Waking Olivia (2 page)

I
'm in a car
, and we're going too fast. The street is narrow, and with the cars parked on either side of the road there are points where we barely squeeze through. There's a four-way stop at the end of every block, but we only slow at some of them. I watch my mother’s shoulders stiffen, her body pushing backward into her seat. My brother takes my hand and squeezes it once, hard, preparing me for pain.

I see the woman in the intersection. A navy blue dress and swollen ankles. I see her before she sees me, and when she does, we both know what happens next. Her eyes meet mine and we both know.

Her body flies up over the hood. The blood is there, on the windshield, a splatter of it like modern art, with such immediacy it almost seems like she must have been bleeding before we hit her. We slam on the brakes and she goes flying forward. And then the car lurches over the top of her like an oversized speed bump.

My mother turns to me then, her eyes wide with fear, sick with it. Suddenly we are in her room.

"Run," she whispers. “Hide in the woods.”

So I run.

I run as hard as I possibly can, desperate and hopeless at once.

The woods, the woods, the woods. It’s a single phrase burned into my brain.

Get to the woods.

I’m nothing but my desire to do what she’s told me to do as if it can fix everything. I run and run, knowing he's behind me, knowing that the blood pouring down my back is only the start, knowing that I’ve done something very, very wrong, and when I stop it will all catch up with me.

I
wake
.

Except I don’t wake in my new apartment. I’m on a street I've never seen before, wearing the shorts and tank I fell asleep in. I’m barefoot now because I never, ever manage to keep shoes on my feet when I sleep. I have no idea where I am. The sun's not out yet but the sky has the promise of it, its black softened with expectation. My heart's still beating hard from the run, from the terror.

"Son of a bitch," I mutter. Now I've got to find my way home.

I
t takes
me over an hour to find my apartment because I’m not familiar with the area yet. I figure I only ran about three miles before I woke up, but I probably ran another four backtracking to find my neighborhood.

I arrive at the track a short time later, undoubtedly the only girl here who's already run seven miles. I stare off in the distance, trying to pretend I don’t see the girls around me whispering, shooting sly glances my way. They all know who I am. Most of them wish I weren’t here. There’s one girl in particular, taller than the rest, who makes no secret of her disdain. Fuck. I haven’t even met my teammates yet and I already want to throw a punch.

Will Langstrom, my new coach and dickhead extraordinaire, walks toward us and every head snaps up. Now that I am watching from a distance, I'll admit that he's ridiculously hot. Just his stride is sexy. His tousled brown hair, the hollows under his cheekbones, the upper lip. He’s cocky and it only makes him more appealing. I sort of hate us both for that fact.

He grins. "Morning, ladies.”

"Morning, Coach," they sing in unison. I remain silent. They're all looking at him like he's Prince Charming and Christian Grey rolled into one. He could pull down his pants right now and half of them would drop to their knees.
No wonder he's such a dick.

"I assume you've all met your new teammates," he says, with a glance at me, but his voice holds no true expectation. Now it's their turn to be conspicuously silent. He introduces the two freshmen first, and then he turns to me. "And this is our only transfer. Olivia Finnegan comes to us from UT."

They look at me with some combination of expectation and delight in the comeuppance I've clearly received, the D1 girl sent back to the minors, but one who might just win them a title. They want to look down on me, but they can't do it for too long because they want to look up to me as well. He makes them all introduce themselves. Betsy, the one giving me nasty looks, is the only name I remember. It’s nice to put a name to the face I’m probably going to rub in the dirt.

"We're running the 10-mile loop this morning, and it's your lucky day because I'm running with you."

There are collective groans, so I guess that's a bad thing. "Hit the road and let's see how many of you slacked this summer."

I haven’t slacked. I spent the whole summer giving riding lessons during the day and running morning and night.
But that won’t be reflected today.

B
etsy takes
off and we follow. She sets a decent pace. Nothing to write home about, but given that I barely had time to shower after my run this morning, I'm okay with that.

Sometimes I don't feel it as much but today I do, that heaviness in my thighs as if I'm asking them to lift a weight with each step, something tepid running through me. It’s not that I can’t run 17 miles in a day. I can. It’s just that I can’t run them fast. I can’t sprint them. And I must have sprinted this morning because my body has nothing left to push me forward. I manage, though. I have to. I can't fuck up here too.

I wasn’t surprised that I’d had a nightmare last night and woke up nowhere near home. It’s been happening since I was a kid, usually when I’m under stress but sometimes for no discernible reason. There are other people out there like me. They have a forum online where they exchange stories, but I’ve never told mine. Their stories involve running down a flight of stairs or maybe a block or two. Mine involve running miles, running through the woods, waking up bleeding and drenched in sweat.

Even in a group of abnormal people, I’m the freak.

There's a water stop at the halfway point, which is when I first take a good look at my teammates, covered in dust from the dry road kicking up, sweat streaking down their arms, creating tiny pathways through the dirt. I have a bad feeling about Betsy, the one who led. There's something arrogant, aggressive in the set of her shoulders, though I suppose the same could be said of me.

Will says nothing the entire time, and I have a begrudging respect for the fact that he can keep up with us at all. Every extra pound you carry, whether it's muscle or something else, is like carrying a few bricks along for the run. He probably outweighs me by 80 pounds. That's a lot of bricks.

It’s a relief when I finally see campus looming in the distance. I kept up. I didn't embarrass myself on the first day. Given that I’ve got that swimmy, unstable feeling I get before I pass out, it could have gone much worse. We reach the track and Will tells us he'll have notes for us at tomorrow's practice and sends us on in.

Well, almost all of us.

"Olivia," he says with an edge to his voice, "we need to talk." It’s clear that this won’t be a feel-good pep talk welcoming me to the team, and prompts a little smirk from Betsy.

"I go by Finn," I growl.

He acts as if I haven't spoken. "What the hell was that?" he demands. "I don't know what they did at your old school, but when I ask for 10 miles, I want a little effort."

"This is complete bullshit," I argue. "I kept up."

"You think we brought you on the team because we hoped you could
keep up
?" he asks. "We need a leader out there. You ambled down the road like a new mom trying to take off the baby weight."

God, what a dick
. "I was tired."

"You've done the exact same workout that everyone else here has, so you've got no reason to be tired," he says, “unless you’ve already violated Peter’s rule about drinking the night before a practice.”

He has me by the throat. The story I used at UT is not going to fly here, so I make the very questionable decision to go with the truth instead, something I’ve never found pays off.

"I ran a little this morning before I came out," I tell him quietly.

His mouth grows tighter. "And why
exactly
would you do that?"

For just a moment, a millisecond, I meet his eyes, though I don't want to. There's a part of me that wants to beg him not to ask, not to question, not to try to take my secrets away from me. I look away because I refuse to beg him or anyone. "I ... I couldn't sleep."

He's silent for a moment, his jaw tense but his eyes uncertain. "You're on my watch now,” he finally says. “You run when I tell you to run and that's it. Don't do it again.” He turns and walks away.

I
ignore
everyone in the locker room. These people aren't my friends now, and they won't be my friends in two years. I've done all this before, and I know exactly where it got me.

"I'm Erin," says the girl changing beside me.

"Hey," I say tersely.

"So you're here from Austin?"

"Yeah."

"Is it true that you got kicked off the track team for beating up Mark Bell?" She doesn't even try to disguise her delight about this juicy morsel of gossip. Funny how everyone looks down on me for what I did, but they don't look down on themselves for being so fucking delighted to hear about it.

"Yeah," I say, packing my bag. "So I've heard."

"So is it true?" she whispers as if this is some special "just us girls" moment of intimacy with half the team standing there with their ears cocked.

"Yes."

"So why did you do it? He must have done something to you, right?" she asks.

"Yes," I say, fixing a look on her along with the other little listeners, who no longer feign disinterest and are watching us avidly. "He asked me too many fucking questions."

“
S
o how did it go
?" asks Peter, but he can tell the answer by taking one look at my face. He chuckles. "You're just like your father, Will. Incapable of hiding your thoughts."

It's taken the better part of two years for the mention of my father to stop hurting, and it will be a good two decades before I can appreciate the comparison. I did what he wanted. I gave up my career as a climber to take over the farm, but he wasn’t alive to see it happen and it wouldn’t have made a difference anyway. My father still would have found fault.

”It could have gone better,” I sigh.

"How are the new freshmen?"

"They hung in there. Evans was solid. The other one I'm not sure about."

He nods slowly. "What about Finnegan?"

There are a million things I could tell him. That hostility came off her in waves, that she looked at the rest of the team like she wanted to shank them, and that her running was disappointing if not flat-out infuriating. I should tell him that she's troubled. What could possibly compel a girl to run before track practice? I
need
to tell him this because if it continues it will spell disaster. She'll either go into shock or have a fucking heart attack right in the middle of a race. But for some reason, I think of how lost she looked when I asked her about it, young and lost and
destroyed.

"She's going to be a lot of work,” I reply.

I’ve only told him half the truth, and it wasn’t the important half.

I
n the dining hall
, I get a salad with grilled chicken, no cheese, no dressing, no bread. The world's leading female long distance runners only have about 15% body fat. Nothing matters so much as weight in distance running. Every pound you run with adds two seconds per mile. It might not sound like much, but an extra 10 pounds over a six-mile course equals two full minutes, the difference between a win and a loss.

I watch the football players with envy as they load their trays with cheese fries and burgers and baked potatoes and pie. Just once in my freaking life I want to eat like a football player. I spend my life in a state of continuous hunger. It's been that way for so long that the depth of my hunger scares me. Sometimes I think that if I took off the leash, I'd eat until I exploded and that I would never stop.

Erin finds me and sits down uninvited. She's extraordinarily wholesome looking with milky skin, scattered freckles and big cornflower-blue eyes. The kind of girl you'd see in an ad for America's farmers. You can take one look at her and know she's never suffered. I shouldn't hate her for it, but I do.

"I'm really sorry," she says. "I feel awful. You were right, I was prying, and it was none of my business."

"Whatever." In truth, I'm too busy being fascinated by her tray to say anything else. Meat swimming in gravy, potatoes, bread, pie on the side and milk. She has at least 2000 calories on that tray. Just the sight of it alternately disgusts me and makes me ravenous in the same moment. I open my newspaper and pray she goes away.

"You aren't very friendly," she says, "you know that?"

"Yes."
Hint, fucking hint.

"Why?"

"I don't need friends."

"Everyone needs friends."

"I don't." I continue to read my newspaper.

"You're not going to scare me off, you know.”

"Are you going to continue to babble while I try to read?"

"Yes," she chirps, digging into that disgusting pile of wet meat on her tray. I flinch, and yet I watch. "I've dealt with worse than you. You should see my brother. He's been in and out of rehab so many times it's like his second home. Maybe it's even his first home. And when he’s using or coming down or detoxing, he's the biggest asshole you've ever met."

"Fascinating," I mumble.

"He's great, thanks for asking," she replies dryly. As annoying as it is, my mouth twitches, and I would smile if I knew it wouldn't encourage her. "He's in LA at the moment, exploring his ‘craft.'" She rolls her eyes and does air quotes. “You’re probably thinking LA isn’t the greatest place for someone just out of rehab. Which is precisely what I told my parents, but they're so excited he's into something that they're trying to overlook it. Is that all you're going to eat?"

Jesus fucking Christ.
This girl never stops talking.

"The leading female runners only have 15% body fat," I reply pointedly, looking at her tray. Erin isn't fat, but she could be thinner. Her extra pounds will drag the team down, and I already resent her for it. I resent that I will work my ass off and starve, and we still won't place because of the girls who had to eat their platters of meat swimming in gravy every day.

"You need food to build muscle," she argues.

"And thus the chicken breast.”

"You really ought to talk to the nutritionist. She'll tell you herself that's not healthy."

“I’m a nutrition major. I think I’ve got it under control.”

“I still think that’s not healthy.”

"Do you always talk this much?"

She grins, wide-eyed. "I do. That's why we're perfect together. You never speak and I never shut up. You're so lucky you found me."

A
fter the ordeal
of listening to Erin blabber is done, I get on my bike and head toward the far side of campus, where the old Victorian houses give way to fields and woods, the kind of places where there will be no landmarks to tell me which direction might be home. I will need to learn this town like the back of my hand.

I try to sleep with my cell phone tucked into my clothes, but it’s fairly useless. And who the fuck would I call? I don’t have any friends. Besides, when you’re deep in the woods, the odds of getting a strong enough signal to pull up the GPS are zero-to-none. Not to mention the fact that I’m a restless sleeper and half the time I discover I’ve pulled the phone out and thrown it across the room at some point.

I usually only make it a few miles before something triggers me to wake up, but a few miles is pretty far when home is new to you and you have no idea how to get back. I got lucky this morning, but I know from experience that I’m not always lucky. That means the more familiar I am with everything outside my apartment, the better.

I need to be able to stand in the woods and gauge, based on the light from the city or the stars or the sound of running water, exactly how to get the fuck out. It’s bad enough to wake up and discover that you are outside in the middle of the night, barefoot, defenseless, far from home, but multiply that by 10 for the times when you wake up and have no idea where the hell you are.

I hate this
.

There’s so much that could go wrong, and there was plenty that went wrong even when I did know where I was. And it’s all probably for nothing: I came here solely to be coached by McEwan, thinking he might turn it around for me, and instead I’m being coached by some cocky asshole who probably didn’t even run
high school
track.

I made a mistake taking a bat to Mark Bell, and I made a mistake coming here. Maybe staying will be the next big regret. In fact, I'm almost sure it will be.