Heroine

by Mindy McGinnis

  They usually look to me for confidence, so I convey that, giving them an up-nod in the hallway, a reassuring “see you after school,” to Bella Center, who never, ever finishes a run without puking. Carolina is a little pale, too. She’s not a distance runner, and even though the most we’ll ever have to run during a game is 240 feet—in the case of a home run—Coach says she won’t play anyone who’s on the plate. Equipment won’t even come out of the lockers for four weeks; this is all about running. And I have to act like that’s something I can do.

  Nikki is positively gray when I see her in study hall, which isn’t uncommon for the freshmen.

  “Does she really chase you if you lag?” Nikki asks me, her feet at the edge of our shared table, knees pulled up to her chest.

  “Only toward the end of practice,” I tell her. “Coach says there’s more in you than you think, and if there’s someone chasing you people tend to find that last energy reserve.”

  “What does she do if she catches you?”

  “Then the whole team runs an extra mile.”

  “Ouch,” Nikki says, going from gray to white. “That’s . . . harsh.”

  “That’s softball,” I tell her. “Oh, and don’t tell Coach you’re going to puke, either. She’ll tell you if you can still talk, you aren’t going to puke. Which is actually true. Same with passing out. If you’re really going to, you don’t get time to announce it.”

  “Okay.” Nikki closes her eyes and rests her chin on her knees.

  “You’ll be fine,” I tell her, and I mean it. It’s something I can see in her, a grittiness that might not be obvious in her small build, but can be spotted in her eyes. It’s what I see in my childhood pictures—pure determination.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “I know it sounds stupid, but just keep putting one foot in front of the other.”

  To someone watching it might seem like I’m being a good team leader, calming the anxiety of a younger player. But really this is what I’ve been saying to myself for weeks, every time I get out of bed and want to crawl back in, each step across the parking lot to the school, then out again. It’s not Nikki I’m talking to when I say these things; it’s myself—keep putting one foot in front of the other.

  Just today I’m going to have to do it faster.

  “Ladies, two miles.”

  It’s how my season has started every year since I hit high school, a greeting that Coach yells to our semicircle of stretching girls before even introducing herself to the freshmen. I know I’m about to experience pain, maybe even enough to punch through the protective fuzziness of the Oxy tablet I quickly bit in half and chewed before practice. But those words still send a spike of adrenaline through my veins, warming up my blood along with the black tarmac of the track as the sun eases behind a low-hanging March cloud.

  “That’s eight laps,” Carolina says for the younger players, as we get to our feet. I reach down to pull up Nikki, whose color hasn’t improved.

  “You’ve got this,” I tell her, pulling my heel up to my rear end, feeling the stretch of my quad. “Pace with me. Longer strides eat up the distance faster.”

  “’Kay,” she says, and joins me with Carolina at the head of the pack.

  “Shorter strides feel easier,” I continue as we take the first curve, the girls fanning out behind us already, weakest at the back. “But they make you take more steps than you actually need to. You’re working harder—”

  “Catalan!”

  Coach’s voice cuts from where she’s standing at the fifty-yard line, eyeing our progress.

  “Yeah?” I shout back.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  I shoot Carolina a glance, but she shakes her head, as clueless as I am.

  “Running.” I’m careful how I say it. Coach doesn’t care for smart-asses.

  “No, you’re not.”

  Shit.

  I cut into the grass, headed toward Mattix at a slow jog. “Coach, I’m—”

  “Fine?” she asks.

  I stop in front of her, aware of Carolina’s back as she passes us, Nikki’s dark ponytail flopping between her shoulder blades.

  “Yes,” I tell her.

  “I decide if you’re fine, and I’m telling you to walk these laps.” She sees my face fall, though I try to hide it.

  “Just for this week,” Coach adds in a lighter voice, one that won’t carry to the rest of the team.

  I don’t argue, although everything inside of me screams as I step back onto the track. I take a lane on the outside, so that others can pass me easily. Soon even the slowest girls have lapped me, and I’m overhearing snatches of Nikki and Carolina’s conversation as they drift by.

  Two times. Four. Six.

  By the end Nikki is struggling and Carolina is talking her through it, even though her own face is red and I can hear the strain in her voice. Others slip past me, teammates casting me curious glances. I’m sure it’s odd to see Mickey Catalan walking.

  And it sure as hell doesn’t feel right to finish last.

  When I was ten we should have won first place in the county tournament, but it didn’t happen. That’s because of a girl name Lana Patrick, who now plays trumpet in the marching band. Lana was a good kid, the cute kind with two little blond braids and matching ribbons on the ends, a button nose, and a sweet voice that always said, “yes, sir,” or “no, sir,” to our coach, even though he was just somebody’s dad.

  Lana had a pink batting helmet that she dusted off after every practice, a shiny bat that remained that way throughout the season because she never connected it to a ball, and a glove that apparently had a hole in the middle of it even though it was brand-new. She couldn’t stop shit.

  To be fair, her parents weren’t the type that insisted she play infield just because she wanted to. They knew her head might get cleaned from her shoulders. Instead, Lana was perfectly happy to hang out in right field, searching for four-leaf clovers and telling the first baseman what her mom had brought for team snack.

  Carolina hadn’t come along yet, but the three Bellas, Lydia, and I were enough talent to pull us through the bracket. One by one other teams fell, their names crossed off and the scores recorded on the big sheet tacked on the side of the pop shack. We’d play three games in a day, sweat pouring out, dirt crusted in the corners of our eyes, running on hot dogs, walking tacos, and Mountain Dew. By the end of Saturday, double elimination had taken its toll, and the second team we faced was done. We lined up on the baseline, everyone clapping for them as they got their trophies, Lana too.

  “I don’t get it,” she said to me, barely there blond eyebrows coming together, the tight pink skin of her sunburn creasing.

  “Get what?”

  “They lost,” she said. “But they get a trophy?”

  “Yeah,” I told her. “They’re done. So they get their trophies now.”

  Lana clapped as the coach from the other team announced the next girl’s name, the dirt on her face smudged with tears as she took hers, trying to smile as her mom snapped a pic.

  “But we won,” Lana said. “They get trophies and they get to go home. What do we get?”

  “We get to play more,” I told her.

  And I meant it. I didn’t play for trophies or ice cream or for the chance to go home. I played because I loved it, and winning meant I got to do the best thing in the world one more time this summer, one more game in this jersey, with this team.

  None of that made sense to Lana, who kept clapping for the other girls, even though I saw her kick aside a cup when we went back into the dugout, not pick it up and put it in the trash can like she usually would.

  I don’t know for a fact that she missed the fly ball in the seventh inning on purpose, or that she struck out every time she batted in order to get eliminated faster. It’s hard to say because those things probably would have happened anyway. I do know that when the team stopped for ice cream later, Lana was the happiest of any of us. She order
ed extra sprinkles on her cone and got selfies with all of us, even though Lydia, the Bellas, and I looked more pissed in them than celebratory, our cones half melted, unwanted third-place trophies in our hands. When she took her picture with our coach she told him he was the best coach in the world.

  “And you’re the best little player in the world,” he said.

  I threw my cone in the trash and walked away.

  I’m thinking about this now because it’s something I’ve never been able to let go, never came close to understanding. But I’ve never been last before, never been the weak link, never been the one people clap for to encourage rather than congratulate.

  I get it now. Lana stuck with the adults because they valued her talents—being cute and doing the right thing all the time. She couldn’t stop a ball or hit one for the life of her, so she steered clear of us, some primal instinct aware that if we had a chance we’d tear her to pieces to strengthen the herd.

  Today is about conditioning; it’s not a race. But that doesn’t mean that we aren’t all keeping track of who was first, middle, and last. It doesn’t mean that it hurts less when Carolina doesn’t wait for me to finish my two miles, heading into the school instead with Nikki, offering her water bottle since the freshman’s is empty. What it means is that the winners are going to go back to the weight room and stay awhile, a stationary victory lap.

  The loser gets to go home and take an Oxy.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  awkward: wanting dexterity in the use of the hands or of instruments; clumsy; wanting ease, grace, or effectiveness in movement or social situations—or—not easily managed; embarrassing

  Ronald Wagner’s pills get me through the first week of conditioning, but I’m not biting the second one in half anymore once Coach Mattix agrees to let me run with everyone else. I don’t have time to go to my car after school, so I risk keeping an 80 in my pocket, once gulping down a ball of lint alongside it when Bella Center surprises me in the locker room and I just want everything out of sight.

  I’ve reclaimed my place at the head of the pack, Carolina by my side, but it’s cost me. She didn’t question me when I handed her an earbud on the first day Coach said I could run. We took off together, striding in sync, my playlist powering us both. I made all two miles, the cord between us never tightening because I didn’t fall back. And if Nikki looked a little bummed that she’d lost her running partner, it sure as shit didn’t hurt as bad as my hip.

  The ache radiates, swelling outward from the screws like an explosion, the debris primed to reach all the way to my toes. I never let it, stopping the fallout with Ronald Wagner’s assistance, may he rest in peace.

  I’ve started checking the obituaries, a new, very morbid habit. Ronald departed this world not long after I lifted his meds, which made me feel better rather than worse since it meant he didn’t need them anymore. I got curious after that, and found Helen Whitmore. She was eighty-five, passed away after a short illness, leaving behind eight children and twenty-five grandchildren.

  I’m not exactly looking for Betsy Vellon’s name, the last provider of Edith’s OxyContin stock, but it would jump out at me if I saw it. With only her and Edith left to refill the safe, things could get sticky if Betsy bows out early. Edith’s prescription for osteoarthritis isn’t enough to take care of herself, let alone me, Josie, and anyone else she sells to.

  There are other names in the obituaries, pictures that I don’t expect to see. Parents who died suddenly, and a few people my own age who passed away unexpectedly. Some of the obits skip the euphemisms and flat out say that their loved one overdosed. My internet searches catch up with me and pretty soon I’m getting ads in my sidebar for cremation services, mattresses with remotes, and discreet adult diapers.

  So I stop looking.

  I tell myself that it’s because I want to get back to pop-ups about the World Series, not because I’m bothered by that word.

  Overdose.

  Yes, I know that people die from this shit. But the obits are for washed-up dreamers who didn’t hit their goals before thirty, stressed-out parents who needed a little break and ended up taking a long one, and people who just plain look like junkies, who have been messing around with this, that, and the other for so long that they tried too much of something new.

  The obits I’m reading aren’t for athletes who know exactly how much to take in order to perform. They aren’t for bored prima donnas like Josie trying to fill up their spare time.

  The obits are for people who are nothing like us.

  “I can’t remember the last time I took a shit.”

  It’s not something I would usually share, but it slips out. Josie almost does a spit-take with the whiskey that she’s sipping, and over in her chair, Edith lets out a snort. It’s Saturday night, the ache of a full week of real practice settled into my bones, sending me over here instead of to Carolina’s for “Netflix and chili,” as we’d started calling it, specifically for my mom’s benefit.

  “That’s the Oxy,” Josie says, wiping her chin clean of a dribble of whiskey. “Take some Metamucil, that’ll clean you out.”

  “Prune juice,” Edith argues as she flips the channel. “You don’t need to be putting all that stuff in your body, darlin’.”

  “Says your dealer,” Josie adds.

  I laugh, but the truth is there’s nothing funny about not being able to take a shit. “Does Metamucil work?” I ask Josie, who is crushing an Oxy with the base of one of Edith’s Precious Moments figurines.

  “I guess so.” She shrugs. “I don’t really worry about it. It’s got to come out sometime, right?”

  Actually, it doesn’t. But Josie doesn’t seem concerned, and while the Oxy has loosened my tongue, I don’t think she keeps me around for constipation stories.

  “What are you doing?” I ask, as Josie forms powder into a line with her nail file.

  “Somebody told me if you snort it, you get high faster,” Josie says.

  “Somebody?”

  “Yeah.” She doesn’t elaborate and doesn’t look at me. Instead she checks her phone, then looks down at the white streak she’s created, a fine wrinkle appearing between her eyebrows. “Do you know how to do this?”

  I almost laugh, but catch it just in time. Josie’s never asked me how to do anything, and I’ve always followed her lead when we’re under Edith’s roof. Outdoors I could run circles around her, or even pick her up and throw her a good distance. In here, she’s the one who knows what’s up. Except right now she doesn’t, and the part of me that got left behind when Coach had Lydia show the freshmen how to slide last week is ready to show off, even if I have no idea what I’m doing.

  I come over to the end table, eyeing the line. “How much is this?”

  “I crushed up a forty,” Josie says.

  I lean over the table, unsure. “I guess you just plug one nostril and snort, right?”

  “I don’t know, yeah?” Josie’s phone goes off and she grabs for it.

  Without her attention on me, I rock back on my heels, enjoying the stretch of the long muscles of my quads. I love even more that I can do this, that I can bend without crying, move as if the accident never happened. If Coach could see me like this . . . my eyes go to the white powder, the Precious Moments next to it, cuddling her puppy.

  Yeah, if Coach could see me like this.

  Josie tosses her phone onto the end table, knocking the statue over the edge. I’m supple and warm, snagging it from midair with little effort. I put it back, for some reason turning her so that the little girl isn’t looking at the Oxy.

  “Nice save,” Josie says. “Hey, Edes, the guys are coming over.”

  Edith’s eyes open slowly. “They buying?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “The guys?” I ask, sudden, hot anxiety peaking in my gut. I’m comfortable here in Edith’s house, my muscles long and relaxed, the heat of her living room matching the warmth blooming inside. I don’t want more people here, ones I have never me
t and don’t know how to talk to.

  “Don’t worry, they’re cool,” Josie says.

  She doesn’t seem to get that that’s exactly what I’m worried about. Boys don’t intimidate me in a weight room or in a gym, but put me in a social situation with them and nothing to lift, throw, or kick, and I’m deadweight. Girls like Josie know how to drop their shoulders, tilt their heads, and use their hips to make conversation. Me, I ask them their stats.

  “Who is it?” Edith asks from the chair. She digs the remote out from under her hip, awake enough now to care again what’s on TV.

  “Luther and Derrick.”

  “That’s fine, hon,” Edith says. “But nobody else. There’s enough cars in the driveway as it is. And tell them there’s no meat loaf left.”

  “Okay,” Josie says, clicking out a response on her phone.

  Edith flips through a few channels, then seems to reconsider. “I can make more though, if they want to stop and get some ground beef.”

  “I think they’re good, Grandma,” Josie says.

  “Actually, tell them if they want to come they need to stop and get prune juice,” Edith says.

  “No, hey—” I begin.

  Edith waves away my complaint. “Prune juice.”

  “Done,” Josie says.

  I find my sweatshirt in a ball at the end of the couch and pull it over my head. “I’m out,” I tell them.

  “Sorry, darlin’,” Edith says. “You’re not driving anywhere. I don’t want your death on my conscience . . . or a police record.”

  “I’m fine.” I’m digging in the hoodie pocket for my keys when Josie stops me.

  “You’re not fine,” she says, hand on my arm. “And you’ll like Luther and Derrick.”

  That’s not the issue, and I don’t know how to explain it to Josie. I’m sure I will like them well enough. But I won’t have anything to say, and I’ll just stand in the middle of the room, an awkward girl as big as they are. They won’t quite know how to handle my silence, or worse—if I open my mouth and say something stupid. But Josie has delayed me long enough, because a few minutes later headlights sweep the front of the house, the back door opens, and Luther Drake walks in.