Girls in Pants - Ann Brashares [16]
Carmen narrowed her eyes. “And what’s that supposed to mean?”
Now, and for a long time, the best way Bridget knew to settle her mind was to run. Sometimes she felt that the meditative state of the long, quiet miles helped her think. Sometimes she felt that the pure exhaustion helped her not think.
Sometimes she believed that she was running toward some sort of resolution, and other times she knew she was just plain running away. Still, it was what she did.
This late-evening run took her up and down country roads fringed by scrubby, June-green trees. The sinking sun poked an occasional sparkling ray straight into her eyes. When she got bored of the cars honking at her (was she posing a hazard in the fading light, or was it her hair?), she leaped off the road. Another girl might have been scared to run through unfamiliar woods as darkness fell, but Bee wasn’t. She knew she could outrun virtually any human being who might find her. And the bears in these parts weren’t man-eaters, she was pretty sure.
It was exhilarating, if anything. The forest was young and sparse, cut through every which way by paths. She followed a deep, wide bed where she imagined a river had once lain. She pictured herself striving in this same place when the river flowed. She ran until her thoughts shortened and no longer formed lines. They flashed and blipped. She didn’t follow them around the corner. She simply felt things without any hows or whys. This was how she settled herself.
Now the sun was entirely gone and Bridget knew the light would soon disappear too. The light that stayed on after the sun always felt to her like an empty promise. Ahead of her, on the dirt bed, something caught her eye. It jostled her breath out of its rhythm and sent her brain spinning. It was less than twenty yards away, and it disturbed her. She slowed her pace to keep the distance from disappearing so fast. She wanted to run wide around it, but she wanted to face it too. She was back in hows and whys.
It was a bird, she thought. A pigeon, maybe. It was clearly dead and bent into a wrong set of angles. Its head seemed to stick up from the ground in a pitiful pose. She was nearly upon it. She wouldn’t stop. She would keep going. She would avert her eyes. No, she couldn’t avert her eyes.
It wasn’t until she was literally over the bird that she realized, in a burst, that it wasn’t a bird at all. It was a mitten. It was a lost, grayish mitten with the thumb sticking up and looking very much like the head of a bird.
She was instantly flooded by relief and reassessment. Her mind and body fell back into calm alignment.
But as she ran and ran and the sky turned a dark, bruised blue, she felt sad. And, strangely, even though the twisted body in her path had been a mitten, she found herself remembering it as a bird.
If Lena’s mother’s car had not overheated it wouldn’t have happened. The whole summer would have gone differently.
But her mother’s car did overheat, on Thursday afternoon, so Lena borrowed her father’s car on Friday and dropped him at work on her way to drawing class. It was easily on the way. In fact, as she drove away from her father, who was already sweating through his white shirt, she considered absently that it was only a short walk from his office building to her class. But at the time, it didn’t signify anything.
By midmorning she was deeply immersed in her drawing. At Annik’s instruction, the model, Andrew, took five-minute poses. For the first few poses Lena felt so harried she could barely get a gesture out of the tip of her charcoal. But then those five minutes began to stretch out for her. The intensity of hurrying stayed, but the consciousness of time dropped away. Just as her awareness of the model’s nakedness had completely bewitched her during the first few days and subsequently floated off. (In hindsight she felt ashamed of her juvenile, red-faced self. To the seasoned artists in the class, Andrew’s nudity was about as sexually charged as Lena’s coffee cup.)
Lena now observed Andrew’s body in extreme detail, staring without