By 4:00 there were sixty people in Dogwood plaza, which was fifty-eight more than Joy had planned on.
"How did this happen?" Joy said, frowning at the audience.
"I told some people," Keiko said.
"Since when do you ever only tell some people?"
"I told people, they told people. That's different!" Keiko was standing on the low wall by the bike rack with her phone out, taking money, which she had been doing for forty minutes. "Also I may have put it in three group chats."
The whole dorm floor had come down. The gang was all here: Derek and Alex, Kevin and Marcus, a girl from the fourth floor whose name Joy had never learned and who had brought a folding chair. Tiffany had been in the front looking like a deer in the headlights, which was Tiffany's version of enthusiasm, until she'd left to walk the long way around to the top of Janss, because Tiffany did not trust anyone else to stand at a finish line. Zane was sitting on the planter with a thermos and had been staring at a pelican circling on an updraft overhead for the past ten minutes.
And down at the far end of the plaza, in team sweats, were eight guys from the track team.
They had not come over. They'd arrived in a group about ten minutes ago and positioned themselves as a group, and they were standing there being a group, and not one of them had looked at her for longer than it took to look away. Except Ade, maybe. Ade looked about half a second longer than the rest, and then found something to do with his shoelace.
Joy felt a small flash of anger at this and took a step towards them.
"Don't," Marco said, beside her.
"I wasn't."
"You were about to go over there."
"I was considering my options."
"They're here." He gave them a sidelong glance. "You know what that means."
Joy did.
Cole was at the start line stretching his calves in a way that suggested he was taking this about as seriously as a casual practice lap. He had his singlet on. Not the team one. An old one, high school, faded, and Joy looked at it a second longer than she meant to.
"Ground rules," Keiko announced, to everybody, from the wall.
"Keiko..."
"Ground rules.” She continued in a sing-song voice, “One: we’ve mapped out the course, the course is marked, Nate's got copies..."
Nate, at the edge of the crowd, held up four sheets of paper without looking up from his phone.
"Two: no interference, if you interfere I know where most of you sleep and can find out the rest. Three: Marcus has a bike and he's going to try to follow them, and I want to be clear that this is not sanctioned and if he dies it's on him."
"It's a bike," Marcus said, and was met with a good deal of commentary on his physical fitness from the rest of the floor.
"Four: finish is the top of Janss. Tiffany's up there, Tiffany has the phone, Tiffany's ruling is final."
"Why does Tiffany..." Joy began.
"Joy. Picture what would happen to Tiffany if she tried to tell a lie."
The image that arrived was of the night Joy had been too tired to think straight and had attempted to hard-boil an egg in the microwave without water.
"Ah."
Joy walked to the line.
She put a toe on the seam in the concrete they'd agreed on and shook out her hands and looked down the plaza at the two hundred flat meters between here and the top of Bruin Walk, and had one clear, cold thought, which was:
Everything I need is in the last four hundred. Nothing before that matters. Don't let it matter.
"Hey," Cole said.
She looked over.
"Do me a favor," he said, to the middle distance. "Don't ham it up with tears when this is over."
"No promises." She could feel her grin spreading and did nothing about it. "Depends how good your excuse is this time. I’m absolutely laughing myself to tears if it’s as good as the laundry one."
"That machine was..."
"The machine was fine, Cole."
"That machine was running a heavy cycle and Marco's was on normal and nobody wants to talk about it..."
"See, just like that!" Joy said as she tried and failed to suppress a giggle.
Cole stopped. Something happened at the corner of his mouth, and he shook his head, and set his feet.
Joy set hers, and couldn’t hide the smile. That trash talk was the closest thing to a normal conversation they’d had since she’d changed.
Ten feet back, Marco was watching the two of them with his normal impassive expression.
Keiko raised her arm.
Sixty people went quiet, which was not a thing Joy had experienced in the plaza during daylight hours, and the hum arrived so hard and so fast that she nearly missed the start.
"GO."
He was gone.
That was the only word for it. There was a start line and there was Cole and then there was a Cole-shaped absence and a person twenty meters up the plaza already at full speed, and the noise the crowd made was not a cheer, it was the sound sixty people make when they see something that fast up close.
Joy ran her number.
It was the hardest thing she had ever done in her life.
Every single part of her wanted to chase. Every instinct she had from years of being a sprinter was screaming that she was losing, that the gap was opening, that you close a gap when it opens. Marco's voice was in her head saying you go out hot and he'll be eating a sandwich at the top, and she held the number. She held it down the plaza with the crowd on both sides going past in a smear. She held it at the top of Bruin Walk when she could see him forty meters below her.
Forty meters. Two hundred into a thousand and he had forty meters.
That’s fine. He’s playing my game, I’m not playing his.
Bruin Walk was two hundred and fifty meters of eight percent downhill and it was where you found out what people were made of. Cole flew down it. Of course he did. But so did she, because going downhill fast isn't strength, it's nerve, it's the willingness to let your legs go somewhere in front of you and trust that they'll be there, and Joy discovered somewhere around halfway down that her legs would be there.
She took back four meters. Maybe five.
He didn't notice. She was almost certain he didn't notice, because at the bottom of Bruin Walk he did the thing she had been counting on since one-fifteen on Saturday morning.
He looked back.
You never look back. Bergen used to fine them a lap for it. You look back and you turn your shoulders and you lose a tenth, and you do it because you want to know how far ahead you are, and you only want to know that if you think you've already won.
Cole looked back, saw a girl thirty-five meters behind him, and eased.
Not much. Enough. His shoulders came down half an inch and his arms went loose, and he ran the start of the flat like a man jogging to his car, and Joy put her head down and took it back, past the fountain, past the student store, meter by meter, until she could hear his feet.
Then he looked back again.
It was a different look. She was close enough to see the look on his face this time, and if he’d been confident before, he wasn’t now. But she knew Cole and knew he wasn’t stupid. She saw him do the math.
Cole didn't speed up. That was the terrible part. A dumber man would have panicked and burned everything on the flat and died at the bottom of Janss, exactly on schedule. Cole settled. His stride shortened. He started running at something that looked a great deal like a number of his own, and the gap stopped closing, and Joy understood, with a sick bright lurch, that he was saving his legs for her stairs.
Her plan had about two hundred meters left to live.
So she stopped running the plan and started playing the room.
The room as it were, had played right into her hands as they entered Bruin Plaza.
She'd predicted the tour group. There was a tour group: twenty prospective students and a sophomore walking backwards with a clipboard, strung across the whole path just past Ackerman. She had not predicted that Bruin Plate had let out, or a folding table under a banner for something called SUSTAINABLE FUTURES WEEK, or a woman with a stroller, or three guys with a cooler.
In short, it was chaos, and it was exactly what Joy had been hoping for,
Cole went around all of it. He went around the tour group in a wide clean arc and around the table on the grass side, and he gave the woman with the stroller a good three meters, because Cole Vandermeer, whatever else he was, did not run through people.
Joy ran through everything else.
She went through the tour group like a woman getting on a subway, saying "excuse me, sorry, sorry," and came out the other side with her stride intact. She hopped the low planter on the inside of the turn, both feet. She went under the banner, which was an inch or two lower than she'd estimated, and did not slow down to duck, and a stack of flyers went up behind her like pigeons.
She could see the back of his neck. Then his shoulder blades. Then the sweat soaking through the old high school singlet.
Behind her the crowd had turned into a thing: forty people running down Bruin Walk trying to follow, Marcus on a bike, Keiko screaming something in two languages.
And then the campus produced a delivery cart.
It came out of the service door by the loading bay at precisely the wrong moment, a flatbed electric thing stacked with catering trays, and stopped across the path with the driver halfway out of his seat. Cole went wide around the front of it. That was six meters of arc she did not have.
But there was a gap at the back, between the tailgate and the hedge, about a body wide, and she'd already picked it, she was already leaning into it, when the woman with the stroller stepped into it from the other side.
The woman was looking at her phone. The stroller went first.
There was a retaining wall on Joy's left. Knee height with a flat top running along the hedge.
She did not remember deciding. She was simply on it. Two strides along the top, the world a foot higher than it had been, and then she leapt. It felt impossibly easy. She’d done hurdles before and knew the effort those took, but now she simply vaulted off the wall like she weighed nothing. She flew, the stroller passing underneath her with a baby in it who looked up at her with total calm. The landing was bad. Her right foot came down on the lip of the curb and her ankle responded with a hot flash of pain, and she was sideways for a step and a half with her arms out, and then she wasn't.
He was a bus-length ahead. Her ankle was sending urgent signals, and the crowd noise behind her had gone strange and high.
And the hum, she noticed, was enormous.
The Janss Steps were eighty-seven steps up from the lower campus to the quad, and they were forty meters wide, and there were about a dozen people sitting on them in the afternoon sun.
Cole hit them with her right on his heels.
Joy hit them moments after he did, and somewhere in the first four steps she saw it. Not the end, not yet. A door, standing slightly open.
Cole weighed a hundred and eighty-five pounds and every one of them was built to move horizontally, and he was the better part of a kilometer past the distance his body had been designed for. Being smart on the flat had bought him something, but it had not bought him this. He was at step fifteen and his knees were coming up late.
Joy went past him at forty-one.
She did not do it dramatically. There was no surge. She went up two at a time. Not at the number, nobody held a number on stairs, but at the feeling Marco had spent Saturday afternoon drilling into her on these exact steps, the one she'd been holding for four minutes and could have held for four more, ankle and all. She came past his shoulder and he made a sound.
Then Cole found something.
That was the part she didn't expect and would think about for a long time afterward. Somewhere around step sixty, with nothing left, Cole Vandermeer found his second wind, and she heard him coming, and at step seventy he was at her hip.
They went up the last seventeen steps together.
She had six inches on him at the top, and six inches across the flat stone of the quad, and Tiffany was standing at the finish with her phone up and her mouth open, and then Joy had no idea where Cole was at all, because every strand of her had narrowed down to pushing just a little bit harder. She went past Tiffany. She went across the small plaza. She discovered, far too late, that she had no plan whatsoever for stopping.
A bench and the shrub behind it handled it for her.
Bent over the bench with her head half buried in the hedge, she heard Tiffany's voice from somewhere behind her.
"Joy wins!"
It took a while for anybody else to get there.
That was the thing about the course. The crowd had to come up the steps too, and most of them were not in any condition for it. So for about ninety seconds it was Joy and Cole and Tiffany at the top of Janss. Tiffany was yelling something, but Joy couldn’t hear it over her own heart beat and gasping for breath.
Gingerly, she picked herself out of the hedge, pulled some leaves and sticks out of her hair, and walked in a small circle with her hands on her head. Her ankle really hurt now, but she ignored it.
Cole had made it four steps past the line and gone down on all fours, and he stayed there a while before rolling onto his back and putting his arms out.
"The wall," he said, eventually.
"Yeah."
"Who does that."
"There was a stroller."
"I saw the stroller, I went around the..." He stopped, because talking was expensive. He breathed for a while. "Eighty-seven stairs."
"Yup."
"You counted them."
"Of course I did."
"This course is bullshit," Cole said, to the sky.
"Oh yeah."
"It's completely fair and it's bullshit and I read it and I said yes to it."
"Mmhmm."
He got an elbow under himself and sat up, which took a couple of tries, and looked at her with his face still the color of a brick.
"You beat me," he said.
And Joy, who had spent the whole walk out of the hedge half-composing her answer to whatever excuse was coming, who knew exactly what a Cole excuse sounded like and had been promised a good one, opened her mouth.
"No. I'm saying it, and I'm saying it in the right order. You beat me. On your course, which you picked because you knew." He waved a hand, still breathing hard. "And I read it, and I saw it, and I said yes anyway. That's the annoying part. Not the running."
Joy closed her mouth.
"I know," she said.
"Over a hundred, I'd have you by seven meters."
"Six."
"Seven."
"You wish.”
And then, for a little while, neither of them said anything, and Joy stood at the top of eighty-seven stairs above the whole of campus with her ankle throbbing and her heart going and a man who'd been furious with her on Friday sitting on the grass next to her, and everything was, briefly, completely fine.
That was when the golf cart came around the corner of Royce Hall.
It was white with a stripe and it had a light bar on it and a very uptight young man in a polo shirt behind the wheel. He had the look of somebody who had been trying to catch up to them, had been thwarted by the terrain of Joy’s course multiple times, and had plenty of time to get more and more upset with them as he did so.
"Oh," Joy said. "Right. Campus Security."