Chapter 26

The next few days I was only able to talk to Julie a little bit. While she was genuinely upset with what her parents had done she also let me know that she wasn’t supposed to be talking to me in school either, at least beyond what was needed in class. Her parents had even set some of the kids of their friends to watching me/her (helicopter parents before it was a term.)

Somehow both Tonya and Tenille had found out quick about the breakup as well. I had to wonder about how quick word could travel around teenagers. They didn’t even travel in the same friend groups as any of Julie’s friends. But I suppose it might have also helped that I stood out a bit in school being a teacher’s kid.

So free time around school was spent with those two and my neighbor. I had to laugh when there were a couple people who ended up asking if I was going out with Tonya now. I guess it was understandable, as she was pretty free with giving me hugs, but then so was Tenille as well as a couple others that I felt like were at least decent and friendly friends.

I do have to admit cross country practices felt a little weird. Since the season was over for the vast majority of the team (we had a big team and a big school, so a 40 person team - one of the biggest in the state) there weren’t as many showing up to practices anymore. With regional done we only had four more practices to get through and at this point we all knew it was more to just keep things loose. After all, by now we were all in pretty much peak shape and four practices wasn’t going to change that.

The state meet was held in one of the parks down in Murray. We had ran a dual meet there against one of the region schools, but the route had to be different than what the actual state meet would be (can’t go giving the home team the advantage of knowing the route, right?) Back in 1996 Davis High was one of the bigger high schools in the state so we were running in the 5A class race. Predictably that meant we were running later in the day so that the lower classes could do their races. They were at least fairly smart about it though: the first three classes were run in a different park, so we really only had to worry about the track being used by three other races before ours. Thankfully the weather was good for the day, so we didn’t have to worry about torn up mud. Just flattened down grass from the runners before us.

I felt good going through my final preparation. The state championship race had the most schools in it of any race we’d been in previously. As such the starting shoot was spread wide, each team being allotted space to have three runners in front and the other four behind them. In our case we put our three fastest runners in the first line and our slowest as the lone runner in our third row. When the race started the vast surge of humanity sped forward amidst some jockeying for position. It was with good reason though, we had probably all scouted ahead to know enough that within a half mile the starting chute would narrow down to a quarter of what it had been. If you didn’t get your position established in the center by then you could be forced into the trees and of course no one would want that.

I ended up staying on the heels of our third place runner and as a group most of my team was able to start working towards the middle as distance started to form between some of the good runners and the middle of the pack. Given my height and this being my first championship race I had to admit to myself I was a little surprised to find myself in a position where there were easily more runners behind than in front of me.