“One,” the announcer calls out. “Two. Three!” A horn rings out somewhere in the distance and we are off, running from the field into the pathway in the woods that had been whacked wide open to create a cross country trail. There are no cameras in here, no judges. Just us and the trees and whatever we choose to do to each other. Stella knows that best.
This is how it always begins. Stella and me at the front of the pack, followed by scared girls, pumping their legs, wondering how they’ll fare against the Steckler sisters. It’s a 5K, and everyone knows that the first few hundred meters are pure chaos. To avoid getting swallowed by the group, by everyone clamoring to tear your limbs apart and eat you for fuel, you have to get ahead, and get ahead fast. Then you have to settle into your race pace and glide past the girls who use all their energy up right away. Tamara’s usually one of those. She sputters out real quick. But now she’s keeping my pace, running so close to me I can hear her breathing.
The pack begins to thin as we trample over roots and fallen leaves, and the canopy of trees narrows overhead. The sky gets darker and the air gets damper as we head deeper into the woods. My heart begins to soar. This is my favorite part, when it’s just me and the dirt and the sound of my own feet on the trail. I know Stella loves it too.
Tamara huffs beside me and I can see her arms pumping up and down. Something red flashes in my peripheral vision and I twist to see what it is. A thin string, tied around her wrist. A bracelet. Just like the one Noah gave me, the one I can feel pressed against my ankle.
I’m so dumb.
I turn my head fast, to look away, to forget that I’m disposable. But as I do my foot catches on something and the ground gives way beneath me. My face slams against the earth.
I cover my head for a second as Tamara runs past me. The rest of the girls are starting to catch up and I scramble to stand. But everything is off, and my limbs are shaking at the thought of betrayal. How could he?
My eyes sting and the tears are coming. But I need to go, to move. I’m toward the back of the pack and it’ll be impossible to catch up. I force myself to put one foot in front of the other, but my gait is all wrong and I can barely see the finish line.
The breakaway is just up ahead and girls spit out into the clearing, sprinting with their heads thrown back. As soon as I hit the slope of grass, I see Coach’s face. His mouth is a thin line of disappointment and his eyes are scrunched around his nose like he has a headache. I swat away the shame and try to place everyone else. Tamara didn’t get too far, even with Noah’s good luck charm—my good luck charm. The winners have already been called; I can see that even from here. Woo-fucking-hoo, Stella. Classic.
I speed up. It’s the least I can do, not come in last, and race over the finish line, landing somewhere in the back with the losers. It’s abysmal, and my heart sinks to my stomach.
But then I spot Stella off by herself, walking in circles, face turned to the sun. Usually when she wins, Coach is with her, giving her an expletive-laced talk about sportsmanship and grace. I swivel my head to find Coach’s burly frame. He’s off to the side, clutching Mila’s hand above her head. Her face is full of elation and her hair is slicked back with sweat. Mila won the race. I turn back to Stella and she’s facing me, her eyes wide and her cheeks bright red. She shakes her head, unable to speak, unable to understand what the hell just happened.
She turns around again, to face the woods, as if they will give her answers, and I lift my head to the bleachers. There in the front row. A gaggle of recruiters, making notes on their clipboards and checking their stopwatches. They used to watch the Steckler sisters. They used to come down and congratulate us and chat about our times. Now a handful of the regulars are climbing down from the stands, with their sights set on someone else: Mila.
8
STELLA
“Come on, everyone. Group photo, whether you like it or not!” Coach is clean-shaven and his bald head is shiny, reflecting the sun. His white dress shirt stretches tight over his chest and he looks like he’s about to Hulk out of the whole outfit.
The cross country team, including parents, is on the lawn in front of Ellacoya Mountain Resort, and everyone rushes into place. As the girls crouch, their tiny stiletto heels sink into the mushy grass and stray tulle scratches my calves. The boys straighten their ties and shove each other’s shoulders as they hold up grotesque signs with their hands. The mundaneness of it all makes me nauseous.
“Say ‘homecoming’ on three!” Coach calls out. Behind him, the cross country parents look on adoringly, with hands over hearts.
“One. Two. Three!”
All around me, twenty-four students call out the magic word. Homecoming. My mouth stays in a flat, firm line and I try to keep my heart rate down, breathe in and out, just like they taught me this summer. These people, this place. It’s not worth the stress.
I turn around and gaze out at the Ellacoya grounds. Even I have to admit it’s stunning. No wonder it’s a world-renowned vacation destination with a Michelin-starred restaurant and a spa that gets glowing write-ups in national magazines.
“We were the only Black-owned hotel in a fifty-mile radius,” Tamara told our class back in second grade. We had been assigned ancestry projects. Most of us explained how our parents had moved to the woods to make time go by slower or because Brooklyn got too expensive in the 2000s. Tamara’s family was one of the few who had been here for more than a generation. She came into class with a laminated report and told us all about Ellacoya’s history.
Her paternal great-grandparents opened the place as an eleven-room hotel that hosted Saturday-night dances and jazz concerts back in the seventies, just as the glow of the Borscht Belt era was beginning to fade. Ellacoya catered to New York intellectuals and musicians who would leave the dense, steaming city on a Friday afternoon and settle in for a weekend of dinner theater and breakfast buffets.
At first, Ellacoya was just a dot on the map, something new in a landscape filled with apple orchards, Jewish family resorts, and sleepaway camps that taught horny teenagers about Shabbat. But as word got out that some of the best hospitality in the area was coming from the modest Ellacoya Resort, business began to boom.
Famously, Tamara’s family perfected the art of East Coast farm-to-table before there was even a name for it. They sourced their own meat from small farms in Ulster and Sullivan Counties, and only cooked with what was available. Ramps and fiddleheads in the spring. Sweet potatoes and squash in the winter. No one paid attention on a national level, though. Not until Tamara’s dad reinvented the place.
Teddy Johnson had grown up here in Edgewater, back when it was something like ninety-nine percent white. He played football and baseball, won Homecoming King, and was even the valedictorian his senior year. He landed a full ride to Princeton, just a few hours away, which is where he met Tamara’s mom, Sara. He told her of his dream to turn his parents’ bed-and-breakfast into a worldwide travel destination. She was in.
The way I’ve heard Tamara tell it, they got married right out of college and after a few years in the corporate world, they bought the hotel and the adjacent hundred and thirteen acres.
Within ten years they expanded the place from one cozy building into a pristine compound with dozens of modern A-frame cottages, a full-service spa, four tennis courts, a clubhouse, a swimming pool, a lakeside beach, hiking trails, a blueberry farm, a pumpkin patch, an event space that can hold a three-hundred-person seated banquet, and a main guest building with fifty hotel rooms that cost more than five hundred dollars a night. It’s a huge selling point when Mom and Dad try to convince clients to plant roots in Edgewater.
I look out over the manicured lawn as we all shuffle toward the bus and my eyes land on Mila, walking alone, away from the larger group. Her eyes light up when she sees me looking and she waves. But I turn away, fiddling with the buckle on my bag.
Sure, she spilled her guts to me in the car
after the cross country formal, but she beat me at last week’s meet. It became obvious after that. If she gets too close, everything I’ve worked for will be ruined even more than it already has been. I’ve gotten this far on my own in Edgewater, only looking out for myself. I have to stay away from her if I want to win State. If I have any shot at getting back into Georgetown’s good graces. I close my eyes for a second and picture their navy uniforms, the white logo emblazoned across my chest.
“Load ’em up!” Coach says. He makes a shooing motion and one by one, the members of the team pile onto the party bus. Ellie climbs up behind Noah and Tamara, a scowl pasted onto her face. Wonder what her deal is tonight. Maybe she misses Bethany. They always stuck together at these things—at all things, really. Now she’s huddled with a few other girls in her class who take selfies and make pouty duck lips.
I find a seat on the wraparound bench as neon lights flash overhead. Someone turns the music all the way up, and handles of booze and red plastic cups appear from backpacks. All around me, shots are poured and beers are funneled. Who cares if it’s only a fifteen-minute ride to the school? We’re used to accomplishing a lot in a short amount of time.
I lean back and cross my arms over my chest. But then I spot Ellie nestled into a corner on the bench, a slim bottle of vodka in her grasp. Her long wavy hair pours over her shoulders, so dark it looks like ink. It only makes her silver silk dress even more radiant. She leans back and tips the bottle straight into her mouth. My whole body tenses, as if I can feel the booze course through her body like it’s mine. Her mouth is wide and red. But her eyes dart around the bus, landing on Tamara and then Noah and then me. She nods in my direction, but doesn’t smile. She’s got fire in her tonight. That can only be a bad thing.
* * *
—
The dance is beyond boring. We’re all packed into the Edgewater High gymnasium and the air is thick with humidity. The team is wasted, shoving each other and bopping up and down like maniacs. The teachers don’t care. The admins don’t give a shit. We won last week’s meet and that’s all that matters. Well, Mila won.
When Principal Pérez walks to the stage under the basketball hoop to announce that Noah and Tamara have been crowned Homecoming King and Queen, the team explodes, bouncing into one another as Pérez places a plastic crown on Noah’s enormous head, and a rhinestone-encrusted tiara in Tamara’s hair. They pause together on stage, bathed in the sickly bright spotlight, and turn to each other for a slobbery kiss.
“Gross,” I say out loud without even meaning to.
Someone laughs behind me and I spin around to find Mila holding her hand over her mouth.
“What?” I bark. I’m so not interested in being made fun of right now.
“You totally just said what everyone else is thinking.”
“Oh.”
We look at each other awkwardly for a second. “I’m gonna get some air. Wanna come?” Mila asks.
She doesn’t wait for an answer and heads to the back of the gym, where a door leads to a playground the elementary school uses.
I weigh my options: stay here alone and watch my teammates make fools of themselves or go outside and get away from all of this mess. I hate that these are my only two choices, but I follow Mila out the door until we’re sitting side by side on swings meant for fourth graders.
Mila doesn’t say anything for a moment and then she kicks off the ground so she’s sailing through the air. I do the same.
“I don’t know how you can stand this place,” she says, her hair blowing behind her.
Cold air breezes past my cheeks. “Imagine living here your whole life.”
“It’s just so creepy,” Mila says, dragging her foot against the ground to slow down. “The whole serial killer thing.”
“We try not to say the s word,” I say.
“They were all cross country runners, right?”
I nod. Marlisse Williams was the first. She was a junior and one of the counselors at the Elite Youth Runner’s Club. She babysat us once a month for a whole year, usually when Mom and Dad would do date night at the drive-in. Marlisse showed us how to let chocolate chips melt on the hot kernels of popcorn for an extra-special dessert, and let us fall asleep on her shoulders while watching movies. After she went missing, her family plastered posters all around the town, her smiling face beaming out from the flyers, Senegalese twists framing her face.
But the police were slow to do anything. There were no frantic search parties, no hunting dogs used to follow her scent. They kept calling her a runaway. A misguided kid. But then, six days later, a middle-aged dad found her body hidden behind some brush on the Oak Tower trail while he was jogging.
There were whispers around town about how the police messed up because Marlisse was Black. How they wouldn’t have if she was white. But no one in Edgewater did anything. There were no protests. No nasty confrontations at the town council meetings. No op-eds condemning the detectives in the local paper. Just a lot of folks who shook their heads when they passed the police station and dropped casseroles off at the Williamses’ doorstep, sheepish as they walked away.
Two months later, senior-class president and captain of the cross country team Beatrice Stiller went missing in the same exact way. She belonged to our synagogue and always played Esther in the Purim spiel. When her family put pressure on Detective Parker, who was assigned to both cases, the department obliged, corralling investigators from all around the region. At first they refused to think the two cases were related. But when their dogs found Beatrice by Oak Tower, killed in the exact same way—blunt force trauma, with missing shoelaces, of all things—Parker was forced to acknowledge there was a murderer on the loose.
That’s when the press descended.
And things just got even bigger when four months and no leads later, they found Abigail Childers in the same exact location, killed just the same. She had made the varsity cross country team and was a mock-trial prodigy aiming for the Ivy League. The only thing the girls had in common was running.
Everyone in Edgewater had their theories. The most believable one was that Monty Fitzwater, the creepy old white guy who’d led guided hikes up and down the trails for decades, killed them all. He knew the woods better than anyone and his gaze lingered a bit too long on the girls when he passed them in town. He was always screaming about how Edgewater was changing too fast, how there were too many New York City yuppies moving in, driving up real estate prices and fixing things that weren’t broken.
Some thought he had an accomplice, his brother Kendall, who ran a fly-fishing program but didn’t get much business from locals since everyone knew he had an assault charge on his record. They lived in Edgewater their whole lives, but Monty died of a heart attack after the police found Abigail. Kendall moved away a few weeks later.
The murders stopped after that and police let it go. They didn’t have anything they could pin on the Fitzwater brothers directly—no DNA, no faulty alibis, no murder weapon. Basically everyone lost faith in Detective Parker, especially because of the way he’d bungled Marlisse’s investigation.
Then, five years later, when Shira Tannenbaum went missing, Parker and his cronies spent all their resources working around the clock to find her and prove that they were capable for once. When the truth came out, everything changed. Girls weren’t taken seriously anymore.
Parker brought it up last year when he grilled me about Allison Tarley. “Never again will I have time for the dramatics of teenage girls,” he said.
Here on the swing set, I pump my legs to go higher and higher. “You know there’s nothing to be afraid of, right?” I say to Mila, though sometimes I’m not even sure I believe those words.
“Yeah, of course,” Mila says. “This town’s just so small. I feel stifled and I’ve only been here for a few weeks. At least back in Connecticut, I could say screw it and take the train into Manhattan wh
enever I wanted. Get out of the bubble. Do you ever feel like that? Like you need to escape?”
I nod and then look at the night sky. “Once you’re labeled something, there’s no turning back,” I say. “Here, you’re branded forever.” I close my eyes and see all those shocked faces looking at me at the finish line last year, how Allison Tarley tumbled forward as she screamed.
“I’m going to run my way out of here,” Mila says. “Be so good, all those college teams have no choice but to pay attention. You know? I can’t focus on anything else right now. Just that.”
Something inside my chest unlatches. No one’s ever spoken to me like this before, like they might possibly understand how my hunger to be number one can trump just about everything else in my life.
“My whole high school experience has been about getting onto the Georgetown cross country team,” I say, swinging through the air. “Ever since I met the recruiter freshman year and learned they actually gave out athletic scholarships.”
“Why Georgetown?” Mila asks.
“It’s just so different from here, you know? It’s in the middle of a city where everyone is trying to make something, trying to be better. If you go there, you can do anything when you graduate. My body will break down at some point and there’s no way I’m coming back here when it does. I need . . . I want out.”
I’m rambling now, which would usually lead Ellie to roll her eyes and zone out, or Julia to make some nasty comment about what a freak Sterile Steckler is, but Mila nods slowly, mulling over my words.
“That’s what I was like about Harvard,” she says, swinging higher and higher. “But when everything happened with my dad, I realized nothing is certain. I thought I’d be finishing up high school with people I’d known my whole life in Hadbury. But now I’m stuck in this small town in the Catskills that’s best known for its luxury resort and being the site of a bunch of gruesome murders that were never solved.”
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