Girl Runner by Carrie Snyder Read Free Book Online

Don’t do that!”
    I freeze, startled. The coach takes an embarrassed stride away from me, toward the factory, three stories of red brick with windows staring straight at us. The rims of his ears flush the same colour as the brick.
    A bared foot seems suddenly grotesque, exposed, naked. There stand between us two blunt facts, which I’ve neglected to acknowledge: He is a man, and I am a girl.
    I feel my face wash with heat too, and hurriedly jam my foot deeper inside the hard leather, tighten the boot’s laces, as if that’s what I’d been meaning to do. “Does it matter what shoes I wear?” I mutter, crouched low, addressing the ground.
    “Not today.” The coach keeps his eyes directed at the factory’s back wall.
    We are positioned at the centre of Rosebud Confectionary’s sports field where the Rosebud Ladies’ Athletics Club trains, sponsored fully by Mr. P. T. Pallister, owner of Rosebud Confectionary. In a flash, I see everything as if I’m suspended above the scene: red brick, chain-link, dying autumn grass, sand pits, wooden benches, a low set of bleachers, and the coach is a man of thirty or forty (I can’t guess) with a pencil-thin black moustache, dressed in a well-cut pale-blue-and-white-striped suit and a white flat cap, and I am me, a girl in loose flannel pants and a man’s cotton shirt, wearing black boots, long golden hair pulled into a tight braid, no hat, breasts flattened by layers of wrapped jersey (unseen, of course).
    The peculiar discomfort of our situation feels suddenly acute, dire, quite beyond me. I’m attuned to a debt already owed to Rosebud Confectionary, which is not my place of employment, and by extension a debt owed to Mr. P. T. Pallister, on whose letter of invitation I’ve come, but my greatest debt seems owed to this man, this stranger, the coach whom it is my duty to impress should I hope to make the Rosebud Ladies’ track team, should I hope to run and run and run.
    Oh, how I hope to run.
    “What do you want me to do? Run at night, after dark, so no one sees?” I can hear myself asking Olive in despair. The two of us, sisters, work at Packer’s Meats, jarring and processing minced pork. Packer’s doesn’t have a track club, but for the past two summers I’ve played for their ladies’ softball team: dutifully knocking balls out of the park, running the bases, and using my crab-apple-trained arm to catch out opposing batters from deep in left field. Nevertheless, our team loses often. I hate losing. My skill, and the intensity of my efforts, has made me no friends among my teammates.
    I’ve made no friends running in the city, either.
    I run back alleys, disturbing chickens and dogs and mothers hanging out the wash. I run paved streets, dodging automobiles and horse-drawn delivery wagons and little boys on bicycles. I am occasionally pelted by handfuls of stones, by rotten fruit, once by a glass bottle that catches me behind the ear. I run along the curving lake going east past the concrete docks and warehouses, until I’m running in swamp and reeds, free from the city. It doesn’t take all that long, really. I breathe in the big sky. But every time, I must turn around and run back into the city again. I can feel it settling all around me on my return like a physical darkness, a weight.
    “You could go home,” Olive reminds me gently, but even if I wanted to—and I don’t—I believe that I can’t. I’ve left home.
    The coach is waiting for me to fix my laces and stand.
    When I do, almost hopelessly, he meets my eye. I’m as tall as he is—no, I’m taller. I have not the slightest glimpse of my own power or effect. I’m a girl who looks rarely into the mirror. The coach strokes his thin moustache with the fingers of one hand. He looks unhappy about something—he’s sad, or grieving, or perhaps it is longing I sense in him, need, desire—and I feel a tug under my breastbone, a sensation akin to pity. I want, in this instant, to please him, to make