Page 63 of 72 Hours of You

A fifty-year-old balding guy on a skateboard pops up onto the sidewalk and slides between Peter and me. But Peter keeps his eyes on mine. “I want to know why you stopped doing it.”

I look away, following the geriatric skateboarder, who attempts some sort of dumbass flip and narrowly avoids slamming into an overflowing trash can.

“Sydney.”

“What?” I say, unable to keep the edge out of my voice.

“Why’d you stop doing it? What happened at the track meet?”

“Nothing.”

“Jesus,” Peter says. He reaches out and rubs my arms. “You’re really shaking. Why don’t we just find somewhere we can go inside?”

I shrug as if I don’t really give a shit, but I’d give just about anything to go somewhere else and put a bullet in this conversation’s head.

“Come on,” Peter says. There’s this ratty bar down the street with the door propped open and no bouncer in sight. Peter takes my hand and pulls me inside. We find a booth in the back with peeling red leather seats and a dusty little lamp on the table, and we sit down across from each other.

“Should I try to get us some drinks?” Peter says.

“Yes,” I say. “No hard liquor, though, okay?”

“You got it.” Peter gets up and walks over to the bar, glancing back at me like he’s slightly afraid to leave me there. He’s always so over the top. It’s fine. I’m fine.

While I wait, I pull out my phone and check my messages. Just a block of eggplant and peach emojis and winky faces from Jules that I ignore. I scroll Insta and try to remind myself that it’s all good until Peter comes back.

He sets a hard cider and a Bud Light on the table. “Apparently, they don’t give a shit if you’re underage here.”

I look back at the bartender. She’s like thirty with long red hair and a tight tank top that her boobs are spilling out of like a flesh waterfall. And she’s still looking at Peter. Somehow I feel like if I had been the one trying to get the drinks, it wouldn’t have worked out.

Peter slides back into the booth and takes a sip of the cider.

“Oh, so the cider is for you?” I smirk.

“I know what you’re trying to imply, but I can assure you that drinks do not subscribe to the gender binary.” He winks and takes another long sip of his princess punch.

I hold on to the Bud bottle and roll it between my hands, the condensation making my fingers all wet.

“Listen,” Peter says. “We don’t have to talk about the track meet. It’s all good.”

I nod, using my thumbnail to peel at the label on the bottle.

“But …” Peter pauses, like he’s considering how far to push me. “How come you still run, though?”

I’m about to say something snarky about patriarchal expectations of the female body or running from potential predators, but instead I find myself telling him the truth. “I read once that for every minute you run, you add a minute to your life. I mean, technically that minute is used up by the act of running, if you think about it. You get this extra time, but you also don’t because of how you have to get it. It’s like …” I take a sip of the beer, the cold bubbles stinging the back of my tongue. “Like when I run, I’m outside of time altogether.”

“Like time can’t touch you anymore.” Peter leans forward over the table. “Like the clocks can’t touch you.”

I swallow. “Yeah,” I say. “That’s what it’s like.”

It’s wild, sitting here in this shitty hole-in-the-wall, across from this boy with these eyes that just keep seeing and not looking away. “Peter …”

A burst of noise erupts at the entrance to the bar. I whip my head around. About thirty people dressed in various shades of black are filing into the bar, hanging on each other, clapping one another on the back and generally being too excited about being alive.

“What the hell?”

“I think they’re a film crew,” Peter says.

“Really?” I crane my neck again. One dude with sunglasses looks vaguely familiar. “Oh, is that that guy from that thing?”