“This is Elissa. We’re friends,” Dylan says, gesturing awkwardly to her.
Elissa sticks out her hand. “Hey. Didn’t see you inside.”
“I didn’t go in.”
She raises an eyebrow, and I’m about to turn and ask Dylan how he knows her and what he thinks he’s doing, when she interrupts me and asks him first.
“Why are you doing this, Dylan?”
He shrugs, then. “You two have something in common. Thought you could talk about it.”
I frown. Elissa doesn’t, though. Elissa throws back her head and laughs and says “That’s her? You’re kidding,” and my face goes red and Dylan blushes, too.
“What the fuck is happening?” I ask, turning between them. “Dylan?”
He holds up his hands, backs away. “I have to go,” he says hastily, and before I can say anything else, he’s off, sprinting away from us and into his car at the end of the parking lot.
Elissa turns to me. “So. You too, huh?”
“Me too, what?” I say, though my stomach flips when she asks because I already know the answer.
“You dated Maggie, too.”
That answer.
I can’t open my mouth to say yes, I did, so I just nod.
She doesn’t ask my name, or how long Maggie and I dated, or what high school I go to like anyone else would have. She pulls a pack of cigarettes out of her pocket and offers one to me.
“Nervous habit,” she says apologetically. “Want one?”
“No thank you,” I say.
“Mind if I . . . ?”
“Actually yeah,” I say, even though I don’t, because I’m feeling spiteful that Dylan’s making us talk and that this girl clearly knows so much about me that she doesn’t even need to ask my name.
I say as much. “I got your name, but . . .”
“You’re Corinne. I know who you are,” she says. And before I can protest, she goes ahead and lights the cigarette anyway. “Maggie told me.”
Hearing Maggie’s name out of this girl’s mouth when I didn’t even know Maggie’d dated another girl is enough to steal the breath from my lungs.
“Well, she didn’t tell me about you, so . . .”
I should regret what I just said but I can’t. Suddenly I’m angry, furious with this girl and with Maggie because why didn’t she tell me about Elissa? It’s not like she didn’t know I’d dated boys before dating her, not like I hadn’t spent the better part of sophomore year hanging off Jeremy Hayes’s arm and three months off Trent Moore’s before her, so why wouldn’t she tell me about Elissa?
“You don’t go to Leesboro, do you?” I say, just to find out more about her, just to have something to say.
“I did. That’s how we met—me and Maggie,” she says, like she needs to clarify. “I graduated two years ago.”
“What . . .”
“I go to Wake Tech, if that’s what you’re asking,” she says, and there’s a note of bitterness in her voice. “Not all of us were planning on Villanova.”
“She told you?”
Elissa raises her eyebrows. Of course she’d told her.
“Look,” she says, stomping out her cigarette, “I know how hard this must be for you—”
“You don’t know shit. I just met you. How are you supposed to know how I feel?” Some part of my brain tells me that of course she knows, she dated Maggie, but I’m too angry to care, because she knew about me when I didn’t know about her.
“Corinne—”
“Elissa. I appreciate the concern, but my girlfriend is dead, okay?” My voice cracks. “She’s dead and she’s not coming back, and nothing some ex of hers says to me is going to make me feel better. So I appreciate Dylan throwing us together, but I don’t need you right now.”
Elissa’s face falls, but she shrugs. “Okay. Fine. I’ll see you at the funeral, then? If you’ve changed your mind by then we can talk.”
“Fine,” I say, and stalk off toward my car.
I don’t look back at her.
One Year Before.
I look for her the next time we race against Leesboro. My palms are itching; I’m bouncing back and forth from foot to foot. I’m never this nervous before a race, and it shows.
“You’re going to burn all your energy before we even start,” Julia says, but she’s amused.
“I know.” I shoot her a grin. “Not like it matters. We both know you’re going to pull us to victory.”
“Oh, hush,” Julia says, but she nudges me with her shoulder before leaning down to stretch. “You’re coming over tonight after pasta, right?”
“Obviously,” I say, and I bend down beside her. “You’ve already picked out a movie, right?”
“You know it. And there’s a giant box of chocolate with your name on it.”
“You’re the best,” I say as I finish my last stretch. When I stand up, Maggie catches my eye from across the line, determination on her face.
I haven’t been able to stop thinking about her since our last race. About seeing her again, running next to her, stride in stride.
Why have I been thinking about that?
The bell goes off. This is a mid-season race, nothing too strenuous, yet we’re starting to get serious now because of Regionals. This is where it starts to matter.
I’m already ahead, shooting out of the starting line like I haven’t since tryouts, because I need to catch up to her. I need to beat her. I need to win.
I pass Haley, pass Julia, hear the breaths of other runners behind me, the crunch of new autumn leaves under our sneakers, the rhythm of my own steps. None of it matters, because I haven’t caught up to her yet.
I finally see her ahead of me, lime-green scrunchie signaling me.
She is not going to beat me this time.
I push myself, run faster run harder be better because I need to win. I need to see the look on her face when I win.
But I’m not used to this, my body isn’t used to running this hard, and I quickly fall back to the middle, because she is so much faster. I almost got close to her, but she is still so, so much faster than me, and I can’t catch up.
“Corinne!”
I’m stretching by a tree when she calls my name, and when I lift my head she’s already settling herself in the dirt beside me.
“Good race,” I say, and she nods.
We’re silent for a moment as we lean down and stretch, comfortable companionship.
“Hey,” she says after a minute. “Would you wanna . . . I mean, would you wanna get coffee in Raleigh sometime? Like. Hang out outside of races?”
I blink. Surely I haven’t heard her right. She’s from a rival school, and by all counts we’re supposed to be enemies.
But there’s something about her. Even though we’ve barely spoken, there’s something about her that makes me think she might be one of the few people in this entire state who would actually understand me.
“Yeah, sure,” I say. She beams.
“Great! I’ll put my number in your phone, okay?”
I hand her my phone without thinking, stop stretching, watch as she keys her number in.