“Kara?” I said.
Nothing.
I still have no idea where Kara went that afternoon, or what she did. I should have gone after her, but . . . well, I guess I was kind of an asshole, honestly. Instead, I spent most of the rest of the day on the screen with a woman named Marcy in corporate HR, trying to figure out what to do about Meghan. We went back and forth for a long while, but the bottom line was that before they’d give me a replacement, I needed to get some definite statement from Meghan as to whether she was sick, or on vacation, or retired, or whatever. When I started whining about the fact that she wouldn’t answer my pings, Marcy told me to get on a shuttle and ask her in person.
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll look into doing something next week, maybe?”
“No,” Marcy said. “You’ll do it tomorrow.”
My phone buzzed. I glanced down. A cheerful yellow icon popped up to tell me that I was booked on the 08:00 to LA.
“You know,” I said. “I have plans tomorrow.”
“Yes,” Marcy said. “I know. They involve figuring out how you managed to let a top-five project, which has recently gotten a great deal of direct attention from Robert Longstreth, spin completely off the rails. If you can’t handle that, I’m guessing you and I will be having a much less friendly call soon. Have a nice day, Drew—and give Meghan my regards.”
I sat staring at the screen after she cut the call. I wasn’t used to being threatened by HR. I pulled up the corporate org chart, and wasted ten minutes trying to figure out if she was above or below me. As it turned out, HR was on a completely separate track—like Internal Affairs, or maybe the Gestapo, I guess. If I wanted to complain about Marcy’s attitude, I’d need to go up five levels before I could start working my way back down toward her. Definitely not worth the effort.
Anyway, she was probably right. I had no idea at the time why the executive group was so worked up about DragonCorn, but I was savvy enough to realize that they were. If nothing else, my crappy management was keeping a dozen of Bioteka’s top engineers tied up and completely unproductive. That was probably a capital offense by itself.
It was a bit after five when I went to pick up Hannah from school. Between Kara and Meghan and Bree, who’d pinged me three more times in the past week, I’ll admit to being more than a little rattled. I started out with the car on manual. I’m an engineer, but I’ve honestly never had much faith in automation. It took me ten minutes and two near accidents to switch it over to full automatic. I spent most of the rest of the drive with my eyes closed, listening to my pulse pounding in my ears and trying to keep my breathing under control. It’s funny—the shit storm hadn’t even really broken yet, but I think on some level I already knew it was coming.
When I pulled into the school parking lot, Hannah was there waiting for me. She wasn’t where she usually was, though, sitting on the steps by the main entrance, staring at her phone. She was there in the front lot leaning against a jet-black sports car, talking to Jordan Barnes.
That, I was not expecting.
My car rolled into a parking space across the lot from them, and shut itself down. I took a deep breath in, let it out slowly, and opened the door.
“Hey,” I called. “Hannah. You ready?”
She looked over at me, held up one finger, and turned back to Jordan.
That, I also was not expecting.
Hannah had her back to me, but I could see Jordan’s face. He was laughing, and as I watched, he leaned over and touched her arm.
“Hannah,” I said, a little louder. “Seriously. We have things to do.”
She gave me a quick full-brow-ridge glare, then turned back again. I got out of the car. Jordan glanced up, got a look at my face, and stopped laughing. He leaned down, said something with his mouth close to Hannah’s ear. She shot me a murderous look, then patted Jordan’s arm and turned away. Jordan folded himself into his car. He was already pulling out onto the main road when Hannah climbed into mine.
“Jeebus, Dad,” she said as soon as she’d closed the door. “What the hell was that about?”
I turned to look at her. She glared back at me for a full five seconds, then finally looked away. We rode the entire way home in silence.
13. In which Hannah learns things she’d prefer not to know.
Looking back, the week after Climb to Failure was definitely what you’d call an inflection point. At the beginning of the season, I’d thought Tara and I were going to be best friends forever. She’d pulled back as I got stronger, but she hadn’t been unfriendly, exactly, and she’d still been a good training partner. That week, though, things went downhill in a big way. On Monday, she tried to ditch me on what was supposed to be a long, easy recovery run. Tuesday was a track day. She made sure she was running in a different group. Wednesday she told Doyle she was having calf pain, and I wound up spending a progression run getting the silent treatment from Miranda and Kerry. Thursday was another long run. I let her pull ahead of me on that one, and hung back just far enough to keep her in sight, but to be out of range of her stink-eye. Friday was interval thousands. Doyle paired us up. I beat her on every one.
On Saturday, I was sitting in my solarium trying to catch up on my reading for American Literature when my phone pinged. It was Tara.
TCSpeed: Hello Hannah. Just wanted to let you know that I’m so proud of the way you’ve been progressing this season. You’ve come so far in just a few weeks. So far, in fact, that I think you’re ready to move on to a different training partner. Sarah or Jules might be more your speed. Good luck!
I didn’t bother to reply.
I wasn’t sure what to do when I got to practice the next Monday. We were just into October then, and we had three hard weeks of running left before we were supposed to start tapering down for States. Tara had made it pretty clear that I was dead to her, and I didn’t think any of the other girls would buck her—not that I should have been training with most of them anyway. I ran from my last class to the varsity lockers, got my stuff and got changed while the other girls were just wandering in. Nobody said anything mean to me, and Sarah actually gave me a sympathetic look as I slammed my locker shut. For the first time since the second or third day of practice, though, I didn’t feel like I was where I belonged.
I was the first girl out to the soccer field, but most of the boys were there ahead of me, standing around in twos and threes, talking and stretching and waiting for Doyle to show. Jordan was off to one side with Micah, who’d spent the past month fighting two other boys for the seventh slot on varsity. They’d all been within a few seconds of one another in every race, and I think Doyle was waiting for one of them to put the other two away so that he wouldn’t have to make any hard choices about who to bring to Sectionals.
Jordan smiled when he saw me. I looked away, but when I looked back he was waving me over.
“Hannah,” he said. “Come help me convince Micah not to stick his head in a wood chipper.”
Micah gave Jordan a half-hearted shove. Jordan laughed, and patted Micah’s cheek with one hand. I glanced around. Nobody else was paying the least attention to me, which, considering where I was with the girls’ team, was kind of a relief. I walked over to where they were standing.
“I’m not gonna stick my head in a wood chipper,” Micah said. “I’m just not gonna make it to Sectionals.”
I looked him over. Micah was tall for a runner, and most of his height was from the waist up. The clothes he’d been wearing at the party had hidden how big he really was. He had broad shoulders and a deep chest, and hands that looked like they could palm a watermelon. I’d never really paid a lot of attention to the boys’ races—we usually ran right after, and I liked to get myself focused before the start—but I remembered then seeing him sometimes muscling through workouts, putting out twice as much energy as the runners around him. He was obviously an athlete, but he just wasn’t built for running.
He was definitely built, though.
“Of course you’ll make S
ectionals,” Jordan said. “Tell him, Hannah. He’s just got to want it, right?”
I looked up at Micah. He looked back, eyes half closed. I sighed. No point in having the boys like me any more than the girls, right?
“Have you tried swimming?” I asked. “I bet you’d be a great swimmer.”
Jordan looked at me, his mouth half open, then turned to look at Micah. I had a second of thinking that I was about to get reamed in front of my last running friend, but then Micah burst out laughing.
“You see, Jordan?” Micah said. “Here’s someone who recognizes running talent—or lack thereof, anyway.”
“No,” I said. “That’s not what I meant! I just . . .”
“It’s fine,” Micah said, and sat down to stretch. “You’ve got a great eye, Hannah. Swimming is exactly what my freaking dad cut me for. The plan was for me to be at the Olympic Training Center in Orlando by now, with some psycho coach lashing me through fifteen thousand meters a day.”
“Right,” Jordan said. “Lucky thing you’re here instead, with a different psycho coach lashing you through fifteen miles a day.”
I sat down beside Micah, stretched my legs out in front of me, and brought my nose to my knees.
“I don’t get it,” I said. “You’re built to swim, but you’re all wrong for a runner. Why are you here and not there?”
“What’s not to get?” Micah said. “Why the hell should my dad get to decide what I do with my life? I mean, have you ever been to a swim meet? They suck. You sit around a hot, dank pool deck for two hours, get in the water for thirty seconds, and then sit around for another two hours. And practices? They’re even worse. Three hours, face down in the water, up and down that blue line. Out here, we can at least talk while we’re running. Swim practice is the single most boring thing known to man.”
I laughed.
“Sounds like you at least gave it a try.”
He rolled his eyes.
“My dad put me on a club team when I was four. I stuck with it exactly as long as it took me to realize that I could actually say no.”
“Micah’s being modest,” Jordan said. “He won States in three events when he was a freshman. Coach Brenner practically blew an aneurism when he quit.”
“He still bugs me, actually,” Micah said. “He had Alan Muhlenberg message me yesterday to try to get me to tryouts at the end of the month.”
“From the way you’re smirking,” I said, “I’m guessing you said no?”
His smirk turned into a full-on grin, and he shook his head.
“Nah. Alan’s cute. I told him I’d be happy to discuss it with him over coffee.”
Jordan kicked Micah, and they both burst out laughing.
The girls weren’t any friendlier out in the field than they’d been in the locker room. Even Sarah wouldn’t make eye contact with me, and Tara acted as if I had some kind of reverse gravitational field that was actively repelling her. While Doyle was giving us our pre-workout lecture, I made a point of moving around the fringes of the group, chasing Tara in super slow motion. No matter where I was, she was always as far away from me as she could possibly be and still be with the team. When Doyle told us to get moving, I walked over to Jordan.
“Hey,” I said. “Mind if I . . .”
I didn’t finish, because the look on his face had already given me my answer.
“Oooooh,” he said. “Sorry, Hannah. You heard Doyle. We’re running a progression today. You know I’ve got tons of respect for you, but . . .”
“Yeah,” I said. “No problem.”
He was right, of course. I’d be able to stay with his pack for the easy part of the run, but when they started to really turn it over they’d drop me, and Doyle was not a fan of his athletes trying to train over their heads.
Of course, he also wasn’t a fan of his athletes running alone.
I was seriously considering getting down on my knees and begging Tara to let me tag along with her when Micah’s giant spider-hand tapped my shoulder.
“Need a partner?”
I looked up at him.
“You’re not with Jordan?”
He grinned.
“Define with.”
I could feel my cheeks redden.
“I meant you’re not running with him. Jackass.”
He laughed, slung his arm around my shoulder and pulled me toward the trailhead.
“I like you,” he said. “You’re sassy.”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s what they say.”
Micah Jacobs turned out to be simultaneously the worst runner and the best partner I ever trained with. I’d seen him run before, of course, but you can’t appreciate just how crappy someone’s technique is until you’ve gone stride for stride with him on an eight-mile progression. Micah’s shoulders hunched forward, his head drooped, his feet reached out too far in front of him on every stride and then slapped at the ground as if he were angry with it. I sort of expected him to try to assert his male prerogative at the start, but he didn’t even think about it. He let me set the pace, then settled in beside me where the trails were wide enough to go side by side, and behind me where they weren’t.
“You know,” I said over my shoulder the first time he dropped back, “if I didn’t know better, I’d say you were trying to check out my butt.”
Micah tried to laugh, but it turned into a hacking cough instead.
“No offense,” he said when he finally got his breathing back under control, “but checking out any part of you is honestly the very furthest thing from my mind.”
The trail widened a bit, and I slowed to let him come up beside me again.
“Yeah,” I said. “I kind of figured.”
The ground was still sloppy from the past week’s rain, and Micah’s screwed-up stride made him prone to slipping and hyperextending. He did that then, front foot sliding out from under him, arms waving wildly. I dodged to keep from getting clocked, then caught him by the arm and steadied him enough to keep him from actually going down.
“Shit!” he said. “Thanks. Sorry.”
“No problem,” I said. “Explain to me again why you think this is better for you than swimming?”
We ran on in silence for five seconds, then ten. I was starting to think I’d managed to alienate yet another potential friend, this time in record time, when he said, “Look, Hannah. I don’t expect you to understand this. I mean, you’re doing exactly what they designed you to do, right? It works for you, and that’s great. You’re lucky. The thing is, though—it didn’t work for me. Dad built me to be a specific thing, but it turned out that’s not what I wanted to be. All other things being equal, I’d rather just suck at running around in the woods.”
The trail narrowed. I slowed to let him move ahead.
“You know,” I said. “You don’t suck.”
He laughed again, this time without hurting himself.
“I hate to break this to you, Hannah, but we all suck. It’s just a question of who we’re comparing ourselves to.”
He had to duck his head to get under a branch that I’d have had to reach up to touch with my hand.
“So,” I said. “Who do you compare yourself to?”
He looked back at me. He was smiling, but he didn’t look happy.
“Who do you think?”
The thing is, what I said was true. Micah didn’t suck. Everything I knew about running said he should have sucked, but he didn’t. When we started, I kind of expected that I’d have to ease up to keep from dropping him. He must have been burning three times as much oxygen as I was—but apparently he had a whole crapload of hay stored up in the old hayloft, and he wound up finishing forty or fifty yards ahead of me.
He must have been a hell of a swimmer.
Micah was sitting in the grass with Jordan when I came in. I started toward the girls’ side of the field, but Micah waved me over.
“Thanks,” he said when I sat down across from them. “That was great, Hannah. It was fun to run with someone
who wasn’t busting my ass about my form the whole time.”
I decided not to mention that even though I hadn’t said anything, I’d been thinking it, really, really loudly.
“We only bust your ass about your form because it’s so adorably terrible,” Jordan said. “Think of it as a compliment. We’re all amazed that you can keep up with us while running like you have brain damage.”
“Whatever,” I said. “That was one of the best workouts I’ve had all season.” I rolled onto my stomach, and rose up into a plank. “I mean, the running was good, but the fact that you weren’t trying to figure out how to murder me in the woods and get away with it really sealed the deal.”
After we’d finished stretching and abs and Doyle had given us a long, droning speech about the importance of team unity and whatnot, Jordan walked me out to the parking lot. I expected Micah to come along, but apparently an eight-mile progression wasn’t enough for him, because he went straight from the field into the weight room.
“Wow,” I said as he walked away. “Hard-core, huh?”
Jordan shrugged.
“A body like that doesn’t just happen, you know.”
“Yeah,” I said after a long, awkward pause. “This conversation is making me uncomfortable. Can we talk about something else?”
He rested his arm across my shoulders, and we started around the building.
“What?” Jordan said. “You don’t want to hear about Micah’s washboard abs? You don’t want to hear about how his biceps are like little box turtles that crawled under his skin?”
I shrugged out from under his arm and took a half step away.
“No, Jordan. I very much do not want to hear about those things.”
He laughed and kept walking.
Dad wasn’t there yet when we got to the parking lot. We walked over to Jordan’s car.
“You know,” I said. “I’m still amazed that you’ve got a car that runs on actual combustion. I didn’t think they made these things anymore.”
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