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  “Because I’m stupid,” Nessa grumbled.

  “No, bonehead, because you’re big-hearted,” Bree looked over at Nessa and smiled a big, goofy smile.

  “Um…watch the road, please?” Nessa said.

  “Fine. But listen. Seriously. The thing with the wolf. You were trying to do the right thing. That’s got to help you in some balance-of-the-universe, good-karma kind of way.”

  “Karma,” said Nessa, rolling her eyes, looking out the Monster’s window. Suddenly, she felt a confession bubbling up. She’d been so determined not to complain, but here it was. “I just can’t believe I’m out for the season,” she said, in a low voice. “I don’t know what’s going to happen to me if I don’t get a scholarship.”

  She rubbed a worn spot on the knee of her jeans. This was the first time she’d said any of this out loud.

  “I know,” said Bree. “And I would feel the same way. But I’m just saying that at some point you’re going to let that go and you’ll find that something else is there.”

  Fourteen days after Nessa had been bitten, Dr. Kalish looked at the scar forming and scratched his head. “Have you been seeing the shamanic faith healer?” he said, chuckling. Nessa loved Dr. Kalish but the man would repeat the same joke for years. She’d forgotten that about him.

  “No,” Nessa said. “No wolf bite magic for me.” She paused. “Can I run again?”

  Dr. Kalish lifted her leg at the knee and rotated it into a few positions meant to test the strength of the muscle.

  “Nessa,” he said. “The healing you see here is the healing on the skin. But a wolf’s jaws—the healing I’m most concerned about is what’s going on under the skin.”

  “I want to run,” she insisted.

  The doctor moved her knee up in a way that caused her hip to twist. For a second, Nessa felt a pain so sharp she had to bite down to keep from gasping.

  “That’s still hurting?” Kalish said.

  “No,” Nessa said.

  Dr. Kalish patted her on the shoulder. “Athletes,” he said, shaking his head. Then he got serious. “Okay, you can run. But if it does hurt, even in the smallest way, you stop whatever you’re doing. As you know, I thought this was going to keep you out of commission for a month, so as far as I’m concerned you’re getting a bonus here. Don’t push it.”

  Nessa nodded, doing her best to look responsible and trustworthy. “I won’t. I swear. I understand.”

  “Good girl,” said Dr. Kalish, patting her on the shoulder again.

  Coach Hoffman didn’t believe that Nessa was cleared for practice until he spoke to Dr. Kalish personally on the phone. Then, Coach told her that he wanted her moving slowly and staying close to school. It was the day the team did a long run all together, but he kept Nessa running one-mile loops, checking in with him every time, stretching and resting. Halfway through practice he had her stop entirely so she could ice.

  She knew this was the only way they would let her run at all, so she followed Coach’s instructions and kept her speed down. Except when no one was watching.

  In the woods, alone, she found herself sprinting, running harder and faster than she had ever been able to before.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  On the morning of the first cross-country meet of the season, Nessa woke early. Careful not to disturb Delphine, she eased open the sticky door to their room and got dressed in the bathroom—she’d laid her clothes out on a corner of the sink the night before. She wore flip-flops with her team shorts, and appreciated the softness of the lining of her new team sweatshirt, though she still would have traded it in a heartbeat for the softness of her comforter and pillow.

  Brushing her teeth and splashing water on her face helped. She started to remember that she cared about the day. The race. She forced herself to take a deep breath—she knew part of her challenge was to remain calm leading into it.

  In the kitchen, Vivian was already awake and making oatmeal. She’d laid out a protein bar on the counter and a plastic bag packed with moleskin, nail scissors, Band-Aids, a tube of Neosporin. “Thanks Mom,” Nessa said, letting herself fall into the worn wooden chair by the window. “You didn’t have to do all this.”

  Vivian smiled, frowning as she checked the thickness of the oatmeal. “Are you kidding me?” she said. “I’m proud of you. You’ve been through something scary, and you’re working so hard.”

  Her mom put the oatmeal on the table and Nessa topped it with chia seeds.

  “Good Lord, put some sugar on that or something,” Vivian said. “It makes me sad just to look at it.”

  Nessa wanted to eat. She knew what an effort her mom had made to get up extra early to cook for her. She knew the food would translate directly into the energy she needed to win today. But the first bite seemed to stick somewhere in her throat and would never make it down to her stomach. “This is really nice, Mom,” she said.

  “Ha!” Vivian waved a hand in the air to show she knew that Nessa was lying. “Nice try.” She reached into a cabinet—the low one she’d set up when Nessa and Delphine were little and needed to be able to get snacks when Vivian wasn’t home. “Here. Have a Pop-Tart.”

  At school, the sun was up, but just barely, as Nessa found Coach Hoffman waiting with the cross-country bus in the parking lot. It was a crisp enough morning that he had the heat on, and the windows were steamy. The bus was a bright spot in the dark. Inside, Nessa could identify the hunched forms of her teammates, heads bowed, earbuds in, everyone keeping in their own head space, still half asleep. Coach Hoffman was leaning against the driver’s side door, checking names off a list on a clipboard, his hair sticking out from under his baseball cap at funny angles.

  Traverse City was on a bay off Lake Michigan—almost two hours from Tether—and when the road ran along the top of the bluffs on the lakeshore, everyone crammed into one side of the bus to catch a view of the water. It was pale blue, with rippling sand bars visible under the surface.

  Nessa noticed that Cynthia barely turned her head to look, as if a glimpse of Lake Michigan wasn’t a big deal. Luc stayed in his seat also, in the third row from the back, his chin in the air, looking out the window like he didn’t know what everyone else was so excited about. Nessa wondered if maybe he had lived near Lake Michigan at some point, if that’s why it did so little to impress him.

  After the sight of water, everyone was awake and chatting, like they were here on vacation. Nessa heard Tim Miller talking about his night of cruising, which meant driving around aimlessly up and down Main Street in Tether, meeting up in parking lots, drinking warm beer out of the back of a pickup until the cops came to send everyone home.

  The freshmen were squawking over a cell phone, tunelessly belting out lyrics to hip-hop songs. Nessa kept stealing looks at Cynthia, who wasn’t talking. She rode the bus with her head down, her knees pulled up to her chest, strong but compact. As the bus got closer to the school, Cynthia started to brush and braid her long black hair.

  By the time they reached Traverse City, where the invitational tournament was being held, the day was bright and warm, and it felt like the cold morning in the Tether High parking lot had existed in another dimension. The team straggled after Coach Hoffman, dropping their pillows and sleeping bags in the area he had staked out, like they were setting up towels on a crowded beach. The freshmen started warming up, drinking water, running laps to the bathrooms, while kids in the varsity and junior varsity races sprawled out on top of their sleeping bags and pulled out homework, checked their phones, or pinned on their race bibs.

  Finally, Coach called them into a circle, and as he began his pep talk, Nessa tried to focus on what she remembered about the course. It started on a football field, and looped around the school, into a nearby park and up a hill, on to school grounds again, along a suburban street, and then back down around, finishing in a chute to the side of the playing fields.

  Cynthia was tightening the red ribbon she always wore in her hair. It matched the team’s red tanks and running
shorts. Nessa retied her shoes, stretched her bum quad muscle one more time. She tried to shrug off the pain she felt and the tightness in her hip.

  They lined up by team with Cynthia and Nessa in the number one and two spots and Hannah Gilroy, the fast freshman who had made varsity, just behind. The whistle blew and the girls shot off. As always, the first thought Nessa had as she was running was, Not fast enough. And then she thought, Too slow. No matter how well you knew your own pace, it was almost impossible to gauge what you were running in the first thirty seconds of pack movement at the opening.

  Coach Hoffman told them to find a runner they recognized from another school and to set a pace to match theirs. Nessa saw Dawn David. She’d seen her at races last year, and Nessa knew they ran at about the same pace.

  “Let her be your pacer,” Coach had said, meaning that Nessa would be conserving energy, letting someone else set the pace.

  She settled in behind Dawn, following her as runners jockeyed for position before the course narrowed into a trail in the woods. Dawn took tiny movements to the left and the right, careful not to sacrifice too much in an effort to pass, but knowing that getting stuck behind a slower runner meant you wouldn’t be running your own best time, but someone else’s.

  Nessa focused on a spot dead center between Dawn’s shoulder blades. She watched the swaying of Dawn’s tank top. Nessa’s chest was already hurting and she felt that she was lifting her legs too high to compensate for the uneven ground.

  The course left the woods and ran about a half mile along the park path and then turned right. That was the two-thirds marker, and Nessa was pretty sure it was time for her to make her move.

  But still, when the course started up the one big hill, before swinging past the school again, Nessa held back, waiting for the downhill to let herself fly, stretching out her stride, letting gravity do the work.

  Heading down the hill, she was up at Dawn’s shoulder, then she was past her, and the next runner in her sights was Karen Lund. Nessa passed her as well, just before the hill bottomed out. She didn’t know where the power in her legs was coming from, but around the next bend, she spotted Cynthia’s black ponytail and red hair ribbon disappearing around the back of the gym. Seeing her was exhilarating and Nessa hoped she could catch her. She lifted her knees higher and passed Amanda DuChamp by stepping around her, and then hopping back in a step ahead.

  Nessa felt good. Amazing, actually. As if an invisible hand were pushing the back of each leg from a spot just above the knee, the muscles linked up to her abdomen, working like the thick rubber bands they were. She passed Rosemary Kolvig, Katie Samuels, Juliana Ortiz, and two girls she didn’t know. By now, there was only a half mile left in the course, and it traveled back around the school, behind the parking lot, across the driveway in front of the school, then looping back around to enter the chute, a strip marked by cones leading to the finish line. She could see Cynthia finish only a few hundred feet in front of her. Nessa would be in Tether’s number two spot for sure.

  Or not for sure.

  Just then, she saw a flash of red on her left as she entered the chute. Before she could even register that it was Hannah, she was staring at the girl’s back, the tiny elbows pumping, the head straight, Hannah’s feet striking at an impossible tempo. Nessa heaved her body forward, but it felt heavy and sluggish now. She could feel her arms swinging to the side, her head lowering as if she could summon strength that way, like a bull. She told her legs to move faster, and they did, but not nearly as fast as she wanted them to. It felt to Nessa suddenly that she was running in slow motion, as if underwater.

  She had no memory of crossing the line, only walking with her hands on her hips, her face hot and flushed, looking down at the ground, thinking, How did that just happen? It was all she could do not to cry.

  Embarrassingly enough, Coach Hoffman came over to comfort her. “Good work, Nessa,” he said. “Welcome back.”

  Nessa didn’t say anything. She swallowed.

  “Hey,” he said. “You okay?”

  “What was my time?” she choked out.

  “17:48,” Coach said.

  Nessa wiped the tears away with the back of her hand. That was a strong time for someone who wasn’t looking for what she was looking for.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Nessa spent the day fretting about the race. Had she held back? Maybe this was the problem. Maybe she’d been holding on too tight. Maybe Bree was right. What she needed to do was let go.

  Just to see how that would feel, Nessa increased her pace, running after dinner. It was getting dark out—the moon was waxing, just a sliver. Kind of weird that two weeks ago, her whole run had been lit up by the giant full moon.

  Don’t think about that, Nessa told herself. She slowed for a second but pushed past the fear this time, keeping her stride long and her tempo rapid, trying to let go of her fear of both the wolf and failing to finish, of falling apart before she got to the end of her run.

  Her lungs burning, her muscles screaming in pain, Nessa kept up her sprinting pace. She was surprised at how long she was able to go. She changed her plan and decided to make this a short sprint instead of a long jog. And then, as it became a long sprint, Nessa could feel complaints coming from parts of her body that she didn’t often hear from. The hip where she’d been bitten was aching, her temples were pounding, and the inside of her mouth felt both salty and rough, like she’d bitten her own tongue. The backs of her hands were itching, too. She started to scratch them, but that slowed her down so she just let them itch, telling herself the feeling would go away if she got herself up past a certain speed.

  The days passed. Nessa ran.

  Even as the teachers started piling on homework, talking about how important grades were junior year, Nessa ran.

  Even as Nessa increased her hours cleaning cages weekends at the vet’s to pay for her new racing spikes, she ran.

  She ran before the sun came up so she could be back in time to get Nate to the bus when Vivian took the early shift at the vet’s.

  She ran as it was setting, on weekends after work, following a road behind the old Dutch Chem plant, noting the glow of the new Paravida complex through the trees.

  She ran as the first maples started to change color, then the oak.

  She jumped over roots, she sidestepped brambles, her footfalls echoing off plank bridges traversing streams.

  She was the first person at practice. The last to go home. She ran for speed. She ran for distance. She stretched carefully first thing in the morning and last thing before bed.

  There were nights when her calf muscles seized up in bed and she had to bite down on her finger while Delphine rushed her a banana. There were times where the bottoms of her feet felt like they’d been brushed with sandpaper. The itching on her hands came back.

  The bite on her hip wasn’t bothering her so much anymore, but other injuries presented themselves. A toe swelled. A knee twinged. When Nessa limped across the living room on the way to bed one night, Vivian put new running shoes on the credit card. Bree drove Nessa and Delphine to school in the Monster, and sometimes Nessa stretched out in the back looking up at the tears and stains on the ceiling, blissfully thinking of nothing as she felt the rhythm of her own footsteps echoing in the regular bumps in the road.

  “Wow,” said Coach Hoffman one day at practice when Nessa ran a 5K in 17:27. “Nessa, you just shaved more than twenty seconds off your race time.”

  “Are you sure?” Nessa said. She was breathing hard, hands on her knees, recovering. Coach showed her the watch. There were the numbers, the chubby clean digital lines, the collection of dashes arranged in a 1 and a 7 and a 2 and a 7, each one a miracle. She could feel the smile stretching out her cheeks.

  The strange thing was? The next day, timing herself in the morning, she ran a 17:17.

  CHAPTER TEN

  By late September, Nessa felt like she was trapped in Mr. Porter’s giant motivational poster where junior year is a mountain, but she was s
till at the bottom. The number of tests and quizzes seemed to have doubled from the year before, and every teacher mentioned grade point averages and SAT prep at least once a week. Bree’s locker, once decorated with a single raw crystal on a piece of pink yarn, was now papered with vocab flash cards defining words like “Machiavellian” and “gregarious.”

  Nessa and Bree were in the same chemistry class, and in an effort to counteract her biology disappointment and battle with the “Z score” or weighted averages on all exams, they started a weekly study group. At least that’s the reason Nessa joined the group. Bree’s latest crush, a certain Gabe Trudeau, was the reason Bree hosted it.

  Nessa was a little bit less enthusiastic than Bree about the study group, particularly on nights like tonight when it was just the three of them. Third wheel, anyone? She tried not to give Gabe dagger eyes as he reached for the second-to-last brownie on the plate. And then the last! The jerk!

  With a sigh, she heaved herself up from the kitchen table and upstairs to the bathroom. Washing her hands (twice) with Bree’s mom’s not-very-sudsy health food store soap, Nessa screwed her face into a happier expression for Bree’s benefit.

  “She hates me,” Gabe said, clear as a bell. Nessa rolled her eyes and turned off the tap. She could hear him chowing down on that final brownie.

  “You didn’t need to glare at him all night,” said Bree after Gabe had gone home. “When you were in the bathroom, he told me he thought you hated him.”

  “Yeah, I actually heard that,” Nessa said, half-smiling.

  “Wait?! How could you hear that?” Bree said. “He was whispering. And you were upstairs.”

  “I don’t know,” Nessa shrugged. “But don’t change the subject. He took the last two brownies without asking if anyone else wanted one. He’s not good enough for you. And Cassian will be jealous.”