Little Pretty Things by Lori Rader-Day Page A

Maddy already out of the room. She’d gone to stretch her legs or work out the nerves. I thought she might have been with Coach, except he came to our door trying to round us all up for breakfast, or just juice if we wouldn’t eat. The Luxe had a nice dining room. Fitz was out, too, so we knew he must have gone looking for her. When she came back, she locked herself in the bathroom and emerged a long while later only after I begged for the toilet. When I came out again, she was pale in her red Midway High uniform, folded over the edge of the mattress. She’d pulled something, she said at first. But it looked to me like cramps. Cramps . You’re in the state capital for the big show and cramps can stop you?
    The melodrama of it still galled me. Both of our big, male coaches bumbling around, trying to make things right. They located maxi pads that truly lived up to the name and ibuprofen, and Coach offered to stretch her out, but nothing could release Maddy from the fetal position. She wouldn’t leave the room, and when I tried to leave her side to get dressed to run, she pulled me back down to her and asked me to stay. When Coach went to call her parents and find mine in the stands, Fitz finally whispered if maybe we should take Maddy home. Maddy held tightly to my hand, whimpering into the bedcover. It was my decision: We would both miss the race. “I know you’re disappointed,” Fitz said. “And your parents will be, and I am, too. Mike’s going to be—but it’s a small price, isn’t it?” But it had never felt like a small price to me.
    Now, the whole story was small. I couldn’t bear to tell Courtney that it had taken so little to divide us. “Coke?” I repeated.
    “No thanks.” Courtney turned to watch. “Are you allowed to skim a drink off the bar anytime you like?”
    “I’m not a dishonest person, Officer Howard.” My hands itched, but I ignored them.
    Something flickered behind her eyes. “Of course not. Sorry.” She snapped her notebook closed and tapped it on the table. “Can I ask you a question—off the record?”
    “You’re the record keeper,” I said.
    She put away the notebook and plucked up the coaster again. It had begun to disintegrate. “Is this what you had in mind?” she said.
    I was rinsing my glass in the sink and nearly dropped it. “How do you mean?”
    “You know,” she said. “Midway, this job. Not that there’s anything—”
    “Save it,” I said. The there’s-nothing-wrong-with-hard-work chat I didn’t need. Fitz sometimes stopped by for a pep talk, but it always ended the same. Me, here, pulling sheets off the beds abandoned by people who had places to go.
    “Maddy seemed like someone with plans, didn’t she?” Courtney said. “Even in high school. Like she wasn’t just running, but running toward something?”
    “That’s a far different tone than what I remember from the article you wrote,” I said.
    She flapped a hand at me. “Yeah, sorry about that. I was just trying to win the Pulitzer Prize. But you seemed driven to me, too. You were leaving the rest of us in the dust. That’s how it felt. I always meant to leave, too, you know?” She tossed the coaster to the table and brushed the shredded bits of it from her uniform pants. “When I got that invitation to the reunion last month—I mean, I’ve been thinking pretty hard about life, ever since. I almost can’t remember what it was I planned to be.”
    I leaned a hip against the bar. “You didn’t want to be a cop?”
    “My uncle was a cop. He made it sound like something real. Like saving the world, with vacation pay. Striking out for justice, undying gratitude of the community, that sort of thing. Like every day would be a ticker-tape parade.” She glanced at me. “He thought I’d be good at it.”
    “Aren’t you?”
    She shrugged. “I’ve barely had a chance to find out. We don’t get any decent crime here, just robberies and drunk drivers. Loughton—he’s just letting me run