Beyond the Point(9)
“Great job at practice today, Mandy,” Avery said to one of the more promising freshmen. “I liked that little behind-the-back pass you did.”
Mandy quickened her pace to catch up to Avery’s side. “Thanks. Hey . . . I was going to ask, are you going to Kevin’s tomorrow night?”
Avery walked with her chin up, blond hair glistening with sweat. She knew instinctively that Mandy Hightower wasn’t looking for information; she was looking for an invitation.
“Doubt it,” Avery replied flippantly.
She reached for the keys in her backpack before remembering with a surge of anger that they weren’t there, and wouldn’t be for another week. In a rare feat of parenting, her father had grounded Avery from driving—for what she wasn’t quite certain. It wasn’t like she was the one who’d been arrested. As she made her way across the parking lot, Mandy followed, hoping, Avery assumed, for the invitation that wasn’t going to come.
“I’ve got a shit-ton of homework this weekend, Mandy,” she said by way of explanation, “and nothing good happens at those—” She was going to say parties, but at that same moment, she noticed a dark and hulking figure standing in the middle of the parking lot. So instead she said, “Shit.”
Following Avery’s gaze, Mandy’s eyes filled with concern. Standing on the passenger side of Avery’s black Honda Civic, a short and stocky man waited with his arms crossed over his chest.
“Who’s that?” Mandy asked. “He’s hot.”
With a sigh, Avery shifted the backpack on her shoulder and started walking faster toward her car. “That’s my dad.”
“Oh. Well, call me. Maybe we could go to Kevin’s together on Saturday!”
When she reached her car, Avery rolled her eyes.
“You don’t have to make such a scene, Dad.”
Avoiding her father’s gaze, she threw her backpack in the backseat and reached for the handle of the passenger-side door.
“Ah, ah, ah!” he said. “We had a deal.”
Next to each other, Hank and Avery looked nothing alike. Avery was ethereal and glowing, her father earthen and rugged. But they shared a competitive spirit, or a persistent stubbornness. And any time Avery reached a goal Hank set for her, he raised the bar higher.
“We never had a deal,” she said. “You had a deal.”
Starting Avery’s freshman year, Hank had driven up to the school like all the other parents, pretending to pick his daughter up from basketball practice. But instead, he’d instruct her to throw her backpack in the back of his car, start a timer, and send her on the three-mile run home. Each day she tried to beat the previous day’s time. He’d presented it as a game—a way for Avery to work on her endurance.
Within a few months of starting high school, Avery could run a six-minute mile without breaking much of a sweat. Her father’s mantra rang through her head as she ran: The only way to run faster is to run faster. In four years, Avery had learned that she could outrun just about anything. She could outrun her teammates. She could outrun the competition from other schools. She could even run the insecurities right out of her head, if she was willing to go hard enough. It was easy to be confident when you were faster than the boys.
The game had ended last year, when she’d started driving herself to school. But now, here he was, looking at the watch on his wrist. “You better get going. Clock’s started.”
“Dad,” Avery said, her voice sounding desperate. “Coach made us do thirteen suicides at the end of practice. I can’t.”
Hank laughed out loud. “This from the girl who applied to West Point? It’s hard enough to imagine you with a gun, Ave. But you gonna say ‘I can’t’ when they hand you a fifty-pound rucksack and say go?” His tone turned dark. “You’ve gotta get serious.”
Staring at his dark features, Avery knew suddenly why he was here. This wasn’t about her future in Division I basketball, or even the long-shot application she’d mailed to West Point six months earlier, which he was now apparently using against her. This was about Caleb.
The parking lot cleared of cars, leaving rectangular imprints outlined with dirty snow. Avery stood in silence until she realized her father wasn’t going to back down.
“I’ll be in counseling someday talking about how you made me run three miles home every day like a maniac.”
“Nah.” He waved a hand through the air. “You love it.” He unlocked the door of his daughter’s car and jumped inside, immediately starting the engine and the heat. His hands slapped together, rubbing out the cold. “Better get moving.”
“Hold your horses!” She pulled off her sweaty jersey, grabbed a dirty long-sleeved fleece from the backseat of her car, and yanked it over her head with force. Then, shooting her father a murderous look and a middle finger, she took off running.
Fury drove her legs over and over again against the cold. Tucking her fingers into the sleeves of her shirt, Avery pushed the pace. From her high school to their home was exactly 3.4 miles. She’d measured it at least ten times with her car odometer, hoping it would get shorter, which it never did. Wind whipped over her ears and eyes, giving her a slight headache. Note to self, Avery thought as she hit her stride, tomorrow, pack a hat.
Once her breathing steadied, she settled into a rhythm. That was the sole benefit of these long runs: they provided time alone, time to clear out the clutter in her mind.