What Happened to Hannah by Mary Kay McComas Page B

while you’d have to give up. It’s more fun to beat your own personal best. You get to know yourself pretty well. You test yourself over and over again. And you amaze yourself over and over again by what you can do. It’s a great feeling.”
    “You’re speaking from experience.” She waited for Anna to cross the finish line, slow down, circle back halfway toward a man holding a stop watch and a clipboard, then bend with her hands on her knees to catch her breath, before she looked at Biscuit.
    “I ran junior varsity three years ago when I was a freshman, then I wrecked my knee in a car accident. It wasn’t the same after that. I can still play basketball, though. I’m a pretty good forward.” He wiggled his fingers at her and grinned. “I have good hands.”
    “Do you miss the running?” she asked, ignoring his youthful innuendo. Looking back at Anna, she watched the girl straighten up and look directly at the tall wire fencing on the scoreboard end of the field. Following her gaze, Hannah spotted Cal Steadman leaning against the front of an old light-blue pickup truck, his arms crossed over his chest.
    “Nah. Not anymore. It’s more fun to watch Anna do all that work.” Catching her glancing between Anna and Cal, he added, “We all like watching her.”
    “Cal comes to watch every day?”
    He shrugged. “And to pick up Lucy. And to hang with me.”
    She had a sinking feeling in her chest. “I think I messed up again. I’m supposed to let her ride home with Cal, aren’t I? That’s what she wanted to do, right? What she usually does? I’m screwing up her routine.”
    “It’s already screwed up. Coach is letting her practice with the relay team for now, but once he decides who to replace her with, it’ll be screwed up even more. Then there’s the move to Baltimore. You picking her up today is pretty minor in the overall screwed-upness of things. Besides, she’s glad that you wanted to see her run.”
    “And Cal?” she asked on a hunch. “Is there something . . . going on, between the two of them?”
    He scrunched his face and looked like he either didn’t want to or wasn’t supposed to speak on this issue.
    “No,” he said at last, and she sensed he was lying—or at least not telling the whole truth. “Not really. They’re friends, is all.”
    “Good friends?”
    “Pretty good.” He looked at her, made a quick assessment, then lowered his eyes to concentrate on his black nail polish. “Lucy says Anna’s had this thing for him since like sixth grade. I’m pretty sure she was just his little sister’s best friend until like last summer because he was way hot on Cassie Jordan for a long time. Cal and Cassie, they were a pair. Until last summer. I don’t know what happened. I don’t think he knows what happened, but suddenly he wasn’t so hot on Cassie anymore and they broke up.” He glanced over at his friend, leaning against the pickup truck, then tilted back on the bleacher behind them, his arms stretched out wide. “He’s been smart about it, though. He didn’t make some big, huge move on someone else right away—Cassie would have made her life a hell. But I know my boy and I’ve seen the way he looks at Anna and . . .” His soft laugh was relaxed and philosophical. “His old man knows him, too.”
    “Grady?”
    “That’s the one.”
    “He knows there’s something going on between them?”
    “No, but he, like me, saw the potential for something to begin, and he told Cal to back off.”
    “Why?”
    He bobbed his head. “Because Anna’s leaving town. He said there was no point in starting something that can’t be finished.”
    Wise advice stemming from Grady’s firsthand experience . “So this was recent?”
    He nodded. “And it was Lucy’s fault . . . again. Seems Cal said something to her about maybe taking Anna to the prom, maybe , and I think Lucy may have said something to Anna about it, of course. But then old Mrs. Benson . . . well, your mom,