A Flawed Specimen
Less than a half mile into her workout the pain kicked in, a sharp, crushing sting on the outside of the knee every time her right foot landed. She tried to work through it but the burn got worse. She was running with the team and fell behind so quickly that no one had a chance to ask her what happened. Her teammates ahead of her rounded a bend in the campus path and disappeared beyond the maintenance building.
Dana slowed to a walk, stopped, then turned around and started walking back to the field house.
Walking didn’t hurt, but that was only a tease.
She spotted her coach in the bleachers at the track. He stood when he saw her approaching and she fought the desire to cry. She’d already fought it and won twice this week, once waking up during the night suffering from homesickness and missing her father and friends, and the second time a delayed reaction about an hour after a guy she was talking with from the lacrosse team looked at her eye and asked who she’d been in a fight with, a comment she’d heard a million times that wouldn’t normally faze her. Now here was yet another reason to cry—a knee injury that could prevent her from running this weekend in the first cross-country meet of her collegiate career, the Plattsburgh Cardinal Classic. But she held her tears back.
“The knee flaring up again?” her coach asked.
She nodded. “Every stride. It feels okay when I first start out, then as soon as I’m warmed up it starts to hurt.”
“You’ve tried icing, stretching, and didn’t you say you rested it for a week over the summer?”
“Yeah, it was good for about two days once I started running again. Then it came back.”
Coach went inside with her and they consulted with the trainer, Sarah Sullivan, who held the university’s record time in cross-country from her student days, a record Dana dreamed of breaking during her four years here. She told Dana to stand with her knees slightly bent and she massaged with two fingers the bony protrusion on the outside of the knee. “Is this where you feel it?”
Dana winced. “Yeah.”
Sarah stood back and looked at her frame. “You’re bowlegged and a pronator, and you started training harder on off-road hilly surfaces over the summer.”
Dana nodded.
“Coach, you know it and I know it and I think Dana here knows it. Classic case of ITBS.”
The trainer was correct: Dana did know it. Iliotibial band syndrome, the official tongue-twisting name for ITBS. When she first started feeling the pain about a month ago, she researched on the Internet and e-mailed back and forth with Sarah Sullivan at St. Lawrence. The trainer suspected ITBS then and was confirming it now. She’d suggested the regimen of icing and stretching and resting, and Dana had followed the advice exactly, even though it was tedious to sit with ice on her knee four times a day and go through the stretching routine, and taking a week off from running put her through a withdrawal that made her almost physically ill.
Until this past summer she never had suffered a running injury, and she’d been racing competitively for ten years. At age eight, when she started running, she placed second in the Morrissey Mile, a race for kids that coincided with the Morrissey 5K for adults on the weekend after Labor Day. For her finish, she received a trophy, cheap and garish, with a sprinting, faceless gold woman perched atop a molded plastic tower painted to look like marble. She loved the hardware, and wanted more.
Prior to that first race, Dana had thought of herself as woefully inadequate—a motherless, disfigured child among a sea of classmates all who had mothers and unmarred faces. Now, suddenly, she had an identity: she was a runner. Now she had a passion and skill that gave her substance. She could beat them all, or most of them.
During School’s Out, the program for elementary-grade students requiring supervision after school because their parents worked, Dana ran every day on the decrepit cinder track circling the playing fields. In middle school she joined the track team and ran the 800 and one mile. In high school, she was one of two freshman girls who made the varsity track team. She sprinted the first leg of the 4×400 relay and also ran the mile. Thanks to genetics, she developed an ideal physique for a runner: long legs like her father combined with a shorter torso, and a thin frame. Small breasts, which did not sway or bounce when she ran.
She gave herself over to running, where she felt confident and unself-conscious, unlike most of the rest of the time, when she felt exactly the opposite. She found a group of friends in her teammates, and it was due to being on the track team that she managed to meet her first and only boyfriend.
Sean Connelly was a junior transfer student. He played football in the fall and participated in track in the spring. There was a pit next to the track where the shot-putters and discus-throwers practiced, flinging their heavy loads into the playing fields beyond the bleachers.
Dana heard Sean before she saw him. He let out a frightening roar with each release. She identified the source of that primordial yell while rounding the fourth curve on the track, the one closest to the pit before the homestretch. She was training at 400-meter intervals and looked over when she heard Sean bellow, and immediately slowed down because it didn’t seem like a human sound. It was more like what she’d expect from an attacking lion or a charging elephant.
Her coach chastised her for her poor interval time.
“I was distracted by that yelling from the pit.”
“Are you going to be distracted when the stands are full of cheering spectators?”
Full of spectators? So far, at every track meet Dana had competed in, the stands were largely empty, occupied by a smattering of parents.
“You can run three extra intervals, maybe that will help you focus.”
She’d already run ten, and had reached her bonking point, but now put in three more—all poor times—and when practice ended, she slumped over on the first row of the bleachers, too tired to stretch or drag herself into the showers.
A few minutes later, the shot-putters and discus-throwers broke practice and made their way from their pit toward the locker room. The loud one passed in front of Dana. She was so tired and irritated that she spoke up.
“Thanks a lot for getting me in trouble.”
“Me?” The loud shot-putter stopped and looked at her with his eyebrows arched—one eyebrow; he was a unibrow person, with a single dark centipede of hair growing over his eyes.
“You make a lot of noise when you’re throwing. I couldn’t concentrate.”
The shot-putter turned a blazing red and cast his eyes at the ground. Dana immediately regretted what she’d said.
“I’m sorry, I can’t help it,” he admitted.
She tried to soften the blow. She added, “I mean, you must put a lot of effort into your throws. It must hurt.”
He looked up at her again, but wasn’t going to let her off so easily. “That must hurt too—your eye.”
Okay, she deserved that. “If you must know, it doesn’t,” Dana said.
“I think you’re in my chem class.”
Her usual routine after practice was to go to Gull and see her father and eat an early dinner with him. She considered asking Sean to go with her, but decided it would be better if they went someplace else. She didn’t need her father getting involved. When she called him and said she was going to Christy’s Diner with a friend, he asked why she didn’t bring her friend to Gull.
“I feel like something different,” Dana explained.
“What friend? Courtney?” Courtney was one of her teammates.
“His name is Sean. He’s on the track team. Shot put and discus.”
“A date?”
“It’s not a date, Daddy, it’s just something to eat.”
But it turned out to be a date. Sean opened doors for her, he held out her chair so she could sit, he even paid for the check against her protests. He told her about his plans to earn a football scholarship and to take premed at the same time, so if he didn’t have a career in the NFL he could become an orthopedic surgeon and repair other football players who were injured.
She wasn’t particularly attracted to him—he wore an open collar shirt and tufts of black chest hair stuck out like a wild plant, matching the thickness of his unibrow. He also continued to sweat, although practice had ended more than an hour ago and he’d showered. His forehead glistened and he swiped away several drips coursing down his face.
Still, she went out with him again, to the movies that weekend. And then again the following week to a soccer game. Maybe she was attracted to him after all. For a big person, Sean was a surprisingly gentle kisser. His lips were soft. Once he put a hand under her shirt and touched her breasts over the material of her bra; she did the same to him, feeling a thick mane of hair on his stomach and chest. She didn’t mind about the hair—her touching of Sean became more like petting an animal, and when she moved her hand over his hair he made moaning noises that sounded like precursors to the explosive howls he emitted when throwing the shot put.
He tried running with her a few times, telling her he needed to cross train to keep his body fat down, but he was too slow and lacked the stamina to keep up with her. It would be like her trying to throw the shot put with him.
Then one day, just three weeks before the start of a summer that Dana thought she would spend with her boyfriend, Sean announced that his family was moving to California as soon as the school year ended. His father had been transferred to a new job in San Jose.
The news shocked her, and she performed poorly in her last two track meets. On the day Sean moved, Dana gave him a hand job without unbuckling his pants, just by reaching down and stretching his jeans with her fist and grabbing his dick and tugging. He stared into her eyes with a grateful and loving expression, unsure what he’d done to deserve such an honor. And the moment he came all over her fingers he let out one of his trademark yells, as if he were throwing something heavy as far as he could.
She thought that having Sean as a boyfriend for a few months marked the beginning of an expansive sexual awakening and a string of boyfriends. But it ended up being the extent of her sexual and relationship experience. A few other boys asked her out, but they looked at her body, not her face. Her face, her eyes, they avoided. At least she had more time to work on her distance running, and in the end it paid off with a scholarship to St. Lawrence.
Because she’d never been injured before, Dana thought she’d been granted some kind of immunity to the bone spurs and shin splints and ankle sprains and sciatica and other pains that many competitive runners endured. Wrong again. Just another reminder, girl, you are a flawed specimen.
If it didn’t get better, if she couldn’t compete this season, she could be off the team and lose her scholarship.
She went to the library after practice, worked through dinner, and headed back to the dorm after dark. Overall, it had been a mixed first week of college. The running injury depressed her but she was excited about being a writing mentor and she’d signed up as a volunteer editor for Laurentian Magazine. She’d made new friends, although she hadn’t met any potential boyfriends. Why she expected college to be any different from high school, she didn’t know, maybe because there would be more guys and some of them might be open-minded and discerning about their choices, but in reality most were shallow as puddles and the frenzy among her suitemates to hook up had the one-upmanship of an arms race. She found the word whatever running through her mind on a regular basis. Also, whocares.
She was busy enough that the disappointment didn’t overwhelm her. Already she had a paper due next Monday for her Women in Short Story class. At the library she checked out the only two books she could find containing critical mention of Margaret Atwood’s story “Death by Landscape.” In addition to the paper, she had more than one hundred pages of textbook reading for poli sci and her first meeting with her team from psychology class to discuss research experiments.
Returning to the dorm, she broke into a jog to see if her knee felt better, but it always felt fine at the start of a run, and she slowed to a walk after a few strides.
When she got back to her room she went down the hall to where her roommate, Jen, was hanging out with Mark, her new boyfriend. A rerun of Friends was on the TV, although no one paid much attention. Steve, who also lived on their floor but already was avoiding his roommate, was sunk in the room’s one chair with his laptop. Mark and Jen sat together in the middle of Mark’s bed, holding hands. Mark roomed single, which meant Dana pretty much had a single now, too, since Jen had spent the last four nights with Mark. Dana couldn’t believe the speed with which Jen and Mark had become a couple.
Jen and Mark slid over to make room for Dana.
“Friends again?”
“It’s on every night.”
“You at the library?”
“I’m writing a paper on this Margaret Atwood story.”
Steve looked up at Dana while continuing to type on his laptop. “I’ve read Atwood,” he said. “The Handmaid’s Tale.”
“That’s the one everyone’s read. It’s not her best.”
“I liked it.”
“I saw the movie. It was creepy.”
“How’s government policy?”
“Also creepy.”
“Steve’s already planning significant changes to the Constitution,” Mark said.
“Those would be called amendments,” said Steve.
“The first one would lower the drinking age and legalize recreational drug use.”
Dana liked Steve. She shared a Monday-Wednesday-Friday class with him—intro to poli sci—and twice now they’d stopped for coffee together on their way, both half asleep, Steve with bed head, Dana in whatever sweatshirt she’d slept in. He treated her like a political ally. He told her that his girlfriend back home in Syracuse was coming to visit this weekend, much to his ambivalence.
Mark said, “I’m telling you, your fake ID business will come back to haunt you, Steve. Everything from your past gets dug up when you’re in an election.”
“When the journalists come knocking on my door for the dirt on you, I won’t tell,” Dana said.
“I won’t, either,” Jen said. “Unless it’s Anderson Cooper. He’s pretty hot.”
“He’s old. He’s got gray hair.”
“It’s blond.”
“Gray.”
“Blond-gray.”
“I don’t care, he’s red hot.”
“Yes, I’ve got it!” Steve said to his laptop. “There’s still tickets for Grace Potter this weekend in Potsdam. Who’s in?”
Mark and Jen simultaneously said, “We are.”
“What about you, Dana?”
“We’ve got our first meet on Saturday, I can’t go.”
“The concert’s Friday night,” Jen reminded her.
“A lot you know about athletics,” Steve said. “You can’t go out the night before a big game.”
“It’s not a game, it’s a meet.”
“And you can’t have sex the night before.”
“That’s just a myth.”
“It’s not an issue anyway.”
“We’ll have you home in time.”
“How’s your knee?”
“It’s pretty sore right now.”
“Well, if you can’t run this weekend, then you can go with us to the concert.”
“No,” Dana said, “I can’t go. I have a race.” She left it at that. She’d be at the starting line with her team in Plattsburgh on Saturday morning. Had to be.