The Admissions

by Meg Mitchell Moore

  Angela thought she might throw up for real now. It sometimes happened, right before races, though more commonly after. Angela wouldn’t mind if she threw up after the race, that would just prove she’d run as hard as she possibly could. But she didn’t have time now.

  One minute. The longest and the shortest sixty seconds of Angela’s life.

  The gun.

  Go.

  They were off.

  The thing about cross-country, well, about running fast in general, was that it hurt. Hurt like hell. Hurt like hell the whole time you were doing it, and it only felt better when you stopped. Why had Angela picked such a painful sport? Cecily wasn’t in pain when she was dancing; Cecily was in ecstasy when she was dancing. Angela’s friend Brynne Jacobson wasn’t in pain the entire time she was playing soccer. She had to run fast a lot, but not continuously, and she had teammates. She got taken out of a game, and she was able to sit on the sidelines and cheer while she drank Gatorade and waited to be brought back in. Where was the passing in cross-country races, where was the resting? Angela thought it would be nice if you could pass off a little bit of the pain to someone else, just for a minute. Even thirty seconds would do it. But it wasn’t a team sport. Except for the scoring, it was the most individual of all the individual sports.

  These thoughts kept Angela busy for the first quarter mile. She had gotten out well. The people standing near the start were just a blur of light and color. Harvard coach or no Harvard coach, they blended in with the trees and the clouds and the other girls breathing around her. Time to fly.

  (“Is that normal?” said Angela’s sweet, naive mother, after Angela’s first meet, freshman year. “That you all sound like you’re hyperventilating the whole time? I mean, is that okay?” “Perfectly normal,” Angela told her. “If you’re running as fast as you can.”)

  She had gotten out well enough, okay, but not first. Not as well as she usually did. She preferred to break free of the pack before the pack even formed, and to pretend that she was running alone. There were two girls ahead of her, one from Tamalpais, one from Novato. Angela had raced against both of them before. The girl from Novato—Casey something—was within Angela’s reach, first figuratively and then literally. She had gone out harder than she usually did. She had channeled Angela! She had a long blond fishtail braid, very pretty. Angela gained on her, gained enough that she could see the little wisps of hair coming out of the braid, could see the red elastic at the end of it, could watch it bouncing against Casey’s school tank.

  Three point one miles, a standard 5K. This was Angela’s best distance, not just on the trails but on the road and even on the track, where many runners would rather stick pins in their eyes and then blink than run a 5K. You had to have nerves of steel for a 5K on the track; you had to be able to beat back the boredom and keep your head in the game while you went around and around the same damn circle. Angela could do that.

  Angela did some math; math was another good way to keep her mind occupied. If she ran eighteen minutes, which—by the way—would not be fast enough to win the thing, then she was already one-ninth done. Good. Only eight-ninths to go! Piece of cake. And hopefully she’d run faster than eighteen minutes, so the whole thing would be over sooner. The faster you run, the more it hurts, and the sooner you’re done: the paradox of distance running.

  If only she could pass this Casey what’s-her-name.

  Casey from Novato, sensing Angela behind her, picked it up a notch, just a hair, barely perceptible. That was fine. That was okay. As long as Angela also picked it up a notch, stayed on her shoulder, didn’t let her pull farther ahead. Angela didn’t hold back on her breathing: sometimes that could disrupt another runner, throw them off guard a little bit, to hear someone’s lungs exploding. She let it rip, stayed on Casey’s shoulder. Casey was playing a good mental game, not acknowledging Angela. She didn’t turn her head, didn’t nod or say anything. She was acting like a girl all on her own, just running through the woods on a November morning for the heck of it. That was smart. That was how Angela liked to play it too.

  They were four minutes into it now. Still on Casey’s shoulder. Lots of time for strategy. Where was the girl from Tamalpais? She had made the second turn into the woods already, ahead of Angela and Casey. Not a great sign, that she was that far ahead. Not the way Angela preferred to race. But not unfixable. The girl from Tamalpais had probably gone out too hard, and she’d pay for it later. Pretty common, especially in a big meet like this. Angela watched Casey’s fishtail braid swing back and forth, back and forth. Was Casey the Harvard applicant the coach had really come to see? Possible. Angela knew nothing about Casey from Novato academically, or at all, really, except what she looked like running a 5K. Did she have siblings, were her parents here? How had she gotten her braid so perfect? Angela had never mastered the fishtail, though Cecily was pretty good at it; she’d refined her skills on her American Girl dolls, Kaya and Josefina in particular. They had the longest hair. In addition, Cecily and Pinkie spent a lot of time doing each other’s hair. When they weren’t doing weird things with Pinkie’s iPhone.

  She was letting her mind wander now. Too much? It was a delicate balance, to let your mind wander just enough to keep it off the pain but not so much that you lost focus. Exquisitely difficult.

  God, it hurt. Her lungs, her legs. Even her eyes stung. How much longer?

  It would be better, of course, if Angela were in front of these two, but it was early. Only—she checked her watch—only five minutes in. Five minutes into a race that would last (hopefully!) fewer than eighteen minutes. Seventeen-thirty, if she had a good day. But what if the Harvard coach was here to see Casey? And what if Casey beat Angela in front of him?

  Okay, Casey from Novato, thought Angela. You’re history.

  Deep breath, suck in all the air you can.

  Quick feet, big blast.

  And Angela had passed Casey from Novato. She kept the speed up for five extra steps to make sure Casey didn’t pass her right back, then she settled in. Casey might have cursed; Angela wasn’t sure. Maybe she was just wheezing.

  Eight minutes down. Almost halfway. Ten minutes, then eleven. Lungs bursting, maybe broken. Casey hadn’t gained on Angela, but Angela hadn’t gained on the girl from Tamalpais. The course turned again, into a single track, up a hill: where was she?

  Then! The course turned back on itself just ahead. A flash of green through the woods, a glimpse of black hair. There she was. She was maybe thirty seconds ahead of Angela.

  Ten minutes down. Seven to go. You can do anything for seven minutes, Angela Hawthorne. Anything. So pick up the fucking pace.

  She picked it up. She was gaining on the girl in green…gaining…gaining. She was invincible. She was the champion, louder than the lion.

  And then the unthinkable happened. She slowed down.

  Angela Hawthorne—Harvard applicant, a runner of such talent that in middle school the high school coach had seen her at the Fourth of July road race and recruited her while she chomped a banana and gulped from a bottle of Powerade handed to her by a race volunteer…. Angela, who had once (embarrassingly, in a moment of extreme weakness that had now become, to Angela’s great chagrin, part of family lore) pushed a fellow preschooler from the top of the slide because she wanted so badly to be first—had slowed down. She was bonking. Everything around her started to blur, and she felt so light-headed she thought she was going to pass out. She blinked hard, shook her head, tried to make her legs go. But her feet were two bricks now, and lifting her legs felt like lifting two logs out of a swamp. She couldn’t go faster. She was moving backward! She looked up, but all she saw were the redwoods, stretching their way to the sky.

  More footsteps behind her, like a herd of antelope running through the plains. More heavy breathing. One of the girls sounded like she was on the edge of cardiac arrest. But she wasn’t, because the next thing Angela knew she was passing her, and then more girls, not just Casey from Novato but other girls too. More than
Angela could count, or wanted to: they were antelope no longer, now they were wolves, running in a pack, urging one another on.

  And the final humiliation was that the last one to pass her was Henrietta Faulkner, who had the nerve to tap Angela on the shoulder and wheeze, “Good race!” as she went by.

  No! It wasn’t too late. Was it? Fourteen minutes in, fifteen. There were girls behind her and girls ahead of her but Angela Hawthorne might as well have been on an island. Marooned.

  She didn’t have it. She had no gas. Nobody heard her roar.

  She crossed the line looking straight ahead and went immediately for her bag. She pulled on her warm-ups. Her legs were lead. She didn’t look for her parents, didn’t look for her coach, certainly (God no!) didn’t look for the Harvard coach. The girl in green from Tamalpais was throwing up in the grass while her mother (Angela supposed it was her mother) stood next to her, rubbing her back and holding a water bottle. Casey from Novato was joking around with a teammate. Henrietta Faulkner was checking her phone, studiously not seeking out Angela. She knew better.

  —

  “Eighth,” her mom said cheerfully later, on the way home, Angela stony-faced in the backseat, but also surprisingly hungry, as though she, not the girl from Tamalpais (Meghan Green, it turned out), had been the one to throw up. But she hadn’t run fast enough to throw up! She wanted pancakes, and she knew her parents would take her anywhere she wanted, do anything to make her feel better. She could ask for the most expensive pancakes in all of San Francisco, she could request solid gold pancakes, and her parents would get them for her.

  But she didn’t deserve pancakes, so she didn’t ask for them.

  “I mean, eighth,” said her mom. “Sure, I know you would have preferred first, but eighth out of how many? Like sixty, right?” Her mother was rubbing at her temples and inspecting her eyebrows in the rearview mirror.

  “Ugh,” said Angela. She didn’t want to look at it that way. Her mother twisted around in the front seat to look at her. Her father remained silent. He had said almost nothing after the race, just clapped her on the back in a manly way that made her feel like they were office coworkers and said, “Hey, nice job.” They both knew he was lying.

  She didn’t say anything about the Harvard coach—she couldn’t stand to tell her father that. That would crush him like a candy cane caught underfoot.

  “That’s okay,” said her mother now. “Not every day can be your day. That’s just how the world works.”

  “That’s a stupid course,” said Angela. “I hate that course, you can’t see where you’re going. It’s such an advantage to the home team.” Angela wanted to claw at something. She settled for kicking the back of the seat the way Maya did when she got mad. Her mother managed to ignore this so she kicked harder and felt a little bit better. But not much.

  Her mother was looking out the window and gnawing at her thumbnail. Odd: her mother was not a nail biter.

  To her father her mother said, “Can you get Cecily from Pinkie’s and Maya from Penelope’s after you drop me at home? I need to jump in my car and be in the city in—let’s see”—she scrunched her nose and tapped her fingers on her wrist, though she wasn’t wearing a watch—“let’s see, in forty-five minutes. Geez, I hope the traffic isn’t too bad. Do you think it will be bad?” Her mother’s voice sounded odd, more frantic than usual.

  “Shouldn’t be,” said her father.

  Angela looked out the window, pressing her forehead to the glass. The sun had come out after the race. Its brightness was a slap in the face. Where was the mist, the fog, the cloud cover?

  She wanted to take a long, hot shower and crawl into her bed and sleep for the rest of the day and into the night. But she had a massive psychology project due on Monday, and she didn’t have time to sleep.

  “The pedestrian traffic on the bridge is going to be crazy. But the car traffic shouldn’t be bad.” To Angela’s ear her mom sounded a little panicked. Angela’s mom was made of velvet wrapped around steel, but, man, she could sometimes be undone by the weirdest things.

  “Right,” agreed her father. He glanced in the rearview mirror but didn’t address Angela. What if he knew about the Harvard coach? Should she tell him, just to get it over with? Then again, maybe Henrietta was wrong. Maybe the coach had never shown. “When the weather’s like this, everybody and their brother wants to walk across the bridge.”

  “We haven’t done that in a long time. I mean, as a family.” Now her mom was inspecting her teeth in the mirror. Once she had gone to a showing with a minuscule piece of an almond between two teeth and she still wasn’t over it. “Remember that time when we tried to go when Maya was too young and she started crying that she couldn’t make it? And we were smack-dab in the middle?”

  Angela looked at her cell phone. A text from Mrs. Fletcher, who knew it was last minute but wondered if Angela might possibly be available to babysit that night. She texted back: So sorry my parents need me at home 2nite. Thinking about the Fletchers gave Angela a stomachache.

  Her father said, “Hmmm…,” and her mother fiddled with the car radio. Comforting, Saturday-morning National Public Radio voices.

  Angela tried not to notice that her parents’ lives were continuing. They didn’t seem to notice that hers was over. Her mother was heading to a showing. Her father was going to pick up Maya and Cecily, and probably Pinkie too, and bring them back to the house, which would be annoying on the one hand but also okay because Angela didn’t want to be alone with her father. Maybe Cecily and Pinkie would watch a movie or go outside and tool around on their scooters. Maya would play with her American Girl dolls. Maybe someone from school would text Angela, see if she wanted to go out, maybe felt like going to that party at Jacob Boyd’s house (his parents were in Napa for the weekend). But the thought of the party at Jacob Boyd’s just made Angela feel more tired. She didn’t want to see Edmond Lopez. She did, but she didn’t. Mostly she didn’t.

  Also, there was one time just after the debacle at his house when he’d jostled against her leaving AP English and she’d looked up at him (more hopefully, more expectantly, more girlishly than she meant to) and she was pretty sure he’d sneered at her. He had definitely sneered at her. And what had Angela done? She hadn’t sneered back, no. She hadn’t even avoided his gaze altogether. She’d smiled! The stupidest, most vulnerable, most needy and ridiculous smile, a smile that said, Give me one more chance. Oh master.

  Just to make sure her humiliation was complete.

  Besides all of that, Angela was hopeless at parties. She was self-conscious in the truest sense of the phrase: so freakishly conscious of everything she said or did that she couldn’t enjoy herself.

  Her mother twisted around in her seat again. Angela saw now that she was wearing her real estate makeup: eyeliner, a hint of shadow. Mascara. Of course. She probably had a pair of heels stashed in her car, along with a lipstick. She probably wouldn’t even need to go inside the house; she’d just get in her car and go.

  “Sweetie?” she said. “It’s just one race, you know.” Her voice really did sound odd, almost the way a voice sounded when its owner had been crying. But what would Angela’s mother be crying about? “It’s not the end of the world.”

  Angela snorted.

  Then, because she felt bad about snorting, she said, “I know it’s not.” She meant to speak nicely, but the words came out like they had knives attached to them. Also, she didn’t believe her mother. It did feel like the end of the world. The end of something, anyway.

  She texted back to Mrs. Fletcher. Nvr mind, sorry I can do it

  CHAPTER 33

  GABE

  Gabe was in front of the house, inspecting the variegated sweet flag for signs of rust. It was a golden fall day, Indian summer, though in California Indian summer was a different beast altogether—not brief, as the term implied in other parts of the country, it could last most of the fall here, up until the rainy season, which passed for winter out here. Earlier that day, just for
kicks, he’d checked the weather in Laramie: a high of 38, a low of 15. Snow possible in the late afternoon. He allowed himself to picture, for a moment, the ranch in winter. The cold! Biting at his fingers, at his toes, at any exposed patch of skin. Feeding the cattle from hay hauled in on a flatbed, when they couldn’t get to the grass because of the snow. A hard, brittle life. No country for old men, that was for sure. And here he was, standing barefoot on his emerald-green lawn, wearing a short-sleeved gray T-shirt and jeans. He could have had shorts on if he’d wanted to. Angela, headed out for a long run with her team on one of the rare Saturdays without a meet, was in a tank.

  In California, people did not put weather permitting on their invitations to outdoor events. In California, the weather always permitted.

  Gabe knew that Nora, even after so many years out here, still missed the (ridiculous) weather patterns of the East Coast, the unforgiving humidity, the extreme cold. The snow. But not Gabe. He woke up most days and thanked God (in whom he did not believe) that he’d done what it took to land himself out here, build a family, keep them there. In paradise. Some might say against all odds.

  He heard his name and turned around to see Anna Fletcher marching toward him. He raised a hand in greeting. They never saw the Fletchers anymore, not since the divorce. Which was a shame: they lived right across the street! In happier times they’d gone back and forth to dinner at each other’s houses. Sometimes it was just impromptu drinks and apps. Angela used to babysit all the time for them; they had quite a social life, from what Gabe remembered, until Alan Fletcher woke up one day, walked into the kitchen, announced that he wasn’t cut out for family life, and took off for a bungalow in Oceanside.