tap, where she and her mother left their pots to hold their positions in the queue as they talked to friends. At least he didn’t try to talk to her.
She felt separate from the world. It wasn’t a new feeling; it had been there for a while. While other girls her age smiled at their distorted reflections in glass windows, her own body had become so strange to her that she could barely glance at it as she poured a mug of cold water over herself in one of the dark washrooms at the toilet complex. Her friends considered the sprouting of breasts and the wearing of bras exotic, but to her, the arrival of periods and the accompanying cramps only signalled the end of even more freedoms. The months her mother couldn’t afford to buy pads, she had to use folded cloth from which it was impossible to scrub out the stench of blood.
These days she had to worry about bloodstains on her clothes, and the boys (even the boys who trained with Coach in the mornings) leering at her as she ran. Coach was always chasing them off, but the boys managed to scale a wall or a tree to take videos of her and the other girls with their phones, zooming in on their breasts, which were (truth be told) barely there. The videos were then shared across school, and the boys ranked the girls according to their physical attributes and scrawled their ratings (Five-star! Three-star! One-star! ) on bathroom walls for everyone to see.
Runu lifted her bag strap where it was cutting into her shoulder. She never showed that she cared about the boys’ rankings, but they preyed on her mind sometimes. Why was she three stars and not four like Jhanvi or even five like Mitali? Why was Tara a two when she looked like she could be Miss Universe? On the days they scribbled the latest rankings, the boys approached her and Tara, as if they thought the odds of the girls agreeing to an outing were the highest on the days their confidence was the lowest. Pravin’s devotion to her, strangely enough, remained unwavering in the face of such graffiti.
Runu had no dreams of falling in love, not with Pravin, not with the seniors who styled themselves after film heroes; and certainly not with Quarter the gangster, whose eyes stalked any girl in his vicinity. She didn’t want romance. All she cared about was getting onto a podium and lowering her head to receive a gold medal. (National? State? District? Something.) But right now, she was a not-good-enough daughter to her parents and, someday, she would be a not-good-enough wife to a strange man. Without a place on the school’s athletics team, this was who she was now and who she could be in the future, though future itself seemed like a mere possibility, a slit in the smog that suggested sunshine but not really.
“Isn’t it training time for girls now?” Pravin asked, having walked around the pillar to speak to her at last. He pointed his nose toward a corner of the playground where Coach was smoothing the ground with the tips of his scuffed canvas shoes. She practiced in this playground dotted with penguin bins and see-saws and slides, and she was still faster than most students who went to private schools. Her speed made her special. Without it, she would be nothing, an unperson. The thought felt to her like a hand parting her ribs. Her chest ached wildly, her head throbbed.
“You aren’t feeling well?” Pravin asked, his voice frail, as if he couldn’t believe he was talking to her.
She pressed her back against the pillar, watched the other girls in the team—Harini would never be as fast as her—nodding to Coach’s instructions. Runu drew a sharp breath. The image in front of her curved and collapsed in on itself. Pravin put his hand on her shoulder, above her bag’s strap.
“Runu, Runu.”
His voice shook off the sleepiness that warped her vision. She shrugged off his hand, twisting her mouth. “Don’t touch me,” she said.
“You almost fainted,” he said, the pustules on his face turning redder.
“Leave me alone,” she said and sprinted to the playground.
Coach nodded at her and said, “Knew you couldn’t keep away.”
“I’m not here,” she said, and just saying that made her want to cry.
“I don’t like anybody watching my team train,” Coach said, his voice as stern as always. “If you aren’t joining them”—he swept his