Who you are: a girl whose mother wrote to her from prison, only to ask for money in her commissary account.

Who you are: someone who is running out of money to wash her clothes at the Laundromat on Kentucky Avenue.

Who you are: not too numb yet, to not feel afraid.

YOU REMEMBER, moments after you see the first poster, the time you left your wallet next to the sink in the bathroom. You had no plan to use the cards, so you only checked that the cash was missing. Two hundred dollars, gone. You had been so worried about that that you hadn’t thought about the Amex for days. The one your aunt signed you up for in case of emergencies. Chances are, she would call everything since you’ve left an emergency. You realized eventually that if someone had used it here, you could be traced. You hoped whoever stole it would wait until they got to another state. You would have canceled it, but you liked the idea of throwing everyone off. It’s not that you wanted anyone to look for you. (Or … or did you? Do you?)

And then, Jesus, the day you saw him. Your uncle. Sitting there at the cheap little restaurant on the boardwalk, the one with all the yellow plastic tables and chairs, the only person without a Bloody Mary or a mimosa next to his plate. Was this what you wanted? To see your uncle slumped over his phone, probably texting your aunt that he was hopeful the posters would help, even though you saw his posture was broken by exhaustion. And it was all your fault.

You couldn’t help it. You followed him a few blocks after he paid his bill. You thought how easy it would be to catch up with him. Seven, eight strides? Even now that you are no longer in race shape. You could tap him on the arm, say you were sorry. But none of that would change the chemistry of your personality.

How to tell your uncle about that? He and your mother grew up in the same tidy little split-level, on a cul-du-sac, where the streetlights weren’t shot out once and never repaired, where whatever was in your mother must have been wrong since then, and it’s wrong in you. You are different from your friends, your coaches, your aunt and uncle. They cared so much about you winning those meets, they screamed your name—your friends even painted it on their cheeks. It had been easy to run that fast, but the attention embarrassed you, made you feel guilty. They couldn’t see that you were slowly souring from the inside out.