Hannah Gersen - Home Field

The flag in the distance turned out to be the two-mile marker. Stephanie heard her father before she saw him; he was calling out splits to a pack of girls emerging from the woods. Then she heard her brothers’ smaller voices.

“Go See-See, go See-See, go See-See, go!”

Stephanie knew See-See, although she didn’t recognize her at first, because her hair was now short, bleached, and spiked. Last year it had been dark blond with long daydreamy bangs. See-See had been in Stephanie’s creative writing class, and Stephanie associated her with one of her short stories, a story about a girl who survives a terrible car crash. The girl is left with an ugly scar across her stomach, a scar the girl hates, but over time, the appearance of the scar changes from a straight line to a gentle U shape — a smile. The story was called “The Smiling Scar.”

“Steffy!” Bryan called. He ran over to her and hugged her hard, pressing his face into her body, so unself-conscious. Stephanie leaned down to complete the hug, rubbing his back and kissing his forehead. He smelled like fresh air and cinnamon toast.

“Where were you last night?” Robbie asked, hanging back.

“None of your business,” she said lightly.

“Dad is PO’d.”

“Yeah, he seems pretty broken up.”

Their father was standing too close to the freshly mown course. He kept checking his watch and then looking at the course — the watch, the course, the watch, the course. A girl in blue was approaching, and he crouched and yelled forcefully, “Come on, Aileen. Get up there with See-See!”

“She’s good,” Stephanie said, watching her glide by on daddy longlegs.

“Our team sucks,” Robbie said.

Their father turned around. “Stephanie! You’re here!”

He ran over to her and pushed a clipboard into her hands. “I’m going to call out the splits and you write them down. Aileen got fourteen twenty-one, and See-See had thirteen thirty, which is good, very good. If she keeps up that pace, she’s going to break twenty-two.”

Two blue runners were approaching and her father began to holler. “ Go Blue! ”

Bry began to run alongside them, his short legs pumping. “Go blue! Go blue! Go blue!”

“He looks so dumb,” Robbie said.

“He’s cute,” Stephanie said, remembering happier times in their family, when they were a big group of five and Bryan’s role was always the little clown.

“Here comes Lori,” her father said. “She’s going to be sixteen something.”

Lori was a feminine girl whose pink skin, yellow hair, and rounded limbs made her look like a stuffed doll. She glanced at Stephanie’s father when she ran by, giving a quick smile to acknowledge that she’d heard her time. A few minutes behind, a second doll-like girl appeared, but this one was a porcelain doll, with pale, blue-veined skin and dark red hair pulled back into a tight braid. As she ran by — at a heartbreakingly slow pace — Stephanie recognized her as Jessica Markham, the smartest girl in school. She was famous for completing all the math courses by the end of her sophomore year and was supposed to graduate early.

“Steffy, come on.” Bryan pointed toward their father, who was jogging toward the gym and the finish line, delineated by two rows of fluorescent flags.

What started out as a jog soon turned into an out-and-out run. Stephanie cursed her shoes and then eventually pulled them off to sprint barefoot in the grass. Her hangover, briefly in hiding, reemerged, and by the time she reached the finish line, her legs and head throbbed with pain. Nearby, an oversized digital clock ticked off the seconds. A skinny man ran up to her father.

“You missed it. Adrienne Fellows broke the course record,” he said. “That girl’s talent is wasted in Div III.”

“Have any colleges shown interest?” her father asked.

“She’s probably going Ivy. I heard she’s smart,” the man said. “But those schools have crap running programs.”

“Not everyone wants to devote their life to sports,” Stephanie said.

The man turned toward her with an expression that made her realize how foolish she must seem in her wilted party clothes. I’m smart, too, she wanted to say. But all he could see was a girl with a hangover, a girl who didn’t take care of herself. Maybe he even knew she’d just had sex.

Stephanie’s father began to yell at the top of his lungs, startling her. “Come on, See-See! Come on, girl, you can do it!”

See-See heard him and began to kick harder, her stride becoming shorter and faster instead of lengthening, like a taller girl’s would. There was a girl in a green uniform in front of her, from Clearspring, who was also trying to kick, but whose face was strained with exhaustion. The knobby-kneed man began to cheer along with her father and See-See’s arms pumped, reaching forward as she passed the Clearspring runner. Her jaw was clenched in a tight, perverse grin. The Smiling Scar, Stephanie thought.

“She’s a real competitor,” the man said. “Here comes another one.”

It was Aileen. She was obviously tired, but there was a lightness in her stride that hinted at hidden reserves of strength. When she finished, she stopped cold and then began to jump up and down on her kindling legs, nearly prancing. Stephanie felt oddly jealous as she watched her father guide Aileen and See-See out of the chute to congratulate them. Their faces were red with exertion. “There’s Lori!” Aileen cried. “Lori, Lori, Lori!” she chanted.

Lori staggered down the chute on her stuffed-doll’s limbs, her body seeming to move forward only by means of some rote memory of movement, not out of any real desire to do so. Runners from other teams breezed by and she didn’t seem to notice or care.

The clock read 26:50 when she finally crossed the line. Jessica finished thirty seconds later, looking even more worn-out than Lori. They were dead tired. Stephanie thought it should be the other way around; the top finishers should be the most wrung out, the most pathetic. Instead, the top finishers were now jogging in the soccer field in random patterns, occasionally kicking out their legs or pinwheeling their arms, as if their bodies were giant toys.

“Hey, do you mind keeping an eye on the boys?” her father said. “I’m going to take the girls on a cooldown.”

“Sure, whatever,” Stephanie said. He was barely making eye contact with her, a sure sign he was angry. But he had no right to judge her; she knew how he’d spent his night.

Spotted Mountain rose up beyond the playing fields. It wasn’t a particularly tall mountain, was perhaps not even technically a mountain, but it was known locally for its spectacular views. It was said that from the top you could see north all the way to Pennsylvania and south to West Virginia. Whenever people from school asked Stephanie where she was from, she had taken to borrowing her father’s phrase, “the skinny arm of Maryland”; that way people got the proximity to both states.

Halfway up Spotted Mountain was the Outdoor School, a sleepover camp that every kid in the county attended for a week during sixth grade. Stephanie remembered her week there so clearly; it was her first time away from home, away from her mother. She had been so excited to go, relieved to get out of a house dominated by two little boys, but her mother had been very emotional about their separation, making her promise to write every day. Stephanie had dutifully sent a postcard each morning before breakfast, but she didn’t read the letters her mother sent. She always meant to, but at the end of every day she was so tired from hiking and bird-watching and orienteering and cooking outdoors that she never opened them. Stephanie wondered now what had happened to those letters. Her mother must have found them when she unpacked her bags.