Page 52 of I Hope This Doesn't Find
My lungs are functioning well enough now that I manage to pant out a reply. “What areyougetting so worked up for? I’m the one gasping for air over here.”
He makes a small, angry sound with the back of his throat, like a scoff and a sigh at the same time. “You don’t get it, do you?”
“Get what? What are you on about?”
But he doesn’t answer the question. He’s talking faster and faster, the words spilling from his mouth. “It’s laughable, really. You’re always insistent on coming first in everything, but when it comes down to it, you’re ready to put yourself last just to please other people—”
“The others need me to,” I protest, confused why we’re even having this conversation. “They didn’t want to race so—”
“Screw the others,” he says fiercely. The heat in his voice shocks me. Burns me to the core. “I don’t care about them. I only care about—” He cuts himself off. Averts his gaze, stares out at the vivid blue sky stretching over the stadium. The students milling around the water fountain, tearing open packets of dried nuts and chocolate bars. Participants warming up by the fences, bending and straightening their legs out over the grass.
My head is spinning, but I can no longer tell if it’s from the lack of oxygen or him.
“Why are you mad at me?” I ask him outright. “You should be happy. There’s no way I’ll win any of our remaining races. You get to beat me. It’s what you’ve always wanted.”
He huffs out a laugh. Gazes back over at me, his eyes a fathomless black, the kind of darkness you could wade through forever and never reach the end. “Good god, you’re infuriating.”
“And you’re making no sense,” I snap.
“Why can’t you just—”
The shrill shriek of the whistle drowns out the rest of his sentence. The next race will be starting soon: the one thousand meters.
I stand up—or try to. But my legs feel like they’ve been infused with lead, and the whole world wobbles when I rise, the running track sliding sideways. White stars spark in my vision again. Frustrated, I fall back onto the cold bench.
“My body won’t listen to me,” I mutter, catching my breath.
“Yes, bodies tend to do that to protect themselves from self-destruction.” Julius’s tone is scathing. “I believe it’s one of our key evolutionary features.”
I don’t have the energy to argue with him. “I still have to race . . .”
“The one thousand meters, right?”
I blink at him.
“I’ll run it for you.”
“Wait—what?” I massage my throbbing temples, willing myself to concentrate. To make sense of this.
“I’ll be faster anyway,” he says with his usual disdain, like I’m slowing him down right now. But the smugness doesn’t spread to his eyes. He’s watching me, tentative, intensely focused.
“No. Julius, you don’t have to—”
“I’ll give you the medal as a present,” he says, already turning around. “Just wait.”
I can’t do anything except stare as he goes to the teacher, says something, points over at me. My skin flushes. The teacher nods quickly, claps him on the shoulder, and then he’s joining the other racers at the starting line. For most of them, this is only their first race. They’re clearly well rested, their hair combed back, shirts smooth, shielding their eyes from the sun, restless energy rippling off their bodies. Next to them, Julius moves with the calculated quiet of a predator. He lowers himself into the correct stance. Fingers touch the red synthetic surface. Shoulders tense. Eyes ahead.
The teacher raises the starting pistol.
Bang.
Cheers and screams erupt from the crowds in the stands as they take off. From the very beginning, he’s ahead by a good few feet. I’ve always raced beside him, only ever been granted flickers of movement in my peripheral vision, the threat of his footsteps next to me. I’ve never had the chance to observe him in action. He makes it look easy. His every stride is long, deliberate, steady. He runs like there’s no gravity, like there’s no resistance.
We’re typically told to jog the one thousand meters, to save our stamina for the end, but he sprints the whole way without so much as faltering.
“Holy shit,” I hear someone yell from the sidelines. “Holy shit, dude. He’s goingfast—”
“What’s gotten into him?”
