Free Beverly Hills Maasai by Eric Walters Page A

with the flow of people to find our way, but as usual, everyone was just standing and staring at the guys in their Maasai wardrobe.
    “Excuse me,” I asked a man, obviously a runner. “Can you tell me where we can find the registration desk?”
    “For the marathon?” he asked.
    “No, for the fashion show!” Olivia snapped.
    “Yes, the marathon,” I said before his confused look took hold.
    “For all of you?” he asked.
    “Just three of us.”
    I noticed that the crowd of fashion rejects around us was growing quickly. Then I looked at Nebala. I knew that attached to his belt, hidden underneath his blanket, he had his
konga
with him. In a fight between three Maasai warriors and three hundred runners, I’d bet on the Maasai.
    Then again, it wasn’t going to be that sort of fight. It was going to be three Maasai running against three thousand other runners … No, not three thousand—there might be ten times that many. I’d seen marathonson TV, and they were just masses of people. I remembered something about there being forty thousand people in the New York City Marathon.
Forty thousand.
There couldn’t be that many running in Beverly Hills…. It wasn’t a big city like New York or … well, really, it
was
L.A. The richest part of L.A. Could there be that many people who were going to be part of this run? Serious runners, people who, with their crew of personal coaches, trained for years and years? People from around the world? Could Nebala and his friends outrun people like that who devoted their lives to running?
    I got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. Nebala and his friends had come here to win
—certain
that they could win. But what if they couldn’t? I didn’t want to think about that. After all, they did spend their entire lives walking and running. They trained not just hours every day, but
every
hour,
every
day. Nebala had told me about how Samuel had once tracked a wounded lion for three days, covering hundreds of miles, before he finally killed it. Anybody who could do that could do this, no problem.
    “Just come with me,” the man said. “I’m on my way to register right now.”
    “Thank you.”
    We fell in behind him. The crowd opened up at one end and allowed us through. Then everybody fell in behind us. I felt like a celebrity followed by a horde of paparazzi. It did have that quality. Everybody was watching us, and there were a lot of phones being pulled out and pictures taken. Of course I was only inthe shots because I was standing beside the celebrities. I guess that made me part of the posse. No, not the posse—more like the Maasai’s entourage!

CHAPTER ELEVEN
    As we walked, the crowd moved aside for us, snapped pictures, and then followed along behind. It was a combination of Moses parting the Red Sea, a celebrity reality show, and the Pied Piper leading the rat parade—except a whole bunch of these runners seemed to weigh
less
than a rat. Forget supermodels being too thin, these runners all looked downright scrawny. I guess the difference between them and the models was that these people were all incredibly fit—they just looked like they really needed a couple of good meals.
    Up ahead there were big signs that said “REGISTRATION”—no more question where we were headed.
    “Are these guys, like, real Maasai?” our escort asked.
    “As opposed to fake Maasai?” I questioned.
    “I mean, like, they’re really from Africa?”
    “From Africa, from Kenya.”
    “Kenyans! They are the best marathon runners in the world,” he said, clearly in awe.
    “Cheruiyot!” said Nebala proudly.
    “Tanui!” cheered Samuel. “Cherigat!”
    Our runner friend seemed to recognize what they were saying—runners’ names, I guessed?
    “Yeah,” he said. “Kenyan runners won the Boston Marathon ten years in a row! Maybe I shouldn’t bother even entering,” he added.
    “No harm in entering,” Olivia said. “Unless you were hoping to win, of course.”
    He looked both