Moonglass

fairly sure that she didn’t want a conversation. Maybe she’d woken up in a mood too.
    Jillian put in both of her earbuds and was scrolling through her music. She wore jeans, a tank top, and the same calm expression she always did, whether she was kicking my butt or just barely holding me off. I sighed loudly. “So … what class are you ditching?” She took out one earbud and turned around to look at me. “Huh? Oh, Leadership.” She smiled. “Ironic, right? What about you? Why are you out here?” I twirled the stem of a leaf between my fingers. “English. I couldn’t make myself do it today. Too much other stuff on my mind.” She nodded. “Yeah. Same here.” When she looked down at the iPod in her hand again, I figured our conversation had run its course, and I let my eyes wander out over the field. Out of the corner of my eye, though, I saw her foot tap a few times, then she turned back to me. “My sister died two years ago today.”
    She said it like it was a normal thing to say, then picked at the grass next to her before looking back up at me and shrugging. “Guess that’s why I’m out here.”
    I kept my face steady and looked her in the eye. Two things I wished people could do with me when they found out. Neither one of us said anything for a moment. I figured that if she had brought it up, she might want to talk about it. “Were you close with her?” At first she looked at me like I was crazy, then eased off and nodded. “Yeah. We were close. We did everything together. She was a runner too. Faster than me, actually.”
    She plucked a blade of grass and rolled it between her fingers, watching the end spin. I watched it too, and then, because it seemed like the right thing to do, I asked her what nobody ever really asked me.
    “What happened?”
    Her fingers stopped, and she looked at me for a long moment before picking another piece and beginning again. “We went to this party together. She always brought me along so she could make me drive home if she got drunk, which she always did.” She laughed softly. “She was the only person I knew who could get wasted at night and set records the next day.”
    She paused and swept her eyes over the field, and I waited for the rest. Her smile faded slowly before she started again.
    “I never drank. I held her hair when she got sick, snuck her in the back door, and lied to our parents when she couldn’t. Except that night. We got into a fight over something stupid, because she was drunk, and I left. I was so pissed, I just left her there to deal with it herself for once.” She looked at me like she’d just confessed something horrible, and I wanted to tell her I understood her more than she knew.
    “She left the party, I guess to walk home, and some other drunk girl who was driving home swerved off the road and hit her with her car. And then the driver took off and left her there. And I was at home, lying to my parents for my sister, while she was out in the road, dying.” I could see the guilt wrapped around her tight, and I knew there was nothing I could say to loosen it. But I tried anyway, because if I really thought about it, it was the thing I most wanted to hear myself.
    “It wasn’t your fault. There was no way you could have—”
    “I know that.” She cut me short in a flicker of emotion, then almost as quickly regained her composure. “Sorry. Everyone has told me that, and logically it’s probably true.” She shrugged. “I just don’t think I’ll ever stop wondering about the what-ifs, though. You know? It’s just shitty and unfair….”
    She trailed off again, and I shifted my weight. I focused hard on her. Avoided the fact that I felt the same way. “But you still run. Isn’t that hard sometimes?
    Because that was a thing you did together?”
    “No.” She turned to me. “Running is the place I feel closest to her, where I can get away from the rest of it.” I thought about my own running, which I’d been doing for a long time. “I get it. It’s the one time I can forget about everything and just go. Hard.” She laughed softly, then sat up straight, and I could tell the conversation was about to shift. “I knew it. You always run like you’re running away from something.” She zipped her iPod into her backpack. “It’s good you’re up for going hard, because today is mile repeats. Four of them, at six-minute pace.” I took a deep breath and pushed it out as we stood up. “Oh, God.”
    “It won’t