Chapter Ten
Lane Four
The program said six four-hundreds at altitude pace. She was at the rail before light, spikes over her shoulder, mist on the lanes.
There was a voice in the mist.
“—Ayo of Korowa takes the bend! The crowd cannot BELIEVE it — nobody in HISTORY has ever—”
A boy. Eleven, maybe. All elbows. He came off the bend in lane four with his arms flailing and his head thrown back, announcing himself to a stadium that wasn’t there, and there was something wrong with the picture that took her a moment to find.
He was running her race.
The head carriage. The strike. The way he attacked the bend. A bad copy, but hers.
That was also how she learned his name. He announced it.
“You’re in my lane,” she said.
He spun around and his whole face went off like the letter arriving.
“Forty-four oh-two,” he said. “Coastal final. You went out in twenty-one flat which everybody said was suicide and then it wasn’t, and in the Capital meet you false-started and they almost—”
“Go home.”
“—and nobody from the Highlands has EVER—”
“Go home.”
He went. Backwards. Still talking.
The next morning he was there.
She ran her session at the far side of the track and he ran his races in lane four, providing his own crowd, and they ignored each other completely, except that only one of them was ignoring the other.
The third morning she managed not to look at him for a while.
Then he ran another one, and his hands came up around his ears on the back straight the way they always did, and something in her could not stand it.
“Stop. STOP.”
He stopped in the middle of the track like he’d been shot, terrified and delighted.
“Your hands are at your ears. You’re strangling yourself. The arms swing the legs — loose hands, or you’re carrying two stones for four hundred meters.”
By the time she heard herself, she was already three corrections in.
“Again,” she said. “From the bend.”
He grinned like he had won something, and she put him on the bend before he could enjoy it.
The next morning she brought cones.