The shoes took nine minutes.
Joy had been buying running shoes since she was fourteen and the process had never once involved a salesperson. She went down the wall, pulled three boxes, sat on the bench, and put the left of each on in turn. The first was too soft. The second, she remembered too late, was the second-generation version of a shoe she'd worn as a sophomore in high school and had some real bad memories of. The third she laced properly, stood up in, and jogged forty feet down the aisle and back while a man restocking insoles watched her with mild alarm.
"That one," she said.
"You didn't even try the right one," Keiko said.
"It's the same shoe."
A women's nine. She'd guessed a ten from the sidewalk on Tuesday and been wrong by a full size, which annoyed her more than she expected. Daniel had worn a twelve. Somewhere in her closet there was a pair of twelves with about four hundred miles left in them, and she was going to have to look at them every day until she found somebody with feet.
Socks were easy. Leggings took a minute, she grabbed a black pair, looked at Tiffany and Keiko, they nodded, done. Two tees. A hoodie.
"Okay," Tiffany said. "Now the important one."
"Ooh," Keiko said. "This'll be fun."
It was not fun.
There were sizes, and then there were sizes within the sizes, and then there was a word, encapsulation, that Tiffany used twice and that Joy did not ask about either time, on the theory that asking would extend her stay. She stood in fitting room three in a succession of increasingly engineered garments while a hand came through the curtain at intervals, moved a strap a quarter of an inch, and withdrew.
"No," said Tiffany, to herself.
"It's fine," Joy said.
"It's not fine, it's riding on the left."
"How can you tell? You're looking at a curtain."
"I was looking before the curtain."
From the bench outside, Keiko said, "That's her size. That's literally her size, I read the chart!"
"It's her size and it's the wrong bra, Keiko."
"I thought it was cuter," Keiko pouted.
By the fifth one Joy had achieved a state of philosophical calm about the whole enterprise. Somewhere around the seventh it occurred to her that she'd spent forty minutes in a fitting room and nine minutes on the shoes, and that if she'd tried to explain that ratio to the Danie of eleven days ago he would not have believed a word of it.
Tiffany finally came out holding three, identical save for color.
"Okay. Pick your favorite color."
"Pink!" Keiko said, before Joy could open her mouth.
Joy looked at the pink one. She had no opinion about the pink one. She had, at that moment, no opinion about anything clothes-related whatsoever. Tiffany could have handed her a strip of dirty burlap and she'd have bought it without a single complaint.
"Fine."
"It'll look cute on you," Keiko said, in the voice of someone who had won something.
"I'm going to sweat through it."
"Sweaty can be cute too!"
In the line at the register, the girl behind them, twenty or so, yoga mat under one arm, leaned in.
"Sorry, this is so random, but where did you get your hair color?"
Joy turned around. The smile arrived before she'd decided on one.
"My mom, mostly."
"Ugh. Lucky."
"Yeah," Joy said. "Mostly."
The total came to two hundred and twelve dollars. Joy tapped her card and didn't look at her banking app until they were through the doors, and predictably grimaced. She put the phone back in her pocket as if it had said something rude.
The pitch came in the parking lot.
Keiko had been building to it since the fitting room, she'd gone quiet at the register, which was never a good sign with Keiko. It was like an active volcano deciding to stop erupting. They got to the Corolla, which Nate had lent them on the condition that nobody eat in it, and Keiko put her bags in the trunk and closed it and turned around with her hands already moving.
"Okay. Hear me out."
"The women's team," Joy said.
Keiko's hands stopped. "How did you—"
"You went quiet at the register. And I already asked. They don't have an open slot this year."
"This year." Keiko's hands started again, faster, as if they'd only been paused. "A year is a long ime! You know how it goes, somebody transfers, somebody tears something, somebody wanders into the Woods of No Return and is never seen again.” She stopped as she realized Joy and Tiffany were both staring at her, “It could happen! Somebody decides she'd rather do investment banking. My point is, you walk on in the spring, you're on the roster, you're fast, and when a slot opens up you're the one standing right in front of it."
"Yeah that’s one problem, that's doesn’t really solve June."
Keiko threw up her hands.
"Yeah look I’ve got no idea what we’re going to do about June. But it's the rest of it. It's, like, a hundred thousand dollars of the rest of it, for running. Which you used to do every single day."
"A roster spot isn't money," Tiffany said, opening the back door and setting her bag on the seat with great precision. "Walk-ons don't get anything. You'd be training for free, for a coach who doesn't owe you anything, on the chance that somebody else's scholarship comes loose."
"So she has to be good enough that they want it to come loose," Keiko said. "Which she is."
Joy stood there, tapping her fingernails on the roof of the Corolla, and turned it over.
It wasn't stupid. That was the annoying part. She had asked, and been told no, and filed it away as such, and had not given it a second thought since. For somebody who'd spent the whole week finding angles in everything, it was a strange thing to have left alone.
"I'm not going to the track," she said.
Both of them looked at her.
The gate by the long-jump pit stuck unless you hit it with your hip. That was all. Every afternoon for a year and a half, Daniel had hit it with his hip on the way in, and it made a particular flat clank, and Joy could hear it from the parking lot of a sporting goods store in Westwood. It was like a second home to her, and somehow no longer running on it felt like her biggest loss this past week.
She didn't say any of that.
Keiko looked at her a second longer than Keiko usually looked at anything. Then her hands started up again.
"Fine. Dogwood plaza. It's flat, it's long, and best of all it's close."
"It's a bit crowded."
"It’s an interactive course!"
The mushroom on the door had two caps again.
NATE was where it had always been, green, slightly peeling at one edge. Beside it was a new one, pink, with JOY on it in lettering so even it looked printed.
Nobody was in the hall. Nobody seemed to be waiting to take credit for it. Joy stood there with two shopping bags for a second, and then went in.
She changed in the bathroom and came out in the leggings, the pink bra, and a cropped tee off a rack marked ATHLETIC that ended, this time on purpose, about where Keiko's shirt had ended by accident.
Nate looked up from his laptop.
"Why'd you go with that?" he asked, nodding at the pants.
Joy was putting them through their rounds, stretching one leg every direction she could and enjoying wearing something that actually fit for a change.
"It's easy to run in." She was working the elastic around her ponytail, which took three passes and was still losing. "And the woman at the store said it made my ass look great."
"And the pink?"
"Keiko."
"Ah." He went back to the laptop. "Yeah."
She sat on the edge of the couch-bed and put the shoes on and laced them the way she laced them, and stood up, and nothing slid.
She stood there a second longer than she needed to.
Then she jogged down the hall, past the elevators and down the stairs, her smile growing as she went.
Down the Hill was easy. Down the Hill was gravity.
She'd run this route a hundred times, down to Sunset, along to the Sculpture Garden, back up Bruin Walk, and her legs knew it, and for the first quarter mile it was fine because she wasn't thinking about any of it. The evening was getting that cool ocean chill that they did in late September in California. The shoes were right. The sports bra was, just as Tiffany had promised, a non-event. For the first time since her transformation, it felt like everything was working the way it was supposed to.
She let it be that for a while. She didn't look at her watch. She passed a guy walking a greyhound, and the greyhound gave her a long look of professional respect, and she grinned at it and kept going, and for about half a mile she wasn't anybody's problem.
Then she hit the flat and opened up and went down.
Not all the way. Her stride went out the way it had gone out since high school and her foot came down somewhere her foot had never been, long, too long, reaching for ground that belonged to somebody four inches taller, and the whole machine hitched sideways. She got a hand on the path. She was up before she'd finished being down.
She stood there and looked at her legs.
Okay.
She'd been running like Daniel. Daniel's stride, Daniel's cadence, Daniel's whole program, and it turned out that program had been written for a different machine. The legs weren’t really shorter which had surprised her, but something in her middle had moved. When she leaned into a stride the way she'd always leaned, the lean arrived somewhere else.
She started again. Shorter, quicker, turning it over faster than felt right.
It felt wrong for two hundred yards, like typing on a keyboard smaller than the one you were used to. Then somewhere past the fountain it stopped feeling wrong and started feeling like nothing at all, which was how running was supposed to feel.
She opened up. Carefully.
There was a ceiling. She found it about three strides in, a place where Daniel would have kept going and she didn't, a click below the top she'd had, and it was strange to hit it and stranger that it was so obvious. Slower. Not by a lot. Still, losing speed stung no matter the reason.
She ran the flat anyway, and the Sculpture Garden, and turned back toward Bruin Walk, and it was somewhere around there that she noticed the other thing.
She'd been going eleven minutes at what Daniel would have called threshold, and she wasn't at threshold. She wasn't near it. She could have held a conversation the whole way.
Fresh legs, she decided. Eleven days off. New shoes.
The ponytail hit her in the same spot on her neck every stride, and she went up Bruin Walk considerably faster than she'd meant to.
Dogwood plaza was flat, and long, and at 6:40 on a Friday it had maybe twenty people crossing it in various directions and Joy tore through it like a maniac on a superbike.
Sprints were different. Sprints were where the ceiling lived. She marked forty meters off with a bike rack at one end and a planter at the other, and she ran it, and walked back, and ran it, and walked back, and by the fifth she had a number in her head she didn't like, and by the eighth she had stopped pretending not to know what it meant.
On the walk back from the ninth she waved at the only Sidhe exchange student, as far as she knew, and he gave her a polite formal bow as he passed.
Daniel had done these. Daniel had done six of these. Six going hard, he’d be falling apart by the seventh, and by the eighth he would have been walking with his hands on his head trying to get the spots to go away. That was the deal. Sprinters spent it fast and then it was spent.
She was on twelve.
Twelve was the same as four.
She stood at the planter end with her hands on her knees, not because she needed to but because it had become almost muscle memory after so many years of doing it, and watched a girl in a UCLA sweatshirt look at her, and then at the pink bra, and then away, and thought: huh.
"Joy?"
She looked up.
Marco was standing at the edge of the plaza in team sweats with a gym bag over one shoulder, and he had the expression of somebody who'd heard a rumor and was surprised to find it was true. He was long, long legs, long neck, all of him built out of the 400, and even standing still he looked like a rubber band that had been pulled back and was about to spring across whatever open ground presented itself.
He'd taken the baton off Daniel two hundred times.
"Hey," she said.
"Keiko told me." He was still checking. "She told me, yeah." He looked at the shoes, and the bike rack, and the planter. "You're doing sprints."
"Yeah."
"How many?"
"Twelve."
He looked at her for a second, and whatever was on his face wasn't shock, and after a moment she placed it. It was interest. Flat, uncomplicated interest, the same look he'd give a new pair of spikes.
"Wow," he said.
Joy pulled the elastic out of her hair and put it back in, which was a thing she had started doing and hadn’t even realized until Nate pointed it out.
"Team's still pissed?"
"Team's still pissed."
"Oh."
"Bergen's not," Marco said. "For whatever that's worth."
"Well that’s something." Joy said, grasping for a silver lining.
"It's worth one guy." He shifted the bag on his shoulder. "You should—"
Behind him, somebody else had stopped walking.
Shorter than Marco, built through the shoulders, same sweats, same bag. Joy knew him before she got to his face, because she knew the way he stood, weight forward, always, like the gun was about to go.
Cole. Third leg. He, Daniel, and Marco had been a team, a well-oiled machine, and an hour after the roster update went out eleven days ago he'd been the one who put in the group chat: cool so I guess we just don't have a relay.
He hadn't worked it out yet. He was looking at Marco, waiting to be told what he was looking at.
Marco didn't turn around.
"Cole," he said. "It's Daniel."
Joy watched it happen. The look went down, and up, and stopped. And then his face did what Kevin's had done in reverse, straight past confusion into something cold and exact that had been waiting eleven days for somewhere to be.
"You have got to be kidding me," Cole said.