Swish.
Tap.
Swish.
Tap.
The steps come easily when I’m alone. Comfortable. Even. Hypnotic. I’m under no pressure to race. Don’t misunderstand—when it’s time to go, I’m off with a flick of a ponytail and disappear before you even realize I was here. I decided this summer that’s my super power: not speed, or endurance, but my ability to cease existing in any given space. My legs get me up and get me out. Running is my reality. My escape. My place to think.
My only good reason to get up in the morning.
And what I wish I was doing right now.
Everything else? Mind-numbingly boring. Scoop-my-eyes-from-my-head-to-feel-anything-at-all boring.
“Lou.” Annabella, my roommate of six days, has a hold on my foot. Her tug is gentle. So’s her tone. Her message is not. “You can’t be late.”
I press my face into my pillow. Inhale. Pretend to drift into a deeper sleep at 7:50 in the morning. Our dorm hallway buzzes, alive, and is loud—kids—students, whatever we are—calling good morning, complaining about early Geography 101 labs, retelling last night’s stupid shenanigans. Like I can sleep with my roommate hanging off my ankle and the noise pollution leaking into our room, but I wait Annabella out, and she releases her skinny fingers from around my crew sock.
I try to not miss human touch as soon as it’s gone.
Annabella doesn’t know I’ve been awake since four. She doesn’t know I spent forty minutes in the bathroom finger-combing the fried bleach-blond at-home dye job I did the night before she moved in, snipping away crusty, dead ends with kitchen shears I found in the building’s kitchenette. A half hour zombie-walking the dorm hallway with only the neon fire escape sign glaring off the linoleum. I floated into our room and up the loft bed ladder like a ghost around the time she started to stir, and assumed sleeping position: back to the room, fetal curl, check.
We’ve lived on a campus for a week, but already I’ve memorized the pattern the rising sun treks through the university-issued blinds, the light so pale it’s basically white. Sleep in an anomaly here. It was all summer too, but Dad hardly realized I was in the house, let alone that I was a newly-minted insomniac. Annabella is already more tuned in.
Someone turns on a shower down the hall in the bathroom. Pipes in the ceiling screech to life behind a stain shaped like a million foreheads smacking into it from startling awake in a loft bed. Below me, Annabella doesn’t make another sound that isn’t premeditated and slow, like she would rather run wind sprints uphill or recite extra Hail Mary’s after confession than try to wake me again. She’s a church mouse right down to the choker with a tiny gold cross nestled against her windpipe. It catches the light sometimes, like Jesus himself shines from it.
Annabella moves around our room like a premonition: snaps her laptop shut, opens the microwave with her hot to-go oatmeal right before it beeps. Shoes on, spoon grabbed, backpack zipped. “Lou.” Her hand is on my quilt, inches from my shoulder. Annabella easily clears six feet tall. Probably how she runs fast. Big-ass strides. She’s a gazelle on the course. Like she’s not even trying. “Come on. We’re both in the Rotunda this morning. I’ll wait and walk to class with you.”
My tongue presses against my teeth to speak. I can’t squeeze my mouth enough to say no.
Annabella waits a beat and pats my quilt, her fingers brushing my shoulder. Perhaps on purpose. Perhaps not. She glides out the door—the rambunctious clatter of freshmen on their own for the first time seeps into our room—and shuts it, stilling, if not quieting, the world.
Safe to move and not be caught as a liar, I look at my phone. Two minutes after eight. She’s late. If Coach finds out, she’ll have Annabella’s ass. Let alone mine when she hears I skipped Comp 101 entirely.
I itch to get out of bed and pull on my shoes. I have other things to do.
Outside, it’s end-of-summer sticky. The gross kind that pools inside your elbows and makes your skin squelch when you shift. The soupy air is heavy enough to cradle me mid-stride, and lift me far, far away. Where would I go? I wonder, walking the opposite direction of Composition 101, the class I’m skipping. I pitch forward into a stretch.
Hamstring: Key West. Glassy water, more swamp than land. Every other true crime murder goes down in Florida. I bet there are lots of ripped men looking for alibis. I’d make a good alibi.
Calf: Alaska. But only the time of year when the sun is up 24 hours a day. It’s easier to pace hallways in daylight. Less creepy.
Glute: What about Sydney? To them, the world is normal, even as they cling to the earth by their shoes, upside down. Dangling like bats. And they don’t even know it. Nocturnal and barely hanging on. Sounds familiar.
Or maybe people in the northern hemisphere are the ones hanging on for dear life. Which part of the human condition is scarier? Dwelling on that string of gravity that keeps us from flying off our spinning rock? Or the general consciousness to live our lives and not fixate on the what-if every damn minute. Acute fear or complete ambivalence?
God. I need to go back to bed.
I zigzag between girls in fuzzy beige pajama pants and more girls in bike shorts and ice white, thick-soled sneakers. Bros in mesh shorts and hoodies who brood down sidewalks, their earbuds peeking out. Thousands of kids rich on student loan cash, flexing through rap lyrics they have no reference for, caffeinated by seven-dollar matcha lattes for the semester’s first French quiz.
I set towards the Campanile on the edge of campus. My bones settle into the rhythm of my feet pounding the pavement.
Swish.
Tap.
Swish.
Tap.
I inhale, my heart leads the way and--
There it is. Adrenaline surges. The only good reason to get up in the morning.
Rude.
Go away, I think.
And true to character, even in my head, Ginny listens, and goes away.
I pick up my pace, but it’s fruitless. I’m not leaving her behind.
The Campanile’s bell tolls: nine dings reverberate through the sea of brick buildings where smart things are discussed, regurgitated, slept through. Campus takes a deep breath and exhales students into the wild again. I pass the bike shorts and bros and slow as I take the steps two at a time to Pierson Hall’s front door. My shoes squeak on the linoleum, but I’m just a footnote in the chaos of comings and goings. Sweat coats my arms from my sprint down Medary. Feels like I accomplished something, at least.
Annabella nearly flings a shoe across the room when I walk in. Her other shoe is double knotted on her foot, safe from a startled throw. “I thought you left already,” she says, tying her laces, pretending she didn’t spook harder than a sleeping cat next to a robot vacuum.
“Left for where?” I nudge our door shut and pull off my gross tank.
Annabella stands, confused, her cleats tied together and looped over her wrist. Dread pools in my gut. “Practice. Have you already trained? Today’s the ten miler Coach harped about all week.”
Shit.
I shrug my shirt back down and grab my gym bag. What I would give for a breeze to scoop me up and drop me over Australia right now.
Tap.
Swish.
Tap.
The steps come easily when I’m alone. Comfortable. Even. Hypnotic. I’m under no pressure to race. Don’t misunderstand—when it’s time to go, I’m off with a flick of a ponytail and disappear before you even realize I was here. I decided this summer that’s my super power: not speed, or endurance, but my ability to cease existing in any given space. My legs get me up and get me out. Running is my reality. My escape. My place to think.
My only good reason to get up in the morning.
And what I wish I was doing right now.
Everything else? Mind-numbingly boring. Scoop-my-eyes-from-my-head-to-feel-anything-at-all boring.
“Lou.” Annabella, my roommate of six days, has a hold on my foot. Her tug is gentle. So’s her tone. Her message is not. “You can’t be late.”
I press my face into my pillow. Inhale. Pretend to drift into a deeper sleep at 7:50 in the morning. Our dorm hallway buzzes, alive, and is loud—kids—students, whatever we are—calling good morning, complaining about early Geography 101 labs, retelling last night’s stupid shenanigans. Like I can sleep with my roommate hanging off my ankle and the noise pollution leaking into our room, but I wait Annabella out, and she releases her skinny fingers from around my crew sock.
I try to not miss human touch as soon as it’s gone.
Annabella doesn’t know I’ve been awake since four. She doesn’t know I spent forty minutes in the bathroom finger-combing the fried bleach-blond at-home dye job I did the night before she moved in, snipping away crusty, dead ends with kitchen shears I found in the building’s kitchenette. A half hour zombie-walking the dorm hallway with only the neon fire escape sign glaring off the linoleum. I floated into our room and up the loft bed ladder like a ghost around the time she started to stir, and assumed sleeping position: back to the room, fetal curl, check.
We’ve lived on a campus for a week, but already I’ve memorized the pattern the rising sun treks through the university-issued blinds, the light so pale it’s basically white. Sleep in an anomaly here. It was all summer too, but Dad hardly realized I was in the house, let alone that I was a newly-minted insomniac. Annabella is already more tuned in.
Someone turns on a shower down the hall in the bathroom. Pipes in the ceiling screech to life behind a stain shaped like a million foreheads smacking into it from startling awake in a loft bed. Below me, Annabella doesn’t make another sound that isn’t premeditated and slow, like she would rather run wind sprints uphill or recite extra Hail Mary’s after confession than try to wake me again. She’s a church mouse right down to the choker with a tiny gold cross nestled against her windpipe. It catches the light sometimes, like Jesus himself shines from it.
Annabella moves around our room like a premonition: snaps her laptop shut, opens the microwave with her hot to-go oatmeal right before it beeps. Shoes on, spoon grabbed, backpack zipped. “Lou.” Her hand is on my quilt, inches from my shoulder. Annabella easily clears six feet tall. Probably how she runs fast. Big-ass strides. She’s a gazelle on the course. Like she’s not even trying. “Come on. We’re both in the Rotunda this morning. I’ll wait and walk to class with you.”
My tongue presses against my teeth to speak. I can’t squeeze my mouth enough to say no.
Annabella waits a beat and pats my quilt, her fingers brushing my shoulder. Perhaps on purpose. Perhaps not. She glides out the door—the rambunctious clatter of freshmen on their own for the first time seeps into our room—and shuts it, stilling, if not quieting, the world.
Safe to move and not be caught as a liar, I look at my phone. Two minutes after eight. She’s late. If Coach finds out, she’ll have Annabella’s ass. Let alone mine when she hears I skipped Comp 101 entirely.
I itch to get out of bed and pull on my shoes. I have other things to do.
Outside, it’s end-of-summer sticky. The gross kind that pools inside your elbows and makes your skin squelch when you shift. The soupy air is heavy enough to cradle me mid-stride, and lift me far, far away. Where would I go? I wonder, walking the opposite direction of Composition 101, the class I’m skipping. I pitch forward into a stretch.
Hamstring: Key West. Glassy water, more swamp than land. Every other true crime murder goes down in Florida. I bet there are lots of ripped men looking for alibis. I’d make a good alibi.
Calf: Alaska. But only the time of year when the sun is up 24 hours a day. It’s easier to pace hallways in daylight. Less creepy.
Glute: What about Sydney? To them, the world is normal, even as they cling to the earth by their shoes, upside down. Dangling like bats. And they don’t even know it. Nocturnal and barely hanging on. Sounds familiar.
Or maybe people in the northern hemisphere are the ones hanging on for dear life. Which part of the human condition is scarier? Dwelling on that string of gravity that keeps us from flying off our spinning rock? Or the general consciousness to live our lives and not fixate on the what-if every damn minute. Acute fear or complete ambivalence?
God. I need to go back to bed.
I zigzag between girls in fuzzy beige pajama pants and more girls in bike shorts and ice white, thick-soled sneakers. Bros in mesh shorts and hoodies who brood down sidewalks, their earbuds peeking out. Thousands of kids rich on student loan cash, flexing through rap lyrics they have no reference for, caffeinated by seven-dollar matcha lattes for the semester’s first French quiz.
I set towards the Campanile on the edge of campus. My bones settle into the rhythm of my feet pounding the pavement.
Swish.
Tap.
Swish.
Tap.
I inhale, my heart leads the way and--
There it is. Adrenaline surges. The only good reason to get up in the morning.
Rude.
Go away, I think.
And true to character, even in my head, Ginny listens, and goes away.
I pick up my pace, but it’s fruitless. I’m not leaving her behind.
The Campanile’s bell tolls: nine dings reverberate through the sea of brick buildings where smart things are discussed, regurgitated, slept through. Campus takes a deep breath and exhales students into the wild again. I pass the bike shorts and bros and slow as I take the steps two at a time to Pierson Hall’s front door. My shoes squeak on the linoleum, but I’m just a footnote in the chaos of comings and goings. Sweat coats my arms from my sprint down Medary. Feels like I accomplished something, at least.
Annabella nearly flings a shoe across the room when I walk in. Her other shoe is double knotted on her foot, safe from a startled throw. “I thought you left already,” she says, tying her laces, pretending she didn’t spook harder than a sleeping cat next to a robot vacuum.
“Left for where?” I nudge our door shut and pull off my gross tank.
Annabella stands, confused, her cleats tied together and looped over her wrist. Dread pools in my gut. “Practice. Have you already trained? Today’s the ten miler Coach harped about all week.”
Shit.
I shrug my shirt back down and grab my gym bag. What I would give for a breeze to scoop me up and drop me over Australia right now.