Page 5 of Waking Olivia

Iignoreeveryone in the locker room. These people aren't my friends now, and they won't be my friends in two years. I've done all this before, and I know exactly where it got me.

"I'm Erin," says the girl changing beside me.

"Hey," I say tersely.

"So you're here from Austin?"

"Yeah."

"Is it true that you got kicked off the track team for beating up Mark Bell?" She doesn't even try to disguise her delight about this juicy morsel of gossip. Funny how everyone looks down on me for what I did, but they don't look down on themselves for being so fucking delighted to hear about it.

"Yeah," I say, packing my bag. "So I've heard."

"So is it true?" she whispers as if this is some special "just us girls" moment of intimacy with half the team standing there with their ears cocked.

"Yes."

"So why did you do it? He must have done something to you, right?" she asks.

"Yes," I say, fixing a look on her along with the other little listeners, who no longer feign disinterest and are watching us avidly. "He asked me too many fucking questions."

4

Will

“So how did it go?" asks Peter, but he can tell the answer by taking one look at my face. He chuckles. "You're just like your father, Will. Incapable of hiding your thoughts."

It's taken the better part of two years for the mention of my father to stop hurting, and it will be a good two decades before I can appreciate the comparison. I did what he wanted. I gave up my career as a climber to take over the farm, but he wasn’t alive to see it happen and it wouldn’t have made a difference anyway. My father still would have found fault.

”It could have gone better,” I sigh.

"How are the new freshmen?"

"They hung in there. Evans was solid. The other one I'm not sure about."

He nods slowly. "What about Finnegan?"

There are a million things I could tell him. That hostility came off her in waves, that she looked at the rest of the team like she wanted to shank them, and that her running was disappointing if not flat-out infuriating. I should tell him that she's troubled. What could possibly compel a girl to run before track practice? Ineedto tell him this because if it continues it will spell disaster. She'll either go into shock or have a fucking heart attack right in the middle of a race. But for some reason, I think of how lost she looked when I asked her about it, young and lost anddestroyed.

"She's going to be a lot of work,” I reply.

I’ve only told him half the truth, and it wasn’t the important half.

5

Olivia

In the dining hall, I get a salad with grilled chicken, no cheese, no dressing, no bread. The world's leading female long distance runners only have about 15% body fat. Nothing matters so much as weight in distance running. Every pound you run with adds two seconds per mile. It might not sound like much, but an extra 10 pounds over a six-mile course equals two full minutes, the difference between a win and a loss.

I watch the football players with envy as they load their trays with cheese fries and burgers and baked potatoes and pie. Just once in my freaking life I want to eat like a football player. I spend my life in a state of continuous hunger. It's been that way for so long that the depth of my hunger scares me. Sometimes I think that if I took off the leash, I'd eat until I exploded and that I would never stop.

Erin finds me and sits down uninvited. She's extraordinarily wholesome looking with milky skin, scattered freckles and big cornflower-blue eyes. The kind of girl you'd see in an ad for America's farmers. You can take one look at her and know she's never suffered. I shouldn't hate her for it, but I do.

"I'm really sorry," she says. "I feel awful. You were right, I was prying, and it was none of my business."

"Whatever." In truth, I'm too busy being fascinated by her tray to say anything else. Meat swimming in gravy, potatoes, bread, pie on the side and milk. She has at least 2000 calories on that tray. Just the sight of it alternately disgusts me and makes me ravenous in the same moment. I open my newspaper and pray she goes away.

"You aren't very friendly," she says, "you know that?"

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