The End of Ordinary

by Edward Ashton

  Heat stroke can be brought on by a lack of hydration, lack of training, and the use of alcohol or caffeine.

  The first symptoms of oncoming heat stroke are cramping and profuse sweating, but in later stages the victim will stop sweating, may become confused, and often feels cold rather than hot.

  Left untreated, heat stroke can lead to kidney damage, brain damage, and death.

  If someone you are with begins showing symptoms of heat stroke, people will judge you harshly if you abandon that person in the woods.

  The ambulance left. Doyle dismissed us. The other runners drifted away, one by one. Jordan patted my shoulder as he passed, and mouthed Call me when I looked up. I nodded, and tried to smile. He and Doyle headed off to the parking lot together. I wiped at my face with the front of my shirt and looked around for my dad.

  He was standing on the other side of the field with Tara’s mom.

  His arms were folded across his chest, but he was standing so close to her, his head bowed so that their foreheads were almost touching. I opened my mouth to call to him, but something about the way they were locked into each other stopped me.

  “Hey.”

  I turned my head. Tara was standing beside me.

  “Hey,” I said. “Are you gonna yell at me too? ’Cause if you are, can we just pretend that I already feel bad enough?”

  She laughed.

  “No, Hannah. I don’t have any interest in yelling at you. You’re not Sarah’s mommy. If it had been me back there, I wouldn’t have stopped either.” She stepped a little closer, and turned to face me. “True story: last year at Sectionals, a girl from Pittsford bonked right in front of me, tripped over a root or something and went down flat on her face. She must have knocked a wire loose, because she didn’t get back up. Just laid there on the ground, kind of twitching.”

  I looked up at her. She was smiling.

  “Holy crap. What did you do?”

  Her smile disappeared.

  “I stepped on her hand, and I kept running. People think this is a kumbaya sport. They think it’s all Good luck at the start, and hugs and tears at the finish line. It’s not, Hannah—not if you want to run for Doyle, anyway. Not if you want to win. I mean, I’m not saying I don’t feel bad for Sarah, and yeah, you probably should have helped her. End of the day, though . . . I’m not the girl who’s about to judge you.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Pretty sure you’re the only one right now.”

  She shrugged.

  “They’ll get over it. Sarah will be back to practice in a couple of days, and this’ll all be water under the bridge.”

  I turned to look across the field. Dad was saying something, gesturing with his hands. Tara’s mom was laughing.

  “So,” Tara said. “What do you think’s up with that?”

  I shook my head.

  “No idea. My dad’s a social spastic. He usually can’t talk to a stranger for more than two minutes without breaking out in hives.”

  “Yeah,” Tara said. “Well, my mom can be really . . . friendly.”

  I turned back to look at her. She was scowling.

  “Sorry?”

  She shook her head.

  “Not your fault. Are your parents married?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Why?”

  She sighed.

  “No reason.”

  Wilma17: Hey Jordan. Got a minute?

  Jordasaurus: Sure. Just let me get away from Mumsy.

  Jordasaurus: Okay. What’s up?

  Wilma17: So that was crazy today, right?

  Jordasaurus: Nah. Par for the course for a first practice.

  Wilma17: Oh. Really?

  Jordasaurus: . . .

  Wilma17: Right. Sorry.

  Jordasaurus: Anyway, I wouldn’t stress about it. I just heard from Doyle. Sarah’s fine. Give it a few days, and it’ll be like it never happened.

  Wilma17: That’s pretty much what Tara said.

  Jordasaurus: Tara, huh?

  Wilma17: Yeah. She got stuck after practice with me. Her mom and my dad had kind of a . . . thing going on. She was really nice.

  Jordasaurus: Nice? You sure we’re talking about the same Tara?

  Wilma17: . . .

  Jordasaurus: Okay. I won’t disillusion you.

  Wilma17: Great. Thanks for that. I need at least one friend on the team.

  Jordasaurus: Oh. Now you’ve hurt my feelings.

  Wilma17: On the girls team, jackass.

  Jordasaurus: That’s better. One thing, though . . .

  Wilma17: Yeah?

  Jordasaurus: Come talk to me again after the first time you beat her.

  6. In which Drew skates on very thin ice.

  Hannah’s first meet came on the afternoon of the second Tuesday in September. The heat had finally broken, and the sun was a dull orange spot in a slate-gray sky. They were running against three of the big public schools, on a hilly five-kilometer course in a park near Perinton. I asked Kara if she wanted to come with me, to cheer on her daughter in her first big race, but she wasn’t interested.

  “It’s cross-country,” she said. “They run into the woods. You stand around in a field for fifteen minutes. They run back out of the woods. As long as she wins, I don’t need to watch. I’ve got better things to do, Drew—and honestly, so do you. We’re in pretty deep over this house, remember? You’ve been spending a shit-ton of time following Hannah around to practices and meets, and not so much on the stuff that pays the bills around here. If you lose your job, darling, we are thoroughly screwed.”

  She had a point. I’d maxed my credit turning that old farmhouse into a low-key fortress. DragonCorn was still more or less on schedule then—as far as I could tell, anyway—but I’d been spending a lot more time worrying about Hannah’s running over the past few months than I had worrying about Gantt charts and deliverables. I had a good development team, but I’d been letting them run on autopilot since at least the previous spring, and if they ran themselves into a ditch, Bioteka’s board wasn’t going to care about Hannah’s 5k times.

  Still, I wanted to see the race.

  I left the house around four, and pulled into the parking lot just as the buses were arriving. I tried to catch Hannah’s eye as she came off the bus, but she was deep in conversation with Tara. They were walking side by side, their heads close together, Tara’s hand on Hannah’s hip.

  “My, aren’t they two peas in a pod?”

  I turned. Bree Carson stood behind me, hiding behind those oversized glasses again despite the thin, filtered sunlight.

  “Yeah,” I said. “It’s nice that Hannah’s made a friend.”

  Bree took a half step closer to me, and her hand came to rest on my upper arm. One eyebrow peeked up over the top of her glasses.

  “Wow,” she said. “You spend a lot of time in the weight room?”

  I hesitated. That was definitely not where I thought this conversation was going. Her smile grew wider, and her hand dropped to her side.

  “No,” I said finally. “I mean, I’ve been known to do the occasional push-up, but that’s about it. Hannah makes fun of me when I work out. She says you can’t punch out the Grim Reaper.”

  She laughed, and reached up to touch her hair.

  Yes, in case you were wondering. I am very, very slow on the uptake.

  Bree and I found a spot on the hillside, looking down on the starting area from a hundred or so yards away.

  “This course is a good one for watching,” Bree said as we sat down in the short, dry grass. “You can see everything other than a mile or so that runs back through the woods from here.”

  I looked around. We were alone. All the other parents were either down in the wide, grassy field near the starting line, or a few hundred yards off to our left, where the trail led into the woods.

  “If this is the best spot,” I said, “why are we the only ones here?”

  Bree leaned back on her elbows, stretched out her legs and crossed them at the ankle.

 
“First,” she said, “nobody wants to climb this hill. It’s a long way up, and you have to hustle down to the field once they run past on the way back if you want to catch the runners at the finish line. Second, even though we can see most of the course from here, the runners never come closer than the bottom of the hill. Most of the parents like to have the girls run right past them, so they can cheer them on or tell them to pick it up or whatever. From here, all you can do is watch.”

  “And that’s what you prefer? Just watching?”

  She looked up at me with a smirk.

  “Mind out of the gutter, Mr. Bergen.”

  I was suddenly very conscious of my heartbeat pounding in my ears. Bree burst out laughing. She reached up, touched my chin with one finger, and gently closed my mouth.

  “My, but you’re easy to tweak,” she said.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I just . . .”

  “Oh, look. The boys are starting.”

  I looked down and saw the smoke from the starter’s gun drifting across the field. The crack came a second later. Fifty or so boys sprinted the length of the field away from us, rounded two sets of cones, and started back the other way. By the time they passed the bottom of the hill, the pack had separated out, and the runners had settled into a steady rhythm. The first five Briarwood boys were in a tight bunch at the front, with the sixth trailing a few steps behind. There were two boys from Penfield and one from Fairport in front of our seventh. The rest of the field was strung out in a long line behind.

  “Is this the way it usually goes?”

  Bree looked up at me, eyebrows poking up over the rim of her glasses.

  “What, you mean the race?”

  “Right,” I said. “Is our sixth runner usually faster than everybody else’s first?”

  “Well,” she said. “They’re two minutes into a sixteen-minute race. Lots of things can happen. That said, though, our runners do tend to beat up on the public schools. They can’t recruit like we can, and practically none of their kids are Engineered. We’ll have better races against some of the other private schools, but even then . . .”

  “Five straight state championships, right?”

  She smiled.

  “That’s the girls, actually. The boys finished second last year.”

  I nodded, and watched until the runners disappeared into the woods.

  “They’ll come back out in a few minutes over there,” Bree said, pointing to a gap in the trees a few hundred yards to our left. “What should we do in the meantime?”

  The boys came out of the woods with twelve minutes gone. Briarwood’s top five had stretched it out a bit, but one of the Penfield kids had pushed in front of our sixth. Jordan was running with the pack when they first came into view, but once the fans could see him he put on a burst, and by the time he rounded the last set of cones he had five or six seconds on the next runner.

  “That Jordan has quite a kick, doesn’t he?”

  I looked down at Bree.

  “Yeah,” I said. “He does.”

  “All natural, too,” she said. “Most of the other boys are Engineered, one way or another, but Jordan’s a garden-variety Homo sap.”

  “Engineered?” I said. “You mean to run?”

  “Well,” she said. “No. They’re mostly the standard packages. But you know how it is. Engineered are usually just . . . better.”

  She pushed her glasses up onto her forehead. I caught myself staring at her eyes. She stared back without blinking until I forced myself to look away.

  “It’s okay to look,” she said. “We’re friends now, aren’t we?”

  It took another six or seven minutes for the rest of the boys to straggle across the finish line, and five more to get the girls lined up. Hannah and Tara started side by side in the middle of the field, and when the gun sounded, they went to the front together.

  “Well,” Bree said. “I thought you told me Hannah was a pacer?”

  She was sitting up by then, arms wrapped around her knees, close enough to me that our shoulders were almost touching. I shrugged, then shivered as the sleeve of her shirt brushed against my arm.

  “I don’t know what she is, honestly,” I said. “I’m not sure she does, either. I think she’s still trying to figure it out.”

  She patted my knee.

  “Oh, we all are, aren’t we?”

  Bree shifted slightly, and then we were touching. The point of her shoulder pressed lightly against my arm. I glanced over at her. The glasses were back over her eyes, and she seemed to be intent on the runners. They were passing the base of the hill, Tara in front, Hannah a pace or two behind. A Fairport girl was in third, close on Hannah’s heels. She was a head taller than most of the other runners, with long, wraith-thin limbs and a thick black braid hanging down the middle of her back. The next five were all from Briarwood.

  “Who’s that?” I asked.

  “What, the one from Fairport? That’s Devon Morgan.” Bree brushed her hair back from her forehead and sighed. “She’s a striver. She’s been chasing Tara for four years. Don’t worry. She’ll be back in the pack by the time they come out of the woods.”

  I wasn’t sure she was right about that. Devon had an odd stride, with more up-and-down than you’d usually like to see, but Tara and Hannah were taking three steps for every two of hers, and she didn’t look like she was running above her level. Her face was calm, her arms were relaxed, her mouth was just slightly open. “I hope so. If she’s still where she is when they come back out, I don’t like Hannah’s chances in a sprint with her.”

  Bree smiled.

  “Well,” she said, “you’re right about that. She ran the four hundred in under fifty-three last spring.”

  I whistled.

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “She’s Engineered, of course. Like the boys, though—not for running. Her daddy wanted a model.”

  I looked over at Bree. She was watching Tara disappear into the woods.

  “How do you know that?”

  She looked up at me. The glasses made it impossible to read her face.

  “What, about Devon?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “How would you possibly know that she’s Engineered—let alone what mods she has, and why?”

  She gave me that glee club smile again. We weren’t touching anymore.

  “Oh,” she said, “you know how we hens are. Cluck cluck cluck.”

  Thirteen minutes later, the runners came out of the woods. Devon had not, in fact, fallen back into the pack. She was hanging right where she’d been before, a stride or two behind Hannah. Tara had opened up a three-or four-yard gap, but she was straining. Even from up on the hill, I could see it on her face. Devon’s stride was as smooth and even as it had been at the start.

  I couldn’t read Hannah. I never could. Something about that brow ridge, I guess.

  Two other Briarwood girls had closed it up a bit on the first three. They were running side by side, maybe ten or twelve yards behind Devon. Tara tucked her chin and started into her kick. Too early, I thought. She still had probably six hundred yards to go. Hannah and Devon let her stretch her lead to six yards, then eight, then ten.

  “What are you doing, Tara?” Bree muttered.

  “Getting ready to bonk, if she’s not careful.”

  Bree’s head snapped around. She opened her mouth to say something, then thought better of it and went back to the race. I was right, though. Tara’s lead was twelve yards, but I could see that she was laboring. Her head was bobbing in time with her steps, and her stride was getting progressively shorter and choppier. Right at the four-hundred-yard mark, Devon decided to go.

  Hannah tried to go with her, but she’d obviously been working hard just to stay where she was, and she didn’t have the speed to kick with Devon, even if she’d had the wind. Devon was even with her in a half dozen strides, and past her in a half dozen more. From that point, the only question was whether Devon would run out of course before she ran Tara down.

  Bree was on her
feet by then, hands cupped around her mouth, screaming at her daughter to Go! Push! Bring it home! And Tara tried. I could see that. Her body language was spastic, desperate, and I imagined I could see tears mixing with the sweat streaming down her face when she made the last turn toward the finish. Devon rounded the cone a half second later, teeth bared. The gap was three yards, then two, then one. With thirty yards left, Devon was right at Tara’s shoulder, and then . . . and then she was doubled half over and staggering. Tara crossed the line, took two more steps, fell to her knees, and puked. Devon regained her footing and came in a second or two behind her. Hannah finished a distant third. Bree was jumping up and down and clapping, but down below I could see the Fairport coach charging down the chute toward the finish line. Devon came up behind Tara, put a foot in the middle of her back, and shoved her face-first into her own sick. Then Bree was running, and I was running, and the crowd of parents and coaches and runners broke over Tara and Devon and Hannah like a wave.

  7. In which Hannah makes a new friend, despite her best efforts.

  So here’s something I bet not too many people can say: my first high-school cross-country meet ended in a brawl. I mean, cross-country really isn’t a brawly kind of sport, usually. I’m not exactly sure how it happened. When I rounded the last cone I was hurting pretty badly, trying to focus on maintaining my stride and not hyperventilating, and I wasn’t paying much attention to what was going on ahead of me. Tara said later that Devon was crowding her, trying to pass too closely. Devon said Tara cut her off, then elbowed her in the gut when she tried to get around. All I know for sure is that when I crossed the finish line, Devon was stomping Tara down into a puddle of her own barf.

  Youth sports tend to bring out the worst in parents, even when their kids aren’t whaling on one another, and that scene at the finish of the Fairport meet was kind of a worst-case scenario in terms of parental crazy making. Tara’s mom wasn’t close enough to the chute to get involved right away, but a bunch of the other team moms and dads were. Devon did her thing with the puke stomp and tried to walk away, but she hadn’t gone two steps when Miranda’s mom ducked under the ropes, grabbed her by the shoulders and started shaking her and screaming. That brought Devon’s dad in. He shoved Miranda’s mom hard enough that she stumbled backward two steps and sat down hard in the dirt.