The Admissions (20 page)

After the team warm-up, a slow jog out on the course for a little more than a mile and then back again, checking out some of the more
ominous
hills, the team split up, each to his or her own particular pre-race routine, gum chewing or water sipping or a final anxiety-laden trip to the trio of porta potties along the edge of the woods. Angela liked to stay near the school banner, which was held up by two rusting metal poles that the coach screwed into the ground.

Twenty minutes until race time.

Angela started with a little Mumford & Sons for relaxation, while she was working on her hamstrings, laying her jacket on the cold ground and stretching herself out on top of it. She rolled out her tweaky left calf with her massage stick. At that point she switched over to a little Lumineers, then some Avett Brothers, music that she did not always listen to at home, due to the fact that her parents also listened to it, and that made it faintly embarrassing, but which she liked anyway. She pulled up her socks, exchanged her regular running shoes for cross-country spikes, tied them. She checked to make sure the laces were even with each other, and that each loop was the same size as each other loop. An acceptable quirk, or a sign of a touch of OCD? She wasn’t sure. She wasn’t sure it mattered. At this point. She double-knotted them, then triple. Many a cross-country runner had been undone by an untied shoelace, and she didn’t want to be that guy.
(Remember Angela Hawthorne? Class of 2014? She was a star cross-country runner, and then there was that one time she didn’t tie her shoelace tightly right before that big regional meet and she face-planted into a tree root, had to have three different surgeries on her front teeth? Didn’t get into college? Yeah, that girl. You don’t want to be that girl.)

She put her hair into a ponytail that was not too high (swung too much), nor too low (made her neck sweat), and she wrapped the elastic three times. Not two, not four. Three.

Ten minutes to race time.

She flipped through her iTunes library and upped the ante: Katy Perry.
Roar.

A shadow crossed in front of her. Angela tried to ignore it, but then the shadow sat down next to her and resolved itself into Henrietta Faulkner. Angela glanced at her watch. Eight minutes to go. Runners were gathering near the line. Two incredibly tall, incredibly skinny girls in green uniforms were doing strides across the grass. They looked as fresh as a couple of daisies. Cliché.

You held me down but I got up…

“Hey,” said Henrietta. Angela pulled the earbuds from her ears. Seven minutes.

“Hey,” said Angela. She didn’t like to talk before races. Everybody knew that.
Everybody.

“Senior year, huh, I can’t believe it. Can you believe it? Last meet of the season. Last meet ever, for high school.” Henrietta Faulkner was nervous; she was terrified. And when Henrietta was terrified she wanted to talk. Angela, who was also terrified, wanted to curl up into a little ball.

“We still have track in the spring,” said Angela.

The music was coming through the earbuds even though they weren’t in Angela’s ears anymore. Henrietta’s face lit up. “I
love
that song,” she said.

“Yeah,” said Angela. Everybody loved that song. Angela was so unoriginal.

I am a champion and you’re gonna hear me roaaaaaar…

“But track,” Henrietta said. “That’s not the same as this. Not for us. We’re cross-country girls, you and me.”

Angela thought,
You and I.
But she nodded, looking over the line of trees, looking at the path that led to the first hill.

Five minutes. She stood up, stretched her calf. She didn’t want to agree too heartily with Henrietta Faulkner, although of course she was right. They were so much alike, the two of them. Good students. Fast runners. Cross-country girls. Even their ponytails hung from the same part of their heads. That’s why they had been friends, way back when. If she squinted she could still see the old Henrietta, the eleven-year-old with the striped bathing suit whose strap tied in a thick knot around her neck, hair tangled from the water slide, face smeared with blue frosting from the Raging Birthday Cookie-Cake.

“Yeah,” Angela said finally. “I guess you’re right.”

Henrietta stood along with Angela, and mimicked her quad stretch. After she released her foot she leaned toward Angela and said, “I heard something.”

“Yeah?”

“I heard that the Harvard coach is here today.”

“You
did
?”

“I did. I don’t know who he’s watching, there’s a girl from Novato who’s applying too and also I think one from Redwood, then of course there’s
us
”—here she delivered a friendly-ish punch to Angela’s upper arm—“but I’m so nervous I could just throw up, aren’t you?”

“Well, now I am,” said Angela. She’d had her usual pre-race breakfast, a slice of whole-wheat toast spread with almond butter, but she could feel it churning around. Why hadn’t Henrietta kept that to herself? God.

But once said, the words could not be unsaid. They were out there, and now Angela was scanning the crowd of spectators, wondering which one he could be.

“I’m sorry,” said Henrietta. “Maybe I shouldn’t have told you. Should I not have told you?” Henrietta was looking at Angela uncertainly. She looked almost like she was going to cry. When had Henrietta become such a bundle of nerves? She used to be tougher than nails, able to hold her own in any situation; she used to ooze confidence. At the infamous eleventh birthday party she’d been the only one out of all of them to go down the Triple Slammer Flume, and she hadn’t blinked. Some adults went up there and freaked out and had to go backward down the ladder to get out of it. Not Henrietta. She’d just hopped on her rubber mat and she’d
gone.

“Well,” said Angela. “Yeah, I guess I wish I didn’t know. But I know now. So…whatever.”

They both scrutinized the crowd standing past the starting line. They were looking for—what? A man in a crimson jacket that said
COACH
on the back? A man with a clipboard and a fountain pen? A man with his palm out, holding their fates? All of the spectators simply looked like parents: a little excited, a little nervous, a little grumpy, a little chilly. Most of them held take-out coffee cups and they stamped their feet on the ground like horses at the Kentucky Derby.

“I’m sure he’s not here for me,” said Henrietta. She was talking really fast now, like her words were racing one another. “If either of us is getting in it’s you. I’m mostly applying to get my parents off my back. It’s a super-big deal to them.”

Instead of saying “Mine too,” Angela said, “Don’t be ridiculous,” too sharply. More gently she said, “You have as much of a chance as I have.” Though, of course, obviously, she didn’t believe that. They wouldn’t
both
get in early, would they? And if only one of them was to get in, well, it would have to be Angela.
Right?
She was valedictorian. She was the better runner. She was team co-captain. She was smarter.

Four minutes. Angela turned off the iPod, put it in her bag, stripped off her final layer of warm-ups. She was wearing the bun huggers, which looked and felt like underwear. Henrietta was wearing shorts. Personally Angela thought everyone should wear the bun huggers in a big race like this. They were more legit. They made Angela feel invincible, like she was Katy Perry herself, flying through the jungle, painting the elephant’s toenails, palling around with the monkey.

Time to line up. They all moved toward the starting line: girls from Tamalpais, Redwood High, Novato. Girls with fishtail braids or ponytails or hair cut super-short to show off their fierce expressions and their hard bright eyes. Some of them bounced on their toes but others remained very still, poised at the starting line. If Angela looked too closely at any of the runners’ faces she saw her own emotions reflected too well in their faces. They were all pale, slender, nervously intense, not blinking. Breathing audibly already.

You had to get out hard. That was key on this course—any course, really, but especially this one, because half of it was single track. Once they got into the single track it was hard to pass. Impossible. Plus Angela’s specialty was going out hard, freaking out everybody else in the race, and then surprising them by not dying. It was part nature and part art.

Two minutes.

“Two minutes!” called the official. The tension increased by a notch, two notches, three. Angela’s coach stood on the sidelines with the rest of the coaches, blowing into his hands and rubbing them together, exchanging a word or two with the men or women beside him. He knew better than to give instruction at this point, especially to Angela. He knew she had a good chance of winning the whole thing if she kept her head in the game, though neither of them had said that out loud, not since the beginning of the season. He knew that Angela, like all good runners, was fifty percent steel and fifty percent crazy and that on any given day one could overtake the other. Did he know about the Harvard coach?

Angela thought she might throw up for real now. It sometimes happened, right before races, though more commonly after. Angela wouldn’t mind if she threw up after the race, that would just prove she’d run as hard as she possibly could. But she didn’t have time now.

One minute. The longest and the shortest sixty seconds of Angela’s life.

The gun.

Go.

They were off.

The thing about cross-country, well, about running fast in general, was that it hurt. Hurt like hell. Hurt like hell the whole time you were doing it, and it only felt better when you stopped. Why had Angela picked such a
painful
sport? Cecily wasn’t in pain when she was dancing; Cecily was in
ecstasy
when she was dancing. Angela’s friend Brynne Jacobson wasn’t in pain the
entire
time she was playing soccer. She had to run fast a lot, but not continuously, and she had teammates. She got taken out of a game, and she was able to sit on the sidelines and cheer while she drank Gatorade and waited to be brought back in. Where was the passing in cross-country races, where was the resting? Angela thought it would be nice if you could pass off a little bit of the pain to someone else, just for a minute. Even thirty seconds would do it. But it wasn’t a team sport. Except for the scoring, it was the most individual of all the individual sports.

These thoughts kept Angela busy for the first quarter mile. She had gotten out well. The people standing near the start were just a blur of light and color. Harvard coach or no Harvard coach, they blended in with the trees and the clouds and the other girls breathing around her. Time to fly.

(“Is that normal?” said Angela’s sweet, naive mother, after Angela’s first meet, freshman year. “That you all sound like you’re hyperventilating the whole time? I mean, is that okay?” “Perfectly normal,” Angela told her. “If you’re running as fast as you can.”)

She had gotten out well enough, okay, but not first. Not as well as she usually did. She preferred to break free of the pack before the pack even formed, and to pretend that she was running alone. There were two girls ahead of her, one from Tamalpais, one from Novato. Angela had raced against both of them before. The girl from Novato—Casey something—was within Angela’s reach, first figuratively and then literally. She had gone out harder than she usually did. She had channeled Angela! She had a long blond fishtail braid, very pretty. Angela gained on her, gained enough that she could see the little wisps of hair coming out of the braid, could see the red elastic at the end of it, could watch it bouncing against Casey’s school tank.

Three point one miles, a standard 5K. This was Angela’s best distance, not just on the trails but on the road and even on the track, where many runners would rather stick pins in their eyes and then blink than run a 5K. You had to have nerves of steel for a 5K on the track; you had to be able to beat back the boredom and keep your head in the game while you went around and around the same damn circle. Angela could do that.

Angela did some math; math was another good way to keep her mind occupied. If she ran eighteen minutes, which—by the way—would not be fast enough to win the thing, then she was already one-ninth done. Good. Only eight-ninths to go! Piece of cake. And hopefully she’d run faster than eighteen minutes, so the whole thing would be over sooner. The faster you run, the more it hurts, and the sooner you’re done: the paradox of distance running.

If only she could pass this Casey what’s-her-name.

Casey from Novato, sensing Angela behind her, picked it up a notch, just a hair, barely perceptible. That was fine. That was okay. As long as Angela also picked it up a notch, stayed on her shoulder, didn’t let her pull farther ahead. Angela didn’t hold back on her breathing: sometimes that could disrupt another runner, throw them off guard a little bit, to hear someone’s lungs exploding. She let it rip, stayed on Casey’s shoulder. Casey was playing a good mental game, not acknowledging Angela. She didn’t turn her head, didn’t nod or say anything. She was acting like a girl all on her own, just running through the woods on a November morning for the heck of it. That was smart. That was how Angela liked to play it too.

They were four minutes into it now. Still on Casey’s shoulder. Lots of time for strategy. Where was the girl from Tamalpais? She had made the second turn into the woods already, ahead of Angela and Casey. Not a great sign, that she was that far ahead. Not the way Angela preferred to race. But not unfixable. The girl from Tamalpais had probably gone out too hard, and she’d pay for it later. Pretty common, especially in a big meet like this. Angela watched Casey’s fishtail braid swing back and forth, back and forth. Was Casey the Harvard applicant the coach had really come to see? Possible. Angela knew nothing about Casey from Novato academically, or at all, really, except what she looked like running a 5K. Did she have siblings, were her parents here? How had she gotten her braid so perfect? Angela had never mastered the fishtail, though Cecily was pretty good at it; she’d refined her skills on her American Girl dolls, Kaya and Josefina in particular. They had the longest hair. In addition, Cecily and Pinkie spent a lot of time doing each other’s hair. When they weren’t doing weird things with Pinkie’s iPhone.