Little Pretty Things

by Lori Rader-Day

  I set myself up at a study carrel. When I sat down, I was met with the particular scent of old pages and dust. Memories came rushing from all angles. I was seventeen again, anxious to get outside to the track, to go home after practice and make a sandwich out of whatever I could find, and, mouth still full, pick up the phone to see if Maddy was home yet. We’d rehash everything that had happened, as though it hadn’t happened to us both.

  Had I turned and found Maddy in the next carrel, I wouldn’t have been surprised. This place was haunted. Everywhere I turned, there she was.

  The girls took a bit longer than they probably needed to but were soon carting out the thick books three at a time, heavy in their skinny arms. On the last trip, the ponytailed girl added a single book to the top of the stack. “One of them’s missing.”

  I nudged the books into a stack and ran my finger along the spines. “You’re kidding,” I said. My year? What were the odds? I checked again. “That year, out of all the years? It’s really gone?”

  “Stolen,” said ponytail as her friend went back to the desk. “Mrs. Jasper—that’s the librarian—was super mad. That’s when she started keeping them in the back. She said people couldn’t be trusted. ‘They’d steal the shirt off your back.’ That’s what she said.”

  The piranha girl made an impatient noise to draw her friend back to her.

  “Yeah,” I said. I’d already been laying plans for how I could slip that same book out of the building. My hands didn’t itch this time—they ached. I might have called it a sense memory of holding the book, but I’d hardly had it in my hands the first time. Maddy had flown through the pages before letting me see for myself what they’d said.

  Third wheel on the track team bus. That was it.

  Now that I remembered what they’d said about me, the insult stung all over again, probably because of its truth. And now more truth: People couldn’t be trusted. And given half the chance, I’d have been one of them.

  I put a protective hand on the top of the stack. “I’ll still take a look at these.”

  “Let me know when you’re done so I can put them away,” the girl said, reaching for the end of her ponytail. “Mrs. Jasper—”

  “Yep.”

  When she was gone, I took the top book and cracked it to the table of contents. It had been a while since I’d looked through one of these. Student life. Clubs. Sports. Tombstoned rows of young faces, all shoulders canted to the same angle, all eyes turned toward the same mid-distant focus. All chins pointed toward the finish line.

  From the advantage of ten years, everyone looked young, naive, and badly dressed. I found the book for my freshman year and flipped to the pages for my class, jarring my own memory. Maddy Bell’s face was wedged between two buck-toothed boys with heavy eyebrows I’d completely forgotten. Even Maddy seemed less familiar. But she was there. I’d almost expected to find her portrait missing, the box where her photo should have been suddenly empty.

  My senior yearbook was the only one missing. Stolen. What was so special about the year I graduated? No special anniversary year for the school. No championship team in any sport. No major news events covered in shallow, student-journalism depth. We’d lived through a year like any other year. Classes, homecoming, spring break, track meets, prom. And then graduation, an occasion I was learning had been merely ceremonious to some of us. I couldn’t remember much of it, even as the memories pressed at me.

  I found the book for the year ahead of me, and turned to the senior class. Then the book for two years ahead, then three. A sea of faces, all young, almost all white. Midway wasn’t the middle of anything except nowhere, after all. Finally, in the book from the year before I started at Midway High, five years ahead of my class, there she was, deep in the S’s and looking just as she should, a girl with the right haircut, the right clothes.

  Kristina Switzer had dark hair and serious dark eyes. Not pretty, exactly, but striking. The kind of face you’d remember. Did I remember it? Like everyone else in the book, she could have been someone I knew, like she might come into the Mid-Night, the bar, once in a while, or maybe she’d waved me ahead of her at a stop sign or blocked my way in the frozen-food aisle of the IGA last week. We’d missed each other at Midway by a year. In my hurry to reach the index in the back of the book, I tore a page.

  I checked to see if the library assistants would take the opportunity to scold me, but they’d returned to their own conversation.

  In the index, Kristina Switzer’s yearbook appearances were limited to two pages, the one with her senior photo and one other. I flipped to that page and found the track team, of course. Again, her face jumped out at me. She seemed older than the other girls, more worldly. In a snapshot, Coach leaned in, his hand gripping Kristina’s shoulder for focus. In the team photo, her uniform showed off shapely arms and collarbones as sharp as knives. Her long, black hair fanned over one shoulder. She stood between Fitz and Coach in the back row, the center spot that in most group photos would belong to the tallest member. On the Midway High track team, though, it belonged to the star.

  I forgot the book in my hands, the memory rushing at me, whole and full.

  Every year, Fitz shuffled the players into position for the impatient photographer while the rest of us waited to see how we stacked up, then preened or fidgeted with the ranking we’d been given. For the photo our senior year, I knew where I’d be situated, and yet I couldn’t help hoping that somehow Fitz would realize the special dispensation that needed to be made. Yes, Maddy in the center, of course. But why couldn’t I stand next to her, and Fitz on the other side of me, he and Coach like bookends to us both?

  But tradition was tradition. Maddy went into the championship slot, and I was put at Fitz’s other side. It was an early spring day, all of us cold and exposed in our uniforms. In a minute, we’d go back into the locker room and change into our practice gear, saving the clean uniforms for the first meet. But for the blink of the camera’s shutter, we’d ignore the breeze coming off the empty cornfield behind the school. We’d toughen up and gaze fiercely into the lens. This was before sectionals, then regionals, then the big show, as the coaches called it as they urged us around the track. Before the season had even started, so that the yearbook could be done by the time school ended for the summer. At the moment the camera clicked, the future lay ahead of us. We all thought we had a state champ on the team. Maddy.

  Standing at Fitz’s side, I’d noticed how he turned toward her. Protective. Claiming the prize he already knew she would bring them. That left me with his shoulder, his back. My teeth chattered in the cold.

  Now I studied Kristina’s team. A few of the girls could have been on the team when Maddy and I joined as freshmen, but none of them stood out to me. I closed the book on Kristina and turned to the yearbook for our junior year again and the track team photo there. Maddy, the coaches, me—and then three rows of girls I should have known.

  I didn’t.

  I closed the book and stared at the date on the spine, now long past. Just like Maddy had said. When you were going as fast as we were, everything and everyone else was only a blur.

  And just like Maddy had said more recently, so much time had been wasted. So much lost.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  In the last period of the day, I met up again with the girls from the library. They’d changed into gym clothes in good faith, so I remembered to give them credit for yearbooks lifted and hauled. The class was made up of seniors already counting down the days until graduation. Complainers all, they didn’t want to run but eventually they, too, saved their breath.

  When I released them to go change at the end of the day, a few came back still wearing their PE clothes and their hair still in sweaty ponytails. At the final bell, they swung duffels over their shoulders and, instead of heading toward the buses or the parking lot, trudged out the back door of the gym. I ran to use the pay phone in the cafeteria to call Lu for a ride home, then followed them.

  Coach leaned on his e
lbows on the inner fence separating the track from the stands. “Did you wear out my girls?”

  “Maybe a little,” I said.

  “What happened to you?”

  I reached for my lip, still tender. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw someone approaching. It was the girl I’d advised to join the team earlier, the gazelle. Back in her street clothes, she seemed less like a track star and more like that bruiser on the locker-room floor with a handful of the other girl’s hair in her fist. She was solid, outfitted in sturdy boots and a leather jacket far too warm for the weather. “I might have brought you a present,” I said, nodding in her direction.

  Coach shaded his eyes and watched the figure coming slowly our way. “How in the world did you do that? Fitzie’s had his eye on her all year. He thought she might anchor a relay team.”

  “Those are thirty-two-hundred-meter legs, in my opinion,” I said.

  “Well, that’s your area of expertise,” he said, flashing me a beaming grin. Coach was a sprinter, himself. “In my opinion of your opinion, you might be a fine recruiter. Well done.”

  He hurried off to coax the girl toward the track. I watched after him, his praise leaving me breathless, like a punch in the gut. I didn’t like to think how much his words meant to me, how long it had been since someone had noticed I was good at anything. How long it had been since I’d been good at anything. Leaning on the fence like this, being here in this place, I missed my dad.

  “No chance she wants to be a manager, huh?” someone said. “Isn’t she a freshman?”

  Behind me on the lowest benches of the stands, the rest of the team tied their shoes and arranged their headbands, cutting secret glances toward Coach and the new recruit.

  “It’s not you who needs to worry,” said one of the other girls. “Right, Mickie?”

  “I can beat her,” said a girl lying on her side along a bleacher plank higher up. The other girl from the fight. She had a scratch down one cheek and a dark bruise on one of her arms, but she might have been lounging poolside at a spa. “One way or another.”

  “Juliet,” called Coach. “Are you staying for practice?”

  I glanced back at the girls. They’d gone quiet. “Until my ride gets here,” I said. “What do you need?”

  “Get the girls warmed up, will you?”

  “I’m warm enough,” said one I recognized from the last-hour PE class.

  “Stay that way, then,” I said. “Let’s go, ladies.”

  They rose in a group. “Have you noticed that all coaches call us ‘ladies’?” one of the girls said.

  “Except Coach, right? Girls.”

  “Technically that’s what you are, though, right?” I said. They went silent again. I felt the wave of curiosity and suspicion coming off them, but it only urged me on. “If you mean age. I mean, that’s the division between being a girl and being, well, a woman.” I sounded like an idiot even to myself. They’d called me a coach.

  “Mickie’s eighteen,” someone said.

  We all gave Mickie another glance. She was gorgeous—slim and lithe as a dancer, her dark hair in that thick braid. I looked around. All the girls were gorgeous. Young, bright-eyed, their skin poured milk, their tiny waists accentuated by the slim-fitting running gear they’d chosen. Little pretty things, all of them. Kids were cuter these days. Or we’d been just as beautiful, and hadn’t known it.

  “Fine,” I said. “Young-women Panthers, let’s blow the dust off the track.”

  Once the girls got moving, they stopped fussing. Coach took his time courting the gazelle—Jessica, I remembered—so I had the chance to check out his pool of talent. Mickie was the star, of course. No one on the track could touch her. She was certainly the girl Mrs. Haggerty had mentioned, the one destined to sweep Maddy’s records off the walls of Midway High once and for all.

  Beautiful, elegant on her feet, and twice as fast as I had ever hoped to be. I imagined the Midway High trophy case filled with her name, and those with Maddy’s and mine shoved to the back and, eventually, into some back-hall storage.

  I didn’t like her.

  The other girls didn’t, either. Every start, she bolted ahead. At every finish line, she crossed the white line long before her next competitor. No split-second finishes here. Mickie didn’t simply win. She killed. She even outpaced the sprinters. Distance runners weren’t supposed to be the stars, but this girl hadn’t heard that. By the time I gave them five to go take swigs from their water bottles, the easy camaraderie of the bleachers before practice was gone. While the girls gathered around the pile of their duffels and joked easily together, Mickie stood alone. In this isolation, she reminded me of Maddy. She had the straight back of someone who was used to turning it on everyone else. The price of championship, of winning too often and by too large a gap.

  One of the girls had been playing music on her phone, singing along. A new song started, and they all joined in. Even Mickie, taking dainty sips at her water bottle, mouthed a few lines. The lyrics were lost to me until the tune dropped into a rap and an angry voice said something I wasn’t sure I’d heard correctly. Something about tying a woman he loved to a bed and setting the house around it on fire.

  “Wait, what?” I said, a chill going through me. “Shut that off.”

  They exchanged confused glances. “What? It’s just a song.”

  “Nothing is ever just a song,” I said, not even sure what I meant. I stared at the girl’s phone until she silenced it.

  Coach was approaching from the gates. “I don’t know how you did it, Jules,” he said. He waved the girls back onto the track and set his stopwatch. With a single nod of his head, the team shot off the starting line and into a loping, long-distance stride.

  “Is she joining the team?”

  “We’ll see if Jessica’s interest survives the night. She’s bringing some gear tomorrow.” He winked at me. “She’s going to try us out. She seems to have a very busy schedule we need to work around.”

  “Well, I hope you all meet her requirements,” I said. I couldn’t help admiring Jessica’s sense of herself. “She’s got some stiff competition.”

  “Mickie, you mean.” We both looked out to find her. It wasn’t difficult, as far out front as she was. “She’s the real thing, Jules. It’s been a long time since—”

  He slammed his fist at the chain link. A few of the girls glanced back at the noise. When he leaned on the fence again, one set of knuckles was scraped and bleeding. “I’m just so angry. She deserved more.”

  “I know,” I said. In that instant, my jealous guardianship of Maddy’s records was finished. I hoped Mickie stripped them all, and good riddance. Maddy was dead, and Coach, Fitz, and I were the only ones who kept watch. We would see her memory erased from Midway, from history, from everything but our own minds. The whole world would forget or pretend to, in order to spare us the pain of remembering. But I already knew a little about this. The worst tragedy of loss was that the world kept spinning.

  I begged off to go meet Lu, hurrying away before I made a fool of myself in front of these self-possessed girls. Or in front of Coach, who was barely keeping himself together for the sake of the team. For my sake. Fitz took care of everyone, he’d said, but that wasn’t the entire truth.

  As I walked toward the parking lot, I noticed another lone figure at the outer fence. We recognized each other at the same time. Officer Courtney Howard—in her civilian jeans and a sweater, as small as any of the girls on the team—strode toward me.

  “What are you doing here?” I said.

  “Was going to ask you the same thing.” Her eyes scaled the length of my track-pant stripes. At least I wasn’t wearing my too-short Mid-Night Inn uniform this time.

  “I was called in to substitute teach today,” I said. “Phys ed.”

  “I imagine school was over at three o’clock, like every other day of the year.”

  Somehow we’d fallen into the well-tread tracks of interrogator and interrogated. “I don’t think there’s a
ny reason why I’m not allowed to stay and assist the team, is there?” I said. “I mean, I’m not a felon.”

  “Not yet,” she said.

  “Get off it, Courtney. You don’t really think I killed Maddy. You can’t possibly believe that.”

  She pushed her chin out toward the track and watched the girls circling. “I’m not sure what I believe. But—” Her eyes shifted around, trying to avoid mine. “But I suppose I think it’s pretty unlikely that you did it.”

  “I knew it.”

  “Unlikely,” she said. “Not impossible.”

  “What’s more likely, then? That I conjured her out of thin air after ten years only to hang her—which, how strong would you have to be to pull that off?” An image fluttered out of memory. “Like, like—oh, shit. What about the dead guy? Oh, my God—”

  “Dead guy? What are you talking about?” Courtney’s attention was all mine.

  “He’s not really—it’s a long story,” I said. “The guy staying in room two-oh-six. He checked out that morning. I was taking his trash—oh, that’s why he was so neat—”

  “I have a lot of questions right now, but I’ll jump to the end,” Courtney said. “We checked that trash bag. Nothing but a lot of—let’s just say he was spending a lot of quality time alone—but no trace of him anywhere near her room or the trash bin, and we’re checking his alibi for the time of Maddy’s death—”

  “How does he have an alibi for being in his room?”

  “Her name is Brandi.” Courtney looked back toward the girls on the track. “She graduated from Midway last year.”

  Like Billy said, we catered to weirdos and wackjobs. And apparently a certain clientele who kept themselves too busy making new friends to rack up long-distance charges calling wives and girlfriends back home. It went to show you could never tell about a person. The dead guy had seemed so pudgy and innocent, like an oversized baby, but he’d had a barely legal girl in his room.