Chapter 13: Run for Mara

The T-shirts were the first thing I saw.

They were pale green, three hundred of them, and every one had my face printed on the chest.

It was the hallway photo, the one Tripp took last spring when I smiled for the memory.

Ezra parked behind the bleachers and turned off the engine.

"You can stay in the car," I said.

"I'm not staying in the car."

"Then stay behind me."

"I'll be wherever you put me," he said.

Nolan climbed out of the back seat with a banker's box in both arms.

Inside were two hundred and eleven envelopes, each with a name in his small neat handwriting.

Every envelope held a refund check from the Mara Fund.

I pinned the bib to my cardigan, number 1, printed by Nolan at his kitchen table.

Then I walked through the gate onto the Marietta High track, where I had finished last in the mile four springs running.

A woman from my mother's church saw me first.

She had a paper cup of coffee, and she dropped it.

The quiet moved across the infield from person to person until it reached the far fence.

My old gym teacher took off his cap.

At the fifty-yard line stood a flatbed trailer with a microphone, a speaker stack, and a banner across the fence behind it.

RUN FOR MARA, it said in green paint.

Someone had pasted a strip of white paper over the words underneath, and in marker it now read SHE LIVED.

Tripp stood on the trailer in his gray quarter-zip, holding a cardboard check as tall as a door.

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