Free Going the Distance by Julianna Keyes Page A

the floor for the seventeenth time.
    “I’ll clean it later.”
    He rose and came to stand beside her, peering at the monstrosity they’d spent the better part of two hours creating. Her students had music class before lunch on Tuesdays, and they’d agreed that he would come by then to help her with the trial run of the first of many trees.
    “It’ll look better when it’s painted,” Olivia said, slapping on the soggy strip of paper with no finesse whatsoever.
    “You don’t think it’s…enormous?”
    “Um, maybe.” She glanced over at him and tried not to laugh. Ritchie was an architect and he was extraordinarily uncomfortable when things did not go according to plan. The original intent had been for the tree to be approximately five feet tall—including the leaves, which she’d already constructed by tying together roughly one hundred large green feathers she’d found at the crowded indoor market. This particular…thing…was all trunk, about a foot and a half in diameter, more than double the measurements he’d given her, and stood about seven feet tall. It was just a giant, lilting, soggy newspaper covered…thing.
    “Let’s wheel it outside to dry,” she suggested. Olivia steadied the “tree” as Ritchie maneuvered the dolly through her classroom and out the door into the courtyard to sit in the sun. “I think it’ll be good,” she tried.
    “Yeah.”
    She laughed and hit him in the arm with her dirty fingers. “Shut up.”
    He trailed her inside and they tidied up as best they could, still twenty minutes left in the lunch break. She had a tiny microwave she used to heat up Styrofoam containers of instant noodles, and they sat at the kids’ tables and ate as they made small talk. Olivia knew he wanted to ask her about Jarek; it was kind of an open secret. She hadn’t been back to the gym trailer in the two weeks since she’d had sex with him on his desk. She hadn’t had to; he met up with her four times a week to run outside, then followed her upstairs to her apartment for an entirely different kind of workout.
    “You seem…better,” Ritchie offered. “Less unhappy.”
    “Yeah.” She forked too much food into her mouth and chewed. “It’s nice now that it’s warming up. Thank God for spring.”
    “Did you figure out how you’re going to make this play work?”
    She snorted. “Not a clue.” She’d been told two weeks earlier that she was responsible for helping her class stage an all-English performance of Little Red Riding Hood for their kindergarten graduation. The school was the only one in Lazhou with a foreign teacher, and the parents of Olivia’s students paid extra for them to be in her class. They needed to be wowed. More important, however, was the fact that they were supposed to have performed something at the Christmas pageant, but the Australian teacher hadn’t managed to cobble anything together. The kids had eventually sung an entirely garbled version of “Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer,” which no one had understood. They were incredibly excited to have a second chance in June.
    The problem was, Olivia knew Little Red Riding Hood . It didn’t have thirty characters. The school principal had chosen it because it had “red” in the title and Chinese people loved the color red. Beyond that, they needed some changes to the story. It couldn’t be scary, grandma couldn’t be kidnapped, the wolf couldn’t eat anybody, couldn’t, in fact, be a wolf, and everyone had to be happy and speaking English in the end. Olivia prided herself on thinking outside the box, but she hadn’t quite figured out a way to make this performance anything other than a hugely embarrassing debacle. So she’d made an enormous tree instead.
    “Hello, Olivia?”
    She and Ritchie turned to see Honor standing in the doorway, the sunlight silhouetting her slight shape, the flare of her dress around her knees. She still wore a long sleeve shirt and thick tights, but somehow managed to look