“Em, I’m so sorry. . . . I wasn’t even thinking.”
Em shook her head and managed a weak smile, hoping they could both just drop it. But the mention of the fire, so sudden and unexpected, made it hard to breathe. She couldn’t even be mad at Jenna, though; what she’d said was true. Since the fire had damaged the interior of the Ascension gym, all phys ed classes were being held outdoors until further notice.
“Well, at least Hadley keeps us on the track and the courts,” Portia said to defuse any awkwardness. “We had to do sprints on the grass at practice yesterday and Sarah Stokes totally wiped out on the mud.” She giggled. “It looked like she’d crapped her pants.”
“She probably did,” Casey Cornell snickered, coming up from behind them. “Remember when she peed her pants at the ski mountain in sixth grade?” Em had never liked Casey—she’d always seemed just a little too fake, a little too plastic. Her clothes were generally more suited for Ft. Lauderdale than Maine, and Gabby always said she looked like a Bachelorette waiting to happen.
Ms. Hadley stuck her permanently scowling face into the locker room. “Girls! Hurry it up! I want you outside in three minutes!”
Em slipped on her gym shorts and a loose-fitting T-shirt and headed outside; as she did, Jenna jogged up alongside her. “Em. I really am so sorry about what I said earlier. . . . ”
“Jenna, seriously—don’t worry about it.”
“Okay, well . . . ” she started. “It’s just good to have you back, is all. But aren’t you going to be freezing?”
Em looked around, noticing all the other girls were pulling on sweatshirts or yoga pants to brave the misty afternoon. But she knew she’d be perfectly comfortable. It was as if her internal temperature had increased over the past month or two. Like her anger at the Furies was a fire burning constantly inside her.
“I’ll be fine,” she responded. “I’m going to go warm up.”
Out by the track, Hadley was already barking at the students: “I don’t want to hear any griping about the weather. Start moving and you’ll work up a sweat.”
She was already burning up. As she folded herself in half, hands dangling by her toes, Em tried to quiet her mind, which was suddenly full of the Furies and everything else. Just the mention of the fire made her feel crazy, made the stories flare up in her brain. The gym, sure, but also that house in the woods . . . the one Drea had told her about.
Drea’s research had unearthed the tale of three sisters hounded to death by Ascension townspeople more than a century ago. Accused of being witches or gypsies or husband-stealers. The fire was set in an effort to drive them out. And while the sisters’ charred remains were never found, the townspeople did find the body of a male, a boy, in that house in the Haunted Woods. They’d assumed he was a servant. That odd detail had stuck out.
She closed her eyes, feeling the pull in her hamstrings, trying to block out everything but the sensations in her body. Then she swooped her torso and arms upward, reaching for the sky, leaning to the left and the right.
“Okay, now start jogging,” Mrs. Hadley instructed the group. “We’re going to run for fifteen minutes. If you can’t run anymore, start walking. But I don’t want to see you strolling. This is work, people.”
Em had never been much of a runner; while Gabby enjoyed sweating it out on the treadmill, Em had always been a Response Runner—that is, her running routines were generally a response to jeans that felt tighter than usual. But today it came naturally. She was barely panting.
“Nice work, Winters,” she heard Hadley shout as she marked her first lap. “You been taking steroids?”
Lap two. Pound, pound, pound. She was an asteroid hurtling toward an unavoidable fate.
She ran past Casey a second time, and felt resentful eyes boring into her. Didn’t care.