The End of Ordinary

by Edward Ashton

  The thing you have to understand about my dad is that he’s not actually bad, and he’s not actually stupid . . . but he does have this weird combination of the two that sometimes makes him do bad, stupid things.

  Things like trying to ditch his fourteen-year-old daughter in the middle of the woods, for example.

  I ran along beside him for the first two miles. He wasn’t pushing too hard, and I was starting to think maybe we were just gonna have a nice run. Then we turned onto the red trail, and he tried to drop me on the first hill. I paced him up that one and down to the next flat. When he tried again on the second climb, I called him on it, and I went.

  Growing up, I heard a lot of stories about what a great hill runner Dad was, about how growing up in the flatlands had made me squishy and weak. He actually was better on the hills than he was on the flats, and I had to put on pretty close to a full sprint to get away from him. There’s no way I could have held that pace for the next three miles.

  Luckily, I didn’t have to.

  I pushed up and over the second hill, down the back side, and up the third. By the time I topped that one I was gasping, and my legs were starting to shake. As soon as I cleared the crest, I ducked off the trail and into the trees, crouched down and focused on quieting my breathing. Soon enough, Dad came pounding down the trail, looking as bad as I felt. I waited until he was a hundred yards or so ahead, then crept back out of the trees and followed him.

  The thing I’d noticed when Dad showed me the course at the trailhead was that right where the white trail turned onto the blue, the green trail curled by in the other direction, just a few dozen yards away. Thirty seconds of bushwhacking, and I’d cut a mile and a half off the course. I jogged the rest of the way out to the parking lot, hung around there for three or four minutes, and then went strolling back down the trail until I ran into him coming the other way. The look on his face when he saw me is something that I will treasure for the rest of my life.

  I never told Dad what I did to him that day. That wasn’t the last time we ran together, but it was definitely the last time he tried to dust me. I’d gotten the point, though. As the summer wore on, I did start running farther and faster. By the start of August I was putting in twenty-five or so miles a week, mixing in some sprints and pace work here and there.

  Dad thought I was doing a lot more. He’d send me out for a long run, and when I came back an hour and a half later, he thought I’d done eleven or twelve miles. I hadn’t, though. The reason those workouts took me so long was because of the other thing I never told Dad about. That was the summer I met my first real crush.

  His name was Jordan. I first saw him in the parking lot of the nature preserve. I was just locking my bike to the trailhead sign when he came tearing out on the green trail, across the lot, and back into the woods on the blue. He was tall and pale and thin, with legs cut like an anatomy poster and long black hair pulled back into a ponytail.

  He was pretty enough, I guess. The thing that fascinated me, though, was the way he moved.

  I’d spent a lot of time studying the way unmodified Homo saps lumbered through their lives, shambling around with their pigeon toes and their pudgy bellies, licking ice-cream cones and drinking frappuccinos out of giant travel mugs. They were clumsy, they were slow—even the ones like my dad, who’d honestly been a pretty serious athlete back in the day, mostly waddled around like something wasn’t hooked up quite right between their bodies and their brains. I’d gotten to the point where I could usually pick out the Engineered just by watching them walk.

  Jordan wasn’t Engineered. I could see that pretty quickly. That didn’t seem to matter as far as running went, though. Engineered or no, Jordan could fly. He was his own little subspecies.

  After that first encounter, I pretty much cut out the road running, and started riding to the nature preserve almost every day. It turned out that Jordan had a steady routine. Almost every day I’d see him zipping across the parking lot right around nine—out on the green, in on the blue. For about two seconds on that first day, I thought about just trying to run with him—you know, I’d sort of fall in beside him, like we were randomly going the same way. Hey. I’m Hannah. You’re a runner too, huh? Only two seconds, though, because even at fourteen I could see that would be awkward verging on creepy.

  Also, much as I hated to admit it, there was no way I would have been able to hang with him. When I thought about trying, I got a quick mental image of me sprinting along beside him for a half mile, opening my mouth to say something witty, and barfing on his shoes. So, I decided to go with a slightly less awkward but definitely much creepier approach. I started leaving bottles of lemonade from the Plank Road farm stand on the hood of his car.

  It took me about a week to figure out that the crazy-hot black sports car that was always in the lot when he was there belonged to him. I left a note the first time—You looked thirsty:)—so he’d know I wasn’t using his hood as a trash can. After that, I just left the bottles and went for my run. The car was always gone when I finished.

  Until it wasn’t, that is.

  “So,” Dad said. “Where’d you go?”

  I was stretching on the floor of my solarium, a glass-walled room on the second floor of the house that looked out on the overgrown fields where someone probably used to grow soybeans, but my parents just grew weeds.

  “You know,” I said. “Around.”

  I was working on my hamstrings, legs spread in front of me, arms reaching forward. Dad sat down across from me. Little beads of sweat were already forming on his forehead. Mom kept the rest of the house subarctic all summer, but my solarium was always steamy.

  “You were gone for a while,” he said. “How far did you go?”

  “Don’t know,” I said. I wrapped my hands around my left foot and pulled my nose down to my knee. “I wasn’t carrying my phone.”

  “Come on,” he said. “You know you need to be logging your miles, right?”

  I sat up, rolled my neck around, and reached out for my right foot.

  “You know I love running,” I said. “Right?”

  “Of course,” he said. “That’s why we do it.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I love the quiet. I love the rhythm. I love the feel of the wind in my hair.” I sat up again, pulled one knee to my chest, and twisted around to look at the far wall. “You know what I don’t love, though?”

  He gave me a half smile.

  “Logging your miles?”

  “Yes, Dad. Logging my miles. Also hay. I cannot stand hay.”

  He laughed.

  “I’ll bear that in mind. Try to keep track, though, okay? Coach Doyle is going to expect you to show up for your first workout in shape and ready to go.”

  I switched legs, and twisted the other way.

  “Got it, Dad. I’ll see what I can do.”

  I didn’t, though. All that summer, I made excuses for why I couldn’t take my phone with me on my runs. I forgot. My battery died. The wristband made my arm sweaty. The truth, of course, was that I didn’t want Dad to be able to track where I was going every day, and how little I was actually running. It wasn’t that I didn’t care about the season, or Coach Doyle, or filling up my hayloft. I just felt like running was something I should do, not something I should think about.

  Also, of course, there was Jordan.

  On a brutally hot Sunday morning near the end of July, I came out of the woods to see that beautiful black car alone in the parking lot. I pulled up short. My lemonade was gone, so he’d clearly been through, but . . .

  “Hey. You’re the lemonade girl, right?”

  I spun around, heart pounding. He was sitting on a rock at the edge of the trees, stretching.

  “Uh . . .”

  He smiled and stood. That’s when I first thought of the whole Homo Jordanus thing. He didn’t roll over onto his knees to stand, or push himself up with his hands. He just sort of rippled from one position to the other with what looked like no effort at all.

/>   “Thanks,” he said. “I mean, really. I love lemonade. I hate feeling like a charity case, though. What do you think—would one nice brunch square us up?”

  And I thought, What would Dad say? Stay focused, Hannah. Eyes on the prize, Hannah. Don’t forget about your hay supply, Hannah.

  Don’t talk to the unmodified, Hannah.

  “Yeah,” I said. “That sounds about right.”

  His smile turned into a grin.

  “So,” Jordan said. “What’s your story?”

  We were sitting across from each other in a booth at the Nine Mile Diner, sipping iced tea and waiting for our waffles.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “I’m not even sure I have one.”

  “Sure you do,” he said. “Everyone’s got a story.”

  I looked up at him.

  “Okay. So what’s yours?”

  He gave me a lazy grin and shook his head.

  “Sorry, lemonade girl. I asked first.”

  I looked away, pushed my hair back from my forehead and then shook my bangs down into my eyes. When I looked back, he was staring at me, his eyebrows slightly knitted. If you haven’t hung around with a lot of custom-job Engineered, faces like mine tend to fall into the uncanny valley—different enough from a Homo sap’s to ring some alarm bells, but not different enough that you can put your finger on exactly what’s wrong. I locked eyes with him, and gave him my best under-the-brow-ridge glare. He held my gaze, smile firmly in place.

  “Fine,” I said. “Here’s my story. On my ninth birthday, my mom took me down to the city to see a Broadway show, visit Times Square, and do all the touristy things that people who actually live there never, ever do. This was just after the end of the Stupid War, so that was kind of a moronic thing to do, but my mom always felt like she was a woman of the people, you know? Between lunch and the start of the show we went to the Museum of Natural History, because Mom used to go there when she was a little girl, and she really loved the giant whale. So we saw that, and the big stuffed elephant in the front hall, and the lions and the giant squids and the dinosaurs.

  “And then we saw the cavemen. Mom didn’t want me to go in that room, but I pulled my hand away from hers, and I went anyway. I walked right up to one of the dioramas, put my hands against the glass. There was a boy there, maybe a year or two older than me. He looked at the cavemen, and he looked at me, and he said ‘Hey, how did you get out?’”

  Jordan reached over, brushed my hair back from my forehead, and ran his thumb along the ridge over my left eye. I closed my eyes and let him do it.

  “So,” he said. “Did you punch him?”

  I laughed.

  “No, I just stared at him until he got uncomfortable and wandered away.”

  “That’s too bad,” he said. “Sounds like he deserved worse.”

  I shrugged.

  “Maybe. But like I said, this was right after the Stupid War. Things were still pretty tense between the Engineered and the . . .” I looked up at him. “. . . and everyone else. My mom would have killed me if I’d started a riot.”

  He took a sip of tea. His left arm was slung across the back of the bench. I’d never seen someone so . . . comfortable with himself.

  “So what about you?” I said. “That was my story. What’s yours?”

  “Me?” Jordan said. “I don’t have a story.”

  I could feel my face twisting into a scowl. Jordan burst out laughing.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I couldn’t resist. I really don’t have one as good as yours, though. My dad’s a VP at GeneCraft. I don’t see him much, but he buys me things. My mom likes it better in Europe. I don’t see a ton of her either. I guess I could tell you that I’m starved for love and all, but the fact is that I’m not. I like things this way. I’ve got a surprising amount of . . . independence.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I get that. My parents monitor pretty much every minute of my life. I wouldn’t mind if they headed off to Europe every now and then.”

  He leaned forward then, covered my hand with his, and said, “Don’t worry, Hannah. Soon enough . . .”

  That’s when I kissed him.

  It was my first kiss. I mostly missed his mouth, and I realized later that I’d given myself a little bit of a bloody lip on one of his front teeth. It probably lasted less than a second, but it felt like forever. When it was over, I sat back and looked up at him. He was laughing.

  “Oh, God,” I said. “I’m sorry. That was . . .”

  “No,” he said, and shook his head. He was still holding my hand. “It’s fine. I’m flattered, honestly, and I would totally have kissed you back if it weren’t for three critical facts that you had no way of knowing.”

  I pulled my hand away, and used it to cover my face.

  “Really?” I said. “Is the first one that I’m disgusting?”

  He laughed again.

  “No, Hannah. The first one is that I’m definitely too old for you, despite my boyish good looks. The second is that I’m guessing you’ll be running at Briarwood this fall, right? That makes me one of your captains, and Coach Doyle takes a very dim view of fraternization.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Those both make sense. What’s number three?”

  He sighed.

  “Number three is that my boyfriend gets really, really jealous.”

  3. In which Jordan introduces himself.

  I wasn’t exactly sure what to make of Hannah the first time I saw her. I could tell she was Engineered, of course. Even without that brow ridge, everything was just a hair off with her—legs too long, chest too deep, hips too narrow. It wasn’t bad. I mean, she wasn’t like the Engineered basketball players or wrestlers. I don’t know where they were getting the genes that they cut those guys with, but I’d be willing to bet that it wasn’t from anything human. Half of them looked like they’d grow fur if they didn’t shave every day.

  Hannah was different. She was definitely human—just more so.

  We did a unit on classical philosophers that fall in Humanities II. Most of it was just noise to me, to be honest, but there was a bit about Plato’s Cave that stuck with me. The idea was that everything we see here on Earth is really just like a shadow cast on a wall. Every cat is just a shadow of the perfect cat. Maybe one gets the whiskers right, but he’s got a crooked tail. Another one has a great tail, but his claws aren’t quite right. If we look at enough cats, though, we can start to get an idea of what the real thing, the thing casting the shadows, must be like.

  Hannah was the real thing.

  The running was part of it. I read once that long-distance running is the only sport where humans aren’t just embarrassing themselves in front of the other animals. Take leaping, for example. I’ve seen ball players who could pretty much dunk their own heads if they wanted to. A jaguar, though . . . I once saw vid of one of those guys leaping fifteen feet straight up into a tree with an antelope in his mouth.

  Long-distance running—that’s the one thing we really do well. Make the race long enough, and a human can outrun a horse.

  Well, not just any human, of course. My mom couldn’t outrun a horse. Not unless it was a fat, diabetic, chain-smoking horse, anyway. Me, though? I hadn’t lost a race at any distance since I was fifteen. I’d have crushed one of those hay munchers without breaking a sweat. And Hannah? Well, she was just a kid. Still, after watching her stride, I wouldn’t have bet against her.

  Poor Tara. She’d been chomping at the bit to take over the number-one position on the girls’ team for two years. I couldn’t wait to see the look on her face when Hannah showed up to our first summer practice.

  4. In which Drew begins to suspect that he may have been misled.

  On a blazing-hot Saturday morning near the end of August, I drove Hannah thirty-some miles to the Briarwood School for her first cross-country practice. I remembered first practices from my high-school and college days as relaxed long runs, getting to know each other, laying down a distance base. Coach Doyle didn’t work that way. He
started every season with a five-mile time trial, a mock race run on a hilly course laid out through the woods around the school. Hannah was not amused.

  “This is stupid,” she said as we pulled into the students’ lot. “Why should we run a time trial before we’ve even started practicing?”

  “Motivation,” I said. “You’re more likely to put in the work over the summer if you know you’re going to have to show what you’ve got in the bank on the first day out.”

  “Bank?” she said. “Don’t you mean hayloft?”

  I sighed and cut the power.

  “Whatever. You know what I mean.”

  I got out of the car. I was sweating before I could get the door closed. Hannah hadn’t moved. I walked around to the passenger side, waited for a minute, then knocked on her window.

  “Hey,” I said. “Are you coming?”

  She opened the door and climbed out. She looked like she was about to throw up.

  “Hannah? Are you okay?”

  She shook her head.

  “I don’t know, Dad. It’s really hot. Do I seriously have to do this?”

  I stared at her.

  “Really? Hannah, you’ve known this was coming all summer, and it’s not any hotter than it’s been for the last month and a half. Are you sick?”

  “No,” she said. “I’m fine. Let’s just get it over with.”

  She picked up her water bottle, slammed the car door, and slouched off toward the soccer field. I followed a few steps behind. I’d never seen Hannah nervous before. I wasn’t sure whether to be more worried or amused.

  The team was gathered at the edge of the school grounds—fifteen boys and fourteen girls sitting in a circle in the grass, with Coach Doyle at the center. Doyle was younger than I’d imagined, short and light-bodied, with a shaved head covered in fine red stubble, and a face like an angry ferret. He walked slowly around the circle, crouching down to speak to a runner here or there, then standing and using his hands to wipe the sweat from his face. Hannah sat down at the edge of the group, took a long pull on her water bottle, and started stretching. Doyle stopped and watched her for a moment, but moved on without speaking.