The Love That Split the World(19)
“What’s happening to me?” I whisper to the empty room.
The clock above the doors reads 4:34 A.M. The library is too dark, too quiet. I’d take the sleeping buffalo over this any day. For a few minutes, I just turn circles, waiting for everyone to snap back into place. Eventually, though, I’m too anxious to sit still any longer. I need to think. I need to figure out what’s going on. I grab my duffel bag and dig through it. Megan had planned on running this morning around six, and I’d brought a sports bra, shorts, and running shoes on the off chance she could convince me to get up with her. Good sleep is so rare for me that, when it comes, it trumps everything. Especially early morning exercise.
I dress as quickly as I can, conscious the whole time that the building could disappear or the people in it could reappear without any notice. Then I slip into the hallway and wander through its emptiness, my footsteps echoing. The front doors are locked from the inside, but Officer Delvin is nowhere in sight, and, squinting through the darkness, I see the parking lot’s empty too. I let myself out, prop open the door with a stopper, and sweep my hair up into a ponytail as I make my way across the asphalt. At the edge of the lot, I break into a jog and turn down the sidewalk toward the football stadium and field houses, momentum carrying me fast past them to the intersecting street beyond. I don’t know where I’m going—whether I’m going to run the six miles home or turn back to the school at some point—but moving has always let me get out of my head a little bit, and when I return, it’s usually clearer.
Dance used to do that for me too: a place where there was nothing to do but be me and let everything else fall away. For a lot of the girls on the team, it was all about the performance, but for me, I think it was always about communication. I know I was supposedly too young to remember those tantrums Dad brought up the other day, but I do. I remember feeling like my throat was closing up. I remember feelings so big and unnamable that all I could do was cry, or sometimes scream. The smallest thing could set me off, anything I thought was unfair or intimidating. When I was a little bit older, I remember fighting to hold those unfocused emotions inside, and sometimes feeling so aimlessly frustrated that I’d shriek into my pillow at night. And then I remember taking my first dance class, a ballet-inspired workshop for kindergarteners, and how everything changed.
For one hour each week, I’d toddle around in a ruffly black leotard and pink tights, skipping across the floor in pre-chassés, spinning around in preludes to cha?nés. We imitated animals and growing trees and whirlybirds falling from branches, pantomimed holding beach balls and swimming. We made ourselves as big as we could, and then as small as possible.
But most of all, I remember the great bodily relief I felt as I sank into the passenger seat on the drive home after my first class. I felt empty, in a good way. Like the things I couldn’t find words for had found a way out, and now I could relax. Now I could enjoy the warm, cozy silence between me and Mom.
Probably my favorite thing about that class, and dance in general, was seeing the way the same movements could look so different when performed by different bodies. When I joined the dance team in middle school, I learned how to manipulate my natural inclinations so that I could be exactly in sync with everyone else, but when I lost Grandmother, my talent for blending in began to make me sick. It felt more like hiding than syncing.
As I run, I pass through the fog of memory and back into the sweltering heat and still-dark morning, turning right along the white fence lining Matt’s family’s property and picking up my pace. As my limbs loosen, my muscles heat, my heart rate increases, and my mind slips into its sweet spot: the unequaled silent peace you get from exercise. Somehow I skip the horrible middle part of any workout when my body’s usually screaming and my mind can’t stop repeating I hate this, this sucks, I hate this, and dive straight into the nirvana of being soaked in sweat. Unbothered by the thick clouds of mosquitoes riding the grass around my ankles. Moved by the intense thumbnail of sunrise visible beyond the hills.
I run across the tumbling fields, down to the Kincaids’ big white farmhouse and their junky rental property adjacent, then turn and start climbing back toward the stadium and track as the sun crests the trees. The gates are locked, but I climb the chain-link fence pretty easily and make my way down the bleachers toward the field just as the world—my world—is bathed in rosy light. Except it’s not just my world anymore. Someone else is down there, running on the track.
I lean out over the railing and watch the boy circling the field. He’s tall and broad but fast, too—a football player for sure, I’d guess a running back. At the far end of the field, he curves around the track, and I feel myself smiling involuntarily when he notices me.
“What are you doing, sweating all over my track?” I shout down to him.
He comes to a stop in front of me, resting his hands on his hips as he catches his breath. “Well, nice to see you too, Natalie Cleary.”
7
“Do you live around here?” I ask.
He walks forward to the bleachers and reaches his hands up through the chain link separating me from him. His white T-shirt is worn out and horribly mud-and grass-stained, the sleeves cut off to reveal long stripes of tan skin on either side of his rib cage and stomach. “Not too far,” he says. “What about you?”
“Down off Wetherington,” I tell him. He nods but doesn’t say anything, and his smile is unnerving. I nudge the fencing with my foot. “What’s that look for?”