"...and then he said if he wins I don't try out, and I said fine but if I win you take it back, and he said Sunday at four."
Nate had not said anything for the whole conversation.
He had made a cup of the instant coffee he kept in a drawer and had not drunk any of it. He was sitting sideways in his desk chair with one arm over the back, which was his listening position, and he had let her get all the way through it without a single interruption, which was worse than interrupting.
"That's it," Joy said. "That's the whole thing."
"Take what back?"
"Some stupid story he told the team about me and a genie.”
Nate looked at her a second longer than he needed to, and then didn't ask the next question, which was worse than asking it.
"Okay," he said.
"You're doing it again."
"Doing what?"
"You're doing the thing where you don't say anything and I fill the silence with worse and worse explanations. The thing cops do."
"Is it working?"
"Well I feel interrogated if that’s what you’re asking."
Nate turned the cup around on the desk.
"So the way it works," he said, "is you win and he tells the team . And you lose and you can't try out in the spring. Which is worth what, exactly."
"A full ride senior year if I get lucky."
"But not this year?"
"Yeah I’m on my own for this year."
"So it's a maybe on the other hundred and fifty." He nodded slowly. "Of a quarter million."
"Some of the other hundred and fifty. It's not like the money's sitting there and I'm choosing not to take it. It's a maybe I'd have to earn in April against actual..."
"Joy."
"Yeah."
"You've been smiling since you walked in."
She stopped.
He wasn't accusing her of anything. That was the problem with Nate. He didn't have an angle, so there was nothing to read and nothing to work. He'd just noticed a thing and put it on the table between them, the way he'd have mentioned that a light was out.
"You got back from a run," he said, "and you told me you bet your tuition on a footrace, and you've had the same face the whole time you've been telling me. You had it when you came in the door. You've got it right now."
Joy put a hand on her cheek, which was stupid, and found that he was right, which was worse.
"Oh, weird," she said.
"Yeah."
"I hadn't..." She thought about it. "No. I hadn't noticed."
"I know." He picked up the coffee and finally drank some of it and made a face, because it hadn’t gotten any better with age. "Okay. What do you need?"
That was the other thing about Nate. He'd asked his question, he'd gotten his answer, and the answer had been I don't know, and that was apparently enough to move on with.
"A course," Joy said.
Nate nodded, as though this were a reasonable thing for a person to need at ten-thirty on a Friday night.
"Walk it however you want," he said. "Then give it to me and I'll measure it. Campus GIS is good to about a meter." He turned back to the desk. "I'm not lending you money for this. Or for the next one."
"There isn't a next one."
Nate didn't answer that, which was its own kind of answer.
She went out that night and walked the campus in the dark for two hours.
This was the part she was good at, and it had nothing to do with her legs.
It was the same thing she'd done at Kevin's table and at Ray's. You looked at what was actually in front of you and surveyed the battlefield as it were. Cole was a hundred-meter runner. That was a fact about him as solid as his height. It meant he was the fastest thing on this campus for about ten and a half seconds, and after that a wheezing mess. Still a fast wheezing mess though.
So. Not ten seconds. Everything else was negotiable.
She went down Bruin Walk first and timed it on her phone and stood at the bottom looking back up at it. Eight percent grade, near enough. He'd fly down that. So would she. No good to anybody.
She walked east along the flat past the med center and found it useless. Long, straight, open, the exact conditions under which Cole Vandermeer had been designed to beat people.
Then she came up on Janss Steps in the dark and stopped.
She'd run up them maybe four hundred times as Daniel, in sets, with Bergen at the top shouting splits, and they had been a specific kind of misery, the kind where your quads filled up with concrete somewhere around fifty and you finished the set by lying to yourself. An idea formed in her head and a trickster’s grin spread across her face.
She dashed up them.
She hadn't warmed up, hadn't stretched, and she still went up them two at a time and got to the top and stood here, barely breathing hard. Turning and looking back down the steps, her grin widened.
She went down and did them again to check. They’d never been this easy before, she was gliding up then with barely any effort.
Then she walked the rest of the course. By one-fifteen in the morning she had about a kilometer of campus in her head with four turns in it, one long flat opening where he would absolutely destroy her, and eighty-seven stairs at the end.
And it still wasn't enough.
She did the math sitting on a low wall by the fountain, and the math wasn’t telling her what she wanted to hear. A kilometer with stairs was a race she could lose. It was a better race than a hundred meters, which would not have so much been a race as it would have been public humiliation, but better was not the same as winnable, and Cole was not going to spend three minutes running badly just because she'd asked him to.
She needed a third thing.
She got up and walked the course again, and this time she didn't look at the ground.
She looked at the space above it.
Because the campus was empty. It was one in the morning and there was nobody on it, and that was not the campus the race was happening on. The race was happening at four o'clock on a Sunday afternoon, and she stood at the bottom of Bruin Walk and built the other version in her head: the Sunday version, with the tour groups coming up from the parking structure and a table of somebody's club with a banner on it and four people walking abreast because there was no reason not to. Bikes. Skateboards. Dogs and pigeons.
Cole was going to run a course.
Joy was going to run a room.
This is either very clever, she thought, or I've just designed a race where I lose in public. Could be both, but that was the fun part.
Marco was at the plaza at eight the next morning, which she had not asked him to be.
"You didn't text me," he said.
"I was going to."
Marco gave her a look that said he doubted that as he set the bag down. "What've you got?"
She told him. He listened the way Nate listened, except that halfway through he took out his phone and started looking at a map, and by the end of it he was nodding at the phone rather than at her.
"Kilometer," he said.
"Nate says a thousand and four."
"Three minutes and change for him, if he's honest. Probably four for you." He looked up. "That's forty seconds of him being ahead before anything you've built even starts. You know that."
"Yeah."
She did not tell him about Sunday. She wasn't sure why, except that it was hers, and she'd only had it for nine hours, and there was some part of her that wanted to see whether he'd find it on his own.
"You're not going to be able to see him by the time you're at the bottom of Bruin Walk."
"I know."
"And he's going to feel like he's won." Marco put the phone away, and there was something happening in his face that hadn't been there a minute ago. "Which means he's going to run the flat like a man who's winning."
"Yes," Joy said.
Marco looked at her for a second.
"Okay. Warm up."
"You went out hot."
"I know, I know."
"Then don't."
That was the whole coaching philosophy, and Joy accepted it, because he was right and because he wasn't telling her anything she didn't know. She'd have told him the same thing. The problem wasn't that she didn't understand pacing. The problem was that she could not feel it from inside, and there was no way to fix that except to have somebody standing outside her with a phone.
"You did it in a two hundred in Fresno," she said, on the recovery jog.
"I did it in a four hundred in Fresno and I was walking at eighty meters and Bergen made me watch the video." He didn't look over. "So now I know what it feels like. That's it. That's all I've got that you don't."
"Well I guess that’s something."
"Barely." He checked his phone. "Again."
What they did, for the next two hours, was find the number.
The number was eighty five. Four hundred meters in eighty five seconds, the pace that, held for a kilometer of flat, would leave her enough for eighty-seven stairs at the end, if Marco's math was right. For a sprinter it was an insult. Eighty-five felt like jogging for the first hundred meters and like a bad joke for the next two, and every rep her legs tried to spend the first fifty in seven seconds, because as far as her legs were concerned that was what legs were for.
She ran four-hundreds on the practice run and he stood at the line and said a time when she came through, and then sent her back out with less rest than she thought was reasonable. She hated the third one. She hated Marco personally by the fifth. He didn't tell her to go faster or slower; he just said the number, and she'd go out and try to feel where that number lived, and come through and find out she'd been wrong by two seconds, and go again.
Somewhere around the eighth one it stopped being wrong.
She came through, and he said, "Eighty-five." She went again. "Eighty-five."
"Huh," Marco said.
She did ten.
On the tenth he stopped the phone and looked at it and then turned it around and held it out to her, and she read the column, and the last one was two seconds off the first.
Two seconds. Ten reps, thirty seconds rest, and the whole set had drifted by two seconds.
She handed the phone back.
"Woah...that’s…" She stopped, because she wasn't sure how to finish it without sounding like she was bragging, and because Marco had done this exact same drill too and knew exactly what this meant..
"Yeah," Marco said, "You know what Bergen would say if he saw that?"
"He'd say the phone's wrong."
"Yup, and then he'd check the phone, and then he'd get very quiet." Marco put it in his pocket. He was looking at the field. "You had the speed. You already had the speed, you've had it since high school, and now you've got that." He moved a hand at the column that wasn't visible anymore. "Both of them. In one person."
"Is that bad?"
"It's not fair," Marco said, and there was nothing underneath it, which somehow made it land harder.
He was still looking at the stretch she’d been running down.
"I've been at forty-seven three since March," he said. "Open four. Forty-seven three at Fresno. Forty-seven three at conference. Forty-seven four in June, and that one was windy. I've done this workout, this exact workout, probably fifty times since March, looking for three tenths." He held up a thumb and finger, almost touching. "Three tenths. And you just..." He stopped. "It's not anything. It's just not fair."
Joy opened her mouth.
There were eight things she could have said, and she could see every one of them, the funny one, the modest one, the one that would have gotten him to laugh. The little voice in the back of her head that seemed to be getting louder by the day told her that shutting up with the right play here.
She closed it again.
Marco picked up his bag.
"Come back at four," he said. "Bring the shoes. We're doing Janss. And forget the number on the stairs. Nobody holds a pace on stairs. On the stairs you hold the feeling. We're going to find out how long you can do that, because that's the only question that actually matters, and neither of us knows the answer."
Keiko had a betting pool by Saturday afternoon.
"It's not a betting pool!" She protested
"Then what would you call it."
"I’m just helping organize the wagers people want to make on your race!" Keiko turned her phone around so Joy couldn't see it, which was a confession. "Twenty-two people so far. Derek's in for forty, which I think is more than Derek has. Marcus wants to know if he can bet on the course instead of the runner. Best guess he thinks you’re both going to wind up tripping and breaking something."
"It means he thinks I'm cheating."
"Yeah, probably."
"What's the line?"
The cringe that crossed Keiko’s face told Joy most of the story.
"Nobody's taking you," Keiko said apologetically. "Like, nobody, Joy. Zane put five on you and then asked me what he was donating to."
Joy sat with that for a second and found that the only thing she actually felt about it was an urgent and specific desire to get a piece of the action, which she could not do, because she had $61 to her name after the shopping trip and a Thursday game in Culver City with a two-hundred-dollar buy-in that she was going to have to text Theo about.
"How much would forty pay," she said.
"Joy."
"Hypothetically."
"You are not betting on yourself, you already bet on yourself, you bet the entire thing on yourself..."
"Yeah, but I don't get anything if I win. I get Cole to confess to a lie he spread in the first place." Joy heard it come out of her mouth and thought, distantly, that it had sounded better in her head. "That's not a payout. That's just going back to normal."
Keiko looked at her the way Tiffany looked at a strap.
"You are completely nuts, girl."
"Yeah, I think I’m becoming increasingly aware of that."
She gave Cole the course on Saturday night, outside the weight room, with Marco standing about ten feet away pretending to be on his phone.
He read it twice.
She watched him get it. It took about four seconds, which was faster than she'd expected and made her respect him slightly more than she'd intended to. His eyes went to kilometer and stopped, and then went to Janss and stopped again, and then he did the thing with his mouth.
"What is this bullshit?" he said.
"Start line, finish line, somebody says go. On campus. Checks all the boxes."
"You've got some kind of trick planned, don't you."
"Nah. If I did that there'd be tunnels painted onto walls and an anvil on a rope."
Cole shot her a glare over the top of the paper.
"So say no," Marco said, to his phone.
"Shut up, Marco."
"Say no. She's telling you to say no. She's standing right there telling you..."
"Shut up, Marco," Cole and Joy said in unison, and then both pretended they hadn't.
Nobody said anything for a moment. Two guys came out of the weight room, nodded at Cole, and made a very clear effort to pretend Joy wasn't there.
Cole folded the paper in half, and then in half again, and put it in his pocket.
"Four o'clock," he said.
"Four o'clock."
"It's always a game with you, isn't it." He wasn't quite looking at her. "Fine. I'll play. And when I've kicked your ass, you and I are both going to know exactly who the better runner is."
Joy gave him a sweet smile.
"And when I win, I get treated to a classic Cole excuse."
Cole opened his mouth, closed it, and went back into the weight room.
Marco put his phone away and came over and stood next to her and they both watched the door swing shut.
"He's going to run the flat like it's a hundred," Marco said.
"I know."
"Unless he doesn't."
Joy looked at him.
"He read that sheet in four seconds. You saw him." Marco shrugged. "He's dumb about lizards. He's not dumb about running."
Joy thought about that, and didn't like it, and found that she liked not liking it.
Marco shook his head slowly, and it took Joy a second to work out that the expression on his face was the one he'd had in the plaza, the first time, looking at a girl doing her twelfth sprint.
"Four o'clock," he said. "I'll bring a stopwatch."