The Tott sisters swung open their doors. They each extended from opposite sides of their shared Honda Civic, a Rorschach test against the dark sky. (Depending on whether or not you have siblings, you could either see two girls, a butterfly, or a cattle skull.) Avery drove in her sock feet. Lisa wore a specific pair of shoes designed for trail running. Avery shoved her unmatching socks into their shoes without untying. Lisa re-tied her double-knots, tucking the loops under. Avery tossed the keys behind the left back tire. And Lisa stared into the dark.
Now they heard the sound above the crickets: a melodramatic gasp, the ensuing squeal of insistence, and the soft windchime of faraway laughter, a hyperbole in the dark. Lisa’s bones straightened. The girls were already here. And they were performing. She saw them do it all the time. Individually everyone was calm and sensible, but existing within the context of the team turned them into songbirds, every expression amplified and — she hated to use this word negatively — feminized. Lisa imagined it was all to prove how close they were, how fun they were, but nothing they talked about seemed so funny or scandalous that it deserved the theatrics that arose. At first, she’d thought, Maybe, when I know them better, I’ll get it. But she’d been on the team a year now. She was their top runner. She heard their chant when she closed her eyes at night. She had let them write mantras on her arms in Sharpie. She felt the flutter of notebook paper confetti with which they showered her on the bus home from State. And still she would hear her laugh stand out like a dissonant note, never quite able to forget she was acting.
At some point on the walk between the car and the table, Lisa watched Avery snap into character. Her sister began bouncing toward the table with a cervine lightness, and when she called out, her voice raised an octave to meet theirs. Lisa thought, this is what annoys people about teenage girls, and in the same breath, felt a blow of cosmic loneliness.
“Hey-hey,” Avery called.
“Now we’re all here!” Bryn sang. She sat on the table with crossed legs, raising her stick roller like a flag. Avery had come to recognize her face in the dark: hair frizzing at the temples, perpetual shine on her forehead and cheeks. When they had met, Avery had found Bryn to be impossibly annoying in the way she found most people who were simultaneously loud and small. It was an extreme merit to the shared burden of running cross country that now Avery couldn't imagine life without her.
After Bryn's cheer, the rest of the girls answered in the dark.
“Good evening ladies!”
“AT and LT in the house!”
“Welcome back, superstar!”
“Hey-hey, AT&T!”
“Get your asses over here!”
Everyone on the team called the Tott sisters by their initials, a tradition started by Coach E. Avery loved it. She did not love how they called Lisa “Superstar.” (Lisa herself didn’t seem to notice it much, which was half of the issue.)
A round of hugs followed: sharp runner arms over cotton t-shirts where the skin of your cheek bristled with the poky ends of ponytails. In the dark, the neon light glinted off the links of their jewelry, the corners of their eyes, their canine teeth. They hugged Avery first, then Lisa, who stood rigid and laughed in attempts to hide the rigidity. She had, always, the savoir faire of a stick puppet.
“Moll, on time for once,” Avery said. Over the summer, Molly had given herself a hawk feather tattoo with a sewing needle and a sharpie. Avery had seen it on Instagram, and now here it was on her arm. She didn’t want to pretend to like it, so she didn’t comment on it at all.
“Ahem, I was the first one!” Molly said. “Because these losers took a million years in Party City—”
“I’ve cracked the code, actually. Molly is late to anything that matters and early to anything that doesn’t,” Bryn jabbed. The seniors had a habit of doing that — verbalizing the obvious — possibly to enforce the depth to which they all knew each other.
The table displayed the debris from this Party City haul: four boxes of multicolor Glo Sticks, standard length with tube fasteners for making loops. Cluttered beneath the packaging was the typical teenage debris: sticker-littered water bottles, a pile of lanyards with jangling key attachments and clear plastic flaps for fresh licenses, and, inexplicably, a bag of half-finished Sour Patch watermelons.
With the Totts’ arrival, the whole varsity team was assembled. If you asked Lisa, no one appeared to be in any hurry. Before every run was a period of socializing that could last anywhere from ten minutes to forty, extended for such imperceptible variables as the interest level of conversation, the residual soreness in their collective bodies, the general pleasantness of the weather, and/or the stock market in Japan, as far as Lisa was concerned. She watched the time build on her watch face.
Avery reached for a glow stick, snapping one band around each wrist. She kept one eye on Lisa, on the blank expression that her sister used to conceal frustration.
Bryn was the one who finally passed Lisa a pair of glowsticks. “Get cracking, LT.”
She snapped both of them between her hands. There was one blue and one yellow. She wove one into her ponytail, and the other into her shoe.
Bryn nodded as if Lisa had said something. “Alright, ladies. Per tradition, we must take off at midnight. Sharp! Which is, according to my watch, in thirty seconds.”
There was a chorus of cheers and watch chirps. They stood, glancing at the dark trail flanked by opposite-leaning reeds, snaking away from the dull roar of the highway and along Lake Charlevoix into Boyne City. Below, the ragged grass was already damp with the promise of dew.
“... And with that, let the First Run Back BEGIN!”
[...]
Lisa checked her watch: 7:20 pace. At this point, she was a half-mile gone. She had not cared to join the conversation or the 9-minute miles; plus there was the whole part where Avery looked at her like a warning. It was better to just meet them at the end. She had run one mile with the team, then broken away, and their voices had faded out like the end of a song. That would be enough, wouldn’t it? For Avery to think that she had tried?
The air was clear and cool and open and Lisa sliced through it like an arrow beneath a high ceiling. She ran without thinking. It was less that her legs felt loose and more that she didn’t feel them at all; focused solely on the way the wind licked her t-shirt and the sand held her shoes. She slid down a crumbling bank, raising her arms for balance, and felt the swing of hair floating in her wake, heart swelling in her chest. This, this was it! Lisa thought. The best part of running! She could have lived in that moment forever.
She could already picture it: the moment the route ended, when she would sit alone at the picnic table, a warm soreness in her legs, washed with a newfound sense of calm. She would be patient as she waited for their shadows to emerge from the dark. She imagined the mumble of conversation. Moll, can I have a watermelon? Did you guys see Coach’s email? Yeah, no kidding. Here, give me your phone. It’s almost one-thirty. My mom’s waiting up for me. See you at practice. I’ll drive you guys home. She imagined the car ride back with Avery, a newfound truce between them, and maybe, just maybe, she'd let Lisa play a song. She already knew: she’d play Fast Car by Tracy Chapman. She would look over at her sister, red-rimmed by a stoplight, and see Avery’s mouth twitch at the corner. And she’d think: I was wrong about the rules. Avery never had a song in her head. The point of the game was that she didn’t know what she wanted, both of us equally unmatched to tame the beast, and she fought with me not to fight it alone. Running’s a drug, Bryn would whisper in her head. Maybe together we can get somewhere. And she would win tonight. The night embraced Lisa; she let herself dissolve. Things would be different when the run ended. They always were.
*
A few steps later, the team’s watches beeped with the asynchronous announcement of three miles. They descended from the wooded trail onto the shoulder of the country road. The scrape of car tires replaced the chirp of crickets. Avery couldn’t remember what they were talking about. Nothing important — but none of it was, was it?
When you run, you focus on the ground fifteen feet ahead of you. And that was how they found Lisa: their headlamps illuminating her crumpled body on the street.
