Laird wanted to come to the meet, but Stephanie didn’t want her father seeing her with him.
“I’m sorry,” she said. She gave him a frugal peck on the cheek and then impulsively kissed his neck.
“No, you’re right,” he said. “I just don’t want to go home.”
The starting gun went off as Laird was driving away. The noise came from the soccer fields, where a horizontal line of runners was quickly becoming vertical as they headed toward the perimeter of the field. Stephanie stood at the edge of the school’s parking lot, uncertain of where to go. In the race, one girl was already pulling ahead of the others, her gold uniform like a little light for the others to follow. Stephanie had actually run cross-country her freshman year of high school, but only for half a season. She dropped out when she realized that the satisfaction she felt at the end of a race didn’t begin to make up for the pain she felt during it. And she couldn’t really relate to the girls on the team, who were true athletes beneath their nerdy, skinny veneer. They actually cared whether they won or lost, whereas Stephanie had just been looking for a sport that she didn’t hate. That was when she was still trying to want what her parents wanted for her, the simple things they thought would make her happy: health, popularity, routine. A wholesome ideal that would only work for someone who was already whole, who didn’t have big parts of her life missing. It had taken all of high school for Stephanie to stop pretending as if pieces of her past weren’t missing: her father, her grandparents, her mother’s happiness. Now, as she gazed at the long line of girls running around the empty field, it occurred to her that identifying the missing pieces was not enough, that she was also going to have to complete the picture of herself without them.
Stephanie made her way through the crowds of spectators. Everyone here had probably had granola and apples for breakfast, and they had probably eaten it after going for a sunrise jog. The running crowd was very wholesome, and their early-morning vigor made Stephanie feel guilty all over again. They were all wearing cuffed shorts — better to show off and stretch their muscular legs. Fleece vests abounded. Stephanie felt dirty and absurd in last night’s clothes, her silly grandma cardigan and denim skirt. She took off her rhinestone earrings and shoved them in her handbag. She thought of her mother, how she was always dressed to the right degree of formality. It was a tendency that Stephanie used to see as conformist and demure, but now she wondered if her mother wasn’t just trying to fit in, if she dressed carefully as a way to pass as a happy, well-adjusted person.
The runners disappeared into the woods one by one, and a large crowd of people moved toward a flag in the middle of a scrimmage field. Stephanie followed them, her cheap cloth shoes getting soaked with dew. They were Chinese laundry slippers with flimsy rubber soles, like limp Mary Janes. Stephanie ironically referred to them as her “signature shoe,” buying three or four pairs at a time at the hippie shops in Shepherdstown, the college town just over the Potomac in West Virginia. She’d actually applied to Shepherd College and been offered a full scholarship. She could have gone there without the Shanks paying for anything. Maybe she should have.
The flag in the distance turned out to be the two-mile marker. Stephanie heard her father before she saw him; he was calling out splits to a pack of girls emerging from the woods. Then she heard her brothers’ smaller voices.
“Go See-See, go See-See, go See-See, go!”
Stephanie knew See-See, although she didn’t recognize her at first, because her hair was now short, bleached, and spiked. Last year it had been dark blond with long daydreamy bangs. See-See had been in Stephanie’s creative writing class, and Stephanie associated her with one of her short stories, a story about a girl who survives a terrible car crash. The girl is left with an ugly scar across her stomach, a scar the girl hates, but over time, the appearance of the scar changes from a straight line to a gentle U shape — a smile. The story was called “The Smiling Scar.”
“Steffy!” Bryan called. He ran over to her and hugged her hard, pressing his face into her body, so unself-conscious. Stephanie leaned down to complete the hug, rubbing his back and kissing his forehead. He smelled like fresh air and cinnamon toast.
“Where were you last night?” Robbie asked, hanging back.
“None of your business,” she said lightly.
“Dad is PO’d.”
“Yeah, he seems pretty broken up.”
Their father was standing too close to the freshly mown course. He kept checking his watch and then looking at the course — the watch, the course, the watch, the course. A girl in blue was approaching, and he crouched and yelled forcefully, “Come on, Aileen. Get up there with See-See!”
“She’s good,” Stephanie said, watching her glide by on daddy longlegs.
“Our team sucks,” Robbie said.
Their father turned around. “Stephanie! You’re here!”
He ran over to her and pushed a clipboard into her hands. “I’m going to call out the splits and you write them down. Aileen got fourteen twenty-one, and See-See had thirteen thirty, which is good, very good. If she keeps up that pace, she’s going to break twenty-two.”
Two blue runners were approaching and her father began to holler. “Go Blue!”
Bry began to run alongside them, his short legs pumping. “Go blue! Go blue! Go blue!”
“He looks so dumb,” Robbie said.
“He’s cute,” Stephanie said, remembering happier times in their family, when they were a big group of five and Bryan’s role was always the little clown.
“Here comes Lori,” her father said. “She’s going to be sixteen something.”
Lori was a feminine girl whose pink skin, yellow hair, and rounded limbs made her look like a stuffed doll. She glanced at Stephanie’s father when she ran by, giving a quick smile to acknowledge that she’d heard her time. A few minutes behind, a second doll-like girl appeared, but this one was a porcelain doll, with pale, blue-veined skin and dark red hair pulled back into a tight braid. As she ran by — at a heartbreakingly slow pace — Stephanie recognized her as Jessica Markham, the smartest girl in school. She was famous for completing all the math courses by the end of her sophomore year and was supposed to graduate early.
“Steffy, come on.” Bryan pointed toward their father, who was jogging toward the gym and the finish line, delineated by two rows of fluorescent flags.
What started out as a jog soon turned into an out-and-out run. Stephanie cursed her shoes and then eventually pulled them off to sprint barefoot in the grass. Her hangover, briefly in hiding, reemerged, and by the time she reached the finish line, her legs and head throbbed with pain. Nearby, an oversized digital clock ticked off the seconds. A skinny man ran up to her father.
“You missed it. Adrienne Fellows broke the course record,” he said. “That girl’s talent is wasted in Div III.”
“Have any colleges shown interest?” her father asked.
“She’s probably going Ivy. I heard she’s smart,” the man said. “But those schools have crap running programs.”
“Not everyone wants to devote their life to sports,” Stephanie said.
The man turned toward her with an expression that made her realize how foolish she must seem in her wilted party clothes. I’m smart, too, she wanted to say. But all he could see was a girl with a hangover, a girl who didn’t take care of herself. Maybe he even knew she’d just had sex.
Stephanie’s father began to yell at the top of his lungs, startling her. “Come on, See-See! Come on, girl, you can do it!”