opposite end of the stadium. Every organization on campus—athletic teams, clubs, honor societies—has a banner in the homecoming parade. It’s just what you do. I look out over the football field at the dozens of works-in-progress spread across the white-painted yardage lines. “Shouldn’t we get started on one? You know I love painting the banner! Ours was so good last year, remember?”
She looks at me strangely for a few moments before replying, “We do have a banner.” She inclines her head toward me and tilts it with meaning to the side. “We have been talking about it nonstop at practice. There was a sign-up sheet to help design and paint it that was passed around during stretches every day this week. There was also an e-mail and I texted you about it.” She purses her lips, crosses her arms, and looks at me. She is waiting for an explanation.
I’ve been so out of it the past few days, so distracted by my own mind, I somehow missed all of this. I guess I remember seeing her text message, now that I think about it. I just didn’t have room in my brain to care. Stepping over cracks, starving, stepping over cracks, starving . . .
Maddie looks me directly in the eyes for five silent seconds. “What is going on?”
I can feel the weight of my uneaten sack lunch in the gym bag on my shoulder. The crackling plastic bag of pretzels, the thick slices of wheat bread and honey-roasted ham. What’s going on? I’m saving myself from cancer, if you must know. Battling for my life. The rest of the team has congregated on a small grassy area near the goal posts for pre-workout stretches. Jenny’s cheery laugh filters above the chaotic noise as I see the group transition from calves to quads. I wonder how many cracks each of them stepped on today. How long will it be before their cells start mutating?
“Hello?” Maddie stares at me.
My eyes click back into reality. She is glaring at me with demanding eyes. I can’t label the emotion on her face.
“What?” I don’t remember her question.
Our eyes connect.
“Seriously? Allison!” she almost yells. “What is wrong with you? You haven’t been yourself all week, but things have really gotten weird yesterday and today.” Her hand moves up to her hip. “You’ve been lethargic. Jenny and Rebecca told me you haven’t been eating anything at lunch. You’re always counting?” She shifts her weight and her tone lightens. “It’s all just kind of out of nowhere.” A few seconds pass as she catches her breath. I see the muscles in her shoulders and cheeks relaxing. “This isn’t okay.” She gestures her hand up and down my body. “You aren’t okay.”
Somewhere inside me there is a small glimmer of appreciation for her concern. A tiny flame in a dank corner of my brain flickers in recognition of our friendship, but it is quickly blown out by a strong gust of pride. I’m not okay? This—I picture my shaking body—isn’t okay? I’m carrying a full course load of honors classes, I’m a member of the cross-country team, and I’m actively fighting cancer. Maddie and her messy hair and crazy freckles. She has no idea what she is talking about. She’ll be sorry one day.
I know I can’t tell her that cracks cause cancer, that I’m starving myself for my health. Even though these thoughts are new, it’s obvious they were a gift bestowed on me and only me. To share them seems disrespectful, somehow sacrilegious. I don’t know their source, but I know they are special. Sacred.
“I’m. Fine,” I say softly through clenched teeth and a sudden, powerful swell of anger. “Just tired—I told you. It’s been a rough few days with school.” I brush past her and allow my shoulder to clip hers so she is pushed roughly to the side. “We’re going to miss stretches.”
I walk away from her toward the chattering crowd near the end zone. I don’t turn to see her face, but I know her openmouthed stare is watching my back the entire way. My cheeks flush with shame, or maybe sadness, as I replay our conversation. I’ve never had a temper. I rarely get mad, especially at my friends. The strong, almost immediate wave of anger that bubbled up with Maddie’s questioning is completely out of character. But, I think, watching my feet plod across the closely shorn grass, it feels good.
Although we always stretch together, today I plant myself as far away from Jenny and Rebecca as possible. Busy talking with each other, neither of them notices me when I walk past. We are targeting hamstrings now, sitting on the ground leaning diagonally toward outstretched toes.
I press my face hard into my thigh, savoring the break from reality. On the grass, there are no cracks. In the dark of closed eyes, there is no Maddie. I switch to the other leg without looking up. I’ve still got two servings of dinner left if I don’t make any more mistakes. I extend my arms over my head as I come up from the stretch and look up to the sky. Two things to eat at dinner! It has been a good day.
Nodding to myself, I stand up at the sound of Coach Millings’s whistle. Within the rustling crowd, I see Maddie huddled with Rebecca and Jenny. Ducking behind people and ponytails so they won’t see me, I watch their conversation through the gaps between bodies. Maddie is speaking fast, gesturing her emotions. They’re talking about me, obviously. I’m naive if I think they aren’t in on this together, tracking my strange behaviors during nightly phone calls. Wouldn’t I do the exact same thing if one of them started tiptoeing, counting, and not eating? Wouldn’t I also get a bit of innocent excitement from the unfolding drama?
• • •
Blind momentum carries me through the first two miles of our run. I lodge myself in the middle of the pack and keep my head down. My safe number is 25,000. “Three hundred twenty-two, three hundred twenty-three”—seems fair enough—“three hundred twenty-four.” We tramp through the school campus down Peachtree Road, and eventually turn left into a rambling, sprawling subdivision that will act as our host for the next five miles.
Rolling Meadows is a solidly middle-class neighborhood in a solidly middle-class town. The houses are right out of the fifties and sixties, the glory years of the region’s tobacco boom. Each yard is adorned with bird feeders, angel statues with upturned faces, American flags flapping beside the front door. An old man mowing his yard in suspenders stops to watch our herd. The sun glares off the bright metal of the playground slide.
Through the traffic, I can barely see the bounce of Maddie’s hair ahead. She is usually my running partner for the first three or so miles, but today she is leading the pack. I wonder what she’s already told Jenny and Rebecca. A memory of her concerned eyes filters across my mind, and I’m filled with a rush of warm shame. I squint against the afternoon sun as the group stampedes downhill. With each step, each contact with the pavement, I sense myself veering
slightly farther to the right, to the right, to the right. A feeling of lightness. Pavement.
At first it is silent. Calm. The world nothing but dull white noise. It’s the pain in my knee that draws me back to the surface. Like turning on a TV, I am suddenly blasted with color, noise, action. A ragged, ripping feeling across my leg mingles with the rapid conversation taking place above me. I’m lost in a confusion of black road and white sneakers.
A murmuring silhouette of ponytailed heads looks down at me and fires questions. “Are you okay?” “What happened?” “Did you trip?”
Slowly, with squinted eyes, I raise myself up to my elbows. I am shaky but remarkably more steady than moments before. Blood, dirt, and gravel mingle together across my kneecap. The sun is blotted out by the crowd of teammates huddled around me. I look up at the forms four feet above, unable to process anything but the shape of their heads against the blue afternoon sky.
“Allison?” It’s Jenny. A hand with wiggling fingers appears in front of my face. “Come on, girl.” I am pulled to my feet with the assistance of multiple teammates. My head swims as my eyes adjust to the new altitude. With the change of angle, I feel the warm threads of blood spread down my shin from my knee. I’m on my feet, and twenty sets of eyes wait for a comment. My starved brain is fuzzy. I’m distracted by the tremor in my hand. My whole body feels paper thin. A strong wind could send me off above the trees. “Helllooo, Allison?” Jenny dips her head down so our eyes align. “You really don’t look so good. Are you sure you just fell? Are you sick? You didn’t eat anything at lunch.” She fidgets with my T-shirt, dusting off the remnants of gravel and leaves.
Through the crowd around me, I notice a blond head bobbing quickly toward us. On my tiptoes, I see it’s Anne Marie, the team captain and my personal hero. Not only is she the fastest runner in the county, but she also just found out she has a full scholarship to Duke University. Her boyfriend picks her up from practice in his candy-apple-red SUV with muddy, oversized tires. She is everything I could ever hope to be.
“Hey, ladies, what happened over here?” Despite being more than two miles into the run, she speaks clearly, as if we have been out on a Sunday stroll. The collective group gestures toward me, and Anne Marie shifts her beaming eyes up to my face. I gawk at her through a frozen smile. She’s so pretty. The hot pink shoelaces on her running shoes match the stripes on her shorts, which match her sparkly nail polish. She has her hair pinned up in a messy, effortlessly perfect bun of curls. A few individual strands fall gently to her shoulders. Anne Marie, teach me your ways!
Over her shoulder, I can see Maddie staring at me behind crossed arms twenty feet up the road. Her glare sends me a wave of clarity. I need an excuse, a distraction. Now. “I tripped,” I almost yell. “I think there must have been a stick or a rock. I felt my foot hit something.” The words flop out of my mouth before I’m even aware that I’ve thought them. The whole team turns their heads to examine the completely clear road. “There was definitely something there.” I hesitate as I see a few girls raise their eyebrows questioningly. “Some kid probably just put sticks in the road to trip us all up, you know? I’ve heard of people doing that before. . . .”
What? I know it’s a terrible lie as soon as I say it, but it’s my only escape. I’ve gotta go with it. Eyes on me. A few tentative nods and half smiles. Inside, I’m willing them to believe me, to take my excuse and not ask questions. Anne Marie looks at me with a strange expression until Jenny interrupts the lengthening silence.
“You probably just tripped over your own foot.” She nudges me in the arm. “Wouldn’t be the first time.” The group laughs quietly in agreement, the tension fading. Freed from their intense gaze, I am furious with myself. Sticks in the road? Was that really the best I could do?
“Well, you should probably head back.” Anne Marie grimaces at my knee. “But be careful. Take it slow. Check in with Coach before you leave.” She pats me on the shoulder with a small smile before turning to the rest of the idle team. “All right, y’all, fun’s over. Let’s go!”
I pretend to jog back toward campus until the group has wound down the road out of sight, and then I slow to a walk. Limping, my pride more hurt than my knee, I’m happy to be alone.
There were no sticks in the street—it was obvious that wasn’t why I fell. It didn’t even make any sense, I scold myself, shaking my head at the lame, ineffective excuse. Even if only a few people know I haven’t been eating, this is the kind of story that, if heard by the wrong ears and spread by the right lips, could mutate into a powerful, irresistible rumor.
Let Jenny, Rebecca, and Maddie enjoy their gossip session in peace. At least if I don’t see it, if I’m not following twenty feet behind them, I can pretend it’s not happening. It’s obvious that three of my closest friends are discussing my eating habits, my lethargy, my strange gait. I imagine them laughing as they recount how I leap across the sidewalk, gasping when Rebecca and Jenny say they haven’t seen me eat lunch all week. But if I don’t know for sure, if I don’t see them chatting incessantly through a seven-mile run, it doesn’t hurt as badly.
CHAPTER 5
I have become a finely tuned instrument. With more than a week’s worth of practice under my belt, I float across the crack-laden sidewalks and classrooms of school like a well-practiced ballerina. I know each divot, each turn, each carcinogen lurking at the edges of concrete squares. My chest swells with a smug confidence. If this is all it takes to defy cancer, I could live forever.
“Fifty-nine!” I yell. “Sixty!” The roar of the cafeteria drowns out my counting as I cross the threshold of a massive pair of double doors. I survey the familiar tiled floor and move quickly toward our usual table in the far right corner. The Samuelson cafeteria is cavernous. Hundreds of voices bump into one another as they bounce from wall to wall. “Seventy-eight! Seventy-nine!” As I approach, Rebecca looks up, smiles at me, and nudges Jenny with her elbow. Jenny immediately puts down her sandwich and grins at me as well. They both stare intently as I walk toward them. “Eighty!” I sit down in my usual seat and park my book bag in the empty space to my right. Since August, we have sat in the same cafeteria seats. It’s an unwritten, unspoken rule that you don’t change lunch seats after the first day of school. It used to be a comfort to know that no matter what, I would always have this spot with my friends waiting for me. But today it feels like I’m walking toward the judge and the jury. I know they’ve got yesterday afternoon on their mind.
Jenny and Rebecca are still giving me the same anxious smiles from across the table when I look up from my book bag. Flanked by the soda machines, our tiny table seems isolated. I’m not sure if I should feel safe or cornered. They stare at me expectantly. “What’s up with you guys?” I plop my brown lunch sack onto the table. “You’re being kind of odd.” I don’t allow myself to think about what Maddie might have told them about our conversation yesterday.
“Odd?” Jenny looks to Rebecca. “Us?” Rebecca shrugs back at her with a small snort. There is something going on.
“How is your knee feeling?” Rebecca asks as she unrolls the top of her lunch bag and begins unloading filled Ziplocs. “It looked like you were bleeding pretty badly.” Rebecca is a senior, the mother hen of the cross-country team. Painfully slow yet unwaveringly supportive, she attends every varsity race armed with banners and posters trailing green and gold streamers destined to decorate the finish line.
“Oh, it’s fine! It looked a lot worse than it was, really.” I pretend to rummage through my lunch, although I have already bartered all my food away for the day. With a shrug, I add, “Probably should have just kept running, to be honest.” After rustling around in my paper bag, I make a show of pulling out my turkey sandwich and examining it, separating the bread and poking at the lettuce. “How was the rest of practice?” I force myself to block out a persistent mental image of the three of them running together, exchanging stories about me, followed by a late-night phone call with Sara.
“Same ol
d, same old, I guess,” Jenny responds as she crunches on a Cheeto. “Oh! Except, listen to this. . . .” She adjusts herself, a one-woman show always ready to perform. “So we’re running, right. That really hilly part after you get to the stop sign.” She pauses and looks at me until I nod back at her. “And guess who comes tearing around the corner in his Jeep . . .”
“Brendan!” Rebecca and Jenny half shout, half squeal in tandem. I gasp. Brendan. Michaels. Of all the days for me to miss practice!
Jenny continues her melodrama as she describes how Brendan Michaels squeals his tires as he pulls up beside his girlfriend, Anne Marie. “He really slams on the brakes. Like, I saw smoke come up from his tires. And he pulls out this red Gatorade and hands it to her.”
“Oh my gosh. So cute.”
“I know, seriously. So I’m running by, and she is saying something about how she’s sweaty and he shouldn’t kiss her. And then he says”—she lowers her voice—“ ‘But, babe, I like you sweaty.’ ” We erupt in a storm of wild giggles that draws annoyed looks from the tables of students around us. Rebecca is choking on a carrot as we finally regain our composure.
“Could she be any more perfect?” I say with a sigh.
“Could he be any more perfect?” Rebecca comments.
A few seconds pass as we all nod silently in agreement.
I am moving my fingers around in a bag of Triscuits. I pick one out, bring it up to my face and examine it, then place it back in the bag and repeat. Breaking off substantial chunks of cracker, I arrange them on the table in front of me. The more crumbs, the more it looks like I’ve eaten.
Moving to trade Triscuits, I see Jenny and Rebecca exchange a glance. Rebecca nods at her, and I barely I hear her whisper, “Just do it.”
“Can’t you do it?”
“It was your idea!”
My insides immediately lock up, but I pretend that I don’t notice their exchange. My body readies itself. Waiting for Jenny to speak, I am tense, alert, but continue to act engrossed in my Triscuit collection.
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