We’d been warned about running alone. We’d also been warned about walking at night, about bus stops and Uber drivers, about the hungry shadows of parking garages. We’d been warned and we’d warned one another about parties at Joe DiCarlos’ house, about Sarah’s older brother, about the lacrosse players who sat at the lunch table closest to the pizza station.
We heeded most of the warnings most of the time. But we were runners. And no one told the boys’ team to practice in pairs or avoid wearing headphones at night. Besides, when we ran, who could touch us? We were our own private rooms. When we ran, in the peach light of an early sunset or in the long gray dawn, we were of the world but not in it.
So, that one fall afternoon, when Lucy darted ahead of us, we all only thought: Showoff. It was just practice, during a week without a meet. There was no need to leave the pack so soon, so suddenly. Lucy was fast, probably the fastest among us, but she didn’t always win her races. She couldn’t pace herself. She was usually quiet and controlled, but sometimes, at the start of a race she’d vibrate with this uncontained energy that she could not rein in.
We figured we’d pass her in a mile, easy, our legs chipping away steadily as she flagged. But after a mile and a half, we still hadn’t caught sight of her. Without mentioning it, we all leaned a little further into the wind, lifted our legs higher.
At mile two, no one even joked about stopping at Dunkin’ Donuts when our course swung us by its orange lettering. We concentrated on our form. We measured our breathing. We narrowed our eyes. The metal taste that came to us during meets appeared. We wanted to beat her.
She was our teammate, yes, but she always held herself a little apart. She did pre calc problem sets on the bus to meets, declined rides home after practice even though she didn’t have a car, never shared secrets at team sleepovers. She was Coach Walton’s favorite.
At mile three, Maria Elena finally said, “Where is she?”
“She can’t be far,” one of us said. “We got this.”
“No,” Maria Elena said more firmly. “We should have caught her already.”
“Maybe she veered off for a quick study break,” Emma said.
“Do you think she’s okay?” Maria Elena asked. “It’s weird.”
What options did we have? We kept running. We thought she’d be there at the end, waiting for us. A quick glance at her watch to hint at her disappointment.
But we finished the run, did our cool down exercises, checked our own watches, rubbed the feeling back into our hands, joked about our numb noses, and—still—there was no sign of her. Coach Walton asked us where Lucy was. We wondered if he’d notice so quickly if any of us were absent, but we simply shrugged. She was with us and then she wasn’t.
And then she wasn’t. And then she wasn’t. And then she still wasn’t.
We backtracked. We texted. We called her name. We checked the Dunkin’ Donuts. We paired off and then fanned out. We tried to recall: who were her close friends? Later, there were police dogs. There were flyers on every telephone pole in town and there was her strangely stoic mother on the Channel 4 News.
In interviews, we told the police, “But she was running.”
How could we explain? How could we make them see? When we ran, we removed ourselves from the world and all the traps it’d set for us. When we ran, our bodies were only ours. When we ran, we were out of reach.
“Nothing bad could’ve happened to her,” we insisted in those first interviews. “She was so fast.”
Rebecca Turkewitz is a writer and high school English teacher living in Portland, Maine. Her writing has appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, The Masters Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, The New Yorker’s Daily Shouts, McSweeney's Internet Tendency and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in fiction from The Ohio State University. You can find her on Twitter @R_Turkewitz or on her website.
Photo by Josiah Mackenzie on Foter.com / CC BY