“Stop that,” I say through gritted teeth.
He smirks.
Fine. If he’s going to play dirty, I will too. Since we’re the last group to run the track, the mud is particularly bad and I kick through a puddle, letting thick globs of mud hit his knees and the bottom of his shorts.
“Fuck,” he curses, faltering to look down.
I pass him, but then I feel a shock of cold water against my back, and I shiver.
“What the hell?” I shout at him.
“You started it,” he says, passing me.
“Youstarted it.” I push him in the back. His body is firm under my hands, and I don’t intend for him to fall. But his feet tangle and then he’s on the ground.
I have enough time to make an “O” with my mouth, my body still moving, when I feel him grab my ankle, and my forearms slam into the slippery dirt.
I can’t say anything. I can’t even swear at him as I pull myself up. My hands and arms and knees are coated in grains of soil and the entire front of my shirt is brown. When I turn around, I’m gratified to see Kieran is just as muddy as I am — maybe even more. He’s got some on his jaw.
I’m about to go off at him when I see someone behind on catching up. No time to scream at him, then. I have to win this. I turn on my heel, not caring how I look, and sprint the rest of the course. It’s not far now, and I keep my eyes on the gym, where the path ends. My heart pounds, my legs ache, and my body is freezing, but there’s no fucking way I’m letting Kieran win.
But he’s still goddamn right beside me.
We approach the finish line. A hundred metres to go. Fifty. Thirty.
The teacher at the finish line with the stopwatch opens her mouth in surprise when she sees us.
Ten metres to go. Five. I’m not letting him win —
As soon as I cross the finish line, I fold over and cough. My lungs are screaming, and I suck in gulps of air. Beside me, Kieran is panting hard.
“You boys certainly got messy,” a teacher says to us, then points at a table in the gym. “Go to that table to record your place.”
“Who came first?” Kieran asks.
“It was too hard to tell,” the teacher says. “Record it as a draw.”
“A draw?” I repeat. “Surely someone was a millisecond faster — ”
“We don’t have Olympic level timers here,” she says. “It was a draw.”
I force myself to nod. I enter the gym, feeling guilty about tracking mud inside, and go up to the table where two elderly teachers are recording the places. Kieran arrives behind me.
“It was a draw,” I say. “What place did we come?”
“Ninth,” one teacher says, looking at us with a scrunched nose. “You boys better clean yourself up. Go to the bathrooms and change back into your school uniforms.”
I force down my desire to say it was all Kieran’s fault. I want teachers to like me, so I nod.
Kieran and I grab our bags with our uniforms from our lockers and get changed in the nearest bathrooms by the library. It’s empty because the rest of the school would be using the gym bathrooms.
As soon as the doors slam closed behind us, I whirl around and poke Kieran hard in the chest. “What thefuckis wrong with you?”
He looks at me with a blank expression. “You pushed me first,” he says.
“That was an accident,” I hiss.
“Yeah, two hands right on my back was an accident.”
