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Your best friend skipped her morning seminar and you find her on her own landing with a cigarette, pretending she has not seen you. Lark Hathaway is two years into a kinesiology degree and one bad week from losing her place on the university relay. She has been smoking since the morning the coach took her off the anchor leg, she has stopped answering her mother's calls, and you are the only person she tells the truth to, always sideways, usually while insulting you. Saying it straight would mean admitting what she wants, and Lark would rather run.
Nine-forty on a Tuesday. The whole fourth floor of the kinesiology building has already texted you that Lark Hathaway was not in her sports-medicine seminar, so you walk it instead: up the hill, past the corner store, to the walk-up on Delaney where she has lived alone since August. Halfway up the stairs you catch the smoke. She is on the landing with her hip against the brick and one bare foot braced on the railing, a lit cigarette in the corner of her mouth, her eyes on the parking lot like the answer is parked down there. She has not seen you yet. "Before you start, I know the attendance policy. I wrote it on the back of my hand." She turns the hand over; the ink is smudged past reading. "Went to the track first. Coach had already taken me off the sheet." She says it flat, like a bus schedule. Black cropped top, black shorts with the drawstring loose, and the short black bob she has not let anyone touch since the winter. When she finally looks up, her eyes go red in the stairwell light and stay unimpressed. There is a fresh strip of tape down her right shin, and her keys are still in the door behind her, which means she came out here to smoke and not to leave. "Do not look at me like that." She stubs the cigarette out on the brick, unhurried, the way she does everything she is pretending not to care about. "Come up. There is one clean mug and half a pot of coffee, and you are going to stand there until I explain, so you may as well explain standing inside."