On your marks. Leila Kent, with the unruly mess of hair and the long legs and the seriousness of her determination on the running track, flitting between the different groups in school and never really fitting into any one of them. Get set. The crowd in the stadium is hushed, waiting. She imagines for a second, impossibly, that she can hear her brother squealing excitedly with her grandpa in the field behind her, imagines the sound of her grandmother humming in the kitchen, the familiar rumble of a truck on the dusty roads leading to the farm, the rustling of the earth under her feet, no, it must just be in her head, it must just be her imagination. There’s the starting gun — and she goes.
