“Who fucked Alistaire?” Bridget ground out. I was more prepared for those words than the girls were, but it still felt like the bottom dropped out from under me. She was way more upset than I had expected. And I had expected her to be majorly pissed if she found out.
Neither girl responded. Given the look they were getting from Bridget, I didn’t blame them.
“Which one of you,” Bridget ground on, “fucked Alistaire, and which one of you knew about it and did not share this information with me?” Her gaze went back and forth between them like a searchlight in the silence that followed.
It was pretty loud in the Tuck, but to me, and I’m betting to all four of us, there was less outside sound than you’d hear in a sensory deprivation tank.
Not looking guilty was apparently not a strength for either of my friends, any more than it was for me. Neither even looked at Bridget at first, as her gaze swept back and forth between them. When they did, they both looked like they had run over her cat. My eyes were glued to Bridget’s face. I had always been happy to look at her face… until now. But know I could not look away, so morbid was my curiosity about our fate.
Her eyes narrowed. Then narrowed again.
Then they shot wide open. “Fuuuuck!” She breathed in fresh shock, eyes snapping to mine without warning, searching whatever she wanted to find there… She caught whatever she was looking for, but definitely not what she wanted, in my face. I was unprepared. Her eyes got even wider.
She trembled. She actually trembled. Not trembled, like crying either. Trembling like Vesuvius in 79 AD.
“Let me out,” she said flatly to me, all trembling instantly banished.
“Huh?” I asked, brain not tracking still.
“Move your scrawny ass, so I can get the fuck out of this booth,” Bridget said with thunderous calm.
Meekly, I stood up.
Bridget slid out in an actually pretty scarily smooth motion, and stood up. “See you guys later,” she said and walked off as if without a care in the world.
I sank back into the booth.
Beth, who had known Bridget the least time, observed, “I think we are in trouble guys, aren’t we?”
Carla and I, who had known her longer, replied that we were so all going to die.
Carla wondered which of us Bridget would slay first.
“I hope she decides on one of you,” I observed, with gallows humor.
“Well, thanks for nothing, hero,” Carla said snottily.
“No, it’s just that then she might lock up while trying to decide which one of you to kill, and we all might get to live to see graduation.”
As I said, gallows humor. We had hurt Bridget, worse than we had feared, and we all were dying a little inside.
*
My alarm went off Sunday at 8AM, like it always did. That is a horrifyingly early time to wake on a Sunday, when the school dining hall doesn’t even open until 10:30 for brunch and omelet bar. But every Sunday morning for three years, year round, unless it was actively snowing or maybe pouring rain, Bridget and I had gone for a training run. My phone’s alarm went off at eight every week, and I would meet Bridget by the bridge beyond the hockey rink to go for a run. That was the calm, right order of the universe.
I groaned and slapped Cancel on my phone. That tradition was well and truly fucked now, all because I had decided secrets were more convenient and easier than telling the truth.
At least I could sleep in.
At 8:15, my phone rang. Why was my mother calling so early? It had to be her. There was literally no one else but her, if you looked on my phone’s call log. No one else on the planet called anyone any more. You texted, like a civilized creature.
“Hello?” I asked blearily.
“Where are you?” Bridget’s voice came acerbically through the phone. “I’m out here in the cold, and you sound like you are still in bed.”
“Well… I, uh… I thought that you would want… wouldn’t want to…”
“I told you three years ago, when we started running together, you don’t skip a day, Al. You skip a day, you start skipping a bunch of days until it isn’t worth doing any more. Get moving!” Fleetingly, and for the first time, I was disappointed to not be called Alistaire.
Still very confused, but eager to try to salvage whatever I could, I hung up and practically leapt into my shorts and a teeshirt. I tugged on my shoes, and was out the door in two minutes. Five minutes later, I was jogging around the back corner of the rink.
There was Bridget, looking fresh as a god-damned daisy and stretching impatiently.
“How about we do the Big Box today?” she asked without preamble.
“Sure, okay,” I said in confusion. Of all the school’s measured road routes, the Big Box was the longest, at an exact 10K. We never ran the Big Box, even in practice, once the actual track season began. It was mostly a cross-country workout
Before I could think twice about the sudden, grueling prospect, we were on the pavement, turning left like you only did for the Big Box.
We usually talked all the way around the route, whichever one we took on Sundays, but that morning we were silent for almost the first kilometer and a half. Finally, Bridget broke the silence.
“You can’t skip a day, you know. Neither of us can. We have a lot left to do.”
“What do we have left to do?” I replied, both of us still breathing easy, though Bridget was setting a slightly stronger pace that I’d have expected, or liked. “We have two meets left in the season, both of which, absent a meteor strike, Varsity, Girls, and JV will all win.”
We ran a few another hundred meters before I added, “And then we graduate. And while, yes, you are good enough to have a chance to make the team at Penn, I’m not sure they are going to even let me into the stands to just watch a meet at USC.”
“We have two meets left,” she agreed, breathing easy. “You still have a chance to win a fucking race at least once in your career. Don’t you want to?”
“Hell yes,” I said emphatically. Then, even more emphatically, “But it isn’t going to happen. I don’t have three seconds in me in the 800, seven in the 1, 500, or God knows how many in the 3, 000.”
“You only need ten to beat Donovan in the three,” Bridget snapped automatically. “But more importantly, do you think either he or Rick are out training today? No, they aren’t. They are cruising. They have already qualified for the New England’s. Those two guys ahead of you are sleeping in and getting fat.”