Free Girl Runner by Carrie Snyder Page B

marked out in white ribbons. Heaven will gather a crowd of girls standing at the start with one leg out, skirts lifted, ready for “On your marks, steady, go!” Heaven will be lined on either side with little kids cheering and older folks too, but I won’t be old in heaven. I’ll be sixteen, the tallest girl in the field, and cheered by how easy it is to pull ahead, how I’m running almost alone across the spiky summer grass, how I catch, with a crashing burst of speed, this one last girl who fleets before me. How the white ribbon breaks free against my soaring and flutters to the ground, tangling my feet.
    I’m hardly started when it’s already over.
    Who was that?
    Olive is hugging me, saying she knew I would win as she lifts me right off the ground: “Can you guess who that girl was, the one you beat? She’s won the city championship two years in a row!”
    The tone in the stranger’s voice is admiring: Who was that girl with the golden hair?
    I know right then. I’m not going home.
    I compose a letter to my mother and father. I can’t tell you what it says, exactly. I can tell you that Olive helps me to write it. She wrote one herself a year ago, but that was different. She was writing to say she had found a job, and here was some money to help at home.
    I was there when Mother opened Olive’s letter, and she flushed and pushed the money back inside the envelope. “We don’t need this,” she said.
    I do not write, in my letter home, I love you. I may sign myself, Yours sincerely , or Yours devotedly, Your loving daughter , any of those. They know, I tell myself. They know I love them. Don’t they?

7
Fall
    “ IT ’ S GONNA BE FINE, ” the girl announces over her shoulder, but it isn’t clear to whom she is speaking, to me or to Max, the young man beside me fiddling with the camera. Besides which, this is hardly a reassuring declaration, as anyone with sense would know. Young lady, you should pay more attention to the road, I say. That was a red light. Here’s another.
    The car screeches to a halt and I’m launched against the seat belt with a groan.
    “Do I need to drive?” Max looks up. He’s transferred his attention to a different screened device, which he cradles between his hands, looking down as if in prayer. He can’t leave it for more than a moment. He bows his head and taps on it with his thumbs.
    “I’m good,” the girl growls through her teeth, pressing the gas pedal with more enthusiasm than necessary.
    “Then drive like you know what you’re doing.”
    “You sound like Dad.”
    “You drive like Mom.”
    Ah. Siblings.
    We’re passing dull buildings, low to the ground, a huddle of ugly boxes that open, abruptly, onto wet ploughed cornfields and sky. She speeds up, and the fields fold one into another and I think it unlikely that it will matter whether or not I pay attention. I close my eyes.
    Some while later, I am jostled out of a rough sleep, tossed to one side as we take a corner precipitously. I press my hands to my cheeks. Warm. Am I sick?
    “Roll down your window.” There is a young man beside me. He leans forward to get the girl’s attention, pulling from one of her ears a slender white cord. “Turn it off, she’s awake again.” His thumbs click, click, click.
    She cracks the windows, but I see she’s disobeyed his other order. One of the slender cords rides up her hair and into her left ear.
    Her hair is whipping in the wind, and she turns to grin at us. “Do you recognize anything, Mrs. Smart?”
    “Not far now,” says Max, as if to reassure himself.
    “I’m getting butterflies!” the girl is shouting with some excitement. Her mood seems highly changeable.
    The road we’re travelling is freshly paved and looks to have been widened in the process. There are no trees on either side, just steep muddy ditches.
    In answer to her question, yes, I think I know this road. I know something about it, but it’s been changed from what it was, I think. Hasn’t