Free Dark Hope by Monica McGurk Page A

I like to take it out on my rowing machine.” She glanced across my room to the treadmill she’d bought, sitting forlorn and forgotten in the corner, strewn with rejected clothing. “You haven’t even touched your treadmill. It’s been weeks,” she noted in a neutral tone.
    I felt my chin rise defensively. “I’ve been busy.”
    She skewered me with one of her looks again. “Hope, I know you love to run. Is there something about this treadmill you don’t like? It still has the tags dangling from it. I could return it if you aren’t going to use it.”
    I fought against myself but couldn’t keep from blurting my response. “It’s just, just … the only reason I ran on a treadmill is Dad wouldn’t let me run outside. Ever.”
    The air was still as she considered this new information, her face a carefully composed mask.
    “What do you mean?”
    I didn’t want to add to my father’s long list of apparent parenting failures, but there was no way I could get out of this one.
    “He thought it was too dangerous for me to be alone. So I couldn’t even walk myself to school, let alone go outside for a run.”
    For a split second I saw beneath her composed veneer, saw the shock and anger she felt toward my dad. But just as quickly, it was gone. I knew then that I could never tell her about the Cupid-Gram Dad had sent me—she would seriously lose it. So I stayed silent until she stood up, brushed off her slacks, and moved quietly to the door. She made one parting shot as she left me to brood in my room.
    “Well, nothing’s stopping you now.”

    I stretched out on the front steps, eyeing the little cul-de-sac with a bit of trepidation. Of course, my mother was right. It was unfortunate that Dad had kept me under lock and key. But that was all over now, and I hadn’t even taken advantage of the fact.
    “No time like the present,” I muttered to myself, starting up my favorite running mix on my iPod as I left the steps.
    A thousand little things underscored how different it was to be outside instead of tied to a machine. The feel of pavement, unforgiving beneath my feet. The sharp air that prickled, icy, as I breathed it in. The drop in temperature when I came under the shade of a stand of tall pines. The wind slicing through my fleece.
    At first, with every step I imagined I was squashing Michael’s face with my foot. But eventually I gave myself to the music, my footfalls synching with the rhythm. Slowly, my stress melted away as I focused on my breathing. By the time I turned the corner off the main loop, I was singing along with my iPod at full voice, doing little hand jive moves when the spirit took me, as if the road was my own private stage.
    I had never felt so free.
    I suppose I looked funny to any neighbors who happened to look out their window. But I didn’t care. I was running, really running, without some stupid program on a machine to tell me how fast or how long to run.
    I kept running past the familiar streets and into others I’d never been on. They all looked comfortingly the same. What was that phrase Mom had used once? Safe as houses. Everybody here is safe as houses.
    But no sooner had I thought this than I began to get a funny feeling that I was not alone.
    I slowed down to a trot to look over my shoulder, but I could see nothing.
    Unsettled, I started running again, darting a backwards glance every few yards. The safe little neighborhood suddenly felt threatening, the dark windows in the empty houses glaring at me like angry eyes. I picked up the pace.
    I had made it back to the main loop, and now the sun was hanging low in the February sky.
Only a little ways left to go
, I thought tomyself, trying to forget that the last bit went through an unfinished part of the neighborhood that had been left open as a preserve.
    My unease deepened as I strode forward. The road was curvy here, swallowed at every bend by spindly pines that swayed in the stiff wind. My pace became more cautious. It was