Little Pretty Things

by Lori Rader-Day

  Surely the third wheel on the track team bus.

  It had less sting, finally. I’d only stuck so close to Beck and Maddy by her request, after all. I’d been loyal, once. That was nothing to be ashamed of.

  I skimmed ahead for Maddy’s section. The song I didn’t remember, and she didn’t have a quote. But the yearbook staff had had their say:

  #1 in distance on the track team. All the way, all seasons.

  I read it again. This was the thing she hadn’t wanted me to read? It was presumptuous, and look where it had gotten them. The season hadn’t even started when the yearbook had gone to press. If I’d won state, the Tracks staff would have gotten things badly wrong.

  As it was, calling Maddy number one in distance had been a safe bet. But to say she went all the way—

  I looked back at what they’d printed. Then to mine. Third wheel … on the bus?

  I flipped through the pages, rereading all the entries. The names, the lyrics, the callouts.

  Beck had never been on the bus.

  Loose thoughts wanted to come together, but I held them apart, sorted them one by one as I flipped through the pages.

  Third wheel on the track team bus. So specific. So detailed.

  But these were high-school students scrapbooking their memories and friends, with a few snarky words for anyone they didn’t like.

  Shadows gathered just at the edge of my mind.

  I shook them off and began cutting the pictures apart. My hands worked at Shelly’s paper dolls, trying to do a good job, but hurrying, urged on by six sharp. Despite the deadline closing in, my mind wandered. Nothing sinister there. It couldn’t be. High-school kids weren’t capable—

  But they were. I knew they were. Hadn’t Mickie seen through Jessica? Hadn’t she kept score, taken notes, bided her time, and then landed the gut punch at the right moment? Were kids so different today?

  I found myself holding the trimmed-out photo of Beck.

  He’d never been on the bus, but I was still the third wheel. What was the pay-off for that joke?

  What did it mean, if the joke had never been on me? If it had never been a joke at all?

  I went back to the stack, turning the pages slowly. There was nothing about Beck. The yearbook staff had liked him—or perhaps, like me, didn’t know what to make of him. Or had forgotten him. Or had left him outside, willingly, knowingly.

  There was something right and just about that, given how things turned out.

  I went back to the paper faces, trimming and glancing furiously at the clock, where time raced away from me, like a nightmare where no matter how fast I ran, I only fell farther behind.

  They would want me to speak at the service. I hadn’t thought of a thing to say.

  All the way, all seasons.

  The only way I could have been a third wheel on the track team bus—

  I’d held the thoughts apart, but now they slammed together, nothing but wreckage. Shards started flying out.

  Sexualized. Beck, saying she wanted away from the team. Courtney’s keen eyes as Fitz nursed my twisted ankle.

  The scissors fell from my hand.

  Fitz stumbling for the door away from the house. I’d guessed then that the puzzle had fallen together for him on who’d gotten Maddy pregnant, but I’d gotten the details wrong.

  I stood up. I couldn’t believe what I was thinking.

  Watch what you say, and who you say it to.

  I had no evidence. It was only a terrible feeling, a terrible, sinking realization that I’d been living in a world parallel to the real one. I felt as though I had believed in the Easter bunny for a decade longer than everyone else.

  No. It couldn’t be true. I walked to the end of the room and back, then again. On the end table, my own heavy-metal smile gleamed up at me, my own narrow shoulders in a Midway High team jersey. I paced past it twice, three times. I wanted to reach in and shake that girl. What did she know that I had forgotten? What had she ignored that I couldn’t now know?

  “Juliet?” my mother called from the kitchen. “It’s almost time to leave, if you’re going to get there on time.”

  I felt again for the wad of money at my hip, the diamond snug inside. I didn’t want to get there was the problem. The responsibility of speaking for another human being, of explaining another person’s life to a crowd—I didn’t want it. I didn’t know how to do it. I stopped in front of the photo of myself again. I might as well be that skinny little kid again, running, running—

  Running as fast as I could for as long as I could. Wasn’t that what I’d said to Maddy that night? To tell her that I’d been doing my best?

  But I wasn’t doing it now. I turned away from the ridiculous photo of myself.

  She’d run the same way, she’d said that night. Only faster because she was being chased. And I’d assumed she meant me.

  I’d understood her every move to be about me. My life had been too much about her, hadn’t it? Like the photo behind the frame—

  The image filled my vision. Maddy and I carried our first-and second-place trophies like infants in our arms, all of us watching Coach accept his due, at last.

  She’d been leading me there the whole time. If only I’d been following as closely behind as I should have been.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  In the car, I started practicing a few words, aloud.

  “Maddy Bell was my best friend.”

  This seemed too past tense and yet still not past tense enough for a friendship that had fallen to pieces ten years ago. “Maddy Bell was …”

  I was late, and I hadn’t finished the nametags. Facing Shelly’s wrath would not be the most gut-wrenching thing I would do today, I suspected. I pressed harder on the gas pedal. Maybe it was the high heels I was wearing, but I felt as though I was driving through mud. Cars zoomed past me. “Maddy Bell was a winner. She was everything we all wanted to be.”

  Could I pass it off as true? “Maddy Bell was everything I wanted to be,” I said.

  What had Maddy been? Fast. But that could mean something else, couldn’t it? A word my mother might have used. Sexualized. Not the kind of opening you left when saying final words. “Maddy Bell was …”

  A semi roared past me as though my car was parked in the slow lane. I checked the gauge and stamped my foot on the gas, pedal to the floor, all or nothing.

  The car shuddered under me, bucking in a giant forward motion, then immediately nothing, no sound, no power. I pulled the stiff steering wheel as hard as I could to the right and let the car drift, dead, to the side of the road. I tried the key. Nothing.

  Cars rushed by, as though I were still standing at the fence at the back of the Mid-Night. That scraggly tree in the courtyard seemed years in the past, like it was someone else’s story, someone else’s life.

  I let the seat back, and something rolled up against my foot. I reached down and pulled up the silver running-man trophy topper from Maddy’s room. Here was evidence—evidence against me. What would Gretchen say if I returned him to her?

  I tucked the little guy into my purse. It was getting crowded in there. I hadn’t trusted any one spot in my room to leave behind the tip cash or the diamond, so I’d brought them both with me, the diamond in a plastic baggie meant for bologna sandwiches.

  The door creaked as I emerged high heels first from the car into the dust of a passing tractor-trailer. The driver laid on the horn as he passed, tooting merrily for a mile to let me know his thoughts on my legs. I tugged down the skirt of my dress, checking back toward Midway, then on toward the city. In both directions, only roaring highway, no exits, no fast-food joints, no gas stations with pay phones. Who would I call, anyway? My mother had no way to come pick me up, if she could still drive.

  Coach or Fitz—

  No one could be trusted. I still couldn’t fully believe what simmered just below the surface of what I would allow myself to think.

  I started walking back toward town. There would be no ceremony for me, no spee
ches, no reunion.

  This was all fine, though something tugged at me to turn in the other direction.

  A car blared its horn on the way past. God, was it the dress? The high heels? Was it being female in public? No one stopped, but I felt ridiculously exposed. I had nothing to arm myself with but the slightly pointy trophy topper. I turned my head resolutely away from the passing cars, toward the horizon. The sun had finally begun to set, but the sky was not yet dark enough for the first stars, or for the cover of darkness. What was I missing, if I skipped the reunion, after all? The chance to compare my messed-up life to everyone else’s?

  The speech. I would miss the chance to get it right.

  “Maddy was—”

  Maddy was. Maddy was. I hated the phrase. I hated how quickly a person passed from life, from memory. Could I remember my father’s voice? Could I remember what it was like to have him grab me off my feet for a hug? Tears welled in my eyes and I smeared them away.

  Maddy had never had that.

  Maybe she’d always had her moment with Coach and Fitz, those little gestures that let her know she had someone on her side. That little squeeze on the shoulder to—

  Another long horn blast. I realized I’d come to a stop, staring sightless into the cornfields. That little squeeze on the shoulder. I’d seen it a million times. I’d been jealous of it. I’d seethed. Maddy was special. Maddy was the favorite. But what did it mean? We’re with you? We’re proud.

  Steady now.

  The words came unbidden, and then so did the memory of Coach gripping Mickie by the shoulder.

  The cornstalks swayed in a breeze. Maddy was smart. She’d left me that photo not as a gesture of friendship but to make me understand something about her life, to pull me closer. Maybe even to pull me along, because she knew it could be the last act of her life.

  “Maddy was brave,” I said, starting to walk again, toward Midway, toward home. Maddy was—

  Maddy was not the last of them.

  I stopped, turned, and started to run.

  The shoes were a bad idea. I paused to pull them off and started again, carrying one in each hand. The sun dropped quickly now, its bright pink-orange heat against my cheek. I watched the road. A piece of glass or a nail right now would be the end.

  It was already the end, but I didn’t let myself think about that. I needed the focus of my youth. I needed Maddy’s ponytail jouncing against her shoulder just there ahead of me, so that’s what I imagined. I kept my thoughts just there, and the rest of it at bay through sheer will.

  That’s how the truck crept up on me.

  I didn’t hear the engine or the crunch of tires pulling up behind me. When the driver decided to let me know he was there with a tap of his horn, I stumbled and fell into the grit and rock at the side of the road, wrenching the my tender ankle. At my back, I heard a door creak open. I threw my shoes to the side and hurried to grab the running man from my purse. He was at least metal.

  “You throwing up again?”

  Beck. Violent relief washed over me.

  “You OK?” he called.

  I picked myself up, dusting the gravel from my knee and retrieving my shoes. He was dangling from the open passenger door of his pickup. As I approached, he leaned back. He wore a button-up shirt and black pants instead of jeans. He looked me up and down. “Guess you’re going my way,” he said.

  I had to hitch the skirt of my dress a little too high to crawl up into his truck. Beck cleared his throat and busied himself studying the traffic in the rearview. “That your hunk of junk back there? Were you planning to run the whole way?”

  I closed the door. My breath was labored, loud inside the truck cab. “If I had to,” I said.

  He swung the steering wheel and got us moving. “I guess I didn’t want to go to this all that bad. Especially the—first part, whatever that’s going to be. But all of it, really. People talking behind my back all night …”

  His profile was lit by the raging sunset over my shoulder. “Only Courtney knows about that,” I said. “And—well, the coaches.” I waited to see what he made of that. Beck was never on the bus. Had he figured out who had been?

  “Can Courtney’s exposé be far behind, though?”

  “I wouldn’t worry about Courtney—”

  “Up until the moment she arrests me,” he said, “I plan not to think of her at all.”

  Watch what you say and who you say it to. I checked the scrape on my knee, feeling Beck’s eyes on me.

  “You know something,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I know you, Townsend. What are you hiding?”

  “You don’t know me,” I said, thinking about the diamond in my purse. Nobody knew me, not really. Not anymore. And even Maddy might have been surprised. Someone had taken her life, but now I was stealing it.

  “Better than you think,” he said, sitting up in his seat. “Anyway. Something happened, right?”

  “You once said Maddy couldn’t wait to get away from Coach and Fitz. Why did you think that?”

  We both watched a mile tick by. Unlike my car, his truck could handle the speed limit, plus some. “Well,” he said slowly. “She used to say things, about getting away, about starting over. I think she felt pressured to be great, to follow in their footsteps. The Olympics, even.”

  “And she didn’t want that?” Hadn’t we both wanted that? I wanted to win now, and yet there was no prize, no competition but the obstacles I set for myself. Maybe this was what adulthood was. No more trophies. No more tapes to break through, and all the striving in the world guaranteed nothing.

  “Honestly?” he said. “I don’t know anymore. It was years ago and I don’t know if I ever—”

  “Yeah.”

  He glanced at me and quickly back to the road. “Did the Olympic torch burn brightly in your soul, then? Is that what you wanted?”

  It was so long ago. I tried to remember what I’d actually wanted back then. All I could come up with was that sweaty hug from my dad at the end of every race, of the silly games and songs on the bus on the way back to school. Of Maddy racing the Coach of the Year trophy toward the front of the bus, laughing. “I think I wanted to be part of something,” I said. “And I was.”

  We rode into the city’s edges in silence.

  “She did that for me, too,” he said at last, so quietly I thought he might not want me to hear it. “People expect something of me, still, because I was with her, did you know that? She created me. Without her, I wouldn’t have existed. I didn’t mind so much then. Well, I didn’t get it, did I? I was just a kid. Now I wonder what I might have been, if she’d just left me alone. I think you might be the only one who—who understands what I mean. Without thinking I’m a monster for saying it.”

  I didn’t think him a monster, but it disappointed me for some reason. Maybe because he was just a guy who still didn’t understand the full scope of what we were bumping up against—Maddy’s past, but also Jessica being taken home in a police car, and all the girls Billy had pressed into service. The girls at the school, preening and hating each other. Mickie was on my mind. What had that sad, erratic girl with the swagger of a woman twice her age been through already? Who among us had become what we might have been? Who had been giving out the chances, and who had been yanking them away?

  As we neared downtown Indianapolis, I caught just the barest glimpse of the university stadium where our state finals had run on without us, lit up for someone else’s activity. Beck took the long way to the Luxe, spinning a full turn around the circle monument at the center of the city before arriving at the hotel. We had barely paused in the curved drive before a valet was tugging at my door. I hopped out on bare feet and reached back for my heels and purse.

  A clutch of onlookers waiting for their car watched as I slipped into my shoes. A woman among them stared in horror at the streak of dried blood down my shin. I grinned at her. Beck, having finally let the parking guy claim his keys, came around the truck hood,
tucking his shirt into the back of his pants. His black boots were dusty. We made a pair, exactly like two kids from Midway High would look walking into a place they didn’t belong and didn’t want to be. I swept my hair over my shoulders, for a wild moment considered taking Beck’s arm.

  “What?” he said.

  “Nothing.”

  We turned toward the wide, golden revolving door, turning on its own at the pace suitable for ball gowns and prim old ladies. I entered, then Beck jostled in behind me, close, and then too close, stepping on the back of my heel. “Sorry,” he mumbled into my hair.

  Inside, the hotel shined as brightly as my memories: the tall, winding stairs to the protruding mezzanine above, the pearl marble floors streaked with silver below. Feasting my eyes all around, I paused at the ornate filigree of the banister spindles on the mezzanine then looked away, but not soon enough.

  My child’s mind had stored the opulence, the sparkle. Now I saw the decorative detail—all the elaborate and sumptuous features—as things that would need to be cleaned.

  A lot of Shinez-All and old toothbrushes had gone into this place.

  But the ghosts lived here, too. We had run up that curved staircase and across the slick marble mezzanine to gaze over the glowing lobby below, giggling and daring the coaches to correct us.

  “Look at the bald spot on the back of Trenton’s head,” Maddy had said behind her hand. She’d taken to calling him by his last name, a habit I’d assumed she’d picked up from Beck or his rough friends. “From up here, you can see it shine like the moon. Like the moooooon,” she crowed out so that everyone looked our way—other runners, other coaches, some snooty people huffy and put out that they’d booked a nice hotel only to find it overrun by participants in the high-school track meet going on down the street. Fitz guided Coach back to the business of getting us checked in and away from any scolding or correcting. Coach liked Maddy to be the silvered girl on the top of the trophy at all times: fast, stoic, gleaming, a prize. He didn’t like her fooling around, especially on stairs. She could get hurt and then where would we be?