Waking Olivia (6 page)

T
he door slams
shut and I sit in shock.

Her story sounded so far-fetched. It never occurred to me for a minute it could be real. Not until she jumped to her feet, her eyes wide and hurt.

It can't possibly be true, though. People don't sleep
run
.

This is just one of Olivia’s many talents—the ability to tell a ridiculous lie and make you want to believe it. The minute those big green eyes of hers go even the slightest bit vulnerable I want to hand her my keys and sign over my paycheck. God help the man she ends up with.

It’s for the best that she’s gone. She’s been nothing but trouble since day one, and she's no longer my problem. But I have a curiously empty feeling as I drive out to the farm.

“How’d the meet go?” my mom asks.

"Bad question," I grumble. "I'm gonna go check the horses."

"The horses are fine," she clucks. "Sit down and I'll make you some lunch."

"I don't have time for lunch, Mom. I have a shitload of work to get done and Jessica expects me by seven."

"One quick sandwich and I'll leave you alone," she promises.

Over lunch, I tell her about the meet, about Olivia and my frustration that we lost because of her.

"It sounds," she says gently, "like you'd have lost with or without her?"

"But we could have placed if she just didn't go running this morning! That's the whole point! And then she tells me the most preposterous lie to get out of it."

"Are you sure it's a lie?"

"Of course it's a lie, Mom. You don't know this girl. She's made of lies. People do not
run
in their sleep."

"And you’re sure of that."

"Yes,” I reply, even as I admit to myself that I’m not actually sure at all. But no, this is just Olivia’s influence again, and God knows I’m lucky to be separating myself from it. “She's been trouble since the start, so she can go be trouble for someone else."

“But, Will, why would she lie?"

"Who knows why she does anything?"

Exasperated, I push away from the table. Olivia is like this small, insistent wound in my side. Always there, making itself known every time I bend one direction or the other. Even now, when she's no longer my problem, I'm still seeing that lost look on her face and feeling as if I just kicked something small and defenseless. That look stays with me. I see it as I turn on the tractor. I see it when I should be inspecting fields. I see it when I’m fixing the water. I see it as I drive away, and find myself heading not toward Jessica’s at all but back to my office.

“I can’t believe I’m doing this,” I grumble as I go online. Sleep running does not exist. I’m angry at myself for even checking. I’m angry at her for having the pull over me that she does.

And when I find that it exists, I feel something much worse. It’s the moment I realize how badly I wanted to find nothing. That I want her out of my line of sight. I want to continue believing she is willfully destroying her running career rather than having it destroyed by something she can’t control.

I don’t want to feel sorry for her.

I don’t want to feel
anything
for her.

Maybe the problem is that I already do. I already care about her outcome, and it feels dangerous for no reason I can pinpoint.

There is website after website devoted to sleep running and forums for people who do it. It explains so much. Her exhaustion, the fact that her college career has been a long series of disappointments. I pull up her file from UT. They must have known, but how could they have just let it go on the way they did? I find nothing. The notes discuss only her performance and that she seems to implode under stress. The underlying implication is that drugs or alcohol are the culprit, but it’s unclear to me how they really could have believed that. She often shows up exhausted, but I’ve never once seen her show up hung-over.

I go through her academic file and it is similarly unrevealing. She gets good grades and she keeps to herself. But then I find three notes written shortly after she’d arrived at UT.

The first: 3:42 am.
Student was running through lobby, attempting to leave dormitory. Student was informed that she could not leave premises, but was hysterical and broke free of officer in charge. Student was later identified by security officer and informed that disciplinary action would be taken in event of further incidents. Student claimed to have no knowledge of incident.

The second came only two weeks later: 2:19 am.
Student ran through lobby and did not respond to commands to stop. Campus security was alerted and found student running barefoot toward southern end of campus. Several officers were required to restrain student, who resisted and did not appear oriented to time or place. Medical personnel called to scene. Student taken to UMC by paramedics. Patient's next-of-kin could not be reached.

The only other note comes a week later:
Due to psychological distress caused by close living environment, student has requested and been granted a stipend in lieu of remaining in the residence halls.

With a sinking stomach, I realize that there is far more than meets the eye with Olivia. She’s been keeping a lot of secrets for a long time, and today, when she finally opened up to someone—to
me,
I laughed in her face.

S
he lives
in the worst possible section of town. Her apartment complex looks like it was built in the 70s, and probably last maintained then too. Once we sort out what’s going on with her running, I need to get her back into the dorms. Even I don’t feel safe on this end of town.

I knock and she opens the door without unchaining the lock. "Yes?" she asks, her face blank.

"Can I come in?"

She bites her lip. "I'll come out," she finally says.

She unchains the door and opens it as little as possible in order to get out. I get the distinct impression she doesn't want me to see what or who is in her apartment.

"Am I interrupting something?" I ask, nodding at her door.

“Yeah. Me, packing my shit."

She isn't going to make this easy. No surprises there, I guess. "I'm sorry about earlier. I shouldn't have implied you were lying."

She blinks in surprise. "Why the sudden change of heart?" she asks sourly. "You realized I'm your only chance of winning in two weeks?"

"You really think as piss-poor as your performance has been so far that I'm putting my hopes on you?" I demand. It's harsh but true, and I know she's the kind of person who responds more to candor than flattery. I could tell her that I think it's possible she could win it for us, that I see in her the kind of untapped potential that makes almost
anything
possible, but I don't. She wouldn't believe me anyway.

"Then why are you here?"

"I'm here because it appears possible that I was wrong."

"That's big of you," she snarls. "The way you're conceding it's
possible
that I'm not lying." She turns toward the door. "Thanks for stopping by. Come back if you'd like to tell me you think it's also possible that I don't deal drugs or poison children, and in the meantime, go fuck yourself."

"Sit," I bark, pointing at the curb. "And stop being a pain in the ass." She pauses, arms across her chest, scowling but not going inside either.

"How long have you been doing it?"

Her jaw shifts. It’s a conversation she’s dying to avoid. "Since I was little," she says flatly.

"Why?"

"How should I know?" she scowls. But finally she approaches, lowering herself beside me to the steps.

Her legs are crisscrossed with small scratches. The paramedics had mentioned it earlier, but at the time I was too pissed about her early morning run to care.

"What happened to your legs?"

Her jaw grinds. "I assume I ran through some brush," she says quietly. "It happens."

"It doesn't wake you up?"

"If it hurts enough."

I sigh heavily. I don't know what to do with this girl. That she hasn't been badly injured is a miracle. "Have you seen anyone? A specialist?"

She shrugs. "When I was a kid."

"It didn't help?"

She shakes her head. "It made things worse."

"How?"

She shakes her head again.

"You can't keep doing this, Olivia. You've got to stop."

"You think I don't want to?" she hisses. "Do you know how humiliating it is to be hitchhiking barefoot at five a.m.? To walk up to a stranger's door and tell them you have no idea where you are or how you got there?"

“Jesus Christ,” I exhale. “Whatever you do, don’t hitchhike.”

“I had to! I wasn’t going to make it in time for the meet otherwise.”

"You're going to get hurt. That's far worse than missing a meet. You've probably already
gotten
hurt at some point."

She closes her eyes. I'm beginning to decipher Olivia-speak. Anything that isn't flat out argument is unwilling agreement. She has gotten hurt, and I'm guessing it was bad.

"There's got to be some kind of sleeping pill they can give you," I insist.

"Yeah, and it'd make me comatose the next day. You think my run today was shitty? Watch me the morning after I take the drugs."

"Olivia, there are things that matter more than running."

She looks at me like I'm insane. "Not for me."

This girl. This stupid, stupid girl. Does she not realize how badly she could be hurt? How in a moment's time it could all just disappear?

"What about your
life
?" I ask. "Isn't that more important than running?"

She turns to me with a single brow raised, her eyes bleak and unapologetic. Nothing’s more important to her than this. It’s an answer I understand all too well. That’s exactly how I felt about climbing.

T
he next few
days are uneventful. She's on time without a single scowl or acid-laced barb. She gives me exactly what I ask for, bearing my adjustments to her form in silence, but she also avoids my gaze entirely. She puts on a good act, but I'm beginning to suspect that tough shell of hers is there for a reason. That perhaps it's hiding something so fragile she's not sure it could survive out in the open.

It's not until Friday that she's done it again. That she can't keep up, and ends up hanging back with the slowest girls on the team. I almost tell her to stop. When they come back to the track, I see her hands and legs jerking, the muscles spasming, and she clasps her arms around her waist to hide it as best she can. Still not meeting my gaze.

"Good practice, ladies," I call. "Head in and I'll see you Monday. Enjoy your last free Friday for a while." She starts in and I stop her. "Hang on, Olivia."

She nods but stares at the ground, her legs knocking together. It's hard to watch. How much must this girl drive herself in order to keep up on the days when there's nothing left?

I tell her to sit and hand her a drink. "What are we going to do about this, Olivia?"

Her glance at me is both panicked and angry, shooting quickly toward me and then away. "I don't know. If I knew, I'd do it."

"What makes it better? What makes it worse?"

“Exhaustion. Exhaustion makes it better. Stress makes it worse."

I look out over the track as I let this sink in. What this tells me is that races create the perfect storm for her. Not enough of a workout to tire her the day before and tons of stress on top of it. And me there, acting like she's going to lose her scholarship the minute she messes up. Coaching a runner isn't rocket science, and yet I'm at a loss as to how I can help her.

"Your parents must have had a way to stop you, though," I say. "They couldn't have allowed a kid to just run out in the middle of the night."

She looks at me again, that small wounded thing inside her making only the briefest appearance before it goes away. She shakes her head. "Nothing stopped me."

God, the idea of her out running like that unnerves me. She thinks she's tough, but the truth is that she's 5'7 and about 110 pounds. A large child could probably take her down. The idea of her hitchhiking to get home ...

It sits in my stomach like a stone.

"You know if you get too far from campus you can call me, right?" I finally ask. "Or if you just need a ride when you wake up? For Christ's sake, don't hitchhike, anyway."

She almost smiles, but not quite. "How am I going to do that, Will? I don't stop to grab my phone on the way out the door."

Jesus.
She's right. She's absolutely right. I can't stand the idea of her taking the risks she must take when it happens. "You need to go to counseling."

"It won't do any good," she says flatly.

"I said that wrong. What I meant is you
are
going to counseling. This is not a negotiation.” She glares at me and I laugh. "You're giving me that look like you wish I were dead again, so at least things are back to normal."

Her mouth twitches. All of the trouble she's caused me so far feels worth it the moment I see her almost-smile.

T
his is going
to go so poorly.

Will, I'm sure, thinks I'm going to go in to see this counselor, and by the end of the session I'll be crying about how I never felt loved or how my mom skipped my ballet recital when I was five or whatever it is normal people cry about. And then I'm going to pop out of my chair, healed and ready to move on. Except I'm not normal. I'm so far from normal that I doubt even the psychologists have seen one of me before. I have experience with this. I have so much experience with this that I swear to God I could switch chairs and counsel myself.

It doesn't work.

The therapist’s name is Ms. Daniels. She’s small and chunky and has a big, fake smile on her face. I hate her on sight, which seems like a bad omen. I'd love to ask, since she's apparently the picture of psychological health, why she can't get her weight under control. I manage to hold back.

She has a whispery little baby voice and sings her words to me like I'm a toddler. "Olivia?" she hums. I don't bother correcting the name because I already know I'm not coming back. "I'm so happy to meet you," she coos as we sit in her office. She still has that eager smile on her face as if I'm here to plan a trip to Bali and she's on commission. "Why don't you tell me what brings you in today?"

This is bullshit. She knows exactly why I'm here. Why should school funds pay for her to sit there and listen to me recount something she can read for herself? "Isn't it already in my file?" I ask.

"I saw a few things," she sings, "but I want to know why
you
want to be here." She continues to smile. It's freaky. I didn't come in here because I just won the lottery, so why the fuck is she smiling?

I tell her I’m only here because my coach forced me to be. “If you'd read my file you'd know that," I add. That gets her. I watch her lips twitch, her eyes blink a little extra. She's growing nervous.

“Well, then we can talk about why you don't want to be here."

"Because I've done this before. It just doesn't work."

"Not all therapists are the same," she says, eyes brightening. "Maybe your last one just wasn't a good fit."

"No, I mean that I don't think it works for anyone," I reply. "Did you know psychiatrists commit suicide more than any other profession?"

Her mouth twitches again. "I don't think that's true."

"Look it up."

"I don't need to look it up, Olivia," she says, growing flushed. "This session is for you to talk about your feelings."

"My feeling is that you're scared to look it up.” I almost feel sorry for her, but not quite. If she wants to position herself as the expert, then she should freaking be an expert.

She glances at the wall behind me. No doubt she has a clock there and is trying to gauge exactly how many more minutes this will drag out. And it will drag out, believe me, because I plan to make this every bit as unpleasant for her as it is for me.

It's one of the very few things I'm good at.