Free Chasing Hope by Kathryn Cushman Page B

on the well-manicured lawn.
    “Why are you stalking me?”
    Brandy shrugged and jumped down. “I’m just trying to figure some things out.”
    “Like what? It might be easier for both of us if you just asked me.”
    “Yeah, well, asking someone is not always the way to get a truthful answer, that much I know for sure.”
    “And lurking outside people’s windows works better for you?” Sabrina sat on the steps to her grandmother’s porch and rubbed her knee.
    “How long you been using?”
    Sabrina looked up. “Huh?”
    “You heard me. How long have you been using?”
    “Using what?”
    “Oh come on, I saw you. You took a bunch of pills and then you injected yourself with something. Don’t tell me you don’t know what I mean.”
    “I know what you mean, you just don’t know what you saw.”
    “Pssh. I knew I was wasting my time trying to get straight answers out of you.” Brandy turned and started back toward the street, shaking her head and muttering something as she went.
    “Brandy, wait. Come back and I’ll tell you.”
    “Right.” She didn’t bother to turn, or even stop walking.
    “Keep going if you want, but I’m telling you this is your one and only chance. Walk away now and you’ll never get the answer to any of it.”
    She stopped, turned, and walked back in a slow, jaunty strut. “All right then, let’s have it.”
    “You might want to sit down for this. It’s kind of a long story.” Sabrina scooted over to make room on the steps.
    Brandy didn’t move. “I’m fine right here.”
    “Suit yourself.” Sabrina wondered where to begin the story. Brandy wouldn’t care about what came before, about all the years of hard work and sacrifice for the dream. “I was a runner for a long time. Pretty good at it in high school.”
    “How good?”
    “Good enough that I got a scholarship for track.” There was so much more that Sabrina could tell her about, state championships, record times, multiple scholarship offers, but there was no reason to give those kinds of details, and it would sound like bragging if she did.
    “Where to?”
    “The University of Tennessee.”
    “Weird.”
    “What’s weird about that?”
    Brandy shook her head. “Never mind. Keep going.”
    “The thing was, a scholarship to me was just like a paving stone on the path to the place I really wanted to go, which was the Olympics. For as long as I can remember I’ve wanted to run the Olympic marathon someday. Since they don’t even allow teenagers in most marathons, and it’s generally considered a bad idea for younger people to run that far, I started cross-country in high school. Again, just another interlocking stone.”
    “So, why aren’t you still at Tennessee?”
    Sabrina’s mind began to travel down a path she didn’t want it to follow. The roaring of the Tennessee River running past the campus after a big rain, the musty smell of her dorm room, the cookouts in the quad. “I . . . uh . . . well.” She blinked back the memories, wanting to stop them all. “During the summer before I started, I upped my training. I wanted to prove to everyone that I had earned my spot on the team. I wanted to be the fastest freshman runner in UT history. So I pushed myself. Hard. Really hard. Close to the end of the summer, I was actually gaining time instead of losing it because my knees hurt so bad. My mother took me to the sports medicine doctor and he told me I needed to rest for a couple of weeks. Needless to say, that’s the last thing I wanted to do right before school started,but at this point, the pain was bad enough that I didn’t have much choice.”
    Sabrina remembered sitting in her bed, ice packs on both knees, reading books on running, and most of all, reading biographies on her hero, Eric Liddell. God had called him to run. He’d won the Olympic gold medal and then gone off to China to be a missionary. A path almost identical to Sabrina’s own plan. She wouldn’t tell Brandy that part of the