Addy's Race (6 page)

If I was going to be last, at least I could try closing the gap between me and the rest of the losers. But as soon as I sped up, a cramp started spreading across my stomach. What had Miss Fielding said about cramps?

Rub your belly
or
Breathe from your belly
?
Breathe
through your mouth
or
Count your breath
?

I was so busy trying to figure out what would make the cramp disappear I was surprised to see people, parents and kids, lining the path, cheering, clapping and shouting.

Had I finished? Already? Mom and Lucy were at the finish line, beaming as if I’d won a gold medal. “You’re the first Mackenzie girl across the line!” my mother said. “Good on you, Addy!”

“You beat Stephanie and Emma! You beat them!” Lucy was so excited, she started pounding me on the back.

She was crazy. There was no way I had beat Stem. I was the last to finish.

I was funneled into a chute with rope fences on either side. I stood on my toes to look for Stephanie, Emma, Miranda and Kelsey in the crowd ahead. I couldn’t see any of them. They had probably finished so long ago they had gone home.

“Here.” Lucy pushed my new water bottle into my hands. “Drink.”

In front of me, girls emptied their water bottles over their heads. I opened mine and sipped. The water felt so good sliding down my throat. I wished I could have poured some over my head, but that would wreck my hearing aids.

My mother leaned over the rope and hugged me. “You finished sixteenth, Addy! Out of almost two hundred girls! That’s great! You worked so hard!”

“Mom, I’m last,” I said. “There is nobody behind me.”

“There are more than one hundred and fifty girls behind you,” my mother said. She pointed over my shoulder. Girls were pouring across the finish line.

A line of sweaty grade sixers, all dumping water over their heads, formed behind me.

“How did that happen?”

“How did what happen?” Lucy asked.

“How did all those people get behind me? I was the slowest person out there.”

“She must be hallucinating,” Lucy said to my mother, as if I wasn’t there. “That happens sometimes when you’re tired and sweaty.”

“I’m not hallucinating!” I said, and that’s when I saw Stem stumble across the finish line and into the chute. They looked more tired than I felt. So much for training with “Edmonton’s top running club.” There were so many girls between us, I couldn’t count them all. Had I really finished ahead of them? And that far ahead?

“You creamed them!” Lucy gasped.

Miss Fielding was waiting for me at the end of the chute. As I collected my ribbon she said, “Very fine job, Adeline Markley. You were a star today.”

“Do you want to stay and congratulate the rest of the girls from your team?” Mom asked.

“Oh please, let’s,” Lucy said.

“I’d rather go home and shower and change my clothes,” I said.

“But you finished sixteenth!” Lucy said. “Sixteenth! That’s like, like, like—”

“That’s like after fifteenth and before seventeenth,” I said. “Let’s go home.”

“But you beat Stephanie and Emma!” Lucy reminded me.

“I think it was a fluke,” I said.

“You finished almost fifty people ahead of them,” she said. “That’s no fluke. You really are fast, Addy.”

“I am not,” I said.

“You
are
.” She looked at her bandaged ankle. “I probably won’t be able to run next week.”

“But you said it was getting better. I don’t want to run alone again.”

“You’d be running alone anyway,” she said. “Even Stephanie and Emma can’t keep up with you.”

My mother hugged me. “I think you should stay and celebrate with your team.”

“It’s okay, really,” I said, looking over my shoulder.

Stem was coming toward us, arm in arm, smug and sweaty.

First they saw me. Then they saw my ribbon.

Suddenly they looked like birthday balloons that had lost their air—not the fun way, whooshing around like missiles, but the slow, depressing way, like balloons three months after the party.

“You finished?” Stephanie asked.

“How did you get ahead of us?” Emma demanded.

“Hello, Stephanie and Emma,” my mother said.

“Hi, Mrs. Markley,” they said in one voice, looking quickly back at me for an explanation.

Lucy looked as if she was going to burst. “She got ahead of you because she finished before you,” she announced, looping her arm through mine.

I held up my ribbon. I wasn’t feeling enthusiastic.

I was embarrassed.

“Where’d you finish?” Stephanie asked in an I-don’t-believe-you voice.

I pointed. “Over there, at the finish line, same as you.” Tons more girls had lined up. They spilled out the back of the chute.

If an adult wasn’t there, Emma probably would have said something awful. Instead she and Stephanie looked at each other and then at me. But not at my face. At my hearing aids.

“I heard you fine,” I said, even though it was getting loud. As more girls finished, their parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, coaches and teammates crowded toward the finish line. Everyone was talking and laughing at the same time, creating a steady hum and buzz. It was distracting.

“What
place
did you finish?” Emma said.

“Sixteenth,” Lucy said.

“We were asking Addy,” Stephanie said.

“Sixteenth,” I said.

Emma huffed. “Well, we all got the same color ribbon,” she said and stomped off with Stephanie.

Lucy laughed. It’s less a laugh, really, than a weird sound she makes when she’s nervous or excited—a cross between a donkey, a rooster and a person with bad lungs gulping for air. You can’t hear it and not stop to see where it’s coming from. Everyone nearby turned, even Stephanie and Emma. Lucy waved at them. She tried to grab my arm and make me wave too, but I wasn’t in the mood.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“I’m not that good of a runner!” My face felt hotter than it had when I crossed the finish line. “I didn’t even run the whole time!”

That got more attention than Lucy’s laugh.

“What did you just say?” Emma asked, pulling Stephanie along as she stomped back toward us.

“I said, I didn’t run the whole way. I got tired. So I walked in the middle.”

“You cheated!” Emma snapped.

Now everyone near us was staring.

“I did not cheat!” I said. “I followed the same course Miss Fielding took us on during our warm-up!” At least, I thought I did.

“You don’t have to yell, Addy,” Stephanie said. “
We’re
not hard of hearing.”

My mother’s eyes grew hard, and her voice was cold. “Stephanie, that was uncalled for.”

Stephanie’s face turned more shades of red than I knew existed. “I’m sorry,” she mumbled.

“I did not cheat!” I repeated. “I am not a cheater.”

My mother started to say something, but Miss Fielding appeared.

“What’s this about cheating?” she asked.

“Addy walked,” Stephanie and Emma said.

“You told me I could,” I reminded Stephanie. “In the starting line. You said, ‘You don’t have to run the whole way. Lots of kids can’t run that far. You’ll have company.’”

I tried to say it in the voice she’d used—the snotty, I’m-better-than-you tone—in case Miss Fielding thought she had said it to be helpful.

“Walking isn’t cheating,” Miss Fielding said.

“But she beat us,” Stephanie said.

“Yeah,” Emma said. “How could she beat us if she walked?”

“She didn’t walk the whole race.” Miss Fielding looked at me. “Did you, Addy?”

“No. I just walked until I wasn’t as tired. Then I ran.”

“So there’s your answer, girls,” Miss Fielding said. “Addy’s fast.”

“Faster than you,” Lucy said, but not as quietly as she should have.

Miss Fielding gave her a that-wasn’t-appropriate look.

I was so confused. Miss Fielding was defending me? I wasn’t even sure
I
should be defending me. How did Miss Fielding know if I was fast? I hadn’t even finished one training run with running club yet. I wanted to say,
Stephanie and Emma may be right.
I might have cheated. By accident.

I tried to remember when and where I could have gone off the path. I was sure I had followed the orange cones marking the course. But I hadn’t seen people the whole time. Maybe I accidentally took a shortcut. I’m not always good at following directions.

“Do I have to give back my ribbon?” I asked Miss Fielding.

“Why would you have to do that?” she asked.

I shrugged.

Miss Fielding put her arm around my shoulder. “Just because you walked doesn’t mean you couldn’t make up the time running, Addy. You’ve obviously got speed. We just need to work on your training so you’ll have the endurance to match. You can do it. You’re off to a fine start.”

Chapter 9

I tried not to look at Stephanie and Emma the next day, but the problem with a small school is it’s hard to avoid anyone. Especially when they go out of their way to be annoying. The more I tried not to look at them, the more annoying they were. Before the first recess bell, they were whispering and pointing at me. I know they were telling Tyler I had cheated, because he glared at me.

Then, when we were at our cubbies, Stem started throwing wads of paper at me. On each piece they had written a big letter
C
. If Mrs. Shewchuk had been there, they never would have dared, but Mrs. Shewchuk had horrible timing and picked the day after the Laurier race to get sick.

The substitute, Mr. Angelo, did not look like a teacher. With hair to his shoulders, a Hawaiian shirt and a gold chain around his neck, he looked as if he belonged at a tropical resort. When he put on Sierra’s boom mic, he reminded me of a rap singer.

Mr. Angelo didn’t know how to be a teacher either. In current events, he let everybody say whatever they wanted. Henry had brought in an article about a family from Indonesia that was being deported. The family had hired a lawyer to get them refugee status when they arrived fourteen years earlier, but the Immigration people said the lawyer hadn’t filed papers and the family was in Canada illegally.

“That sucks,” Tyler said. “It wasn’t their fault.”

“I think they lied,” Henry said. “They wanted to stay in Canada without applying to.”

The family had three kids, all born in Canada. The oldest child was our age.

I raised my hand. “If they hired a lawyer and the lawyer didn’t do his job, shouldn’t the lawyer get into trouble?”

Stephanie interrupted before I could ask my next question. “How do we even know they hired a lawyer?” she said. “Sometimes people say one thing when everyone knows they cheated.”

My face started burning. I raised my hand again. So did Kelsey and Miranda, but I started talking before Mr. Angelo called on anyone because, really, it was still my turn.

“The article said they hired a lawyer,” I said. “But now nobody can find him. Maybe he wasn’t a real lawyer, but they didn’t know any better because they had just arrived here.”

“They didn’t follow the rules,” Stephanie said. “You can’t blame someone else because you cheated.”

I wasn’t blaming anyone. And I didn’t cheat. If Mrs. Shewchuk had been here, she would have told Stephanie to stick to the subject. Not Mr. Angelo.

“That’s a good point,” he said. “If you don’t know you’re cheating, does it count as cheating?”

He called on Kelsey, whose hand was still raised. “If the kids are Canadian, shouldn’t they get to stay?” she said. “It’s not fair to make them go some place they’ve never been. They probably don’t even speak whatever language is spoken there.”

Mr. Angelo didn’t answer. Instead, he called on Sierra. “My cousin in New York had a nanny from Haiti,” she said. “She had to go back because Immigration said she was an illegal alien. After that my cousin didn’t have a nanny.”

“You have a cousin in New York?” Tyler interrupted.

“Tyler, we’re talking about immigration,” Mr. Angelo said.

“I’d like to immigrate to New York,” Tyler said, and everyone laughed, even Mr. Angelo.

I raised my hand again. “Was there an article in the New York paper when the nanny got deported?” I asked.