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I laughed, said, “We better get going or we’ll miss the race.”
CHAPTER
102
TWO AND A HALF hours later, we hurried from our car into the stadium at the University of Maryland in College Park. The stands were crowded for the special meet, which had brought in the top under-eighteen track stars from Virginia, Maryland, the District, Delaware, and Pennsylvania.
It took us a few moments to locate the official Jannie Cross cheering section. John Sampson and his wife, Billie, were already on hand. So was Damon and his new girlfriend, Sylvia Mathers, the student at the Kraft School who had first told me about Acadia Le Duc. A row in front of them, Ali was standing on a riser next to Nana Mama, who looked annoyed.
“We didn’t miss it, did we?” I asked when I realized she was annoyed with me.
“Jannie’s been looking for you,” my grandmother said. “She’s over there, warming up by the long-jump pit. You better make sure she knows you’re here.”
I left Bree and climbed back down the bleachers. When I reached the fence that surrounded the track, I called, “Hey, you!”
Jannie smiled, ran over to me. “I was afraid you weren’t going to make it.”
“Nothing was getting in the way of our being here.”
She toed the grass. “I’m nervous.”
“Don’t be,” I said. “Your coach says you were born to be here. You have to believe that.”
Her eyes got glassy and she nodded. “I do. Even after everything, I do.”
“Especially because of everything,” I insisted. “You survived for a reason. This is the reason.”
Jannie knitted her brow, said, “I’ll see you after?”
“You will, and I’ll love you truly, madly, and deeply no matter what happens. But before the gun goes off?”
“Yes?”
“I want you to believe in yourself, and I want you to have faith in the gift God gave you.”
“Okay,” she said, then she smiled and trotted away.
“She got the jitters?” Bree asked when I’d climbed back up into the bleachers.
“A little.”
“This is for, like, five states, right?” Ali asked, fidgeting.
“It’s big,” Damon said. “There are all sorts of college coaches here to recruit.”
They called for the finalists in the women’s 400-meter race, and Jannie got off her warm-ups, walked into her starting lane, and then danced toward her mark on the stagger, looking like a strong girl among powerful women. She was the only fifteen-year-old in the field.
I helped Nana Mama to her feet and glanced at Bree, who was hugging herself.
“You good?” I asked.
“I am,” she said. “You?”
We’d all been asking each other that question multiple times a day since our r
escue. For a brief period, two weeks, I’d been consumed with guilt that Sunday had done all those heinous things—murder, kidnapping, and the persecution of my family—because of me. I mourned the fact that so many innocent people hadn’t survived Marcus Sunday, including Bernice Smith, the Pennsylvania woman who had been murdered and mutilated simply because she looked like Bree, and Raphael Larkin, a Baltimore teen lanky and tall enough to have resembled Damon.
It had all happened because of me. But beyond knowing that Sunday was an obsessive, homicidal narcissist, I did not fully understand his actions.
