The concept of a cross-country meet, all those situations she knew so well—girls pressed into the starter box like slaughterhouse cattle, the kindergarten chaos of the first two hundred meters—not a single thought of it occurred to Liv over a weekend of skinner food prep and feverish dreams. Nothing of the event touched her until Monday morning while walking from her parked car to the school, the keys in her hand making her fist look even more like the weapon it had become.
“There she is. Our jailbird.”
Liv looked up, half-blinded by the rising sun, and saw Monica, wrapped in a sleek jacket, standing like the bow of a ship with Krista, Darla, Laurie, and Amber fanned out to either side. It was windy, and Monica’s long, highlighted hair whipped like a flag, beautiful and savage. Liv woke up nauseated every day now, but at this instant was glad she’d skipped breakfast; her stomach flopped, like it did anytime Monica turned on her.
“Ha,” Liv said, hoping to play it off.
“Forty-nine,” Monica said.
Liv had a sense where this was headed, and she felt a falling sensation, like the balance she’d kept in the face of the captured skinner had been but a few toes on a narrow ledge.
“Monroeville: forty-four,” Monica said, and the inference was clear: Had Liv, one of Bloughton’s top runners, been racing, they would have won handily. For Monica, coming in second was worse than coming in tenth. Such nearness infuriated her.
“Oh,” Liv said, the most pitiful syllable.
Monica shrugged like she didn’t care, the biggest tell that anger had been eating at her all weekend. “At least we won’t have the stress of maintaining a perfect record all year.”
“I’ll be back in two meets.” Outside the reverberating box of the Armory, Liv’s voice was a dead leaf, whisked away with the breeze. “I’m sorry.”
Monica tapped her chin as if in thought, before gesturing at the girls behind her. “That’s good to know, since none of us got a way-to-go text about the meet, or anything, really.”
Krista winced at Liv, a look of apology, but how much was that worth? Krista said nothing and made no motion on Liv’s behalf. Liv considered that old saw, I’ve been busy, but Monica would ask what, exactly, was keeping her so busy, and Liv didn’t have the strength to generate the necessary lies.
None were required, at least this morning. Monica whipped her head, a show-horse gesture, and the wind threw her hair into a whirl of daggers. She said one more thing, which Liv missed—no doubt one of her practiced dollops of sweetness laced with arsenic—and then headed for the school’s back door. The girls, tapping gadgets to pretend to have missed the conversation, trailed after Monica, wiggling goodbye fingers at Liv. Only Krista lingered, raising her eyebrows as an invite to join them, but Liv felt like her ankle had been snared in a big metal trap in the woods. The difference being that she didn’t struggle. She wondered why as Krista walked away.
“That was cold.”
She looked back to see Bruno Mayorga striding along the line of rusty, dirt-crusted teachers’ cars. At the edge of the student lot, she could see what must be Bruno’s vehicle, a rectangle-shaped jalopy with a replacement trunk of a different color, currently swallowed in noxious blue exhaust. Bruno, though, looked as clean as ever, his collar so sharp it must have been ironed that morning, his silver belt buckle a minor sun. What shocked Liv was how quickly his brightness, of buckle but also of eye, punctured her dark matter and began to bleed it out.
He stood an inch closer than he ought to, something Liv noticed immediately but decided was all right.
Bruno nodded toward the rear exit. “Did you kill their cats?”
Liv sighed a sequence: “Baldwin, Gamble, suspension, cross-country.”
Bruno tsked. “You sports people. So competitive.”
“I bet the drama kids have knives hovering over each other’s backs.”
“I’ll let you know. Auditions are today. Oh, sorry. Maybe that pisses you off.”
Liv barely had energy enough to shrug beneath her backpack’s weight. “Doesn’t matter. I can’t do anything about it.”
“Look, I’m just some jerk auditioning for a play. But those girls? Not to be all parental, but shouldn’t your friends be nicer to you?”
Liv couldn’t hold her head up. She found herself staring at Bruno’s shirt buttons, pearlescent discs popped through tidy, seamed holes, everything in its place.
“They like me how I am now. They didn’t think of me before.”
“Before your dad did the play,” Bruno surmised.
“Before all of it.” She wanted to take one of his shirt buttons between her fingers, relish its small, containable cleanliness. “After my dad disappeared, I only had Doug, you know? I was the crazy man’s daughter. So I got into sports. Made friends. All that.” She squinted at him, way up there, his poof of hair like a bird’s plumage, something to cradle. “They’re never going to understand what that was like.”
“Not to restate the obvious,” Bruno said, “but I know.”
This boy’s newness in her life, ignorance of social orders, and refreshing distance from her backyard shed must have been the qualities that put Liv at such ease. It was like being in a hot bath; anxieties dripped from her pores and became steam.
“Be the tallest you can,” she said.
“Well, all right,” Bruno said. “I mean, I’m five-eleven. I’m trying.”
She smiled. “We used to have these neighbors, the Dawkinses. There’s a pond between our places, and my dad dragged Major Dawkins’s daughter out of it once.”
Bruno’s forehead pinched, and Liv read the look: the realization that Lee Fleming wasn’t just some irrelevant wacko being disgraced by Baldwin’s Oliver!
“Dad always said she would’ve been fine,” she added. “She was just caught up in the cattails. But the major didn’t believe it. He’d have a birthday barbecue every year with all his military friends, but the only one he saluted was my dad.”
“I think right this second is the nicest I’ve ever felt about our military,” Bruno said.
Liv laughed. “Yeah. Major Dawkins was good. The last barbecue was right between when Dad said he was abducted and when he disappeared for good.”
“When he was sick.”
“So sick,” Liv replied, grateful that he remembered. “And the major pulled him aside and it was…” She exhaled loudly. “I guess because the major was so big and strong, Dad just looked … I mean, the major had to hold him up. I don’t know if I ever saw two friends more…”
Bruno gestured at the school. “That’s what I’m saying. Those girls. How hard is it to be supported? If you were my friend…”
Liv met his brown eyes, several shades lighter in direct sun. It was the second time she’d caught him off guard, and the fact that she could be amused by it made her feel human, no matter what was going on in the alternate world of her backyard. She gazed at the football practice field, the sun turning the goalposts into bars of gold, the tufts of sod into gold nuggets.
“I couldn’t hear what the major was saying,” she said, “but whatever it was, my dad was crying and nodding his head, and then I heard one thing: Be the tallest you can. The major told him that. I’ve always thought it was a lovely thing to say.”