Little Pretty Things (13 page)

“Who?” I said.

“Mickie and Jessica,” she cried. “Come help!”

I ran, following her into the stuffy locker room and into a ring of yelling and jeering girls. On the floor, the independent study and the gazelle were at war. Running shoes kicking, fists of hair pulled. Terrible things were coming out of both their mouths. I blinked at the sight until Delia yelled, “Knock it off, you guys. The teacher’s here!”

This seemed enough of a threat to the girls watching, who pulled back to let me closer to the middle of the brawl. I reached into the pile of girls on the floor and came out with the tiny one’s arm. She was light, and so I was able to pull her off the other one.

“Slut,” the gazelle said, rising from the ground on her own.

“Keep it up, you whore, and I’ll knock your teeth in,” screeched the girl in my arms, swinging out of my grasp. Her fist struck my face as she shook me off, then she grabbed her things from the floor and let the locker-room door slam on her way out.

“What was that about?” I tried for scolding authority but was shaking too hard. I tested the spot on my lip where the girl had clocked me. Bleeding.

The other girls fell away, grabbing their things. The gazelle, or Jessica, according to those who asked if she was fine, would only shake her head. The bell rang overhead and the girls scattered, leaving me alone with my hand to my fat lip.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

My classes were all girls. Occasionally, Coach brought a class of boys through the gym on their way to and from the tennis courts, giving me a nod or a thumbs-up to make sure it was all going according to plan. Thumbs-up. I turned my cracked lip from him. No other independent studies showed up, no other fights broke out. I force-marched back-to-back classes through laps until a bell rang and a new class failed to emerge from the locker room.

Lunch break, I supposed. I could smell the tater tots from where I sat on the stairs.

I stretched my legs in front of me. White stripes ran down the sides of my tracksuit pants, like a joke. I hadn’t been running for months. I patted at my sore mouth. Who was I to prod these kids around the gym? Who was I to take no excuses?

It was just—they had their whole lives ahead of them. They should be racing toward their futures.

I’d already been where they were. I was allowed to lope along, to slow down. It made sense to slow down, didn’t it? Since I didn’t know where I was going?

But then I did know where I was going.

Past the locker rooms, the hallway led to the weight room, and eventually, to the pool. The air was heavy with chlorine—but hot. Before I’d gone too far, an open doorway roiled with steam. I paused in the opening, taking in the mountain of white towels. I did laundry at the Mid-Night every week, and the piles of sheets always seemed out of line with how many guests we had, but I couldn’t imagine keeping up with this amount of work. It ruined your hands. I covered my mouth with the back of my wrist. It probably ruined your lungs, too. Someday we’d all suffer the ill effects of the Shinez-All and bleach.

Far back behind the stacks of clean, folded towels, two of the cleaning staff sat with magazines, smoking. They wore loose, blue uniforms, boxy and unflattering, but I envied how they must be able to move in them. Then one of them, a meaty woman with eyes keen and black, looked up.

Her name rose like the steam from memory: Cheryl.

For a moment, I could see her dark eyes boring into me, and below them, her mouth pulled in anger.

“Help you?” she barked. She seemed amused, though, not mad.

I shook my head, hurrying down the hall.

I shouldn’t have disturbed them. The back halls were their undisputed territory. It felt a little reckless to ignore the unspoken laws, and a little more than indecent to trespass on the domain of a fellow cleaner. I felt scolded.

The back pathway continued past the pool and dumped me out behind some lockers in an academic hallway. Here, it was quiet, the roar of the cafeteria far behind me. A long line of classrooms stretched ahead, and to the left, the library. A thousand memories rushed at me. I took manageable, bite-sized views, grabbing a drink from the water fountain and taking a look at some books on display in the library’s broad front window. I caught sight of myself and my puffy lip in the glass. Inside, two girls stood behind the checkout desk. They stopped talking and glanced in my direction, then at each other. It hadn’t been long enough since I’d been the object of high-school girl ridicule. I still recognized it.

Outside the administrative offices, I paused to read a few notices on a bulletin board about upcoming Honors Society food drives, and how to buy tickets for prom. Fixing a noncommittal expression on my face, I made my way past the open doorway of the main office and through the lobby toward the long wall of glass cases containing all the honor and recognition my school had ever earned.

Of course I already knew right where to locate my own name. I’d been through the cases plenty of times over the years. Cross-country five thousand meters, track thirty-two hundred meters. County invitational. Tri-county tourney. Southtown Regional. Always the second name, tucked under Maddy’s. A matched pair, etched together forever into shining plates and trophy towers, the tops decked out with silver ponytailed girl runners.

The silver had started to tarnish.

As I looked, other names started to leap out. People I knew from school, but also from the Mid-Night. Courtney Howard had received some kind of student journalism award. Yvonne’s named showed up on a plaque for something called the Student Business Alliance. All these awards, squeezed together on a shelf, literally under glass like pinned butterflies. Youth caught in mid-wing beat.

Even Coach’s youth was represented. Among the brass and glass of lesser awards, his Olympic bronze medal was dull and small, easy to miss. I took a minute to admire it and think of all the hours Coach would have trained, only to miss out on the top prize. If he’d won gold, no one could have missed it.

I checked around for his Coach of the Year trophy or medallion but didn’t see them. Again and again, though, on awards chiseled with names I didn’t know, I found Coach and Fitz’s influence. I’d always considered Maddy and myself the all-stars Coach and Fitz had been waiting for their entire careers, but the truth was that they’d mentored plenty of strong runners. In fact, now that I spent the time to see it, there was a plaque from the state tournament leaning up against the back glass, earned by a track team member before Maddy and I had even joined the team. The wooden plaque was shaped like the state of Indiana, with the expertly carved ripples of the Ohio River at the bottom edge visible through the glass shelf from below. I peered at every angle, trying to catch the name of the student, which was blocked by other trophies. I stood far to the left to read the letters in relief.
Kristina
. Then far to the right, I got a better angle.
Switzer
. I looked again at the fine carving, those ripples, idly rubbing my palms together. Who the hell was Kristina Switzer? How had I never heard of her?

“Well,” said a voice behind me. “You’ve made it to halftime, I see.”

Mrs. Haggerty, the school secretary. Her too-red lips twisted into a grimace of a smile. She was a small woman, a cardigan-wearing little bird of a thing who looked like someone’s grandmother. But I wasn’t falling for that. Mrs. Haggerty held the true seat of power at Midway High. Any punishment dished out by the principal—she’d outlasted or outlived at least five—was nothing next to having Mrs. Haggerty peck at you. If she didn’t like me, I wouldn’t have been called in to substitute teach. But she did—though I had no idea why, or how to keep it that way. “But I guess that’s a bad analogy, given your own athletic interests,” she said.

“What? Oh, right. Halftime, er, lunch.” I couldn’t seem to think of anything to say. “Just looking over the trophy case. It’s cool that Coach Trenton keeps his Olympic medal here.”

She raised an eyebrow. “If it had been a gold, I imagine he would wear it to parties. I don’t think he cares about it. It’s his Coach of the Year trinkets he must love, since he never brought them in to add them to the display. Maybe they’ll find their way in now, with Madeleine—”

She had the decency to stop herself. “Not too difficult to find your name among the historical records, I assume.”

Everything Haggerty ever said sounded like a trap. I felt seventeen again, like I needed to pat my pockets for my hall pass or spit out my gum, fast. “I saw a lot of people I recognized, actually. Courtney Howard. Did you know she’s a —”

I didn’t want to tell that story, really. Mrs. Haggerty gave me an inscrutable look, until I realized that she might not like me all that much. Maybe she only preferred me, over Maddy. How many times had I sat out in the lobby while Maddy faced Haggerty, then the principal or vice? For being late for school, skipping out of study hall to meet Beck out behind the Future Farmers’ tractor barn, or dropping a word-bomb on one of our teachers. Maddy was smart, smart enough to have done well. But she hadn’t wanted to, I guess, especially by about halfway through our senior year. She hadn’t wanted to be at school, always bringing in ambivalent notes from Gretchen for the days she missed. A headache. Stomachache.
Cramps
. The last semester, when we had first-period phys ed with Fitz, she hardly showed up at all. He must have let a lot slide, or her GPA wouldn’t have been high enough to keep her on the team.

Sometimes while I waited outside the admin offices for Maddy to face her reckoning, Beck would wander by or take the seat at the far side of the bench to wait, too. Like rival suitors, we wanted to see which of us would be called upon to console her first, a contest I couldn’t remember winning or losing.

Maddy. Beck. For the first time, it occurred to me how much of my high school experience had been rooted in competition. Real competition, but also the kind that hadn’t made any sense.

But it hadn’t mattered that Beck and I had been in a contest to be the shoulder Maddy would cry on. She always emerged from these run-ins renewed, laughing. She was almost happier with a few detention hours against her. She couldn’t be punished. She couldn’t be stopped.

“I saw some names I didn’t know, though,” I said, turning back to the case and the state tournament trophy. Third place, it said. It wasn’t as good as Maddy and I would have done, but then we’d both walked away with nothing. The frilly edge of that carved border bothered me. I wanted to run my fingers along it. “Kristina Switzer?”

“Oh, yes,” Mrs. Haggerty said. “Your coaches’ first love.”

“I—” My hands had begun to itch in earnest. I rubbed my palms against the stripes on my hips. “Who?”

“The coaches have their obsessions. They do love a winner. Surely you noticed?” she said. “Madeleine, of course. There’s a girl on the team now that has every chance of beating most of the standing records. Oh, yes, even Madeleine’s. This might be the year. They’re certainly smitten.” Her eyes shifted to the trophy case. She pulled out a heavy ring of keys and opened one of the glass doors, then reached inside and turned one of the regional spelling-bee cups a couple of degrees.

I noticed that she’d left me off the list of Coach and Fitz’s favorites, but I was too distracted watching her nudge and fuss with the pieces in the case. I crossed my arms and tucked my hands into my armpits to keep from reaching out for something. Not the state tournament prize. Too large. Too special. It would be something small, something carelessly arranged and easily missed. Something that would fit into the makeup bag at the bottom of my vanity.

Then I saw it. A tiny marble tablet, a paperweight with an inscription I couldn’t read. It was instant. As soon as I saw it, I wanted it, had to have it, desired it more than any man, any accomplishment. More than a college degree. More than anything.

In that moment, I wanted that little monument more than I wanted my father back. More than my own next breath.

It didn’t make any sense. I didn’t truly believe my own desire, even as it made my bones hum. The object—I didn’t even know what it was—was a magnet, and I was helpless against its draw.

Finally Mrs. Haggerty closed the door and secured the lock.

I took a step back, gulping for breath. With all my concentration, I pried my attention away from the case. “When did she graduate?”

“Kristina? That’s an interesting question.” Mrs. Haggerty’s eyes flicked up and down the hallway. “She went through ceremonies—oh, I’d have to check the year. She was a bit ahead of you.”

Neither the question nor the answer seemed particularly interesting or worth protecting to me. But too much curiosity was probably another mark against my character. Would I still be judged against Maddy, or was I being measured against another yardstick now? “What’s interesting?”

“Technically,” she said, “Kristina Switzer didn’t graduate.”

“Oh,” I said. “Why not?”

“Hard to say,” Mrs. Haggerty said. “She drifted away. You don’t see that much, not with the promising athletes, not with the ones getting recruiter visits. Like with Madeleine.”

Somewhere in my mind, a domino dropped, and I waited for the entire pattern to fall. Finally the last piece knocked over.

“Are you saying—wait. Did you just say that Maddy didn’t graduate, either?”

Mrs. Haggerty seemed startled for a moment, then glared. She didn’t like me as much as I wanted her to. “I said no such thing—”

“But—”

A girl in bare shoulders trudged by, giving us a long, curious look.

“Miss Whisler,” Mrs. Haggerty said. “Where is the rest of that outfit? And I imagine they’re waiting for you in chemistry, aren’t they?” She turned back to me with her face wiped of any emotion but disdain. A kid without a hall pass and I were getting the same treatment.

“I said no such thing about Madeleine,” she said. “I said no such thing about Kristina, either, if it comes down to it. That’s confidential information. I thought you must have known about . . . You were thick as thieves, but that’s neither here nor there. Consider it an interesting bit of trivia. Better yet, forget all about it.” Mrs. Haggerty pulled at the hem of her cardigan. I’d never seen her ruffled before, but she was recovering quickly. She gave me a cool look. “But wouldn’t it be strange? If it were true?”