Stephanie made her way through the crowds of spectators. Everyone here had probably had granola and apples for breakfast, and they had probably eaten it after going for a sunrise jog. The running crowd was very wholesome, and their early-morning vigor made Stephanie feel guilty all over again. They were all wearing cuffed shorts—better to show off and stretch their muscular legs. Fleece vests abounded. Stephanie felt dirty and absurd in last night’s clothes, her silly grandma cardigan and denim skirt. She took off her rhinestone earrings and shoved them in her handbag. She thought of her mother, how she was always dressed to the right degree of formality. It was a tendency that Stephanie used to see as conformist and demure, but now she wondered if her mother wasn’t just trying to fit in, if she dressed carefully as a way to pass as a happy, well-adjusted person.
The runners disappeared into the woods one by one, and a large crowd of people moved toward a flag in the middle of a scrimmage field. Stephanie followed them, her cheap cloth shoes getting soaked with dew. They were Chinese laundry slippers with flimsy rubber soles, like limp Mary Janes. Stephanie ironically referred to them as her “signature shoe,” buying three or four pairs at a time at the hippie shops in Shepherdstown, the college town just over the Potomac in West Virginia. She’d actually applied to Shepherd College and been offered a full scholarship. She could have gone there without the Shanks paying for anything. Maybe she should have.
The flag in the distance turned out to be the two-mile marker. Stephanie heard her father before she saw him; he was calling out splits to a pack of girls emerging from the woods. Then she heard her brothers’ smaller voices.
“Go See-See, go See-See, go See-See, go!”
Stephanie knew See-See, although she didn’t recognize her at first, because her hair was now short, bleached, and spiked. Last year it had been dark blond with long daydreamy bangs. See-See had been in Stephanie’s creative writing class, and Stephanie associated her with one of her short stories, a story about a girl who survives a terrible car crash. The girl is left with an ugly scar across her stomach, a scar the girl hates, but over time, the appearance of the scar changes from a straight line to a gentle U shape—a smile. The story was called “The Smiling Scar.”
“Steffy!” Bryan called. He ran over to her and hugged her hard, pressing his face into her body, so unself-conscious. Stephanie leaned down to complete the hug, rubbing his back and kissing his forehead. He smelled like fresh air and cinnamon toast.
“Where were you last night?” Robbie asked, hanging back.
“None of your business,” she said lightly.
“Dad is PO’d.”
“Yeah, he seems pretty broken up.”
Their father was standing too close to the freshly mown course. He kept checking his watch and then looking at the course—the watch, the course, the watch, the course. A girl in blue was approaching, and he crouched and yelled forcefully, “Come on, Aileen. Get up there with See-See!”
“She’s good,” Stephanie said, watching her glide by on daddy longlegs.
“Our team sucks,” Robbie said.
Their father turned around. “Stephanie! You’re here!”
He ran over to her and pushed a clipboard into her hands. “I’m going to call out the splits and you write them down. Aileen got fourteen twenty-one, and See-See had thirteen thirty, which is good, very good. If she keeps up that pace, she’s going to break twenty-two.”
Two blue runners were approaching and her father began to holler. “Go Blue!”
Bry began to run alongside them, his short legs pumping. “Go blue! Go blue! Go blue!”
“He looks so dumb,” Robbie said.
“He’s cute,” Stephanie said, remembering happier times in their family, when they were a big group of five and Bryan’s role was always the little clown.
“Here comes Lori,” her father said. “She’s going to be sixteen something.”
Lori was a feminine girl whose pink skin, yellow hair, and rounded limbs made her look like a stuffed doll. She glanced at Stephanie’s father when she ran by, giving a quick smile to acknowledge that she’d heard her time. A few minutes behind, a second doll-like girl appeared, but this one was a porcelain doll, with pale, blue-veined skin and dark red hair pulled back into a tight braid. As she ran by—at a heartbreakingly slow pace—Stephanie recognized her as Jessica Markham, the smartest girl in school. She was famous for completing all the math courses by the end of her sophomore year and was supposed to graduate early.
“Steffy, come on.” Bryan pointed toward their father, who was jogging toward the gym and the finish line, delineated by two rows of fluorescent flags.
What started out as a jog soon turned into an out-and-out run. Stephanie cursed her shoes and then eventually pulled them off to sprint barefoot in the grass. Her hangover, briefly in hiding, reemerged, and by the time she reached the finish line, her legs and head throbbed with pain. Nearby, an oversized digital clock ticked off the seconds. A skinny man ran up to her father.
“You missed it. Adrienne Fellows broke the course record,” he said. “That girl’s talent is wasted in Div III.”
“Have any colleges shown interest?” her father asked.
“She’s probably going Ivy. I heard she’s smart,” the man said. “But those schools have crap running programs.”
“Not everyone wants to devote their life to sports,” Stephanie said.
The man turned toward her with an expression that made her realize how foolish she must seem in her wilted party clothes. I’m smart, too, she wanted to say. But all he could see was a girl with a hangover, a girl who didn’t take care of herself. Maybe he even knew she’d just had sex.
Stephanie’s father began to yell at the top of his lungs, startling her. “Come on, See-See! Come on, girl, you can do it!”
See-See heard him and began to kick harder, her stride becoming shorter and faster instead of lengthening, like a taller girl’s would. There was a girl in a green uniform in front of her, from Clearspring, who was also trying to kick, but whose face was strained with exhaustion. The knobby-kneed man began to cheer along with her father and See-See’s arms pumped, reaching forward as she passed the Clearspring runner. Her jaw was clenched in a tight, perverse grin. The Smiling Scar, Stephanie thought.
“She’s a real competitor,” the man said. “Here comes another one.”
It was Aileen. She was obviously tired, but there was a lightness in her stride that hinted at hidden reserves of strength. When she finished, she stopped cold and then began to jump up and down on her kindling legs, nearly prancing. Stephanie felt oddly jealous as she watched her father guide Aileen and See-See out of the chute to congratulate them. Their faces were red with exertion. “There’s Lori!” Aileen cried. “Lori, Lori, Lori!” she chanted.
Lori staggered down the chute on her stuffed-doll’s limbs, her body seeming to move forward only by means of some rote memory of movement, not out of any real desire to do so. Runners from other teams breezed by and she didn’t seem to notice or care.
The clock read 26:50 when she finally crossed the line. Jessica finished thirty seconds later, looking even more worn-out than Lori. They were dead tired. Stephanie thought it should be the other way around; the top finishers should be the most wrung out, the most pathetic. Instead, the top finishers were now jogging in the soccer field in random patterns, occasionally kicking out their legs or pinwheeling their arms, as if their bodies were giant toys.
“Hey, do you mind keeping an eye on the boys?” her father said. “I’m going to take the girls on a cooldown.”
“Sure, whatever,” Stephanie said. He was barely making eye contact with her, a sure sign he was angry. But he had no right to judge her; she knew how he’d spent his night.
Spotted Mountain rose up beyond the playing fields. It wasn’t a particularly tall mountain, was perhaps not even technically a mountain, but it was known locally for its spectacular views. It was said that from the top you could see north all the way to
Pennsylvania and south to West Virginia. Whenever people from school asked Stephanie where she was from, she had taken to borrowing her father’s phrase, “the skinny arm of Maryland”; that way people got the proximity to both states.
Halfway up Spotted Mountain was the Outdoor School, a sleepover camp that every kid in the county attended for a week during sixth grade. Stephanie remembered her week there so clearly; it was her first time away from home, away from her mother. She had been so excited to go, relieved to get out of a house dominated by two little boys, but her mother had been very emotional about their separation, making her promise to write every day. Stephanie had dutifully sent a postcard each morning before breakfast, but she didn’t read the letters her mother sent. She always meant to, but at the end of every day she was so tired from hiking and bird-watching and orienteering and cooking outdoors that she never opened them. Stephanie wondered now what had happened to those letters. Her mother must have found them when she unpacked her bags.
Her father returned, slightly winded, his forehead shining with sweat. He seemed happy.
“It’s a world away from football, huh?”
“You said it, I didn’t.”
Her father smiled, an old smile, like the ones he used to share with her when she was a little girl. For a moment, she forgot she was angry with him.
THE BUS TOOK them back to Willowboro High from Clearspring. Dean waited around at the school to make sure everyone got a ride home. See-See was the last to get picked up. Her mother drove a tan Toyota Tercel, an ugly termite of a car, but she acted as if she were driving a Ferrari, speeding into the lot and coming to a dramatic stop in front of the school. She waved to Dean but didn’t bother to roll down her window.
“Great race,” Dean said to See-See as he sent her off. She smiled so hugely at this casual compliment that he felt protective toward her. On the bus ride home he’d overheard her talking to the other girls about her mother’s latest boyfriend, a salesman who always wore striped shirts with white collars. The shirts seemed to be a black mark against him, but Dean had no idea why. He felt sorry for the salesman boyfriend—and for See-See. If he ever dated again, he would keep it a secret from his kids.
“I’m hungry,” Bryan whined. “Can we get lunch at Asaro’s?”
“Let’s go somewhere else.”
“But I want pizza.”
“I could go for Asaro’s,” Stephanie said.
Dean glanced at Robbie, who surprised him by raising his eyebrows and shrugging in an adolescent way, as if to say, What’s the big deal?
“All right, pizza it is. Give me a minute, I have to get something inside.” Dean tossed the car keys to Stephanie. “You can go ahead to the car, I’ll meet you.”
The empty parking lot sparkled in the midday sun, radiating heat. Dean felt a kind of satisfaction at how much had been packed into one morning. And at the same time, there was dread at the thought of the long, empty afternoon ahead. Was this how Nicole felt, on bad days? He still wasn’t used to weekends without her. And now Stephanie was back. He needed to get into a new rhythm with the boys, and she had jolted things out of sync. He’d been embarrassed to introduce her to the cross-country girls in her soggy shoes and wrinkled clothes. He had no idea where’d she slept. He didn’t even want to deal with the possibility of sex. But the girls didn’t seem to notice or care about her unkempt appearance, or maybe they expected her to dress that way, maybe that was her reputation: disheveled but smart. Dean didn’t have a clear picture of how Stephanie was perceived by her peers. She was one of those kids who moved in and out of lots of different groups of people. A good thing, he’d always thought. Or maybe it meant she was lost.
The gym was cool and dark, a sanctuary as always. His office, in contrast, was stale and hot. He opened a window to let in some fresh air and saw the football team gathering on the field for their postgame practice. His chest tightened with longing. They were just starting their day and had a long, sunny afternoon ahead. There was nothing better than working out after a victory.
He’d told the girls he’d run their practices for the next week, until their coach arrived, but he was already beginning to regret that promise. He had nothing to say to four mediocre girl runners. Still, he had admired the way See-See had finished her race with gritted teeth, a race that didn’t matter, a race neither she nor her team could win. He wasn’t sure if he’d be able to do the same.
His whole life, he had always been on a winning team.
He began to search through his PE files, hoping to find something about running stowed away. It had been a long time since he’d bothered with lesson plans, so he was pleased to discover a list of several track-and-field workouts, as well as some xeroxed articles about stretching and the training habits of elite runners. There were also maps of the school’s cross-country course and nearby trails. He grabbed everything, stuffing it all into a manila folder.
When he came back outside, Stephanie had pulled the car around to the front of the building. He thought she would move to the passenger side as soon as he approached, but she stayed put in the driver’s seat.
“We’re not going to Asaro’s,” she said, leaning out the rolled-down window. “Robbie told me everything. How he’s been going there for lunch, how he got in trouble, how he’s seeing a psychiatrist.”
“Bry told her,” Robbie said.
“I didn’t mean anything by it!” Bryan said. “I was just making conversation.”
“Robbie’s been talking to the school counselor, it’s not a big deal.” Dean couldn’t understand how the mood in the car had changed so quickly.
“Dad, he ran away,” Stephanie said. “That’s a serious cry for help.”
“Stop talking about me!” Robbie covered his ears. Then, upon second thought, he opened the side door and took off running across the empty lot.
“Robbie!” Bry called. He began to scoot across the backseat to follow him, but Dean blocked him.
“You stay put,” he said, pointing a finger at Bry.
“Don’t yell at him, it’s not his fault!” Stephanie unbuckled her seat belt. “I’ll go get Robbie.”
“You’ll stay right here.” Dean barely looked at her, instead keeping his eye on Robbie, who was now heading toward the greenhouse at the far end of the school.
“I should talk to him. I know how he’s feeling. I’ve been thinking of seeing a therapist.”
“Well, that’s just great.” Dean couldn’t keep the sarcasm out of his voice.
“You’re against my seeing a therapist?”
“Of course not! I’d rather have you do that than come home and wallow in your misery, going God knows where at night.”
“You’re the one who should be explaining where you were last night.”
“I’m not going to apologize for going to a football game.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about. I saw you.” She glanced at Bry in the backseat. “I was at that bar. That’s all I’m going to say.”
“Get out of the car,” Dean said.
Stephanie shut the door behind her.
“What were you doing in a bar?”
“What were you doing? Who was that? Were you seeing her before Mom died?”
“No,” he said. “Not that it’s any of your business. She’s my friend.”
“She looked like more than just a friend.”
“I didn’t do anything wrong, Stephanie. You were drinking underage. You could have been arrested.”
“I’ve seen you with her before.”
“Believe what you want,” Dean said. “I’m going to go get your brother.”
Dean made his way across the asphalt toward Robbie. But he could only think of Stephanie. He never would have talked to his father the way she had just talked to him. Even after his mother left, Dean had not been so sullen—although he had certainly blamed his father for not being able to keep his mother around. Once, when his father was hospitalized for a broken leg and high on painkillers, he told Dean
that his mother had cheated throughout their marriage, that she was notorious. Dean remembered that word—notorious—because it was the name of one of the horses his father trained. Dean didn’t want to be like his father, tight-lipped with secrets that slipped out under chemical influence. But how could anybody be expected to talk to their kids about suicide?
He found Robbie all the way at the other end of the parking lot. He was sitting in the overgrown grass near the greenhouse that was adjacent to the school’s woodshop. Behind him were the clouded shapes of tables, plants, and trees. He looked up at Dean. “Sorry,” he said.
“You don’t have to be sorry.” Dean sat down next to him. The ground was still a little bit wet from the morning’s dew.
“You’re really not mad?”
Dean shook his head.
“Stephanie seems mad.”
“She’s mad at me,” Dean said, “not you.”
“Why isn’t she at school?”
“What’s going on with you?” Dean searched his son’s face for some clue of what motivated him. He still had a babyish profile, round cheeks and soft, wispy hair.
“Nothing much.” Robbie plucked one of the taller grasses and began to tie it into a knot.
“There’s a lot of new kids, right? Have you made new friends?” Dean said. The middle school was large, bringing together the graduating classes of four littler elementary schools.
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