2
MORGAN
“Do you have everything?”
“Yes!”
“Do you have lunch money?”
“Yes, I have lunch money.”
“Your track schedule? Practice goes until at least five thirty most days, they said.”
“Yes, and then I’m gonna jog or walk to the apartment after.”
“Okay, I’m usually at the shop until about six thirty, so if you beat me home, don’t worry.”
“Oh my god, I’m not worried. I can handle being home alone.”
“I just want this to be good for you. You deserve it after—”
“Can we not talk about that? Fresh start and all?”
“Okay, well, what would Mom say?”
“I don’t know. ‘I love you’? ‘Have a good day’?”
Dylan smiles, a serious look in his eyes. “I love you. Have a good day.”
“Holy crap, Dyl, (a) your impression of Mom needs work, and (b) you’re taking this ‘in loco parentis’ thing a little too seriously.”
“I just don’t want to screw anything up,” he says. “Mom and Dad will kill me if I break you or lose you or whatever you do with kids.”
“Dude, I’m seventeen.” I groan, pulling my long brown hair up into a ponytail.
The car behind us beeps, and someone shouts, “The drop-off lane is for drop-offs. Get out or get moving.”
“Yikes,” Dylan says, looking into the rearview mirror.
“Yeah, hell hath no fury like a suburban mom late for her latte,” I say. “But don’t worry, I’m going to be fine. And you need to go.” I give him a quick one-armed hug and then dart out of the car before he can stop me.
But despite what I told Dylan, I have no clue what I’m doing. A bunch of kids bustle past me, laughing with their friends, completely oblivious to the fact that I’m new. I shift my backpack higher on my shoulders—or at least I try to, which is exactly when I realize it’s missing. Crap.
“Dyl!” I call, but of course he can’t hear me on the other side of the parking lot with his windows up. So I do what I do best: I run, fast. I fly through the parking lot, weaving between rows, hoping to cut him off as he moves slowly through the traffic jam that’s formed in front of the school entrance. I’m just about there, one more row to go, when a loud horn and the screech of brakes makes me freeze in my tracks.
And there, a foot away from my hip, is the bumper of a very shiny blue car. Seriously? I look back to Dylan’s car just in time to see it pull out and disappear down the road.
“Dammit!” If it weren’t for this stupid car, I would have made it. I wouldn’t be standing in the middle of the parking lot of a new school without my schedule, a notebook, or even a friggin’ pencil. “What is wrong with you?!” I spin around, slapping my hands on the hood of the car. “Watch where you’re going!”
I look up to glare at the no doubt macho asshole driving this stupid muscle car and am struck with the brightest pair of blue eyes I’ve ever seen—which promptly narrow and glare back at me.
“You’re the one running through the middle of a parking lot,” she says, hopping out of her car and shoving me out of the way to inspect her car hood. “If you so much as put a scratch in this—”
“You could have killed me!”
“It would have been your fault if I did,” she says, straightening up so we’re nearly nose to nose. “Where were you even going? School’s the other way, if you haven’t noticed.”
And, oh no. Oh. No. She’s . . . very . . . cute. And before I know it, my brain is unhelpfully making a list of everything I should not be wondering about. Like how her perfectly tanned hand might look linked with my lighter, peachier one. And whether there are tan lines underneath her fitted gray hoodie and obscenely tight jeans. And, oh god, I am a creep.
It would be so much easier to stay angry with her if she really were some asshole dude, but this is a complication. One that will require a full system reboot if I want to get out of this without embarrassing myself. Step one: close my mouth, which is currently hanging open like I’m witnessing a miracle. Step two: pull it together with a quickness.
Like, the objective part of my brain recognizes that she still technically sucks. But the nonobjective part of my brain still really wants her name and number and to know if she’s single and how she would feel about dating a marginally disgraced track star of the female persuasion.
“Hello! I asked you a question.” She waves her hands in front of my face. And, yes, that was helpful. Please keep being an asshole, car girl.
“I forgot my backpack in the car,” I answer the second my brain comes back online. “I was trying to catch him before he left.”
“Why didn’t you just call him?” She looks pointedly at the phone sticking out of my pocket. And, okay, good question.
“Instinct?” I say. “I’m a runner. I run. It’s what I do.”
“Yeah, well, don’t run here. This is a parking lot. For parking. It’s what it’s for,” she says, mocking my tone.
“It was an emergency situation.”
The girl huffs and pulls her hair—long dirty-blond strands that look like they’ve been highlighted to within an inch of their life—into a messy bun on top of her head. “You’re lucky there are no scratches from you punching my—”
“I didn’t punch your car. I lightly pressed my hands against it in frustration.”
“Sure. Well, the good news is all it’s going to cost you is a car wash to get your grubby prints off the hood.” She smiles in a mean kind of way that should not make my stomach flip down to my toes but absolutely does. And seriously? Seriously?! Can I just for once not be attracted to someone who looks like they could eat me for dinner without batting an eye?
“I am not paying for you to wash your car just because I touched it.”
She shrugs and walks back to her still-open door. “It was worth a shot. She’s due for one anyway.”
And now when my mouth pops open, it’s with annoyance instead of awe. “Worth a shot? Are you—You almost killed me! You almost killed me, and then you tried to scam me into paying for a car wash you’re already getting? What kind of a monster are you?”
“The kind that didn’t forget her backpack and isn’t going to be late for homeroom,” she says before sliding into her car and reversing down the row.
“Asshole!” I yell, flipping her off for good measure, but she just rolls her eyes and laughs.
I have the good sense to wait until she’s out of sight before admitting defeat and pulling out my phone. Dylan answers on the first ring, sounding totally panicked. Once I reassure him that, yes, I’m fine, the world has not ended, nothing irrevocably bad has happened in the five minutes or so since he dropped me off—barring almost being run over by the rudest girl in rude town, which I definitely do not mention—he calms down enough to promise to bring me my backpack.
I find a bench near the track with a good view of the park-ing lot and wait. So much for coming early to find my classes. There are a couple girls running on the track, no doubt members of the school team, and I wonder if they’re making up a practice or if they’re running penalty laps. My old coach at St. Mary’s was big on those. Coming in early was good for the soul, she used to say, although my body wholeheartedly disagreed.
I recognize one of the girls as she runs by: Allie Marcetti—we’ve run against each other a few times, and I kind of know her. She’s fast, but not as fast as me, and definitely not for as long. No one is. Well, no one around here at least. I heard a rumor she was switching to sprinting for her final season anyway.
They rush past me, their matching ponytails streaming behind them, and I bounce my leg, wishing I were running too. I can’t wait until later, when it’s finally my feet slapping the track, pushing myself until my muscles burn and my stomach shakes and . . . I stop, reminding myself I’m technically not an official member of the team yet, not until my waiver comes through.
If it comes through. But with my past ranking, Coach had no qualms about letting me practice with them for the last couple months of school. I even signed an early letter of intent to run for my dream school—although at the moment it’s “on pause” while they “evaluate the incident.”
I’ve spent a lot of time convincing myself this is all fine and none of it hurts. That going from star athlete to high school scandal is a totally normal progression that I am both equipped for and totally saw coming. But, yeah, I look away as the girls cross the finish line, trying really hard not to think about how that should be me, at my old school, with my old friends.
My mom keeps saying it’s just a matter of time before I’m cleared to compete again and everything is sorted with my college. Apparently, being given the choice to withdraw or be formally expelled from your old school—a school your parents are currently suing for a myriad of reasons including but not limited to discrimination and harassment—makes it seem a lot less likely that your new school is poaching elite athletes. Let’s just hope the High School Athletic Association agrees when they finally rule on my case.
Coach didn’t poach anyone. We both just got lucky that my brother has an apartment in a school district with a decent running program in the same conference, and the school happens to have a spot for a distance runner. If it were up to me, I’d still be racing with my old crew at St. Mary’s, but it’s not.
That’s what happens when you lose it on a teacher who tells you that being queer is against the code of conduct at your stupid private school . . . and then decides to make your life a living hell because of it.
We tried the homeschooling route when everything first went down. We naively thought we could just remove that one part of my life and everything else would still be the same. But then the local news picked up the story, and I started to feel like everyone was watching me or something. Maybe it was in my head at first, but then my friends stopped calling, and their parents stopped texting my parents. And then I just had to get out of there.
Whatever. No wallowing. Fresh start. New me. Out and proud. Taking a stand. So fun! This waiver just better come through before states, or they’ll have to chain me to the bench to keep me from competing. I will not miss the final track season of my high school career, so help me god.
The first bell rings, and everybody rushes inside, the parking lot and school grounds becoming a ghost town in seconds. And I stay sitting, waiting for Dylan. Late for my fresh start already.