Fierce as the Wind

by Tara Wilson Redd

  She’s not trying to be mean. I know that. But god she’s tone-deaf sometimes.

  “My dad can’t afford to send me on a vacation to Europe,” I say.

  “But you’re an artist! It’s not a vacation, it’s education.”

  “Yeah, but even for school…I mean, that’s why Trinity didn’t do that summer program at Carnegie Mellon last year even though she got in. Her parents couldn’t afford it even with the financial aid.”

  I stop myself from saying anything more. Rei went to theater camp every summer in New York growing up, and I can tell I’m making her feel bad.

  Rei and Scumbucket have this in common: they don’t like to be reminded of how well-off they are. The few times we hung out together in a big group, it was like seeing another rich person made them feel accused of something. They’d try to “out-poor” each other, mentioning things that they didn’t have: private tutors, luxury clothes. They’d make fun of other rich kids they knew, who flew on private planes and were afraid of being kidnapped. It was super awkward, like they had to prove they belonged with the rest of us.

  But when it was just me, Rei, and Scumbucket, the “poorer than thou” competition calmed way down, and we had a lot of fun together. Sometimes I wondered if it was too much fun. I didn’t like the way they made jokes about the bad service they’d had on different international airlines, because I didn’t get it. I didn’t like how their dads belonged to rival golf clubs, or how their moms both spent too much time at the same luxury nail salon that served mimosas all day. I didn’t like how they understood each other.

  I was jealous.

  “It doesn’t matter anyway because I wanted to go with him,” I say, to break the silence. “We were supposed to see those things together. He told me my birthday was his favorite holiday.”

  “You two were weird. Was Scumbucket the first guy you slept with?”

  I shift uncomfortably and gaze upon the pumpkin. Rei is my best girlfriend, but I’ve only ever talked about this kind of thing with X. I’m not even 100 percent sure if Rei has had sex. She’s super cagey about it.

  “So that’s a yes,” Rei says. “Was that the first time? Your birthday?”

  “No. The first time was in this mansion he was house-sitting. We watched all the Thin Man movies in a row, and we just kept doing it, like over and over. My birthday was…”

  “What?”

  “I guess it’s when I realized he was the person I wanted to be with forever.” My voice cracks. “I’m so stupid. I believed we’d be together forever.”

  “Yeah,” Rei says, wrapping her arm around me.

  “I feel so dumb,” I say, laughing.

  “You’re not dumb. Look, don’t tell anyone, but I think I really like Wyatt. Like, maybe love him?”

  “Ew, gross,” I say. She laughs, sticks her tongue out at me.

  “I hope he’s not gonna do me like Scumbucket did you.”

  “Oh, he wouldn’t. Wyatt’s good people,” I say. And guys probably don’t do that to girls like Rei.

  “You and Wyatt are friends in that game you play, right?” she asks, a little too casually.

  “Yeah, but he’s never on,” I say. “I think he added me to be nice. Scumbucket was my only friend.”

  “But that’s what I’m saying. Who knows who Wyatt talks to on there. Or on his phone. You’d never know. The only thing you can do is trust him, because cheaters get caught. Especially dumb ones like Scumbucket.”

  I nod.

  “Too bad Wyatt isn’t dumb,” Rei says. “I’d never know.”

  Scumbucket wasn’t dumb either.

  “I wish you’d tell her,” Rei says. “Think of him as a dad cheating on her in PlayStation Land, having affairs on his phone while she’s having their second kid, their third. I couldn’t stand it, knowing I’d been two-timed. I feel for you. But I feel for her too.”

  I know exactly what she means. I kind of think I’m breaking the girl code by not telling her. She deserves to know the truth. But it’s not only about her. It’s about their kid.

  My dad left my mom and me before I was born. But my mom had a lot of problems of her own. Maybe it was hard, being a single parent. But one day, she just…broke. I don’t know if it was drugs, or stress, or if she was just a bad person. But she picked me up from school one day, drove halfway home, stopped on the side of the road, told me to get out, and then drove away and never came back. I was in sixth grade. I stood on the highway with my lunch box and my little backpack for what felt like days. The cars rushed by. Finally, the police picked me up. I went to the police station. They found my dad, somehow. And then my memory kind of blacks out, and I was here. I refused to get in cars for months. Maybe that’s why I like my bike so much.

  I could never be the reason that kid’s mom dumps her on the side of the road and vanishes. I could never be the reason that kid’s dad decides to bounce before she’s even born. It doesn’t matter if your dad comes back for a World’s Best Dad third act after your mom abandons you, and then you’re sitting in a police station in California so terrified that you wet yourself. He still left.

  “Anyway, you know, just because he was first, doesn’t mean he was best,” she says. “This is a small pond. There will be other Scumbuckets.”

  “I hope not.”

  “I mean other…what did you used to call him? ‘Partners in crime.’ There will be other loves, but this one is going to hurt for a while.”

  “But what if the person I love doesn’t want me?”

  “Then you’ll find another.”

  “But what if it’s me? What if I’m not what that kind of person wants?”

  She raises an eyebrow.

  “What?”

  “I mean…what if the kind of guy I am destined to fall in love with only wants…”

  I look around, looking for a way to say it. I spot a J. Crew down a passageway.

  “What if that kind of guy only wants that kind of girl?” I ask, pointing to J. Crew.

  “What kind of girl?”

  “That one. And that one. And that one,” I say as I watch a few girls from St. Agatha’s going into the store. They’re all wearing uniforms for some team.

  “That’s not a kind of girl. Those are all just girls shopping at J. Crew.”

  “Yeah, but I couldn’t shop there.”

  “Why?”

  “You know I can’t afford it.”

  “Yes you can. You just don’t want to spend stupid amounts of money on clothes.”

  “Fine. I can’t shop there because those clothes would look ridiculous on someone like me.”

  “Now, that is a ridiculous thing to say. And I’m sick of hearing it.”

  Rei grabs my arm and heads toward the store.

  “Wait,” I say, pulling back in panic. Rei is stronger.

  “You did this to yourself. It’s time to face the horror of J. Crew.”

  * * *

  Rei wanders around, picking things up. I shadow her so closely I step on her foot.

  “Ow!” says Rei.

  “Do you need any help?” asks one of the clerks. Rei examines her foot, and I stare at the salesgirl like a deer in headlights. She’s the same age as us, and seems more bored than judgmental.

  “Yeah, sale rack?” Rei asks. The girl points us upstairs, then heads off.

  “Can we leave?” I ask.

  “No,” says Rei. “We’re going to find those girls.”

  We pass through the men’s section, and I spot the pink linen shirt that Scumbucket left with me. I slept in it for a week once when he was on vacation. I wonder which one his real girlfriend was sleeping in. Rei is dramatically limping up the stairs away from me, and I follow her. The St. Agatha’s girls are on the other side of the store, and they don’t notice us. We watch them sideways as we pick through the s
ale rack. I look at the price on a plain skirt. It’s ten dollars.

  “Oh,” I say. “How is this so cheap?”

  “Fast fashion is killing the planet,” Rei says, shaking her head. “When they do sales here, they basically give it away. How do you think X affords all those ridiculous button-downs and chinos?”

  I never thought about it. The St. Agatha’s girls let out a peal of laughter.

  “The difference between you and those girls is this”—she pulls a skirt off the sale rack— “this, this, and this”—she throws a shirt, some tights, and a pair of chunky heels my way—“and twenty minutes with some mascara and a flat iron,” Rei says.

  “That sounds like a lot.”

  “That’s the price of three pizzas.”

  “Yeah, okay, fine. Even if I dressed like them, I wouldn’t be like them. It’s like I said. It’d be a costume.”

  “That’s what clothes are. If you don’t get it by now, Miho, it’s because you don’t want to get it,” Rei says. She slides a velvet headband with little pearls on it over my hair, floofs it out to the side. I look in the little face mirror posted on the table.

  And for the first time I see it: this one tiny slice of me could look like someone else. Could be someone else.

  She’s right. We’re in a J. Crew and no one is even looking at us. This time, whispers my brain. Just because you got away with it once doesn’t mean you always will. I’ve been followed in a store before. That stuff happens. But this time? It’s nice.

  I take the headband off, pile it up with everything else. A Coke with my three pizzas. “Should I buy it?” I ask awkwardly, nodding to the clothes.

  “Do you like them?”

  “No.”

  “Then no. Obviously. But you could.”

  I look over again at the girls we followed in. They’re so effortlessly clean, their hair shiny and neat.

  “Look,” Rei says. “Let me prove it to you. If I can turn myself into a green witch”—Wicked. She was phenomenal—“I can turn you into one of them. If you walk the walk, everyone will assume that’s the way you always walk.”

  I nod.

  “So? Are you ready to walk the walk?” Rei asks. I dump the clothes back on the table.

  “There will be pizza?” My stomach growls.

  “And makeup! And hair! And a dramatic chair-spin reveal in front of my mom’s vanity!”

  “And also pizza?”

  “And also pizza,” she says.

  * * *

  When I get home, I run to my room and look at myself in the long, tall mirror. I’m wearing the running clothes that Rei bought me, with one of Rei’s open-back mesh shirts layered over it. With my shirt tied in a little knot and my hair straight, I look so different. Rei was right: a flat iron and some mascara. I look like I don’t belong in my own room.

  I straighten myself up, flip my hair, stand at just the right angle so it almost looks like I have a thigh gap. I look just like them.

  “What are you doing?”

  I crumple.

  “Dad!” I shout. I forgot to close the door.

  “Modeling?”

  “No. What are you doing?” He is wearing his hook leg, and I want to ask him why, but I’m too embarrassed. He looks sheepish. Also sweaty. Was he running?

  “I asked you first,” he says.

  “Rei gave me a makeover.”

  He raises an eyebrow. I sigh loudly.

  “You look…nice. I know these are very trendy, but they are not pants.”

  “Dad. They’re leggings.”

  “Why exactly are you wearing them and where are you going in them? Surely not out of this room.”

  “I’m just trying them on, okay? They’re for running,” I snap. He raises his hands, laughing.

  “As long as it’s not to school. Dinner in fifteen minutes. Did you eat?”

  “No,” I lie. Somehow I’m hungry again. He shuts the door still grinning. I can’t be mad. He didn’t mean anything by it.

  I take it off and shove everything in a drawer.

  chapter fourteen

  Two months pass in a blaze of schoolwork and training and work and training and friends and training and training and training. I barely notice prom, yearbooks, senior pranks. It’s all white noise. Rei and Wyatt make a cute prom couple. Lani and Trin go, not as a couple, but “maybe as a couple,” each one tells me secretly. They refuse to talk to each other about it, so I tag along. This way no one has to admit that they have feelings for anyone, even though it’s painfully obvious. They dance all night, leaving me to fantasy-shop for bikes on my phone under the sparkle of a disco ball. I dream of speed all evening. Trin and Lani do not hook up, or confess their mutual attraction, despite my best efforts. X takes his cousin to his swanky prom so his mom’s heart won’t be broken and she’ll get her prom photos. He doesn’t ask me, and of course I know why. Instead of going to the afterparty, he comes over to my place to binge-watch The Avengers. He lets me keep his bow tie.

  I run in the dark before school. I find out that not only does my school have a gym, but apparently, I’ve been able to use it this whole time. It’s not limited to team sport athletes and PE classes. So I splash water on my face at five a.m., and I’m in the building at six a.m. every school day, logging miles on the rickety treadmills with the judo boys and the softball girls. We avoid each other for a few days, until we start arguing about what to watch on the single TV. I’m on Team X-Files. We hate Team Food Network. And then on the basis of television preferences, I find myself with a new crew I never would have talked to at school.

  I ride the spin bikes. It’s like having a genie who can take me anywhere, to ride any terrain I want: steep hills and flat stretches I could never find outside. I never imagined I’d enjoy riding a bike that goes nowhere, but now I can choose my workout instead of taking what I can find. I can work only one leg (my left is lazy), spin high RPMs to build “fast-twitch muscles,” or simply enjoy not worrying about getting hit by a car as I push myself past my threshold. In April, Mr. Smith, the weight room monitor, pulls me aside, and I think I’m in trouble, but he wants to show me how to use the cable machines, because “Strength complements cardio.” He remembers me from when I took non-optional gym in ninth grade, and I’m shocked. I thought he didn’t even know my name. He says, “Of course I remember you. You’re the passive-resistance basketball player.” He gives me weight-training sheets to fill out and file in a folder with all the other kids. I watch the numbers go up and I love it. I can do a pull-up. Just one. But still. My X-Files posse cheers so loud when I finally do it that the band kids down the hall complain. I barely get my chin to the bar, but I feel like a superhero.

  I swim after school when I have a long enough break between school and work. I’m worried about the 2.4-mile swim, even though I’m practicing everything like I should. It just seems so far. Right now, it takes me an hour and twenty minutes and I can’t get faster. I’ve plateaued. Some days, when Wyatt doesn’t practice with his team, we swim together. I make fun of his ridiculous swim drills, which are all named after inanimate objects and performed like math problems: Eggbeater Drill for 4 x 50. 4 x 25 on :30. Tape Dispenser Drill x 300. Hold your hands like this, lift your elbows, stop breathing weird! Sometimes X comes and cheers us on while he does homework. Sometimes we meet alone and just swim, split a lane, with his much crazier set printed out on a piece of paper and stuck to a wet kickboard. I tell him it looks like a tombstone that reads, “This is what killed our dear friend Wyatt.”

  And soon, I don’t get faster, but it does get easier. I must be doing something right.

  And of course I run. I’m terrified of the marathon, but I watch the distance go up every week on my long runs. Five miles. Ten miles. A half marathon and I didn’t even cry! I remember when I couldn’t even run three miles. Now I can run fifteen. Well, walk and run. It�
�s a strategy, though: run .9, walk .1. But I can do better. I know it. I’m going to run the whole thing.

  I log twenty hours a week of training on some weeks, if you count pizza deliveries. At first I’m half-asleep at school, but then, after a few weeks, I’m wide-awake. It’s like I’m flying. I’m sore everywhere, but I’m also weirdly happy all the time. Having absolutely no time makes me organized. I have lists of everything that needs to get done. I zip through my homework, my chores. I haven’t thought about that Scumbucket or his fiancée in weeks. I know they’re getting married soon, but I don’t care, not at all. I don’t have time to worry or be sad. There’s no time to think. I just do what has to get done.

  By the time May rolls around, I’m a machine.

  chapter fifteen

  “Delivery!” Uncle Tua shouts. I lift myself painfully off the kitchen floor, where I’ve been half cleaning, half dozing.

  The address looks a little familiar, but it’s not one of my regulars. I waste the data on Google Maps to narrate the trip so I don’t screw up the directions—I’m that tired. The past few weeks have been awful. Everything was going great, and then all of a sudden, the harder I train, the worse I get. I can’t think.

  As I’m biking, all I can think about is how hungry I am. Delivering pizzas after my run or my swim or doing intervals on the bike on top of school on top of freaking everything else I have to do, there’s no amount of food that seems to help. I realize pedal by pedal that I have to eat, even though I already had dinner. Lani said this might happen, so I have a snack with me at all times, unless I’ve already eaten it. I don’t even stop my bike. I don’t have time. I open my sandwich and ride without my hands on the handlebars as I cram it into my mouth. I am so hungry I can barely see. This triathlon has taken over my whole life.