You Can Run by Norah McClintock

think the trainer’s death wasn’t an accident?” I said.
    â€œI don’t think anything yet,” my father said. “I’m just looking into things.”
    â€œBecause someone hired you to?”
    â€œThe trainer’s sister.” He took another couple of bites of chicken. “It doesn’t add up,” he said. “Everybody has somebody in their life.”
    Huh?
    My father looked casually across the table at me.
    â€œYou know what else I did today, Robbie?”
    I said I didn’t.
    â€œI went to your school. I talked to kids, teachers, the principal and the vice principals, even the school secretaries.”
    I tried to look interested. I tried not to look guilty.
    â€œAnd all I came up with is that one of the secretaries thinks she saw Trisha arrive at school on Wednesday morning. But she obviously didn’t make it to homeroom because her homeroom teacher marked her absent. In fact, all of her teachers said she was absent that day and all of them said they had no idea why she wasn’t at school. All except one.” He looked directly at me. “You want to know which one?”
    He didn’t have to tell me. I already knew. I looked down at what was left of my dinner. When I looked up again, I said, “Dad, I have to tell you something.”

I blame it all on my substitute history teacher. Before Ms. Twill, my history teacher (Sixteenth Century to the Dawn of the New Millennium), had to leave town unexpectedly (and for an unspecified length of time) to care for her sick father, she assigned us our first major project of the year—an essay and presentation. Okay, fine, no problem. I’ve been in school long enough to know that major projects are part of the game. So I chose my topic, the Reformation, and made a note to start my research. When it turned out that Ms. Twill was going to be away for longer than anyone had expected, Ms. Lewington, her substitute, decided that we should do the assignment in pairs. She assigned partners based on who was working on what topic. I got paired with Trisha Carnegie.
    â€œYou know what that’s all about, right?” Morgan had said when I told her.
    â€œYeah. Bad karma.”
    Morgan shook her head.“Laziness,” she said.“Think about it. This way, Ms. Lewington has half the number of essays to mark and half the number of presentations to sit through.”
    â€œThe presentations have to be twice as long as Ms. Twill told us, because there are two of us,” I said.
    â€œThere you go,” Morgan said. “That way they’ll take up as much class time as they originally would have, so Ms. Lewington won’t have to do any extra teaching.”
    Morgan had a point, but I wouldn’t have cared one way or the other if I hadn’t been stuck with Trisha.
    At first I adopted what would universally be acknowledged as a positive attitude. I’ve worked with partners before. I’ve been stuck in groups of three or four people, each with wildly different personalities and work styles. I’ve also been assigned to groups in which I was the only person who did any work, which means that I’ve simultaneously felt the pride of getting an A+ and the bitterness of having to share that A+ with a couple or more slackers. That’s the reason I prefer to fly solo rather than as part of a flock. But in this case, I decided to be a big girl and get on with it.
    I maintained my resolve until it became obvious that Trisha was not only weird, she also had no interest in history (at least not between the sixteenth century and the dawn of the new millennium) and no apparent intention of doing her fair share of the work. Or any work at all.
    The two-week anniversary of me being stuck with Trisha coincided exactly with the two-week anniversary of her doing absolutely nothing in the way of research on our topic. By then I’d developed what could only be described as a bad attitude, the