had loved the hot showers after a long run in a cold drizzle, had loved the mere act of running when someone else might not be disciplined enough to. She loved telling her body what it could do. Now, though, the rain depressed her, made her want to blow raspberries in boredom, as if it was somehow limiting her options.
* * *
The early storm roused a few kids in the foyer from sleep. Some tossed off sweatshirts or thin sheets that served as blankets and headed straight for the bathroom. Others grabbed towels—thin, quick-dry travel towels, which were the only ones that could be shoved through the windows—and shuffled upstairs toward the gymnasium locker rooms to shower before the morning rush.
Amira noticed Kenji was awake, too, scrolling through his phone, his eyes half-open but his glasses already on, cowlick as prominent as ever. He had earphones in, black, corded ones, not the lock-in earphones, which were in perfect working order but hardly anyone used anymore. It was as if the students had had the best possible experience with the earphones and didn’t want to sully the memory of the lock-in night party with everyday use. He spotted Amira and gave her a little wave, and only then did Amira allow herself to look back at Marisa.
She was chewing on her thumb and staring absently across the foyer, her eyes unfocused like Kenji’s before his improv scene with Peejay. Amira rose to her feet, her heart suddenly thumping so hard she felt it in her stomach, too.
“Morning run already?” Marisa asked, feeling ridiculous for the whine in her voice. Amira spent such a huge chunk of her day by Marisa’s side, she was entitled to time away, entitled to spend her mornings working off her considerable energy, working off the frustrations of being stuck in here because of Marisa.
Amira nodded and tried to smile, not sure why she was feeling hurt. The game—counting seconds and creating thresholds and rewards—was entirely in her head. She couldn’t be mad at Marisa for not following rules she didn’t know existed. She waved goodbye, then walked around the strewn, sleeping bodies toward the stairs, shaking her arms out and pretending to loosen her muscles.
Each morning she supposedly went to work out. To run, like she used to. To do yoga, play basketball, lift weights. This is what Marisa assumed, and Amira never corrected her. Instead, she went and sat in the gym and watched others do yoga and felt a deep and confusing anger at Marisa. Marisa, who had taken away from her all the training, had taken away her own version of protesting against her mother. Marisa, who had taken the decathlon away from her, and in its place left daydreams and butterflies, sweaty palms, tingles. Something even more complicated than what she had before. Amira had been in control of her body for so long, and in more ways than one Marisa had taken the control away from her. And Amira didn’t know which was louder: the anger, or the butterflies.
Her mother’s voice reverberated in her head: a girl could not.
* * *
Kenji hadn’t been sleeping well. He knew few people who’d been getting much sleep on the floor. Even Shmuli Rogers, who’d claimed dibs on the couch in the library, slept fitfully, waking up from dreams that he was late to class, and needing to pee every two hours. Kenji wasn’t doing himself any favors by listening to podcasts in the middle of the night or as soon as he woke up. He found himself focusing too much to fall back asleep once he’d done this, enthralled in that world he loved so much, often having to stifle his laughter so as not to wake others.
Which was better than the alternative: to not sleep, anyway, and to think of his father.
It felt inevitable, really, that he would have to be the one to call his father and tell him to cancel the construction project he’d been speaking about since they moved here. The whole reason they moved to this place, the whole reason Kenji lived in a world of lock-ins and Lindsay and “Yes, and...” Kenji would have to speak to his father and tell him to pull its plug.
Eventually, Marisa would figure out Arthur Pierce was in charge of the project, and he was Kenji’s father, and she would tell him to call. If she herself didn’t do it, the rest of the school would. They’d beg him to, they’d force