1
Forty-three minutes before she would die, Lisa Tryton felt a tap on her shoulder. Her older sister had yanked the aux from the crumb-lined gorge between their seats. Now it waved between them, bobbing with the motion of the car.
“Your turn,” Avery said.
Lisa looked up from her legs. “You sure?”
“Yeah. My phone’s almost dead.”
As always, Avery was draped against the seat. One of her infinite rebellions. She drove without shoes: one hand on the wheel, one sock foot hooked under her thigh. Their mother always corrected her. But unless she was running, Avery would create new ways to be lazy.
Lisa attached the frayed cord to her phone. She scrolled through her saved songs, praying its depths held something brilliant and forgotten. She really only listened to the same five things.
“Lise, come on.”
On the car clock, the colon between the 11 and 42 blinked at them, waiting. Lisa clicked at random. Soon there was a cymbal crash from the speakers, a little too loud, and both of their hands flew to the volume knob at the same time. Avery turned it down two notches; Lisa two more. From the first note the track was unmistakable as My Body by Young the Giant, with all its gallop and echo.
“You do know this is about drugs, right?” Avery asked.
“Well, it’s also about running.”
“No song is ever about running.”
“Or every song is about running.”
Avery finally looked away from the road, her eyes falling on her sister with a sad sort of judgement. “Maybe for you, sicko.”
A year ago Lisa could have laughed — would have laughed. But now she only looked back down. Sicko. If only Avery knew. That summer, Lisa had become terrified of being discovered. Of what, she could not tell you. She’d been running better than ever, but the universe was punishing her for it. She didn’t know how to describe it except to say that her edges had become hazy. When she went on her phone in bed, the screen would glow through her fingers. When she came downstairs, barefoot after a shower, she would see the grain of wood through her feet. And on her lap, even now, she saw the blue plastic bottle, and through it, the red cords of her muscle behind a thatch of veins. She had a strange conviction that there was something glaringly wrong with her, and if anybody looked too closely at her body, they’d make her stop running. Maybe it was harmless. Maybe it was all in her head. She would tell someone eventually. But she had to wait until the season ended, because this was the year she was supposed to win State.
Before Lisa could make any sort of retort to the sicko accusations, the song about drugs ended. Another song about drugs began.
Avery groaned. “Wait, is this just the 2016 XC playlist?”
“Yeah?”
She smacked skip six more times—beep beep eep eep eep ee—until Lisa clicked the sound off.
“What’s wrong with ‘Bringing SeXC Back?’” Lisa asked. The word sexy came out quieter than the rest of the sentence. She couldn’t actually remember another time she’d said it out loud.
“Don’t you have your own music?”
“I thought you’d want to get into the spirit.”
“How are you not over this playlist?”
“Didn’t you make this playlist?”
“Well, me and Bryn. But last year we suffered through a whole season of listening to all this old shit and now I never want to hear it again.”
“But you liked the first song.”
“No I didn’t. It annoyed me.”
“You didn’t turn it off.”
“Yeah, because I didn’t realize where it was coming from.”
“That doesn’t make a difference.”
“It’s going to get stuck in my head. Change it.”
“To what?”
“I don’t know! Anything!”
“Clearly not anything!”
“Whatever. Just turn it off. We’re basically there.”
This was the thing about Avery: whether you liked it or not, you had to play her games. In this one, she would rotate one specific song in her head and refuse to name it. And when you did not present that one song out of the infinitude of your shared discography, she would moan and groan with such consistency that it became clear that this game was less about your choice of music and more about her choice of insult.
They had reached the turn. Without warning, Avery’s wheel hand whipped clockwise to swerve into the unmarked lot off the M-66. There were two other cars parked in the back corner, blocking the view of the weather-beaten sign for the Lake Charlevoix Trailhead: a Subaru with Christmas ornaments hanging from the rearview mirror (Bryn) and a RAV-4 with paint scratched on both sides (Molly).
Even though it was nearly midnight, this gathering technically constituted the first day of cross country practice. According to Michigan Law, it is illegal to hold a high school sports meeting before August 15th. To honor the ruling, the Miltred High School varsity girls’ cross country team (MHS Lady Ravens) always met on August 14th, at 11:45 p.m., and counted down the seconds like it was New Year’s Eve. They called this event the First Run Back, or FRB. It was apparently a tradition that existed back when Coach E. had been an athlete at Miltred; he encouraged the team to do it with a fervor that was only matched by how strongly he didn’t want to be involved. Every year it was the same route: The girls always met at the Charlevoix County footpath, ran a six mile loop by the lakefront, and came back on the shoulder of Foster Road. Lisa thought it was a nice route. Mostly, she just remembered how slowly they ran it last year.
The headlights snapped off. The sisters sat in complete darkness beyond the glow of Lisa’s phone screen, still open to Spotify. They could make out the neon traces of glow sticks across the grass. The car made a clicking sound as it cooled.
“Are you sad?” Lisa asked.
“Huh?”
“That this is your last year? You know, doing this stuff?”
“Fuck off. Are you sad that this is your last year doing it with me?”
Lisa nudged open her door. She could only make out the peaks of laughter through the muted drone of the highway.
They both turned, then, and dropped their feet to the pavement. It would have been a sight from far away: that big blue Michigan sky, the sisters on either side of a Honda Odyssey like a Rorschach test against the dark sky. Avery shoved her feet into shoes and tossed the keys behind the left back tire. Lisa re-tied her double-knots and stared into the night.
She could already hear it above the crickets: a melodramatic gasp, the ensuing squeal of insistence, and the soft windchime of faraway girl laughter, a hyperbole in the dark. Lisa’s bones straightened. They were performing. Bryn, Rachel, Molly, the other Rachel — individually everyone was calm and reasonable, but existing within the context of the team inflated all of them, every expression amplified and 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’d learned the exact temperature at which each of them transitioned from shorts to leggings, could pick their spikes out of a lineup, memorized the separate snacks that they ate on the bus before meets. And yet every time they laughed, she heard her voice as its own distinct layer. The only dissonant note.
The rest of the team awaited the Tryton sisters at a picnic table. At some point on the walk between there and the car, Lisa watched her sister snap into character. She swung her drawstring bag around. She adopted a cervine lightness. And when she called out, her cheer 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.
The show commenced: Hey laaaaadies! AT and LT in the house! Welcome back, superstar! What took you so long? Sharp runner hugs, arms over cotton t-shirts and cheeks brushed with the poky ends of ponytails. Moll, you’re here on time! These losers took a million years in Party City. And AREN’T YOU LUCKY? We got glow sticks. Six I think? Yeah, probably. It’s tradition. No FRB without it. The snapping of the glow sticks. You what? No fucking way. Let me see that. I love you. Brynnie, are these highlights? Really? The syncing of the GPS watches. Hey, hold on. We gotta get this started. It’s almost midnight. Who’s ready, Lady Ravens? Are you ready to mother-fucking FLY? Five… four… three… two…
Lisa swallowed, fingers toggling the familiar knobs of her watch. She slotted herself behind Avery. Their sneakers briefly knocked. Someone tugged a glow stick through her ponytail, elastic snapping. When the countdown ended, the thunder of their shoes swallowed the hum of their voices. A song about running.
*
The girls took off into the night, each one a soda shaken and popped. Infinite things to talk about after two months of separation. Summer jobs! Their mothers! Driver’s ed! Avery couldn’t have lowered her voice if she tried. If she gathered the seven people in the world whose company she wanted most, they would be right here. Even better that they were running, outlined in neon, with gritty tongues from the same bag of Sour Patch Watermelons. Back in the car, Lisa had asked if she’d miss this. The question was backwards. This was what she had been missing, all her life. Until the cross country team yanked her out of obscurity, tossed her onto the grass track of the Michigan International Speedway, and brought her into existence. Coach had rechristened her “A.T.” These girls were her sisters now. It was a shortcoming of Lisa’s that she’d only found an after-school sport.
Beside her, Bryn’s shorter limbs matched her cadence. A pin of white light met between their eyes. When they had been introduced as freshmen, 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 they were now best friends. As co-captains, they’d been planning this night all summer and now they were thinking the same thing. Should we begin? It’s time. You start. No, you!
“Alright, ladies,” Avery said, the words leaking with a half-life of laughter. “Bryn has an announcement.”
“I talk to Avery a bunch, clearly, but I haven’t heard a peep out of the rest of you for two months,” Bryn said. “We gotta go around and make sure everybody had a good summer.”
Saying this was, of course, her unofficial job. Last year Coach had given Bryn the Heart of the Team award at the post-season banquet. Avery was the heart of nothing, but Bryn cut her bitterness. The two of them were like a balanced atom.
“Oh, I have stories,” Molly said.
“Lisa should start,” one of the Rachels offered. “Then she can speed up.”
“Alright, L.T., you’re up.”
“And then you can go off and start running five-minute-miles, like you do.”
Avery dug her fingernails into the palms of her hands.
It took a full seven seconds for Lisa to respond. Having some conversation in her own head, surely, about how long she could tolerate going slow for other people. “It’s the first practice of the year! I’ll stick with you guys for a bit,” Lisa said eventually. “My summer… uh, I didn’t really do much.”
“Not true,” Avery said. “You went to running camp.”
“Oh, yeah. That was the beginning of the summer. I went to this running camp in Madison. I got to stay in the dorms there. It was fun.”
The others asked the customary questions, such as how many miles she had run each week, who she had roomed with, and if she had met Freddy Cattely, who had recently broken four in the mile and used to go to Bryn’s church.
“Uh, I had my own room. Everyone was pretty fast. I spent most of my time running with the girls from their college team, since those are the people that help at the camp. I think we did seventy miles a week, but it was only two weeks, so it wasn’t really that much. I can tell I got faster.”
Molly snorted. “You? Faster?! Thank God.”
Lisa made a noise that began as a laugh and gave up halfway.
“You dodged the Freddy Cattely part,” Rachel said.
“Would you go to Madison for college?” the other Rachel asked. “Is that why you went?”
“No. I went to get faster. Almost all the girls who place in the top 10 at state go to this camp.”
For a few footsteps, nobody said anything. Avery’s nails sunk further into her skin, teeth marks of half moons. “You’d definitely consider running there for college, though,” She added, without thinking. “Right? Didn’t you say that?”
“No, I didn’t say that.” Lisa said, rejecting the escape ladder.
Avery wasn’t stupid. She knew that Lisa was gunning for State Champion that year. And she felt normally about it: there was a small spark of jealousy, sure, but also overwhelming admiration. The part she hated was the part where Lisa didn’t make room to think about anything else. If Avery could slip into her sister’s skin and pilot her limbs for a minute, she would. Force her to take one run easy. Ask a question in the conversation. Have a shred of investment in other people. This team was the best thing Avery had ever known. All she’d ever wanted was for her sister to have it too. But now that Lisa was here, she really wasn’t. She had done this impossible and stupid thing, which was to be led to Eden and stop in the parking lot outside it. Avery was out of ideas for how to fix her.
“You’re too good for Madison anyway,” Bryn said, smoothing the silence. Heart of the Team. “Me, though — I better get in. Did I tell you guys about the party Mikey took us to when A.T. and I visited?”
For the next few minutes, Bryn and Avery tag-teamed the retelling of a story that in some ways happened last week and in most ways never happened at all. In actuality, they’d gone on a campus tour and spent two hours hanging out with Bryn’s older brother and his friends. But in this version, every man in the room was a single oversized character trait. Mikey had still rationed them single sips of Svedka but they’d gotten twice as tipsy. And Bryn’s parents were unmentioned instead of installing a shelving unit in the next room. When they got to the end of it, Avery glanced into the space where her sister had been. But it was empty. Her head whipped back to the front, suddenly recognizing Lisa’s retreating form a hundred feet ahead of them. She had moved so quietly that no one had even mentioned her departure. Going, going, gone.
Would it kill you to enjoy something, for once? Maybe it would. Avery had no clue what sort of mental games she played with herself to run like she did. It was a real shame that Lisa was so naturally talented. If she had been a mediocre runner, or even a normal-fast, like Avery, she might not have sold her soul to the 5k. But it was far too late for that. In the pursuit of greatness, she missed everything good.
*
Leaving the team, Lisa’s feet clawed further and further from the fray. The wind licked her t-shirt. The sand caved beneath her shoes. The sky 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. 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! The best part of running! She could have lived in that moment forever.
Lisa imagined the end of the route, the completion of six miles. 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. The show would go on: Moll, can I have a watermelon? Who needs a ride home? Here, give me your phone. It’s almost one-thirty. My mom’s waiting up for me. See you at practice. She imagined the car ride back with Avery, a newfound truce between them, and maybe, just maybe, her sister would listen to Lisa’s 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. She asked me to look for the right music because she couldn’t find it either. Running’s a drug, Avery would whisper. Maybe together we can get somewhere, Tracy would say. And Lisa would win, she would win tonight. The night embraced her; she let herself dissolve. She could feel it in the air, through the shift of her arms, down to the tips of her fingers.
Ahead, the trail opened out onto the road. Lisa could see headlights in the far distance. She raised one arm to make herself more visible. And maybe it was a trick of the angle, but the beam didn’t even touch her skin, cutting right through.
Lisa blazed on into the light and shadow. Things would be different when the run ended. They always were.
2
What do you talk about, when you run? The paramedics would ask her later and Avery would struggle to think of a single thing. College, probably. Admissions essays. The SAT. I think Rachel Beach got a new dog. Yeah, wait, we definitely talked about that. Write that down. The real answer was worse. Flaky salt. Emmanuel Kant. The final rose ceremony. Nothing important — but none of it was, was it?
Six girls and their infinite inconsequential things descended from the wooded trail onto Foster Road. By this point, they assumed that Lisa was far enough ahead that she was no longer visible. The scrape of car tires replaced the chirp of crickets. They had narrowed into a formation two-across, to account for the size of the road shoulder, with Avery and Bryn in the front. 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.
The group slowed to a trot, then stopped completely. Avery and Bryn were the only ones to reach her body.
Lisa’s eyes were shut but her mouth was open. The yellow glow stick woven into her ponytail had cracked beneath her head, seeping into a sticky paste in her hair and filling the cracks in the asphalt like neon grout. She was lying on the pavement the way she sometimes laid in bed, legs at normal angles. Calm-looking. Avery pressed two fingers against the side of her neck — please God please God please God — and when she felt the quiet nudge of a pulse, it seemed somehow inevitable. Of course Lisa wasn’t dead. That was impossible. Avery would have known. The world would have ended.
No one had their phones. No one knew if you were meant to turn an unconscious body onto its side; they eventually confirmed that they should leave Lisa as they had found her, in case she’d broken a rib.
“I’ll run back to the car to call an ambulance.” Bryn said. “I’ll go as fast as I can.”
In the days that followed, the high school’s mental health counselor would say to Avery that “it must have felt like an eternity” that she knelt there. In reality, she had exact time markers for everything that happened. Lisa hadn’t stopped her running watch, and as Avery leaned over her, she noticed the numbers ticking. Seventeen fourteen, seventeen fifteen, seventeen sixteen. When Bryn left, it was at 17:42. Bryn should have made it to a phone, if she ran 6:30 miles, by 37:12. If she was running seven minute miles, she should have been there by 38:42. Avery watched the digital numbers climb to each minute with a dull fixation, unable to look at anything else. Come on, come on, come on.
Her knees burned from kneeling on the dislodged chips of asphalt, but she didn’t shift positions because they’d be there soon. They were coming in the next minute. They were right there. It was going to be okay. Every time she heard a stir in the distance, she would bounce onto the balls of her feet, preparing to jump up and grab Lisa’s shoulders while the paramedics took her legs. She stared into the darkness at the end of the road, pleading for the lights of an ambulance, letting her chest clench with every whisper of wheels in the distance, and over and over, it was nothing. She would look back at the watch to find that only one second had passed since she had last checked. It was as if the seconds moved in reverse when she looked away. It was thirty whole minutes, counted by the second, one-hundred and eighty if you counted the moments where time moved backwards.
The other girls stayed in a clump by the side of the road, mumbling to each other, too shaken to cry. At forty-five, Avery lost hope that help was ever coming. That would be God’s cruelest trick: to leave her sister where Avery would find her, provide the illusion that she might be saved, and snatch her away after all. She continued to hold two fingers to Lisa’s neck so that she could know the exact minute that they lost her. She would be able to tell the doctors, and it would go in Lisa’s official file forever, and maybe, it would be the last thing Avery ever did for her.
When the paramedics did arrive, she surprised herself by being angry.
“Back up, back up,” A voice shouted. “We need to load her into the back.”
“The hospital is ten minutes away!” Avery screamed, throat raw. “And it took you thirty minutes to get here!”
They did not respond to her. A heavily-coated arm pushed her away from her sister’s body. Fifty-five times she had imagined how she would hold half of Lisa’s weight when they placed her on the gurney, and when it actually happened, they didn’t let her help.
“You’re the sister? Take one of those seats.” Someone pointed to a fold-down slab attached to the ambulance wall. Avery obliged, body boiling. She could see, through the siren-bright frame of the back doors, Bryn’s car arriving in blue, in red, in white. The four underclassmen filed into the station wagon, but with the effect of the strobe, they were doing it at one-fourth speed. And when the ambulance doors slammed shut, the window on the back was tinted with blue plastic, so that Avery could only see two of the flashing colors, the last having been absorbed entirely. The road behind them disappeared at a limping sort of pace. Time had been moving too slowly, she thought, and now the rest of the world was buffering to catch up.
*
When they made it home, each MHS Lady Raven would wake their parents in a burst of tears. By the time morning dawned, the entire town had heard the catastrophe of the Miltred Girls’ Cross Country Team. People were already leaving paper sleeves of flowers and tins of blueberry crumble on the Tryton front porch by the time Avery and her family heard the diagnosis from their plastic hospital chairs. Her parents had arrived almost immediately after the ambulance. They hadn’t said a word to Avery. But it’s possible, with everything going on, that she might not have noticed if they had.
“She’s not dead. She’s very lucky.” The first, second, and third doctor said. It was a mean-spirited nicety to award this adjective. Traditionally, Avery thought, they saved that one for people outside of the hospital.
No one could know for sure what happened in the incident, but from the massive welt on her chest, the doctors formed a hypothesis. Most likely, a car had been driving over the speed limit on Foster Road. Most likely, the left-hand side mirror — a frequent target for accidents, the farthest curbside point from a driver — hit Lisa square in the chest. Most likely, the contact force knocked her body to the ground, head hitting the pavement first. Most likely, she lost consciousness upon contact with the road. With shock like that, most people would.
The welt, the doctors continued, was an obvious indication of internal bleeding, but that wasn’t why she was in a coma. Her spinal cord was unharmed — that was key — but the impact had depressed her skull, most likely damaging parts of the occipital and parietal lobes. (They couldn’t even fix this; she would have to cover the dent with her hair for the rest of her life.) Now her brain was functioning at the nadir of alertness. She was functioning enough to remain alive. Pumping blood, circulating air. But it’s difficult to know how long someone can exist in that state. Avery knew this part, even before they told her.
The rest was a murky blur of jargon. Couple scans this morning… we’re looking for swelling, fluid leaks, hemorrhaging, serious problems… if she’s unresponsive, that’s different… you have to worry about seizures… might be safer to transfer her… have you ever heard of Neuroimage technology?
“We have,” Avery’s mother said, in a flat voice, to that last part. “My brother is Geoffrey Frisk.”
In other words: He invented it. The doctor nodded slowly, swinging from awe to embarrassment. “Well, then, I will keep you updated on her status. But if we don’t see the right activity, your brother’s technology might be her best hope.”
Before he even had time to leave the room, Avery’s parents locked eyes.
“Did you text Geoff?” Her father asked.
“Of course.”
“Did he get back to you?”
She sighed. “He’s getting a room ready for her.”
“That’s great.”
“He said he’s never used the NM on someone this young. Like a fucking experiment.”
“Well. It might be our best hope.”
“I think he just wants to market those machines to kids.”
“If it works, Eileen, if it works.”
Avery stared at her shoes. She was cold. And still wearing the cotton t-shirt and damp spandex shorts she’d worn to the First Run Back. It was now six a.m. She didn’t want Lisa to get sent to Uncle Geoff’s clinic either. The only time her family had gone there to visit him, he’d given them a demonstration of his machine and the patient had died halfway through. This was, of course, an extremely tragic occurrence. But Avery had been unable to erase it. If you dug into the filing cabinets of her brain, Uncle Geoff was tucked beside the Grim Reaper. Sending Lisa there was a death sentence. But according to the doctors, so was everything else.
Her parents dropped her off at home on their way to the clinic.
“Honey, you should get some sleep.” Her mother said.
“I’m not tired.”
“You’re probably still shocked. I think — we think it would be good for you to have a minute to digest all this.”
“I want to come with you to the clinic.”
“Just take a shower, climb into bed, and we’ll be home in a couple hours. You can skip practice later. I want us to be together as a family.”
“Mom, you’re not even listening to me.”
“They’re not going to be able to get Lisa set up today anyway. It takes at least twenty-four hours for the machine to connect, you know that.”
“Just let me come with you.”
“Avery, out of the car.”
She blinked. There was a chance this could become some sort of stand-off. She debated sitting in the seat, unbudging until they pushed her. But for some reason, her hand cracked open the car door and her legs swung onto the driveway. It happened in a haze.
“Don’t go anywhere, honey,” Mrs. Tryton said as they rolled back out of the driveway. “We’ll be home when you wake up.”
Avery figured it would be difficult to get anywhere anyway, considering that her phone, keys, and car were still parked off the M-66. Or at least, she thought they’d be. It was a surprise to find them waiting in the driveway. There was a letter tucked under one windshield wiper, scrawled on torn notebook paper: Thank God you have this horribly unsafe habit of stashing your keys behind the tire. Your phone is in the cup holder. Text me when you get it. Love yew.
Bryn’s handwriting. Lisa’s drawstring bag still sat on the passenger seat; her blue water bottle resting on top of it. A phone, as promised, in the cupholder. Avery picked it up. 56 texts, 10 calls, 6% battery. The other girls wanted to hear good news, but Avery didn’t have it. She went inside, walked upstairs.
You had to pass Lisa’s room to get to hers. The door was open, sunlight already streaming in at that hour. Wrong. Avery hadn’t planned on going in, but then suddenly, she had. It was so clean and organized. Bed made, trash emptied. No sign of life. What if Lisa died, and then they had to look at it like this forever? No one would have to go in and clean. It would be so uncomfortable that they’d close her door, and then they’d all be afraid to open it again, and it would become this locus of loss that the three of them avoided, initially out of pain, but eventually out of habit, and then one day their cousins would come to visit and ask to stay in the house, of course, to avoid getting a hotel, and so Mrs. Tryton would tell Avery that she would be sleeping in Lisa’s room, using that face that looked like steel but was built of cardboard, and both of them would trudge over the tilled carpet like it was mountain terrain and finally barge the door in, and when the room was finally open to the air they would find that Lisa’s perfect uncreased bed had been coated with centipedes, her streakless mirror draped in cobwebs, her trophies rusted to black beneath a film of gray dust.
You can’t think like that, she decided. But didn’t she deserve to? Wasn’t it part of her punishment to start anticipating how bad it would be if Lisa died — not because she would, but because that was on the table, and wasn’t all this just a little bit or maybe entirely Avery’s fault? Her parents felt too bad to blame her yet, but once they thought about it for five minutes, they’d realize. Thinking, you have always resented her for being faster than you. And now they’d have an argument.
But fuck that. Avery was always worrying about her sister. Noticing how she shrank from social situations, watching her sprint away during practice, listening to her talk about nothing but State. And pissed off about it, too. Awful. Punishing Lisa twofold. Loving the team so much, dangling it in front of her. Pressing her nail into the cut just to make it bleed. Hating her sister so much that she knew it must be love. God, Lisa might as well have been superimposed on her eyeballs and still she had been hit by a car and practically killed, and so what good was any of that, all that love? And what does the bad one do, after the bad thing is done? How does she sleep at night? What tone does she take in the group chat? When she takes off her clothes, how does she decide on new ones? Does she shower in hot water? And when she washes the blood off her hands, is it her responsibility to leave a little of it there, in the cracks between fingers, so that everyone knows she is trouble?
f'(2)
The feeling is like that of a zip. One foot in Charlevoix, Michigan. Damp at the roots of your hair, ears outlined in wind, aware of your waistband. One foot here. No edges, all fill. Afraid to put weight on that one, afraid to let go. What if you held your breath, went under, and it killed you? What if you became the best runner in the world?
You have been semitranslucent for weeks. Maybe you tripped, maybe something pushed you, maybe it was merely time. Halfway gone in the mirror, floating in every puddle, only ever in pieces. You fell through the glass. The tint of it dissolved all of your color. You emerged only light.
Now here are you, in your moon-bright skin. Here you are, through the turn! You’re still steady, but then again, aren’t you always? When you need it, you can conjure that video game kind of grace.
A thick weight knocks the back of your heel. The pain is a dazzle. Run, Lisa, RUN!
You turn to look over your shoulder — never mind the barren landscape; no time to think about that — there! The sheet of bluish glass looms an inch off the ground, hovering upright. Almost sentient. It retreats an inch, then moves toward you. A weight knocks against your heel again; you scramble and surge. This time, a crack. Skin splits near your ankle. A warm spurt — is it blood? The glass meets flesh for only a flash. And then, thank God, you are running.
Lisa! Your name! Why does it sound so shrill?
You remember the dark. You remember the blow. You remember liquid in your hair. Now the flood. Now the light. Now the weight on the balls of your feet.
Lisa! The scream again. A dozen copies of your sister, in chorus.
I’M COMING! You try. But the sound doesn’t leave your mouth. Again you try! And again.
LISA PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE, she is saying now. When she talks you hear every instrument at once. The overall effect is quite ugly, but the last note is beautiful.
HEY. HEY. LISA LOOK AT ME. LOOK AT ME. LISA?
Her fear burns over your head like sun through a fog. Your sister, afraid! If you weren’t so busy running, you’d hardly believe it. You want to tell her, I’M RIGHT HERE, but you are mute. It is like sleep paralysis, to realize she cannot hear you. Are you dead? Is that what this is?
You pump your arms, drive your knees. Coach always says not to look back in a race, but he isn’t here, so you do. The glass is still there — is it closer? Is it gaining on you? Surely. But you’re the runner. You will escape. You have to. You can’t be dead — just close to it. If that glass hits you, then you’re dead. Nobody has to tell you the rules. You know.
Somewhere: the clicking of Molly’s keys like a dog yanked away. A gasp. A whimper. Does anyone have a phone?
You can barely pay attention, so focused on the glass. Faster, faster. Blazing to that final realm of effort, the one you rarely reach. You can’t hold this pace forever, but the glass will tire of you. It must. You can hold it off. You will make it further than anyone else.
All the while, Avery’s voice: a cacophony. How many times, at this point, has she said please?
Every twenty seconds, you allow yourself to look at it. Where it was blue before, it is now colorless. You can only see it because the shine shifts with the twist of your head, the edges shifting reality like the sides of a mirror. There is a triangular shard missing from the bottom, a memory of where it hit you. What does it mean, if you broke it? Does it seek to break you back?
The surge is working. The glass is fast, but you’re faster. With every glance, it is smaller. You run until it is only a square in the distance, like a sunset on a distant horizon. It shifts between colors: tints green, then violet, then clear. Content with the gap, your legs can admit their ache. But you can’t stop, not when it’s still there. You can slow down, but you have to keep running. You can hold this pace for the rest of your life, if you need to. And you do.
A pang rings through your side. Dehydration — no, it can’t be. You are light and shadow. Of course, you used to have a physical body. You probably still do, in some locker between worlds. It came with everything. The euphoria of freshly-shaven legs in bedsheets. The strain of a tight ponytail, tender on the back of your head. The sardine lids of dry skin that left ditches on either side of your fingernail. The ache of ice water, startling down to the roots of your teeth. Muddy nights waking up to blood in your underwear, blood on your thighs, blood on your fingers. A sandpaper tongue after a sip of hot tea. The taste of metal when you lose a tooth. White cracks in your skin after peeling an orange. The emptiness of outer space, the one and only time you’ve been kissed.
Where are the others? You can’t hear them now. She was just here. Well, Avery and all the rest. Was that really her voice that you heard earlier? You strain your ear for it. You will accept a whisper. Just to know you’re not alone. You can’t see her, sure, but that’s never mattered. Her face is printed on the back of your hand. The knobs of her spine against yours in the tub. Queen Frostine and Princess Lolly. You were the crier. She ate the crusts of your sandwiches.
She knew things that only God could know. How you’d only been pretending to read. How you left the dents on all the good pencils. How you went into the kitchen at night and ate the french fries frozen. You’d be in your room, praying: Avery, if you can read my mind, cough twice. It would be silent, so you’d pray: God, if Avery is reading my mind and not telling me, send a car past my window. It doesn’t even have to be a car, really. You can just play the sound that a car makes. I promise I won’t actually look to check if it’s real. I won’t catch you in the game. I just want answers. And because God could read your mind, you knew he’d punish you someday for lingering on someone who wasn’t him, and so he wouldn’t help you either. Always alone. You and your thoughts. You and your theories. The only way to be safe was to assume they were watching you at all times. Terrified of being discovered. For what, you could not say.
Why can’t you see her anymore? She must not know where you are, or she’d have come and gotten you. Or maybe she’s just on the other side of some screen, watching you struggle. You don’t even care about being embarrassed. It would be enough to know she’s there. Please please please come get me. That’s who she sounded like, earlier, when she was pleading. She sounded like you.
You look down, like the earth has answers for you. But this isn’t the earth, sorry. There are all these hollows in the ground, footprints everywhere with the heel parts missing. And — well! You remember the fresh pain on your ankle. It’s dulled to nothing, now, but you reach your hand to it anyway. Your fingers hit the hard edges of thick glass. The shard! It’s still in you! In place of blood, the wound leaks fluorescent yellow. A Glo-Stick, when cracked.
Three, two, one… you unsheath it. Let the neon drip down. Your skin is featureless, color without shade, and at least the yellow makes it easier to see where your body ends and the world begins. The shard is heavy in your hand. You hold on to the smooth edge, the part which used to be the bottom, skimming over the ground. The other two edges, the ones that cracked, are sharpened like knives, prismatic like gemstones.
This fragment is not alive. The glass chases you, shifting in color and light, but this piece is powerless without the rest. It has no temperature, no vibration, no drive. But if you tilt it in your hand, you can see things through it. Things that aren’t there.
There is a lump of rumpled cotton. Your family, when everyone was young. The cyprus trees from the old house. A camcorder in your mother’s hand. They used to play games with you. You and Avery used to run a three-legged race. One bit of cord at the ankle, one at the knee, and it would rub skin through the sock so that you had red lines, later, undressing before a shower. Please, please, just be here. You think, as though she can hear you. But no car comes past the window, no sound effect from above. I am scared. I need you. Please just be there. Please.
You lower the shard, and the image is gone. You’re alone — but then again, aren’t you always? The shirt sweeps from view as you pass it. The landscape yields infinitely more: A chocolate-covered strawberry, criss-crossed with white glaze; a clothing tag, extra-small; the crooked joystick of an Xbox controller; a polka-dot blanket, wrapped like a cape; a necklace with three tangled strands, each holding its own charm. It begs to be painted. Everything and nothing. The wretched debris of your life, moving past you at the speed it takes you to outrun it all.
Behind you, the glass looms. You will run. Here it is, finally: that thing that you’ve trained for.
Special thanks to Mychala Shultz, Ben Chase, and David Gleisner for editing this excerpt. And even more special thanks to Tristan Jung and Megan Beach for reading the entire book, which is longer and much worse.