“I can lend you one of my brother’s bikes, Sean,” Claire said.
I choked on the water I’d just sipped and tried not to laugh.
Sean focused a slightly deranged look at Claire. “You think I said no because I don’t have a bike?”
Claire’s eyebrows drew together, as if she couldn’t imagine another reason for him to object.
I reached out to tap Claire’s calf. “Offer to loan him a bike again.”
Sean half bent to rest his hands on his knees and started laughing. It still caught me off guard when he let go so completely like that. I both envied and resented him for it.
“I’m just trying to make you a better athlete,” Claire said. “Trust me, the other guys are training like this.”
“Other guys?” Sean straightened up and gestured his arms around the track. It was empty apart from a pair of silver-haired ladies power-walking in matching purple sweat suits. One of them appeared to be listening to a Walkman. “Who are you talking about?”
Just then the duo walked past and we all stopped to wave.
“Look, I know this doesn’t mean as much to you—either of you—as it does to me.” Claire glanced in my direction. “But I know we can be better. I can be better.”
Sean’s irritation slipped away as he moved to stand in front of her. “In case you haven’t noticed, Claire, you’re already awesome. I mean, look at you. You’ve worked really hard to get healthy and you’re doing great—”
She was. It was more than all the weight she’d lost. Claire thrived on working out.
“Jill and I look like The Walking Dead after running—”
“Thanks,” I said.
“—but you, you barely get winded. Maybe you can do more, bleachers and biking and all that, but this is my limit. Neither the flesh nor the spirit are willing.” That earned him a small smile. “Hey, you need to do more? Go for it. But, Claire, and hear me when I say this...” Sean lightly gripped her shoulders and widened his stance so she wouldn’t have to look up to meet his eyes. “I will never, never, run those bleachers with you.”
Another smile, slightly bigger than the one before it, crossed Claire’s face. “Yeah, I guess. I mean, I didn’t really expect you guys to agree.”
“This is just me talking. Jill is probably totally up for it.”
They both looked at me and I froze, a water bottle halfway to my mouth. Sean winked.
“What? No, my flesh is way weaker than his.”
Claire spent our first mile once we moved on to the canals trying to convince me, but fortunately I had the perfect thing to distract her.
Sprinting ahead, I turned to jog backward so I could face them both. “I committed an act of vandalism last night that heroically ended a fight between my new neighbors.” I relayed what happened, omitting the mom’s more violent outbursts. I wouldn’t have wanted those details shared if they were about me.
“Were you scared?” Claire asked.
“Well, yeah, that’s why I threw the can.”
Claire matched her pace to mine, letting me face forward again while Sean hung a few strides behind us. “I mean when he caught you. A potential criminal goes psycho on a...a...”
“Shed.”
“—and then turns on you? I’d be scared.”
Sean came up along my other side, close enough that our arms brushed a few times. “Claire, you get scared watching animated kid movies with your brothers,” he said.
I shot him a tentative smile while pressing closer to Claire. “Besides, he wasn’t the scary one. He was...normal, nice. He wouldn’t even let me pay for the window.”
Claire had tried and failed to defend herself on the movie front several times, and wisely chose not to renew her case. Instead she said something equally asinine. “Are you sure you’re not maybe overidentifying with him because of your mom?”
I came to a sudden halt. So did Sean. I bent forward, resting my hands on my knees and panting while sweat dripped into my eyes, making them sting. All my physical responses were eerily similar to that last night I saw Mom. I looked at Sean, and that immediately made it worse.
Claire stopped several feet away and turned back to us with wide eyes. “That came out wrong. I just meant maybe—”
“Seriously, Claire?” Sean shook his head, and then placed a hand on my back.
“Don’t.” My voice came out harsher than I’d intended, but it wiped the sympathetic look off Sean’s face, so I didn’t regret it. How could he, of all people, look at me like that?
Claire walked back to us, slowly, hesitantly. Unlike me, she was barely out of breath. “I’m sorry. I completely turned off my friend brain.”
“Yeah, you did.”
Claire’s stepdad was a psychiatrist and she used to spout analytical stuff like that constantly. It got so bad that we came up with our own way of identifying it, “turning off her friend brain.” She’d gotten a lot better about it but still sometimes slipped. Her psychoanalyzing me was usually only mildly irritating or something I could tease her about, but when it involved my mom...it was a lot harder to shrug off.
“For the record, I’m not identifying with him because of my mom. I saw something I could fix, so I did, okay?”
Claire was quick to nod. “Okay.”
“Is your friend brain back on?”
“Yes, super on.”
“Then let’s go.”
The last mile was awkward, but by the time I collapsed on the grass back at the school, I was too tired to care.
Claire cared. She made me promise we’d hang out that night.
“I want to run again after dinner, but I’m free after.” She picked up her water bottle and started jogging backward toward her mom’s minivan. “Call me when you get off work.”
I shot up, hoping she’d see the panic in my eyes at the thought of being left alone with Sean, but her back was already toward me. I could call out, but that would only draw more attention to the situation.
From the corner of my eye I could see Sean lying in the grass a couple feet away with an arm thrown over his eyes. I felt a strong urge to slink away, and also the urge to reach out. The conflicting impulses were not mixing well with the remains of Claire’s energy drink, and there was a good long minute where I could have thrown up.
I decided it was because of the running.
Just as I became moderately sure I wasn’t going to vomit, Sean sat up and tugged me to my feet.
“Come on, I won’t be able to sleep until Claire’s energy drink wears off. Let me give you a ride.”
And because my father didn’t raise a coward, I said, “Okay.”
The walk to Sean’s Jetta felt like my own green mile. The idea of being alone with him in a car with barely two feet between us brought my nausea trickling back. We hadn’t done that yet—been alone.
I cast Sean a furtive look while unlocking my bike, trying to ascertain if he was as uneasy about the prospect as I was. But after one fleeting expression, he took my freed bike and started walking it to his car, defaulting to an easy tirade on the evils of running while we wrangled my Schwinn into the backseat of his Jetta. We knew from