Hannah Gersen - Home Field

A group of boys who had finished their mile began to cheer for her. “Go, Missy!” She scowled, and all at once Dean remembered meeting her at Sheetz, before school started, when he was still the football coach. Smoot’s sister. Of course she was fast!

“Did I make your ninety-ninth percentile?” she asked Dean, a few seconds after sprinting over the line.

“Easily,” he said. “You should go out for cross-country.”

“Yeah, right.” She raked her hair into a fresh ponytail.

“I’m serious,” he said. “Come to the small gym after school. I’m meeting with the team. It’s not a practice; we’re just going over some stuff for tomorrow’s race. You can meet the other girls and see what you think.”

Missy regarded him through smudged eyeliner. He felt certain she was going to turn him down.

“All right,” she said. “I have to wait for my brother anyway.”

“Great, we’ll see you then.” He felt like a salesman for how hard he had to work to hide his excitement.

That afternoon, Dean told the girls about Missy, and when she didn’t show up, his disappointment hit hard and he felt foolish for saying anything. The girls seemed let down, too. They had dressed up for their meet the next day and looked older in their skirts and dress pants, their loafers and modest heels. Their proximity to adulthood stilled him. He could imagine them with jobs, marriages, children. He got the same feeling, sometimes, when the football players gathered on game days, clean-cut in suits and ties. And with this feeling, he always noticed, came a strong sense of responsibility.

SATURDAY’S MEET WAS in Left Creek, West Virginia. Dean had to wake up early to meet the girls. The boys were late getting up and had a breakfast of graham crackers in the car. Outside the fog was heavy, floating above the pastures and soybean fields along Iron Bridge Road. The cows were like ghosts, visible if you looked for them.

When they arrived at the school, the parking lot was empty. A girl was sitting on the curb and she stood up to greet them, waving. It was See-See; Dean recognized her bleached hair first, and then her muscular, ever-so-slightly bowed legs. She was wearing a faded blue baseball cap that did not quite match the blue of her uniform.

“You took all your earrings out,” Bryan observed. He knew the girls well now, from going to practices.

“You can’t race in them.” She tugged on her naked earlobe. “Hey, Robbie. Long time no see! How’s the play?”

“How’d you know I’m in the play?”

“I’m friends with the Cowardly Lion.”

“You know Seth?” Robbie seemed to wake up for the first time that morning. “He’s really funny.”

See-See smiled. “He likes to think so, at least.”

The bus appeared, emerging from the fog like some big yellow dinosaur. Two other cars were hidden behind it, and they pulled up to the school to deliver members of the boys’ team. A third car joined the line and then drove around the bus to pull right up to the curb, where Dean stood. It was Bill Smoot, Jimmy and Melissa’s father. He leaned out the window.

“Coach! I had no idea you’ve been trying to recruit my girl. I told her, if Dean Renner wants you on his team, you say yes! Go on, Missy.” He nudged his sleepy daughter, who sat in the front seat with a gray duffel bag on her lap. She barely glanced at Dean as she got out of the car.

“She’s a good runner, always has been. It never occurred to me to sign her up for cross-country. Can you get scholarships for that?”

“Sometimes, sure,” Dean said. He couldn’t keep back his grin, even though Missy had clearly been dragged here against her will.

“All right then,” Mr. Smoot said. “You have a good race, honey! Call me when you get back.”

“I’ll get a ride,” Missy said. She shut the door and didn’t bother to return her father’s wave as he drove off.

“How’d you know to meet here?” Dean asked.

Missy nodded toward See-See. “She told my brother. He told my dad.” She shrugged. “I don’t have the right shoes.”

She wore black low-top Chuck Taylors. She had drawn enormous eyes on the sneakers’ signature white toe boxes, so that her feet appeared to be staring up at her.

“Those are fine for now,” Dean said. “I’ll get you a uniform.”

Stephanie really had been planning to see a therapist. The school provided free counseling and there were signs in all the first-year dorms encouraging students to take advantage of it. But when she’d returned to school on Saturday, arriving ten minutes too late for dinner in the cafeteria, she had run into Raquel, who had also arrived too late for dinner. So she and Raquel had gone out for pizza. Pizza turned into drinks and then they had wandered into three different parties, all held in the basements of dormitories. The dimly lit, anonymously furnished rooms, so similar to Laird’s house, gave her life a sense of eerie continuity. The next day her hangover felt familiar and borderline luxurious as she and Raquel sat in the dining hall and drank burnt coffee and picked at stacks of syrup-drenched pancakes.

On Sunday night she and Raquel stayed up until three, talking about all the students and professors they had met so far and what they thought of each of them. Stephanie apologized for giving such a bad first impression, and Raquel was forgiving in a way that let Stephanie know that her initial refusal had actually charmed her. And then on Monday morning, Stephanie overslept and missed her therapy appointment. And then she had just plain skipped her rescheduled session, which prompted the therapist — Jill was her name — to call and deliver a minilecture about the importance of keeping appointments, not only for her sake — Stephanie’s sake — but also for the sake of other students who might wish to take up Jill’s valuable time if Stephanie was going to throw it away. Stephanie apologized and then, too embarrassed to reschedule, and also rattled by her father’s obvious disapproval, lied and told Jill she’d found help elsewhere. “I get enough lectures from my father,” Stephanie said later to Raquel, who agreed with her that Jill sounded like a bitch, and that anyone practicing therapy at a liberal arts college instead of having her own private office was probably not that great anyway. “She’s probably used to way easier problems than what you would give her,” Raquel said. “Like, people with time management issues or alcoholics in training or whatever.”

Stephanie had told Raquel most everything about her life, including her mother’s death, which fascinated Raquel in a way that made Stephanie feel slightly uncomfortable. Raquel seemed to be in the midst of her own suicide project of sorts, eating as little as possible and smoking unhealthy amounts of clove cigarettes (she called them “dessert”). She hoarded food in particular ways, carrying small paper cups of cereal to her dorm room and filling the pockets of her jean jacket with tiny single-serving containers of cream, which she would divvy up, ceremoniously, into cups of black coffee and Earl Grey tea. She never seemed to sleep. Whenever Stephanie wanted to talk, she was game for a drive to the all-night Dunkin’ Donuts, where she would torture a French cruller, tearing it into delicate pieces and perhaps letting a few flakes of sugar melt on her tongue. Stephanie knew there was something off about her new friend, but she recognized her as the kind of girlfriend she had wished for in high school, the rebellious, egotistical bad girl, the girl with impeccable taste, the girl who was a little bit spoiled, a little bit reckless, a little bit selfish. The girl who let you be her mirror.

Their friendship was immediately intense. They stayed up late every night, talking, listening to Tori Amos and Ani DiFranco, smoking, and sometimes even studying for one of their two shared classes, Psych I and Evolutionary Biology. Without planning it, Stephanie began to spend most of her nights on the futon sofa in the common area of Raquel’s dorm room. The only break they took from each other was before dinner, when Raquel liked to work out at the campus gym. She always asked Stephanie to join her, but Stephanie’s rebellion against jock culture was too strong. Instead she used the time to study in the library, reading for her other two classes, a survey of medieval history and a Great Books course that all first-year students were required to take. The Great Books course was easy for her, mainly because her high school’s academic deficiencies had not impeded her study of literature, which she could supplement on her own. History was another matter. She had not, to her surprise, been given a textbook. Instead she had been assigned to read parts of nine different nonfiction books. They were difficult books, almost scientific in their presentation of historical facts. She was accustomed to a mode of history that was more theatrical. Her understanding of the Civil War was almost entirely gleaned from the reenactments at the Antietam Battlefield, where people came from all over the country to dress up as Union and Confederate soldiers and pretend to die in battle. It was such an odd hobby, Stephanie thought. Imagine going back in time and telling soldiers that in the future, people would relive their deaths every year.