Page 16 of Bent Heavens

“When’s your first cross-country meet?”

“Saturday. Why?”

“You’re suspended from that, too.”

“What?”

“And you’re going to apologize to Ms. Baldwin.”

“That’s not fair! She’s a bitch for doing this and you know it!”

“There goes another meet. You want to try for a third?”

Liv’s face felt like it was in flames. Gamble ripped off the detention slip, and through the blurry heat waves of her vision she noted his sorry look but wouldn’t accept it. She took the slip—she wanted to snatch it—and marched from the room without a word. Baldwin’s room was just five doors down, and Liv planted herself at the threshold. Steeled as if to rip off a patch of duct tape, she performed what was, in a technical sense, an apology.

“I’m sorry about what I said.”

Baldwin looked up from sending a text. The woman wore owlish glasses and a waist-long braid, the kind of thing Liv attributed to Renaissance fairs. Her wardrobe was composed of frowsy bohemian dresses in faux-patchwork crepe, which swept along the floor, hiding gross old sandals. These were Monica-like judgments, but right now Liv gave in to them.

“Liv,” Baldwin sighed. “Let’s talk.”

“That’s okay. I wanted to apologize, that’s all.”

“Come in. We have a couple minutes. I think you may have the wrong idea about this.”

“No, I’m good. I’ll see you tomorrow. Bye.”

“Liv—”

But Liv was off, the distasteful task taken like a vaccination shot; she’d have to rub the pain away for a few hours, that’s all. The silver lining of the outburst with Baldwin was that it competed with the Doug video as the week’s top story. When the video hit her phone lunchtime on Wednesday, she watched it and judged that it could have been worse. The camerawork was woozy, and the acoustics made dialogue unintelligible. Her cameo at the climax was obscured, a small miracle she was happy to accept. No one would know she’d been involved.

Except, that is, Bruno. She scanned the cafeteria and found him with another random assemblage of kids, snarfing another torta, leading a gregarious conversation. Her secrets, it seemed, were safe with Bruno, and it surprised her that she was all right sharing them.

“I just heard about Baldwin,” Hank said, sitting down with his tray. “Holy shit, Liv.”

Liv closed her phone, killing the video. “All in a day’s work.”

“I was there,” Phil boasted. “The baddest-ass thing I’ve ever seen.”

Liv felt the prickling of a blush on her neck. She looked at the girls at the table. They seemed cautious, even suspicious. Darla wouldn’t meet Liv’s eyes. Amber and Laurie exchanged a look. Krista offered her a weak smile. Naturally, it was Monica who gave voice to the roiling undercurrent.

“That’s two meets, Liv,” Monica chastised. “We were sort of counting on you? We didn’t train all summer for you to flake out, you know. I hope you at least got some jollies out of your little tantrum.”

Monica smiled sweetly at the end of it, twisting it into a joke, but if you knew Monica at all, you knew no joking was involved. The flush of pleasure around her neck tightened into a burn. Liv swore right there, while picking at another tray of unpalatable food, that she’d make it up to the whole team. Just because she couldn’t run with them this week didn’t mean she couldn’t keep herself in top shape for when she returned, at which point she’d rededicate herself to the new Liv, finally bringing the old Liv to an end.

So here she was, doing her part, running even harder than she would at practice. John, who’d jogged with her on Custer Road for a mile, was waiting on the shoulder where he’d given up, and he rejoined her as she headed back home from the Dawkins place. It had to be past seven. The forest line under which the sun had dipped glowed as if on fire from another of Doug’s flares. In the time she’d been running, her mother would have gotten home, changed, drunk some wine, and departed for the steakhouse. Their home would be empty.

When Liv got to the mailbox, she kept running.

John followed her to the backyard, where he, as usual, halted. Liv ran past the perennial grave markers: the lawnmower corpse, the swing set cemetery, the cairns of loose brick, the garden-shed mausoleum. She vaulted the trampled back fence and hurtled through the woods, faster than she’d ever done it. Trees, upset at her unscheduled invasion, slapped her with leaves, which she ignored, and branch ends, which she fended off with elbows. There was a good strong branch, practically a baseball bat—she swiped it off the ground without breaking stride.

She wouldn’t miss another cross-country meet. She wouldn’t miss anything ever again. With the play unpreventable, as well as the affronts that would come with it, she would need to focus hard, do whatever needed doing, and to start with, that meant taking the step she’d failed to take on Sunday. The branch felt natural in her hand. It would do the job of destroying most of the traps, if not all of them. All she had to do was keep running, because if she didn’t stop, didn’t catch her breath, didn’t think, she couldn’t change her mind.

There came a sound.

Louk.

Don’t stop running.