The starting gun goes off and the panic hits me the way it usually does, as a tingling up and down the muscles of my legs and fingertips. I channel this energy into a burst of controlled speed meant to send me into the ranks of the girls just behind the lead. It’s our first Van Cortlandt varsity group race of the season. I see spandex shorts and school names in white block letters, hair twisted back in preparation for punishment by wind and dust and sweat. I think about how this morning the girls around me rose and combed their hair out carefully, maybe teased it up in a style borrowed from a magazine, and how they will wash their hair with shampoo and scented conditioner when they get home, all to impress adults, boys, and one another. For fifteen, twenty, maybe thirty minutes out of the day, starting now, none of that matters.



What does matter is figuring out how to overcome the distance between me and the entrance to the woods, and the distance from there to the finish line that follows. The main thing is to cross the field, which is the gray-gold color of fall and overarched by a sky like the inside of an oyster shell. Some people have told me that the beginning of a race is the worst part because you’re out in the open, and your family and teammates and all the people who came to the race can see you and are screaming for you to move. I get that, but I usually tune everything out the moment the race starts. During a race it really doesn’t make a difference whether I came alone or brought my whole school to support me. Running as I know it is a selfish sport.
I’m running beside my friend Bethezriel, who wears her hair in cornrows bound with plastic beads that click when she runs. We wear the matching team uniform of blue and white. She’s told me that she got her weird moniker because her parents thought it was Biblical somehow. “Good job,” I whisper.
“Thanks,” she says. She joined the team this year because I asked her to. She’ll start walking once we reach the woods but that’s okay, because she comes to every practice and hugs everyone at the finish line and has the best sense of humor.
The entrance to the woods is getting closer. Trees arch around it darkly like something from a fairy tale and we run toward it, our breath coming more harshly now. Little nagging fears tug at my consciousness, pressing down the complaints of my knees, muscles and lungs to slow down. I worry I’m going too fast. I worry my mind isn’t strong enough to pull me through to the finish. Most of all, I worry about the people around me – how to beat them, that is.
“Good job,” someone breathes– the phrase everyone loves to say and no one wants to hear. I look out of the corner of my eye and see that it’s Charlotte coming up from behind me, confirming my worst fears. I speed up my pace a little bit and try to fall into step with her, but to no avail. Hopefully I’ll pass her in a little while, after she burns out, but it’s not likely. Her pale legs are lined with smooth muscle from running cross country since fifth grade. Her form is perfect – left leg and right arm extended, fingers tucked loosely together, back straight. Our team is not stellar, but Charlotte consistently places in the top twenty-five of every Van Cortlandt race and the top five at Prospect Park. I never get her very dry and intellectual jokes so we are not especially good friends. Except for one time. We were at a team dinner at this organic pizza restaurant sharing three huge pies topped with every vegetable on the menu. Charlotte and I were sitting next to each other in a green pleather booth talking to different people, and suddenly she turned to me and said, “Hey, Alicia! I bet you can’t eat four slices of pizza after today’s practice.” We’d spent a half-hour doing a fartleks, a special breed of torture disguised as a running exercise.



I picked up a slice of pizza, brushed off the onions and tore off a big piece of crust with my teeth. “This is my fourth slice. I bet you can’t eat four.”



She did. And then she leaned in. Her long nose and long blond bangs were very close to my face and her breath smelled of garlic and banana peppers. “I bet you can’t eat one more slice and run a mile with me afterwards.”



My stomach cramped up at the mere thought. “How much?”



“How much do I bet you?” She flipped open her wallet. “Twenty bucks.”



A few minutes later the whole team piled out of the pizza shop to watch me and Charlotte run two laps around the block, the equivalent of a mile. One of the boys on our team, Joshua, asked the kitchen for some plastic bags and stood off to the side, yelling that if we needed one it would be twenty bucks. I have never run a worse mile in my life and I probably never will. All I will say is that Charlotte fared somewhat better than me on that run, and that, yes, I did use one of Joshua’s bags. And when I finished my final lap Charlotte smirked but handed over the twenty bucks with delicious reluctance.



Her speed should make me grateful that she runs for us, especially since today is a group race and our team won’t place without five strong runners on the track, but at times like this my competitive spirit is so rattled that I can’t view her as anything but an adversary. Being second-best is nothing new to me, but when it comes to cross-country I simply can’t stand it.
The sun disappears behind the cover of the trees and we are in the woods. It’s like that moment on an elevator when your ears pop and everything seems a little different – the air is quiet except for the crunch of running spikes on gravel, there is a clammy chill in the air, the starting sprint is over and I dart around at least four girls who have started to walk. “It’s all on us, Alicia!” Bethezriel calls out as I break away from her side. I smile a little to myself; that is her personal take on our coach’s favorite running mantra, It’s all on you. Bethezriel always says that it is an awfully lonely statement. Unfortunately, it is the easier one to believe right now as I take off on my own.
I only leave her because I have to, if I want to compete. We run at different paces; in fact, she was last in her first race. When she made it to the finish line fifteen minutes after I did, she put her face in my shoulder and swallowed several shaky, breathless sobs of shame. Her face was streaked with dust, tears and sweat, my sweat and her sweat. The friend in me felt horrible for her, and the cold competitor felt superior, but I also felt something I had not expected: Admiration. She had faced every runner’s nightmare and yet I knew she would be back for the next practice, the next race. That was a victory in itself. I could never support such a defeat – running is the only thing I am good at, and I have always clung to it fiercely. I knew from then on that even if she never placed, she was a member of our team, not just another runner.



There is another girl trying to pull up beside me – I recognize the wacky crimson ponytail as my teammate Elizabeth’s. “Good job,” I manage. She doesn’t, and probably can’t answer (interestingly, she’s never at a loss for words outside cross-country). She’s trying to pace herself with me but I can already tell that she’s breathing too heavily and won’t last. The sound of it blocks out even the sound of my own gasps. I focus on the trail ahead of me and try to ignore the sluggish signals my brain is sending me.



The soft-edged voice of our coach Ms. Trestle just before the race began comes back to me: There will be a moment during this race, like in any race, where you will tell yourself you hate cross-country, you’re not feeling well today, and this is going to be the one race you take it easy. You cannot listen to this voice. You especially can’t listen to this voice today, because today is a group run. Your whole team is relying on you to aim as high as you can. You all know that running is an individual sport – except for when it’s not. Think about that during the race, and think of your teammates. At the top of the hill I scan around for Charlotte, but can’t see her anywhere. I listen for Bethezriel’s unique and noisy style of race-breathing, but I can’t hear that either.



The runners are starting to thin out, which makes me nervous. I am right behind a pack of girls who are probably close to the front, although I can’t be sure. Either way, I can’t go any faster without risking falling behind later. We are coming up on the cement bridge that signals we are only a quarter of the way into the race, or something like that. Time is so elastic when you are running – reaching the top of a hill may seem to take hours, and the sprint across the finish line can never be over soon enough. But there are times when you’re in the woods and everything looks the same, and you don’t know how long you’ve been running for or how long you have left. That’s when you understand the real meaning of alone. All you can really focus on is the pain and the girl ahead of you.
I haven’t reached that point yet. I try to focus on Trestle’s pep talk in order to keep the voice she was talking about at bay, but it’s already hard for me to do – my thoughts seem to scatter further with every footfall. Instead I find myself thinking of Ms. Trestle herself. She is mostly quiet, mostly utterly mousey. I know my friends outside of cross-country make fun of her for having a voice even a megaphone could not adequately amplify. She’s a decent teacher, if you get a seat at the front of the class and can actually hear her, but Trestle is a cross-country coach above all. I saw her afterschool once, on a day when we had no practice, running like a fugitive. I realized that she was tall in her pink running shorts. Her back was straight and her thin face was set. It was a transformation. Even at practice, when she is ordering us to do the running, she has more confidence than she does anywhere else. She doesn’t seem to be close with any of the other teachers, but we are weirdly loyal to her, no matter how many sets of hills she makes us do. Bethezriel once told me it is because running sets our anxious coach free, and this allows us to see a side of her that she doesn’t show to anyone else, that we treasure. In Elizabeth’s words, Ms. Trestle is shy on the street but a freak in her cleats.
Elizabeth, of the red-dyed ponytail, is on the opposite end of the spectrum of runner personality types from Ms. Trestle. The first time she ever came to practice was about a month into last year’s season, when she was a junior and I was a freshman. She arrived late with my friend Shawna, who was already on the team and usually never late. In the park across the street from our school, where we usually meet, Elizabeth made the rounds, hugging everyone. She and Joshua had an elaborate handshake that took about thirty seconds to finish and involved a butt-bump at the end. She even tackled Trestle, who normally would have reprimanded a runner for being late but didn’t. I was suspicious.



“Ms. Trestle! Did I or did I not get the most perfect test scores of anyone you’ve ever had?”



“I can’t be sure, Elizabeth,” she said, looking only a little embarrassed.



“Sure you’re sure,” she said carelessly.
No one said anything to contradict her, so I figured her boasting must be pretty accurate. My grades didn’t garner any special attention; they were reliably average, as was every other aspect of my life. I was more than mediocre at cross country, but that was it.
She bounced out of Ms. Trestle’s arms and into mine before I had the chance to make it clear that I had no desire to touch her. “Alicia, right?” she asked, and before I could answer, she dropped her voice to a loud whisper and continued: “Cross-country isn’t a real sport, is it? I hate organized sports. But the parents are up my butt this year to join stuff.” Everyone laughed except me.
If this girl turned out to be likeable, smart, and fast, despite her complete and total ignorance of the sport, I would be really miffed.



Once she finished hugging me she began chatting up the other members of the team. Joshua started doing this thing where he would come up really close behind Elizabeth and then breathe in really deeply, like he was smelling her. She knew of course, and would burst out laughing every time. The third or fourth time he did it his hands hung at his sides so that they were sort of holding her hips. It was very sly, and I think I was the only one who noticed. At that something in her face changed. She broke away and announced, “Guys, let’s go. It’s time you all saw me fail miserably at something.”



“So it’s never happened before?” I asked.



“Oh, no,” she shot back, grinning. “I just make sure nobody’s around to see it happen.”



Like most new runners, Elizabeth sprinted for the first two minutes of the run before realizing she couldn’t keep it up for the remaining twenty-eight. She finished a few minutes after everyone had retreated into the air-conditioned school building; I was the only person still waiting outside.



“Good job!” I called out. As she got closer I could see that her hair was falling out of her formerly perky half-bun and was plastered to her face. Parts of her blue t-shirt were soaked dark with sweat. It gave me some satisfaction to know that she was an ugly runner.



“You did great. It’s okay if you walked,” I said automatically.



She stopped in front of me and put her hands on her thighs, panting. “I didn’t walk,” she snapped. For a moment I was speechless – there was no brightness or manufactured cheer in her voice. There is no room for other people and what they think when you run your hardest.
“Sorry,” she amended a few moments later, straightening up. “Can I tell you something?” I nodded warily. “Joshua is really annoying. I need to be perfect most of the time, for most people, but there’s no reason for me to be perfect for him, right?”
“No,” I said adamantly, after a short pause.
“When I was running, he didn’t matter at all, and neither did anyone else, at least not what they thought of me. It was just my mind and my body.” She smiled.
I understood and I didn’t. For me, running was all about other people – beating them, that is, and proving myself. But I understood that running did crazy things for different people. I understood, at least for the moment, that Elizabeth was not a shame to the name of cross-country or a threat either, and that we were united under the spandex colors of our team. She put an arm over my shoulder – it felt genuine now – and we went back into school together.



Pavement. I snap back into my body, into the pain of my tightening lungs and the road below me. There is pavement, rather than dirt trail, under my feet; pavement is good. It means we are about to come out of the woods. I lift my head up with some effort and see grey sky, grey trees, a pack of girls crossing the bridge ahead of me. Am I imagining it, or do I see blond hair, blue and white up ahead of me?
Charlotte. I’ve never been this close to her this far into a race. Wonder washes through me, giving me the strength to pass over the bridge with my running cleats squealing on the concrete. Then I am in the woods again, and although I know it is not for long, I can’t hold back a feeling of despair. She has disappeared around a bend. I suddenly feel that I am so far from the finish line, and yet I know I have to start picking up the pace. It is all I can do. I want so badly to walk.
I think of Bethezriel running behind me, probably still not across the bridge. I think of the giant slab of ginger-and-cream carrot cake waiting for me at Lloyd’s bakery across the street. I think of my PR. And I speed up, just by a little bit.
More and more light filters through the treetops until I can see a white glow at the end of the trail. My throat closes up for a moment and I am out in the sunlight, finally at last permanently. I clip past a big referee in black who says something encouraging, past a pair of soccer players at the water fountain, down the path cutting through the grey-green grass under the grey-blue sky. I try not to see the long stretch of path between me and the finish line. I try to focus on Charlotte’s bobbing ponytail. I try to connect us with my gaze, try to draw myself along a piece of invisible string, closer to her.
We turn the last corner of the course and the heaviness sets in like never before. My lungs feel bound in barbed wire and my calves are made of lead. People say that running is like waging a war against the natural instinct of your body, and that’s true, but more than anything else it’s actually my instinct to compete that drives me on. Charlotte is helping me in this way, even though we are also fighting one another with all our strength. I think of my PR. I think of falling into Ms. Trestle’s arms at the finish line. I think of Charlotte. I zero in on the back of her head and pump my arms and nothing, nothing matters more. A yard, another yard. Closing in on Charlotte. Close enough to touch.
I stumble across the finish line a second behind her, take three steps and puke water. There isn’t much left. A ref rips the bottom half off of my racing tag and puts something in my hand, a small plastic box – a medal. By the time I reach the end of the cordoned off chute some of the shock has worn off and I’m blinking back tears because I know that if I’d pushed harder, wanted it a little more, I could have beat her.



Charlotte is waiting for me. I don’t have the strength to congratulate her right now. But acknowledgement is not what she’s after. Instead, she fumbles for my shoulders and pulls me into a dirty sweaty messy hug, where we lean on each other and sway a little for balance, balance between team and competition, between the selfish and the self-conscious. I don’t want to let go because I suddenly know that I might not be able to hold myself up without her.



“I got you,” she says blearily.