Episodes From Today's Track Meet.

"Leela, are you in the first heat?" Sadie is a distance runner but used to be a sprinter, so now she runs the 400 and up. She is state-class in everything. Also, her hair is naturally beachy-curly all the time, and she has cat eyes. I am intimidated. I am also, at this point, frantically taking off pants.
"Yeah, I'm going."
I dash over to the starting line. It is cold, in the lower fifties, and overcast. Our uniforms are sleeveless spandex shirts and shorts that are tighter and smaller than many undergarments.
The starter is talking. I look around for Braxton, I don't want him to be photographing this. Then it's time to run.
By the first hundred, my shorts have climbed to the edge of decency, and it occurs to me that I haven't touched my hair in several hours and it is coming loose. By the end of the second hundred, I hear Anna and someone else, who is that?, cheering for me. There are more cheers. The first lap is done, my arms are going numb and my face is far gone. I am on the second, it's the last hundred, I am done. Whatever.
I take my spikes off. With one foot on the back of a bench, my leg is shaking violently. I have trouble with the laces.

The 100-meter dash, the final and fastest heat. Alice is running. The first time Alice did the 100 was last Saturday, and she won spectacularly.
Start. Alice has long legs and they take the lead when she sprints, torso resting back so she looks like a gazelle. She pulls into the lead, then it is over. The second and third-place finishers are also from our school. It is a nice, unifying moment.

Anna was panicking. She had to fill in for a girl on the 4x4, which she hadn't run since 8th grade and even then with poor results. She was babbling, panicky, about how terrible it was going to be. I grabbed her shoulders.
"Anna. In the past several...well, since March, I've learned a lot about doing something terribly and still doing it EVERY SINGLE DAY. You can do this. I believe in you. No one else in the relay will care, and I'll be cheering for you."
"Oh, well...you're invited to my funeral, anyway."
Well, that mini-speech was a fail. She was equating "relay" with "death."

From our school, Nick alone runs the 1600. All the other distance boys sat the meet out, because they're going to the prestigious Penn Relays tomorrow. So Nick runs, his hair flouncing in the wind. I am very cold and start to chatter-laugh at the insanely graceful bounce-bounce of his hair.
"It's silky," Shannon said when I told her my reason. "That's the only word for it."
He finishes first, with a personal best. I don't know what it was.