Free Little Pretty Things by Lori Rader-Day Page A

my case, paying for. Inside the stadium would be the track, long white stripes on a red circle. The finish line. The launching pad. All of it, the early hours and the late hours and the blisters and shin splints—inside that stadium in just a few months, all of it would come to its natural end. I harbored hopes that we would run one, two, but in the other direction, with Maddy finally seeing what my jaw looked like for a change.
    We sat and watched the silent structure for a long moment. And I was satisfied. I felt exactly like my dad had taken me for ice cream, that I’d made the honor roll. That I’d been treated. Maddy and I had shared something special here. We knew who we were. We knew who we were going to be.
    In that moment, I knew everything I needed to know about our friendship. Everyone else was a blur.
    But then Maddy drove us out of the stadium’s shadows and down an even more secluded street. Within a few minutes, we were parking next to long, blank brick wall with a single, opaque glass door.
    “What is this place?”
    “I need to do something, OK? Will you stay here and wait for me?”
    “You can’t be serious, Maddy.” I looked at the long side of the building, all the good feeling from the stadium dropping away. I couldn’t decide where my anxiety was coming from. There was something about the building’s empty face that said more than any sign would have. “What is this place? What if you don’t come out?”
    “You can be so dramatic,” she said. “It’s just a test, OK? No big deal.”
    What kind of test. What kind of test. My mouth wouldn’t form the words. I knew what kind of test, and why the building was unmarked.
    “Are you pregnant ?” I said.
    “No way, shut up.” She bit at her nails. “Not a pregnancy test. Another one, OK? You can’t tell anyone.”
    We are seventeen , I wanted to say. Surely you can’t need any tests. Sex-ed films. All the times we’d whispered behind our hands at girls waddling gut-first past us at school. We were smarter than that. We had better things to do. What were we doing here? We would be running in that stadium in a few months, but only if we did everything right, timed every move perfectly, trained like we’d never trained—and she was getting tested for some sex disease? I wanted to shake her. No, I wanted to shake Beck . This was his fault.
    I hadn’t even known they were having sex. And this was how she told me. It stung. Maddy, rushing past me. Leaving me behind, as ever.
    We weren’t having the day I thought we were having. We were not having ice cream. We were not sharing something. I was not a part of this.
    I sat in the car, the heat roaring but still weak, until Maddy came back. I hurried to unlock her door. She slid into the driver’s seat, pale.
    “Well?” I finally asked. We might have been halfway home by the time I got up the nerve. We stopped and got tacos—I remembered the bag of tacos keenly now, how neither of us wanted them, how the smell took over the car until I felt sick.
    “I won’t know for a day or so. They’ll call.”
    “God, what if Gretchen answers the phone?”
    She shrugged.
    What if it’s positive? Why didn’t you tell me? I couldn’t seem to catch my breath to ask her anything. I felt as though I’d been running hard to catch her.
    The drive home was long and silent. When she dropped me off, a part of me wondered if I’d ever see her again, if she hadn’t planned the trip as a good-bye of some kind.
    It was. Or at least it seemed so for a while. The results must have been something she could live with, because she never mentioned them. She came back to herself after a little while. But I could no longer stand the sight of Beck’s hand on her. What disease had he almost given her? How many other girls had he put his dirty hands on? Why hadn’t he been the one to take her to that cold, blank building?
    Now, Beck was sliding through the crowd away from me. Everyone pulled back to let him