Elizabeth Miles: Eternity

“Yeah, but the point is, we wouldn’t even be out there if the stupid gym hadn’t—” Jenna cut herself off, her eyes wide with embarrassment.

“Burned to the ground?” Em asked, struggling to keep her voice neutral.

“Em, I’m so sorry. . . . I wasn’t even thinking.”

Em shook her head and managed a weak smile, hoping they could both just drop it. But the mention of the fire, so sudden and unexpected, made it hard to breathe. She couldn’t even be mad at Jenna, though; what she’d said was true. Since the fire had damaged the interior of the Ascension gym, all phys ed classes were being held outdoors until further notice.

“Well, at least Hadley keeps us on the track and the courts,” Portia said to defuse any awkwardness. “We had to do sprints on the grass at practice yesterday and Sarah Stokes totally wiped out on the mud.” She giggled. “It looked like she’d crapped her pants.”

“She probably did,” Casey Cornell snickered, coming up from behind them. “Remember when she peed her pants at the ski mountain in sixth grade?” Em had never liked Casey—she’d always seemed just a little too fake, a little too plastic. Her clothes were generally more suited for Ft. Lauderdale than Maine, and Gabby always said she looked like a Bachelorette waiting to happen.

Ms. Hadley stuck her permanently scowling face into the locker room. “Girls! Hurry it up! I want you outside in three minutes!”

Em slipped on her gym shorts and a loose-fitting T-shirt and headed outside; as she did, Jenna jogged up alongside her. “Em. I really am so sorry about what I said earlier. . . . ”

“Jenna, seriously—don’t worry about it.”

“Okay, well . . . ” she started. “It’s just good to have you back, is all. But aren’t you going to be freezing?”

Em looked around, noticing all the other girls were pulling on sweatshirts or yoga pants to brave the misty afternoon. But she knew she’d be perfectly comfortable. It was as if her internal temperature had increased over the past month or two. Like her anger at the Furies was a fire burning constantly inside her.

“I’ll be fine,” she responded. “I’m going to go warm up.”

Out by the track, Hadley was already barking at the students: “I don’t want to hear any griping about the weather. Start moving and you’ll work up a sweat.”

She was already burning up. As she folded herself in half, hands dangling by her toes, Em tried to quiet her mind, which was suddenly full of the Furies and everything else. Just the mention of the fire made her feel crazy, made the stories flare up in her brain. The gym, sure, but also that house in the woods . . . the one Drea had told her about.

Drea’s research had unearthed the tale of three sisters hounded to death by Ascension townspeople more than a century ago. Accused of being witches or gypsies or husband-stealers. The fire was set in an effort to drive them out. And while the sisters’ charred remains were never found, the townspeople did find the body of a male, a boy, in that house in the Haunted Woods. They’d assumed he was a servant. That odd detail had stuck out.

She closed her eyes, feeling the pull in her hamstrings, trying to block out everything but the sensations in her body. Then she swooped her torso and arms upward, reaching for the sky, leaning to the left and the right.

“Okay, now start jogging,” Mrs. Hadley instructed the group. “We’re going to run for fifteen minutes. If you can’t run anymore, start walking. But I don’t want to see you strolling. This is work, people.”

Em had never been much of a runner; while Gabby enjoyed sweating it out on the treadmill, Em had always been a Response Runner—that is, her running routines were generally a response to jeans that felt tighter than usual. But today it came naturally. She was barely panting.

“Nice work, Winters,” she heard Hadley shout as she marked her first lap. “You been taking steroids?”

Lap two. Pound, pound, pound. She was an asteroid hurtling toward an unavoidable fate.

She ran past Casey a second time, and felt resentful eyes boring into her. Didn’t care.

Lap three. Go. Go. Go. Her skin soaked in the dampness around her. She was pulling energy in like a magnet. The running came easily—she whipped along, enjoying the wind against her face and the steady pounding of her feet against the asphalt. It was more comfortable sprinting than standing still. She felt like she could keep going forever. Part of her wanted to. As if she could outrun every thing and everyone that reminded her of the fire, of Drea’s death, of the Furies.

But then, just as she was starting to relax, to feel a whiteness in her whole body, a cleanness, like she was floating, something happened: a terrible sound, like high-pitched wind chimes keeping an off-kilter beat, went tearing through her mind. The trees lining the track blurred together in fast-forward. The speckled asphalt below her feet created fractals—patterns that repeated themselves over and over. It was like everything was folding in on itself. Soon, she could hear nothing else but the unmistakable timbre of Ty’s laughter reverberating in her mind. She ran faster and faster, trying to drown it out with the air whooshing into her ears and her increasingly strained breath. When fifteen minutes were up, she stood on the sidelines with her hands on her hips and an expression of what she hoped looked like nonchalance on her face. Oh, hey, no big deal that I just lapped every one of you. Inside, her heart was pounding.

Then they were moving on to handball—dividing themselves into teams and “serving” the ball by bouncing it against the ground and slapping it against the wall. The goal was to hit it in such a way that one’s opponent couldn’t return the shot. Bo-ring.

Em teamed up with Jenna against Casey and Portia. She waited for the first serve, shaking her head in an attempt to quiet the lingering echo of Ty’s laugh. Any peace she’d found while running had disappeared completely.

When the ball came whizzing toward her, she held her palm flat, enjoying the sting as her skin made contact with the rubber surface. It was a nice kind of pain. She swung, propelling the ball forward. Her arm was simply part of a machine. The ball shot away from her hand like a cannonball, hurtling toward the wall. She could practically hear it whistling through the air. It hit the wall with an explosive thud, sending several chips of green paint onto the asphalt below. Em watched it go. She felt calm. Like she’d done it before.

“Shit,” she heard Portia mutter with a mixture of fear and respect.

The ball came shooting back in their direction with amazing force. Suddenly, it was as though time was moving in slow motion. The blue ball was the size of a nectarine or a plum; it probably weighed a pound or two and it seemed to be hurtling forever in the air. Zoom. There was no way to stop it.

She saw where it was going. The bullet of a ball smashed directly into Casey Cornell’s face.

There was a sickening crack and a moment of stunned silence before Casey collapsed to the ground, wailing, covering her cheek.

Em felt twenty sets of eyes on her—fearful, wondering, accusatory. A sick feeling opened up in her stomach. People were looking at her as though she were a criminal.

Her fault.

I’m worried you’re going to hurt someone, Crow had said.

Ms. Hadley began barking out orders, instructing a terrified-looking Jenna to go retrieve the ice pack from the office and telling Casey to tip back her head; her face had begun to bleed. Spots of blood spilled—one, two, three—sharp red on the pavement.

“Why would you DO that?” Casey blubbered, practically hysterical.