Girl Runner by Carrie Snyder Read Free Book Online Page B

from my sprints around the track, and although the sun remains high overhead the wind has gone chilly.
    “What do you say, Mr. Tristan?” Glad grins. “I know I just met her, but I like her.”
    “You might not like her quite so much when you see her run,” says the coach. I can feel the tension rushing out of me, out of him too. Glad’s doing.
    “Consider yourself a Rosebud girl,” the coach says to me, bowing ever so slightly. “Glad needs the competition.”
    “I do!” she agrees. “Have I come too late today?”
    “You’re never too late for me, Glad,” says the coach. I blush, as if I’ve just seen him touch her face, but she ignores him and squeezes my hand once before dropping it, like we’re already friends. I’m amazed at the idea of being friends with someone like Glad, who effortlessly commands confidence. She seems at ease being a girl and a runner, both.
    “Let’s go,” she says simply.
    I am thirsty. I am dusty. My muscles are raging and torn, my feet blistered. I haven’t eaten since breakfast at Mrs. Smythe’s table, a woman never overgenerous with her portions, even when all she’s serving up is a splat of grey porridge with molasses and a skiff of milk.
    “Yes, let’s,” I reply.
    The coach gives me the inside lane. Glad stretches beside me, swinging her arms in circles, bending and rocking at the waist, kicking her legs out like a dancer on a stage.
    “Twice ’round,” says the coach. “On my go.”
    And we’re off.
    I can feel her giving me the track. She is being polite, offering up space like some kind of bargain, letting me run ahead. Is she going easy on me? I don’t like it. I’m offended. But it’s good to race with a bit of gristle on the tongue.
    As we enter the first turn, it comes to me that I’ve never raced like this before. My toughest contests have been in the schoolyard against boys, straightforward tests with no tactical underbelly. I’m either the fastest, or close to it, an accepted fact, as it is also accepted that the longer the race, the more unlikely it will be that even the fastest, tallest, strongest boy could best me.
    I’ve never raced anyone like Glad—my match. There crackles between us an undercurrent of emotions that I haven’t the experience to gauge, nor use to any advantage. All I know is that I’ve taken the first turn ahead of her, and I’ve stayed ahead, though she’s on my shoulder now, pushing a little. I don’t mean she touches me, I mean I can feel her presence, sapping me of will and strength, drip by drip, as if she’s put a tap into me. I have to get away from her.
    I open up a gap between us on the back straightaway, but on the turn, she taps me again, easily, and it takes a kind of fury to pull away as we pass the coach. I catch a sense of him as if in a still photo, his hands clenched into fists at his side, his shoulder muscles risen up, his mouth open. He might be shouting instructions or encouragement, but I can’t take it in.
    I hear my own breath, chopping the air. The turn feels smooth. I haven’t given way this time. She hasn’t closed the gap. I’m ahead and sailing, and something in me loosens—and that is when she takes me. I don’t even feel her coming, but suddenly I hear the coach yelling, and I know he’s not yelling for me, he’s yelling for Glad. He wants her to win.
    It’s like hitting a wall of water, like an ocean of resistance has risen up before me and I’m plunging into it. We are on the final turn and Glad is gathering speed ahead of me, seemingly without effort while I flail and churn through waves that come heavy and dark. I’m not sure I can stay upright for this last stretch.
    She has me by an impossible gap. Still, I press. I finish on my feet. I have to walk in circles to stay upright. I feel like a fool, so easily tricked and beaten, battered, stolen of breath.
    “Great run!” Glad dances around me, grinning, scarcely winded.
    “Do another two of those, and then we’ll work