Little Pretty Things (14 page)

“If it were true—”

“Yes,” she said.

“—that two of the best runners at Midway both—” She blinked at me, and I took that as encouragement. “Wouldn’t it be strange, if two of the best runners in Midway High history had both dropped out? In their senior years?”

“In their last few weeks of school,” she said. “And—” The red lips clamped shut. “Well, that’s enough for two poor souls to have in common,” she said, giving me a softer look. And then it was over and she was turning to watch another girl hurrying past. “Stop by to sign your tax form before the day is out, Juliet. Miss Nevarez, is that how you want to be perceived? Pull up your pants right this instant.”

The wooden plaque of Indiana caught my eye again. Funny how small it seemed, when it was all we’d ever wanted.

I went to look at Coach’s Olympic medal again. Less than a handful of metal, dull and aged, with a sun-bleached red, white, and blue ribbon. How small and meaningless everything seemed.

Maddy hadn’t run the state race because she was sick. But if she also hadn’t crossed the finish line to get her diploma, she must have been—a different kind of sick. Sick in the head. Sick in the heart.

It’s not as though I hadn’t had experience with both. I leaned against the case, all the bits of glory inside trembling in response.

CHAPTER TWELVE

By the time I walked away from the trophy case, I was overwhelmed by the glare of silver and brass plating. I didn’t want to run my fingers over the ripple at the south end of that Indiana-shaped prize. I wanted to smash it.

That third-place plaque dug at me. Who was Kristina Switzer, anyway? Maddy had been faster, better. She would have taken home first.

But now that I’d met the ghost of Kristina, I was forced to consider Maddy a choker. How was I qualified? What had I ever seen to the end? I even cut corners when I cleaned the rooms at the Mid-Night.

In front of the library’s windows, I stopped. The two girls at the counter stood close, whispering.

High school.

High school and my friendship with Maddy. The only two things I’d ever finished didn’t seem to be finished with me.

Inside, the library was appropriately hushed. The stacks lay open to casual reach. I walked along the outside aisle, running a finger over a few spines. Back in school, I’d only spent time near books when I had to. Running—that was my life. Now I found myself curious. All this abundance, and I’d never taken part in it. A swirl of gold on the edge of one book caught my eye. I pulled the book from its spot and patted the raised, gold letters on the cover. The edges of the pages were gold, too. There was some process by which things were made to shine. It had a name, but I didn’t know it. I probably never would. It was frustrating to think of the world as a place full of things I’d never know.

The book back in its place, I made my way around the edge of the room, looking for a way in. Somewhere there was a drawer of cards or a computer that would tell me where to find stuff. Dewey somebody. But I didn’t have time to make up for a short education. Lunch would be over soon, and then I’d be urging another group of students around the gym.

The girls behind the desk watched me approach. One of them twirled the end of her long ponytail around her finger.

“Nice track pants,” the twirler said. They wore the uniform of teenaged girls as I was beginning to understand it: tiny shirts, bra straps showing, pants so tight they looked wet.

They didn’t smile or laugh, but a hint of hilarity peeked out from behind the curtain so that I knew I was the thing that was funny. “Thanks,” I said. “If you’re in PE class later today, you can admire them every time you complete a lap.”

“I have a note,” the other one said. She had small, precise teeth that made me think of something feral. A hyena—no, a piranha. I knew expensive orthodontia when I saw it.

“Do you have a broken leg?” I said. “Otherwise, everyone runs.”

She scowled. “Did you want something?”

“Where do you keep the yearbooks?”

“Which year?”

“Every year,” I said.

They exchanged a look.

I would never have kids. The disdain was just too much. And I’d daydreamed about being a full-time gym teacher? Cleaning up after a wall-thumping sexcapade at the Mid-Night didn’t embarrass me as much as being on the other side of this desk, needing the help of these scantily clad children. “What?” I said.

“The librarian keeps them in the back,” said ponytail.

“We’d have to bring them out,” said piranha. “NBD, but they’re kinda heavy.”

NBD? “Tell you what,” I said. “Bring out the last fifteen years, and I’ll give you a break on the laps later. We’ll call this an independent study in weight-lifting.”

They didn’t like the arrangement, but must have seen the bargain for what it was. They had disappeared into the back office before I translated them. No Big Deal.

I set myself up at a study carrel. When I sat down, I was met with the particular scent of old pages and dust. Memories came rushing from all angles. I was seventeen again, anxious to get outside to the track, to go home after practice and make a sandwich out of whatever I could find, and, mouth still full, pick up the phone to see if Maddy was home yet. We’d rehash everything that had happened, as though it hadn’t happened to us both.

Had I turned and found Maddy in the next carrel, I wouldn’t have been surprised. This place was haunted. Everywhere I turned, there she was.

The girls took a bit longer than they probably needed to but were soon carting out the thick books three at a time, heavy in their skinny arms. On the last trip, the ponytailed girl added a single book to the top of the stack. “One of them’s missing.”

I nudged the books into a stack and ran my finger along the spines. “You’re kidding,” I said. My year? What were the odds? I checked again. “That year, out of all the years? It’s really gone?”

“Stolen,” said ponytail as her friend went back to the desk. “Mrs. Jasper—that’s the librarian—was super mad. That’s when she started keeping them in the back. She said people couldn’t be trusted. ‘They’d steal the shirt off your back.’ That’s what she said.”

The piranha girl made an impatient noise to draw her friend back to her.

“Yeah,” I said. I’d already been laying plans for how I could slip that same book out of the building. My hands didn’t itch this time—they ached. I might have called it a sense memory of holding the book, but I’d hardly had it in my hands the first time. Maddy had flown through the pages before letting me see for myself what they’d said.

Third wheel on the track team bus
. That was it.

Now that I remembered what they’d said about me, the insult stung all over again, probably because of its truth. And now more truth: People couldn’t be trusted. And given half the chance, I’d have been one of them.

I put a protective hand on the top of the stack. “I’ll still take a look at these.”

“Let me know when you’re done so I can put them away,” the girl said, reaching for the end of her ponytail. “Mrs. Jasper—”

“Yep.”

When she was gone, I took the top book and cracked it to the table of contents. It had been a while since I’d looked through one of these. Student life. Clubs. Sports. Tombstoned rows of young faces, all shoulders canted to the same angle, all eyes turned toward the same mid-distant focus. All chins pointed toward the finish line.

From the advantage of ten years, everyone looked young, naive, and badly dressed. I found the book for my freshman year and flipped to the pages for my class, jarring my own memory. Maddy Bell’s face was wedged between two buck-toothed boys with heavy eyebrows I’d completely forgotten. Even Maddy seemed less familiar. But she was there. I’d almost expected to find her portrait missing, the box where her photo should have been suddenly empty.

My senior yearbook was the only one missing. Stolen. What was so special about the year I graduated? No special anniversary year for the school. No championship team in any sport. No major news events covered in shallow, student-journalism depth. We’d lived through a year like any other year. Classes, homecoming, spring break, track meets, prom. And then graduation, an occasion I was learning had been merely ceremonious to some of us. I couldn’t remember much of it, even as the memories pressed at me.

I found the book for the year ahead of me, and turned to the senior class. Then the book for two years ahead, then three. A sea of faces, all young, almost all white. Midway wasn’t the middle of anything except nowhere, after all. Finally, in the book from the year before I started at Midway High, five years ahead of my class, there she was, deep in the
S
’s and looking just as she should, a girl with the right haircut, the right clothes.

Kristina Switzer had dark hair and serious dark eyes. Not pretty, exactly, but striking. The kind of face you’d remember. Did I remember it? Like everyone else in the book, she could have been someone I knew, like she might come into the Mid-Night, the bar, once in a while, or maybe she’d waved me ahead of her at a stop sign or blocked my way in the frozen-food aisle of the IGA last week. We’d missed each other at Midway by a year. In my hurry to reach the index in the back of the book, I tore a page.

I checked to see if the library assistants would take the opportunity to scold me, but they’d returned to their own conversation.

In the index, Kristina Switzer’s yearbook appearances were limited to two pages, the one with her senior photo and one other. I flipped to that page and found the track team, of course. Again, her face jumped out at me. She seemed older than the other girls, more worldly. In a snapshot, Coach leaned in, his hand gripping Kristina’s shoulder for focus. In the team photo, her uniform showed off shapely arms and collarbones as sharp as knives. Her long, black hair fanned over one shoulder. She stood between Fitz and Coach in the back row, the center spot that in most group photos would belong to the tallest member. On the Midway High track team, though, it belonged to the star.

I forgot the book in my hands, the memory rushing at me, whole and full.

Every year, Fitz shuffled the players into position for the impatient photographer while the rest of us waited to see how we stacked up, then preened or fidgeted with the ranking we’d been given. For the photo our senior year, I knew where I’d be situated, and yet I couldn’t help hoping that somehow Fitz would realize the special dispensation that needed to be made. Yes, Maddy in the center, of course. But why couldn’t I stand next to her, and Fitz on the other side of me, he and Coach like bookends to us both?

But tradition was tradition. Maddy went into the championship slot, and I was put at Fitz’s other side. It was an early spring day, all of us cold and exposed in our uniforms. In a minute, we’d go back into the locker room and change into our practice gear, saving the clean uniforms for the first meet. But for the blink of the camera’s shutter, we’d ignore the breeze coming off the empty cornfield behind the school. We’d toughen up and gaze fiercely into the lens. This was before sectionals, then regionals, then the big show, as the coaches called it as they urged us around the track. Before the season had even started, so that the yearbook could be done by the time school ended for the summer. At the moment the camera clicked, the future lay ahead of us. We all thought we had a state champ on the team. Maddy.

Standing at Fitz’s side, I’d noticed how he turned toward her. Protective. Claiming the prize he already knew she would bring them. That left me with his shoulder, his back. My teeth chattered in the cold.

Now I studied Kristina’s team. A few of the girls could have been on the team when Maddy and I joined as freshmen, but none of them stood out to me. I closed the book on Kristina and turned to the yearbook for our junior year again and the track team photo there. Maddy, the coaches, me—and then three rows of girls I should have known.

I didn’t.

I closed the book and stared at the date on the spine, now long past. Just like Maddy had said. When you were going as fast as we were, everything and everyone else was only a blur.

And just like Maddy had said more recently, so much time had been wasted. So much lost.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

In the last period of the day, I met up again with the girls from the library. They’d changed into gym clothes in good faith, so I remembered to give them credit for yearbooks lifted and hauled. The class was made up of seniors already counting down the days until graduation. Complainers all, they didn’t want to run but eventually they, too, saved their breath.

When I released them to go change at the end of the day, a few came back still wearing their PE clothes and their hair still in sweaty ponytails. At the final bell, they swung duffels over their shoulders and, instead of heading toward the buses or the parking lot, trudged out the back door of the gym. I ran to use the pay phone in the cafeteria to call Lu for a ride home, then followed them.

Coach leaned on his elbows on the inner fence separating the track from the stands. “Did you wear out my girls?”

“Maybe a little,” I said.

“What happened to you?”

I reached for my lip, still tender. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw someone approaching. It was the girl I’d advised to join the team earlier, the gazelle. Back in her street clothes, she seemed less like a track star and more like that bruiser on the locker-room floor with a handful of the other girl’s hair in her fist. She was solid, outfitted in sturdy boots and a leather jacket far too warm for the weather. “I might have brought you a present,” I said, nodding in her direction.

Coach shaded his eyes and watched the figure coming slowly our way. “How in the world did you do that? Fitzie’s had his eye on her all year. He thought she might anchor a relay team.”

“Those are thirty-two-hundred-meter legs, in my opinion,” I said.

“Well, that’s your area of expertise,” he said, flashing me a beaming grin. Coach was a sprinter, himself. “In my opinion of your opinion, you might be a fine recruiter.
Well
done.”

He hurried off to coax the girl toward the track. I watched after him, his praise leaving me breathless, like a punch in the gut. I didn’t like to think how much his words meant to me, how long it had been since someone had noticed I was good at anything. How long it had been since I’d
been
good at anything. Leaning on the fence like this, being here in this place, I missed my dad.