Chapter 1:
My feet pounded against asphalt, my ratty old Sketchers thumping like bass drums. Farther, farther. I had to push myself, one more mile, one more block, just one more.
My calf muscles burned. My legs felt like rubber. My lungs were bursting. Still, I didn’t stop. Just one more, Zeph.
The endorphins kicked in, making my insides flutter in a happy, high frenzy. I soared across the sidewalks, past the pedestrians that I couldn’t recall ever not knowing. I was flying. I was a cheetah. No! I was a falcon, speeding at one hundred twenty miles per hour. The landscape was a blur. The trees were a blur. The pain in my sides was a blur. I didn’t feel anything besides the wonderful sensation of my stretching muscles and the joy-buzz in my brain.
The rhythm of my footsteps matched the frenzied beating of my pulse. One, two, one, two, lub-dub, lub-dub. The weather forecast had promised still air, but even so, wind whipped past my face. It took me a while to realize that perhaps I was the one creating the wind. Not some old god of Norse legend. Who was that, anyway? Thor? No, he was the thunder guy.
The lovely chemical whizzing through my blood stream wouldn’t stop me from feeling pain, though. My knees screamed at me. The cramps in my abdomen complained loudly, attacking me when I didn’t listen. I shook my head, even as the sweat poured into my eyes. Maybe if I pushed myself hard enough, I’d have so much of the happy-brain-nature-drug that it would erase all traces of the hurt and turn me into a perfect little fluttering bird, with wings that could carry me for miles. And I’d fly forever, not ceasing until I reached my destination.
Where exactly that was, however, I had no clue.
Finally, I had to stop because my throat was like a desert and I couldn’t breathe. Leaning against a tree, I checked the pedometer. Six thousand three hundred forty seven steps. I did the math and figured that I’d run a little over three miles. I pushed my sweaty hair off of my forehead and grinned. My head was spinning and my knees threatened to give way underneath me, but I was still filled with joy-buzz.
Straightening up, I walked the two blocks to the 7-11, my legs stiff. I chugged down the bottle of water the second I shoved the crumpled dollar bills at the cashier. The miracle liquid worked its way through my body, transforming the desert in my throat into an oasis.
When I gasped, finally tearing the empty bottle from my lips, the cashier smiled at me and handed back my change.
“Hey,” she said, and I recognized her as Grace, a girl from my English class. “You run?”
I nodded. “Yeah. You?”
“I jog,” she said with a shrug.
“I went three miles just now. The cramps are killing me.”
“Just breathe, Zephyra. We learned last year that they’re caused by a build-up of lactic acid when our body uses more oxygen than we can give it. But wow, three miles! How fast?”
“Well, I started at noon. It took me a few minutes to get here, though. What time is it now?”
“Like, twelve twenty-seven,” she said, checking her watch. “Hey, that’s pretty fast. I guess your name fits you. You are wind.”
I smiled. Not many people were aware of the Greek origins of my name. “Yeah, well, you know. Thanks for the water.”
“Don’t thank me; thank the Poland Springs Company.”
I gave her a half-hearted chuckle and a wave as I left the store and threw the water bottle in a convenient garbage can. Sighing, I detoured through Main Street and took the short way home.
“Zephyra!” my mother exclaimed as I walked through the door. Her eyes were red and puffy, the corners of her lips pulled down in a frown.
“Mom.” I didn’t even try to keep the exasperation from my voice. I instantly regretted coming home. I wanted to turn back around and run until my muscles stretched so wide that they broke my skin and my lungs burst. Anywhere but here, with my mother a mess again.
“Where were you?” she demanded.
“I went for a run,” I said.
“Did I say you could go for a run? I need you.”
Closing my eyes, I gritted my teeth and said nothing. Mom had murdered my happy, innocent endorphins, wiping off the blood and fingerprints so the police wouldn’t find out. Too bad I’d been a witness.
She took a swipe at her eyes before going on. “Can you make lunch for yourself and Pepper? I don’t feel up to it.”
“Sure.”
I walked into the kitchen, finding Pepper already in there with her head in the fridge. I poked her rib and she looked up at me. “Zeph, you making lunch?” she asked.
“Yeah. Any requests?”
She glanced back at the contents of the refrigerator before pulling out a carton of eggs. “They’re the only good things left. Make an omelet.”
As I whisked the eggs, Pepper dumped a spoonful of butter on a skillet and let it heat up. Once the little red stove light turned on, signifying a hot surface, I poured the eggs onto it.
Pepper watched every move I made, recording little picture-memories into her twelve-year-old brain. I scraped the spatula underneath the omelet and turned it over, listening to it sizzle. Pepper’s eyes followed my arm.
“You know, you’ve probably seen me do this a hundred times,” I said. “You could make your own.”
She shook her head, her wild black hair whipping around her face. “No. You’re a better cook.”
I smiled as I turned the stove off and cut the omelet, giving half to her and half to myself. “But you’ll never know unless you try.”
“Trust me. You’re better.”
I shrugged as I stuffed the food into my mouth, shoveling calories into my empty stomach to make up for the ones I’d burned off.
“Pepper,” I said finally, “you think Mom’s alright? I mean, has she done anything crazy again?”
“No,” she replied tentatively. “But I think she’s mad at you for telling Jericho off. I think she’s even madder because you tell them all off.”
“Well, someone needed to! You want her to keep dating assholes? You want her to maybe marry an asshole?”
“No, Zeph. I just want her to be happy.”
“Those guys don’t make her happy, Peps. They just make her forget. That’s all she really wants anymore.”
I got up, dumped my plate in the sink and went upstairs to wash off the stink of sweat, eggs, and stale memories. I turned the shower on, the noise blocking out the rest of the world.
But not before I heard Mom cry, shaky, soul-shattering sobs that could make even the strongest eagle lose its wings.
Chapter 2:
I fought my way through the over-zealous throng of students to the locker that could not possible hold all of the books that I needed. Twirling the combination that had been permanently inscribed into my brain, I watched as armies of girls with ridiculously short skirts and boys with disgustingly saggy jeans marched passed me. Off to battle, I thought.
I pulled A Midsummer Night’s Dream out of my backpack and made my way to first period English. I’d already read what I considered to be Shakespeare’s best work — twice, the first time being in seventh grade. Now in ninth it became “required reading.” In my opinion, reading should not have to be required. People were supposed to want to read.
I took my seat in the middle row, hiding myself behind brown hair and Shakespeare. Puck’s antics were much more interesting than the superficial chatter around me. I felt like I’d just shrunk five feet and was three inches tall. A tiny sparrow, dancing across the pages of the play, I was gone. I closed my eyes, erasing myself until I was just a puff of feathers and muscles.
Someone tapped my shoulder and I was forced to redraw my body and return to the real world. Grace was smiling at me, her 7-11 uniform traded in for jeans and a Rolling Stones t-shirt that was probably older than I was.
I arranged my features into what I hoped resembled a smile and said, “Hi Grace.”
“Hi Zephyra!” she greeted me. If it was anyone else, I’d say that her enthusiasm was forced, but I knew better. Grace was a bird of paradise, glowing and colorful.
She glanced down at the book in my hands and her pretty little petals wilted just a little. “We have a quiz on that today, don’t we?”
I nodded, giving her my best reassuring wink. “Don’t worry. You’ll do fine.”
“No I won’t! I don’t understand a word that guy says. Or, you know, writes.”
“That’s what Spark Notes are for.”
The sound of her laughter was masked by the shrill screech of the bell. Miss Merrigan walked into the room right on cue, her three-inch heals clicking against the linoleum.
“Good morning, class!” She was happy-happy sunshine, the result of several more cups of coffee than could possibly be healthy for one person to ingest in one morning.
The students muttered garbled greetings as Manic Merrigan passed out sheets of paper. “We’ll start right away. You have twenty minutes. Begin at once!”
I finished in half the allotted time and gazed out the open window. The sky was a perfect shade of blue. I knew how the grass would feel beneath my feet, like a carpet of the finest silk. I knew how the air would feel on my skin, like a warm embrace from a long lost friend.
I doodled sneakers and blue jays on the back of my quiz paper. It was prison, being here when the whole world was out there, doing important things like sleeping or running or building the country up from the ashes that the Fire of Illiteracy had created. It should have been illegal, holding us in this building against our will. It was illegal, taking away our constitutional rights. Freedom of speech? Hah! If I opened my mouth, I’d be given a detention for “causing a disruption.” I sighed wistfully. But going home would be a prison as well. Home would be death row.
The twenty minutes were up and Manic Merrigan collected the quizzes, grinning at the pictures my brain had generated.
We spent the remainder of the period discussing Shakespeare’s word choice.
“‘I mean my heart unto yours is knit so that one heart we can make of it,’” Merrigan read. “What do you think that means? Why did he say that?”
My arm rose before I could stop it. “It means that Lysander loves Hermia so much that they become one person, sort of. He can’t not love her.” If only it worked that way in the real world.
“Ah, but then why did he tell her that he didn’t love her later on?”
I frowned. Is she seriously asking me this? “Um, because the fairies messed with his brain?”
She gave me a slightly psychotic giggle and a thumbs-up.
The rest of the day, like so many others before it, was unremarkable. The hours knit together with the weeks and the months, spinning into one long grey spool of thread.
Until lunch. Lunch was neon purple.
I sat at the usual table, second in the row closest to the door. Truth was already there, twiddling her thumbs and crossing her eyes.
“What’re you thinking, Truth?” I asked, recognizing her old deep-in-thought habit.
She blinked, her eyes straightening out, and looked up at me. “I’m thinking that if it’s illegal to kill a praying mantis because it gets rid of pests, it should also be illegal to spiders. I mean, spiders do the same thing, right? But we kill them anyway, and no one give’s a rat’s tushy. So why do we kill them?”
“Um, ‘cause they’re creepy looking?”
“Is that all? Well then, we’re racist against spiders!”
“You can’t be racist against a spider,” Heather said, coming up behind us. “They’re not human; therefore, they have no race.”
Truth rolled her eyes and stuck her tongue out at Heather.
Heather slid into the seat beside me and nudged my shoulder. “Zeph, are you trying out for the track team? The meeting’s next week.”
“I don’t think so,” I admitted, chewing on the inside of my cheek.
They made noises of “aw” and protests of “why not?”
I shrugged. “I run to run. It’s not some lousy competition between a bunch of sweaty people with too-tight underwear.”
They looked at me like I’d just grown another head.
I sighed and stabbed my fork at the nameless-barely-edible-thing that the cafeteria people decided to make us shove down our throats today.
“But you have to try out!” Truth exclaimed. “You’re the best runner in this school! You might be our only chance of winning this year.”
“Nope, sorry. I’ve made up my mind.”
Truth started to protest, her round little mouth open guppy style, but Heather cut her off. “If she doesn’t want to try out, don’t make her. It’s her decision, after all.”
Alright, so, I would add a little more about Grace's character too. What is she like in school? Is Zeph close to her? I mean, seeing that you're writing this, she must be opinionated! Is she smart? Or dumb? Does she like Shakespeare? Y'know? But, considering that this is just the first two chapters, this isn't bad. Add a little now, or if it doesn't fit, later? Ya? 