by C. D. Bell
“What are you doing here?” she whispered. She glanced up the street to make sure no one else was outside. “Do you realize how much trouble you’re going to get me into?”
“I thought you might be ready to shift,” he said. “I wanted to see if I was right.”
“I was hoping to hold out until the school day was over,” Nessa said, but even as she was speaking she could feel something moving up along her spine.
“You look ready,” Chayton said. “Want a ride?”
Even as Nessa nodded, Chayton was already handing her the helmet. By the time they reached the trailhead, Nessa felt as anxious and ready to go as she had on the starting line of every race she’d ever competed in.
“Hold on,” Chayton said, swinging his leg over his bike and moving as quickly as Nessa had ever seen him. He pulled a sheaf of more dried rye from the trunk box of the bike and, heading into the woods with Nessa behind him, arranged the grasses in a circle just off the path. He took her by the shoulders. “Look me in the eye, okay, hold on, okay?”
Nessa could feel her entire body starting to shake. “I think I’m going to throw up,” she confessed.
“You’re not going to throw up,” Chayton said. Holding her shoulders, he guided her to step into the circle of rye. He closed his eyes and started to speak, his voice rising into a soothing rhythm. “You’re going to change, Nessa. In a few moments you will allow the animal inside to express herself in the form of a beautiful white wolf. You will pass through rye, which has sustained your ancestors when they lived closer to the land, and which sustains our land now. You will return to this earth through the portal of grain, coming from the wilds of running to the grain that is the foundation of our table. Be one with the Spirits that guide our life on this earth.”
Chayton had closed his eyes while delivering this statement, a wind rising to blow his long hair.
When he opened his eyes, Nessa felt he was seeing her from far away. He let go of her shoulders, and Nessa started to run, her legs flying out from under her, the pumping motion in her arms lifting her with each extension of her body.
The wolf pack was not waiting for her today in the early dawn and when she went looking for them, they were nowhere to be found. She ran to the lake where she’d first seen them. The shoreline was deserted. She ran to the rise near Billy’s house and looked down on the Larks’ darkened windows. The rocky outcropping was swept clean. She thought about getting closer to the house but didn’t want to go alone. Before, she’d had Omega as her friend, but now Omega was…Nessa felt her throat closing up.
Feeling lonely and useless, she turned for the trail. How was she supposed to figure out wolf communication if she couldn’t even find any wolves?
She returned to the circle of dry rye stalks that Chayton had set up, stopping inside, feeling the safety of the familiar, slightly yeasty smell, the quiet the circle provided. She stood there panting, recovering from the long run, her heart rate slowing, her muscles twitching as they often did when she came to rest after a race in which she’d pushed herself to the limit of her capabilities.
She looked down—she was standing on her own two legs in her track pants and her old sneakers, trembling in the frigid morning air, her breath before her in clouds.
She stepped out of the circle, leaving the stalks where Chayton had laid them, fast-walking out to the trailhead to tell him everything that had just happened, only to find that he was gone. Spent as she was, Nessa was going to have to jog all the way home if she wanted to make it look plausible that she’d only gone out for a morning run.
Nessa called Bree to tell her what had just happened. They talked about everything Chayton had told Nessa—about how the dried rye had smoothed the transition, given her more control, about wolf communication, about cultivating the ability to transform in and out of wolf state not just at the new and full moons.
“I wish I’d been able to get down to Billy’s house again,” Nessa said. “I know that has to be part of this—the wolves brought me there on purpose. But there is nowhere to hide down there. Last time, I nearly got shot.”
“You definitely don’t want to get shot,” said Bree. “You’ll figure it out.”
“I keep thinking I should try to warn him. Or warn his mom. But about what?”
“Sure,” Bree said. “You’d call the Larks and tell them Billy is in danger, and you know this because you are that wolf they saw outside his bedroom window.”
Nessa held her head in her hands. Bree was right. She couldn’t warn the Larks if she didn’t know what she was supposed to warn them about.
“Wait! I know!” Bree said. “I’ll call and offer to babysit. We know Billy and his parents from the clinic. It won’t be weird.”
Nessa nodded. “Sure. You can give it a try.”
As Thursday turned into Friday, Nessa had to stop thinking about wolves and Billy and Chayton. She had to focus on States. Her ankle was healed, she was running strong in practices, this was her chance, and until the full moon, she wouldn’t be able to get closer to understanding the wolf mystery anyway.
Then it was Friday afternoon, and Nessa was suited up in her good luck blue hoodie, hoisting her overnight bag over her shoulder, high-fiving Nate goodbye at the front door, and climbing into Coach Hoffman’s car.
Cynthia engineered it so that Nessa was sitting in the front with Coach Hoffman, listening to stories about his daughter Martha, who was now twenty-five and getting her teaching degree in Iowa, while Luc and Cynthia listened to Luc’s music in the back, a pair of earbuds shared between them. Nessa was amused to see that when she turned to look at them, Luc was sleeping soundly, and Cynthia was staring out the window, a look of focused concentration on her face.
They went to bed early—Luc bunking in with Coach, and Nessa and Cynthia each plugging into their music, focusing on the race the next day.
They met up again in the hotel’s breakfast room. Nessa forced down a bowl of Raisin Bran and an English muffin with peanut butter. Cynthia had brought her own food—plain yogurt, chia seeds, wheat germ.
“You guys aren’t having the waffles?” Luc said and proceeded to go back to the plastic cups of batter and the machine five times, patting his completely flat stomach, and then stuffing one last slice of bacon in his mouth. “Breakfast of champions,” he said with his mouth full, then burped.
“Wow,” Coach said eventually. “I’ve been watching high school athletes eat for almost thirty-five years, and even I’m impressed.”
At that, Cynthia stood up quickly, as if angry, pushing back her chair, and walked out of the breakfast room. “Was it something I said?” Coach Hoffman said, looking from Luc to Nessa.
“Nah, it was me,” said Luc. “She’s a charter member of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Waffles, so I wasn’t being exactly…sensitive.”
It wasn’t even funny, but Nessa found herself laughing. Too much. Pretty soon she was choking and Luc was saying, “Easy there, Tiger.”
“I think we’re all a little on edge,” said Coach Hoffman. “I’ll go find Cynthia. Be down in the lobby in fifteen.”
Every race Nessa had competed in before today had been at a mediocre high school track, usually several decades beyond newness, but today’s race was at a college track. Everything felt big, and fresh, and real.
There were parking attendants, giant banners hanging over the entrance to the field house with the Michigan Cross-Country Association logo on them, and tents set up with directions and first aid and giveaways. Nessa, Luc, and Cynthia each received a backpack, a two-pack of running socks, and samples of sports drinks, just for competing.
“Sweet!” Luc said, and Nessa couldn’t have agreed more. Even Cynthia—who had been keeping to herself since breakfast—seemed pleased.
A crowd was forming, and Nessa realized that the stadium seats that usually stood mostly empty during high school meets were going to be filled. She’d known about the 100 spectators on two chartered buses coming down from Tether,
of course, but she hadn’t registered that would translate to 100 spectators from every other school across the state.
The teams were directed to a large tent behind the stadium where each school had a table, folding chairs, mats for stretching, and a hospitality basket of waters and energy bars. The tent had flaps, and heaters were set up in the corners so the runners—most racing in the slimmest of tank tops and briefs—would not get cold.
The morning passed in a blur. Nessa stretched, listened to music on her phone, jogged to the Porta-Potty units, took some selfies, and listened to a last, frenzied Coach Hoffman pep talk.
And then she and Cynthia were heading to the starting line, located inside the football stadium. As the runners took their places on the starting line, the roar was deafening. Nessa looked up into the stands to search for the enormous orange rubber hand her mom had attached to a garden stake so Nessa would be able to see them.
While scanning for it, her eyes tracked across dozens of faces she recognized from Tether. She saw her ninth-grade math teacher. She saw Bree, who had painted a stripe each of Tether High’s red and gold on her cheeks and put her curly hair into a high ponytail tied with red and gold ribbons. She saw Cassian in the middle of the crowd of beautiful seniors. When he caught her eye, he waved excitedly.
Moving on, Nessa’s eyes finally found the orange hand. She saw Delphine cheering, her hands cupped over her mouth like a megaphone, Nate looking cold and uncomfortable in the crowd, Vivian’s face tense and drawn as if she could feel how much this race meant to Nessa. They both knew there might be college recruiters in the stands right now, and if there weren’t, they certainly would be following the race’s outcome. Nessa noticed her hands were balled into fists thinking about how much she wanted—no, needed—this to be a good race.
This was not what she should be thinking about, she knew. She should be engaged in positive imaging, thinking about what it felt like to run when she was running well. She followed Cynthia into position, willing herself to remember the wolves. They were always in her mind, with her the way the characters in a really good book stay with you. It wasn’t hard for Nessa to conjure the feeling she’d had when she was running with them.
She closed her eyes, and for a microsecond she could smell the pine trees and damp leaves and animal odors of the woods. The roar and cheering of the crowd faded into the background, and as if she were standing in a field of rye, she forgot where she was. She forgot who she was.
Looking down at the turf, she watched her sneakers move into position, lining them up with all the other sneakers. She waited, in a strange state of relaxed readiness, for the blast of the air horn. She didn’t feel that she was so much inside the moment as that she was watching someone else inhabit it.
The sound of the start broke the spell. Nessa remembered exactly where she was. But by this point she was already running, and she was already out in the front of the pack. This was bad, she knew that. But Nessa couldn’t stop herself. She could not slow herself. She felt far too loose and relaxed in her stride to risk making any kind of a change.
The course wound into the woods on a wide, gravel trail, and Nessa heard her feet making crunching sounds. She heard the sound of a squirrel darting through the woods on her left. She couldn’t put her finger on what was so un-race-like about these sounds, and then it occurred to her: they were the sounds you hear when you are running alone. In a race, the noises of the other runners would drown them out.
Where were the other runners? Nessa shot a look behind, and saw that the closest was several hundred meters behind her. She was running the race in reverse—getting her sprint in now. She wouldn’t be able to maintain this pace. She could only hope she’d given herself enough of a lead that she’d be able to hold on when the others were making their moves.
She ran on, feeling her heart starting to burn in her chest, as if it were a mechanical engine with the ability to overheat. Even Coach Hoffman would have told her to slow down, she knew that. He would have told her not to give everything she had this early on. But Coach Hoffman was not here. Coach Hoffman had not run mile after mile all summer long, had not given himself over to running as Nessa had. Coach Hoffman did not know how much it meant to her that she give this race her all with every single step she was taking.
Instead of slowing down, Nessa pushed herself harder. She ran up a low hill, and turned left, following an arrow at a crossroads. The trail looped around at this point, and then turned left and headed back down the hill. There was a cabin on the right, used for sap collecting—this college had an agriculture program. Nessa passed the cabin. She felt the trail leveling out. She knew that meant she was close to the end of the second mile. Could she pick up her pace even more?
She was afraid to try. The muscles in her calves were growing brittle; she felt like they were made of paper, that they might tear. But now she was past the second mile marker where the trail looped around the crossroads again. Nessa’s arms were pumping, her chest was heaving. She didn’t think she’d run this fast even when she was a wolf. She didn’t think she’d run this fast ever. Each step took her closer to where she wanted to be, closer to who she wanted to be.
She was tired, but she had not forgotten how much she wanted to run her absolute fastest. She worried she’d be too tired for the full mile she had ahead of her, but she wasn’t too tired for the next step she had to take. Then the next after that, and the next after that.
Nessa broke out of the woods as the trail reemerged on to the athletic fields, in sight of the stadium, and she was greeted by a deafening silence.
But this time, it wasn’t the silence of running alone. It was the silence of a thousand people not talking. Not even breathing. She could tell that something was wrong. The crowd was aware of her—she could feel their eyes on her.
Had she gotten lost? Was the sad fact that at this one most important race of her life, she had made the most colossal mistake of her running career—making a wrong turn in the woods?
Nessa came close to stopping but she knew that the way she was running, she wouldn’t be able to start up again if she turned around and tried to find her way back, so she continued forward. As she did, she felt one of her legs buckle. She nearly tripped over her own footfall. But she managed to catch herself and keep moving. And just after she caught herself there was a roar from the crowd that was at once the most surprising and the most affirming sound Nessa had ever heard.
She’d seen plenty of diagrams of sound waves over her years watching science documentaries on TV with Nate, but never before had she felt them. But she felt them now. Her exhausted legs absorbed the energy of the noise as if it were an electric stimulus. She felt lighter, and she was able to increase her pace once again, even though a moment before, the best she would have hoped for was not stopping.
The crowd continued to cheer, the sound pulling Nessa along. She knew that she was running on borrowed energy and it wouldn’t last long. She had to cross the line. She was desperate for it, starving for it. So she sped up even more, passing the first cone into the chute, her spikes digging in for the last 50 steps.
She wasn’t sure she had 50 steps in her, but again, with each one, she knew she just had at least one more, so she kept taking them. And then suddenly she was past the finish and she was still running and she knew she could stop but she didn’t know how.
The sound of the crowd was still with her, making her feel that people were almost on top of her, but at the same time that she was alone. And then somehow Coach Hoffman was shouting in her face, words she didn’t understand, and she had slowed down, and she actually hadn’t just stopped, she’d collapsed, and he had his arms around her and she was shaking. She couldn’t stop shaking and Coach was actually crying, which was weird, Nessa thought, until she realized she was crying too.
“You did it. You did it,” Coach was saying and her mom and Delphine were there and jumping on top of her, hugging her. Nessa started to see the other runners coming in now, one girl, then
another, and then two, and then a cluster of five. Suddenly it was a crowd, streaming across the line. And it occurred to Nessa that she had actually just run out in front and stayed there, finishing the race significantly ahead of the next-closest competitor. It was why she felt so weak. Nessa knew—suddenly—that she had won.
Won.
States.
She’d been hoping to get a good time, to get the attention of a recruiter. To beat Cynthia. To get a scholarship to cross-country summer camp.
“What—” she said to Coach. “What did I run?”
“You didn’t see it?” he said. She shook her head. She looked at Vivian, who had an arm around her, holding her up.
“Nessa,” Vivian said. “You ran a 14:53.”
No matter how many people came over and wrapped their arms around Nessa, crinkling the silver blanket someone had wrapped around her shoulders when Nessa’s teeth started to chatter, Nessa had a hard time understanding that she had done what she’d done. Her mom held both sides of her face and planted a huge kiss on each of her cheeks. Delphine seemed kind of shy to be near her, and Nate was nowhere to be seen, but Bree nearly knocked Nessa down with a bear hug. Kids from school Nessa barely knew hit her on the arm or gave her high fives. Cassian was there for an instant with a hug and a kiss that brushed her hair, and then there was a bunch of adults introducing themselves.
Someone led her over to a podium. There was brass band music playing, though she couldn’t tell where it was coming from. All she was aware of was the warmth on her face. She tried to remember the race, but all she could think about was how in a few minutes it would be found out that something had not gone the way it should have.
Her 14:53 was unheard of for high school girls. In her wildest dreams she’d hoped for a 16:00, but that had been an outside hope. She’d have been happy with 16:30. Nessa looked out at the crowd. It’s been worth it, she thought. Everything.