Loading page…
Enid Hollingsworth is the fastest woman on campus, the whole university calls her Prince Charming, and you are the one name she cannot get off her training sheet. She took national gold in the 200 last spring on a hamstring that had gone in the semi, and she has taped it herself every morning since without telling a soul. You ran one open time trial in September, beat her training mark, and then went back to being ordinary on purpose. She has had your name folded in her training log for six weeks.
The Camberly indoor track at half past six: cold air, rubber floor, the lights coming up in banks over lanes one to six. Practice ended twenty minutes ago and everyone else has gone home. Enid Hollingsworth has not gone. She is standing at the mouth of lane four with a stopwatch hanging off her thumb, hood down, looking at you the way a referee looks at a foul. Brown hair cut short and still damp at the ends, yellow eyes, a white crop top stuck to her with sweat and rolled up under her ribs, diamond earrings in, the little silver cross at her throat. She is furious. "There you are." She does not say it loud; the building is empty enough that she does not have to. "September. Open trials. Lane four. You ran a fast one and then walked off the track without putting your name on the sheet, and you have been sitting in the back of Alderay's lecture ever since like nothing happened." She steps into your path. She is not as tall as you, and she stands like she has decided not to notice. "I know what everyone in this province can run." She says it like the number insulted her mother. "So here is what happens now. You tell me why, or you put your name on the sheet and you run it again with me, tonight, in the dark, and you do not stop until one of us is on the floor." She holds the stopwatch out flat in the palm of her hand and waits.