The Runner by Cynthia Voigt

Author:Cynthia Voigt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atheneum Books for Young Readers

CHAPTER 13

Bullet hooked school the next day: he just got off the bus and went his own way. The thick, triple story of brick waited like a prison, and he didn’t go in. Nobody could make him. They could, he guessed, capture him and drag him inside, if they could get a rope onto him—which he doubted.

Anyway, the question never arose. Hanging onto his lunch bag, he moved around the building and down to the playing fields. A couple of first-period gym classes were doing calisthenics, but he went on by them. Nobody asked him any questions. If anybody had, he wouldn’t have answered, and if they’d come chasing after him he wouldn’t have run. Nobody was going to make him run.

At the oval track he put down his lunch bag and stripped off his sweater and jeans. He folded them into a little pile, the bright red sweater on the brown earth. It was chilly, but the sun was already burning off the morning mist, and the day would grow warm. He ran the cross-country course, ran it five times, ran it hard. Nobody was going to stop him from running.

When the sweat on his chest had dried, he put on his shirt and tied the sweater around his waist by its arms. He walked along down into town, following the main street right up to where it ended at the water. Then he followed the water around to Patrice’s, going through shallows when there was no public pathway. By the time he got out there, his sneakers were sodden and muddy and his jeans clung to his calves.

Patrice wasn’t home. His truck was gone. Bullet went out and sat on the deck of Fraternité for a while. He would have hosed her down except she was always kept clean. He ate his sandwiches, then went back along the dock to drop the crumpled-up bag into Patrice’s incinerator. He hung around the yard for a while, seeing what Patrice was up to. The fourteen-footer was almost finished. The ribs were in and boards ran its entire curved length—fitted so neatly you almost couldn’t see that it was made of separate boards. A new transom lay nearby, needing sanding before it could be set into place, the joints cut out like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Bullet ran his hand along the sides of the boat, sanded to silky smoothness, ready for an undercoat. He didn’t know how Patrice stood it, all that slow work, but he surely admired the results, and even admired Patrice for being able to achieve them.

He turned and looked around the yard. A couple of hulls, an empty boat trailer digging its nose into the ground, motors and propellers. Then he stepped over the picket fence.

The road by Patrice’s was lined on both sides with little houses, each house surrounded by a yard and fence. The other yards, past which Bullet jogged, were planted and tended, kept neat. It bothered his neighbors that Patrice didn’t plant and tend his lawn.

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