It strikes Dana how fucking obvious the answer is. But she asks anyway.

“Where, Stewart?”

“Dana, I can’t say. I promised.”

“We’re dying, you fucking moron.”

But Dana already knows where Kit went. And, in a sense, she’s already on her way there.

Kit once called it heaven. She said, For me, heaven is the gym. Samhattan High. It’s the only place I feel faster than what chases me.

“I’m gonna tell you where she is,” Dana says, eyeing the three. “And you’re gonna tell me I’m right. And if you don’t, and if I turn out to be right, that’s it for us on any level ever again. You got it?”

The boys agree.

Dana clears her throat, overwhelmed with the emotion there.

“She’s in the gymnasium,” she says.

Stewart nods. Brandon nods. Little Richard says, “Yep.”

And Dana’s off. Walking so fast, the world moving so fast, it already feels like her brief encounter with the boys happened days ago. She’s crossing Buckland without looking both ways, then passing the very bookstore Stewart mentioned. The cemetery to her left, the buildings where men and women no doubt discuss the basketball team, her team, to her right. She can’t stop for anything now, wouldn’t even if the police pulled up.

Her phone rings.

Dad.

Doesn’t matter.

They know she’s gone now.

Doesn’t matter.

She takes a left. A car honks and she doesn’t look to see who it is. She starts running. Jeans or no jeans, Dana is flying now. Like she’s late for class—worse, late for a game.

The building is brick orange, easy to spot. Her chest hurts with the running and she imagines Coach Wanda coaching her, pushing her, applauding her endurance. Coach Wanda, who is hard as hell on the girls but only because she wants the best out of them. Coach Wanda, who epitomizes Samhattan more than any other person Dana knows.

The parking lot now. She’s still running, the same speed, the same hurt.

“Come on, Kit,” she says. “Be alive.”

A terrible thing to think. Yet how could she think anything else? The reality of the last few days cloaks her, wraps itself around her, gets into her in a way it hasn’t yet. And she feels heavier for it, thicker, like she can’t possibly make it all the way to the silver side doors of the gym, yes, their heaven, yes, the site of so much glory that it must remain their glory days, no matter what they do, where they go, from here.

If Garland Park is where they discovered themselves, the Samhattan High School gym is where they showed the world what they found.

Dana can hear Coach Wanda yelling at her to keep it up, to push, to reach those fucking doors. She can hear her saying the doors are open: look!

And they are.

Someone’s inside!

And someone is.

Listen: a ball bouncing on the hardwood floor.

“Come on,” Dana tells herself. “Come on.”

It’s Kit, has to be Kit, please, Kit, still alive.