“I’m Gene-short-for-Eugene Wolf,” he says. “You’re Chamomile, right?”

I nod. “Yep, like the tea, only not as hot.”

He laughs and we walk back to the center of the field, where the team with pinnies (his) is facing the team with stale, wrinkled gym shirts (mine).

“You’re funny,” he says, and I smile. Funny is a new thing for me. Until everything started happening with my dad a few years ago, I didn’t really have to be.

As we walk across the patchy field I try to envision what he sees when he looks at me: long hair that always borders on frizzy, two individually nice but asymmetrical eyebrows, a nose that’s never been pierced. “I was thinking you should come running with me sometime.” He looks over at me and I look back at him, our eyes pleasantly locked.

“I don’t really run,” I say, like the dolt that I am.

“Oh, you should try it.” Then he lists all the reasons: college scholarships, teammates, heart health (which may or may not be true, given that people croak during marathons all the time). “Plus, then we could see more of each other.”

Boom, bang, pop. Heart fireworks. I smile and he grins and Gene-short-for-Eugene Wolf has one of those melting grins that makes you heat up, then drip.

“Okay,” I say as the whistle blows and he puts his hands on his knees, facing me with faux competitiveness across the imaginary line we’re about to cross. “I guess I’ll come running with you.”

So we run. He picks me up outside my house before school, while it’s still dark and the birds are black shapes against a sky that’s very slowly starting to lighten. We run all over the place—through the woods, around the ice-cream place in town and the drive-in movie theater, and we stop at the playground for a drink of water, and then one time he kisses me there. Our mouths are still wet with water that tastes like a penny died in it.

“Race me?” I say after. I’m breathless because the closest thing I’ve had to being kissed before this was a gross encounter with a really friendly dog at Petco, but from then on we’re a threesome. Not me, Gene, and the dog, but me, Gene, and running. Running before the world even wakes up. Seeing the sun rise over the roofs, like someone making breakfast in the sky, the egg cracking and then light. Over the next few months he shows me something to love, and that’s why it’s so hard later to let him go.

But why do I have let him go, you ask? Because I’m about to be bitch-slapped by the universe.

1

SECOND HALF OF SENIOR YEAR
{JANUARY}

Days ’til prom: 103

I’VE GOT MY NOSE LODGED IN A RACK OF OTHER PEOPLE’S clothes when my best friend taps me on the shoulder frantically.

“How about this one?” Abigail asks, shoving a dead cat into my arms.

“Ew.” I jump back and nearly knock over a row of vintage dresses with yellowing sleeves and a certain old-lady smell to their armpits.