“You still didn’t answer my question, though,” Ash said. “You told me how you started running, but you didn’t tell mewhyyou do it.”
“I guess I didn’t.” Cassidy’s expression dimmed, and Ash wondered what he’d said wrong. Whatever it was, he wished he could take it back immediately.
But she didn’t seem upset, just a little sad. More of that gray storm cloud had moved in.
“When I got sick,” she said, “the first horrible thought I had was that I’d never be able to run again.”
“Oh god, I’m so sorry,” Ash said.
Cassidy barely nodded. Her mind was back in the past. “That was before I realized that the actual worst thing was I might die from my disease. It was looking really bad for a while—I was hooked up to an oxygen machine twenty-four/seven. And since I was only thirteen, the chances of finding a matching organ donor were slim. You can’t put adult-sized lungs into a kid’s chest.”
Crap,Ash thought.Why did I have to dredge this up for her?
“After a year of waiting, my lungs failed completely. I lived in the hospital, hooked up to an ECMO machine—basically the most advanced life support that exists. It took all the blood out of my body and oxygenated it for me, since my lungs couldn’t do it, then pumped the blood back into my veins.”
She started hammering in the nail she was supposed to be extracting from the fence, but Ash didn’t think this was the best time to point that out.
“You can’t live on ECMO forever, though,” she said. “It’s risky for a lot of reasons. I kept getting sicker and weaker, and I was literally a few days away from dying when my doctor rushed into my room.” Cassidy’s mouth flattened into a grim line. She pounded harder at the nail. The wood around it splintered, but she kept hitting and hitting it as her eyes grew watery. “He told me that another girl had died at a nearby hospital. Her last wish was for her organs to go to someone else. And it turned out, that ‘someone else’ would be me.”
Ash was rendered even more speechless than usual.
“It was my second chance,” Cassidy whispered, “and I vowed to fill my life with things I loved. So, to answer your question—Irun for me because I can, and I run for the girl who died that day and gave me her lungs, because she can’t.”
“Th-that’s a really good reason,” Ash said lamely. He was trying not to choke on the lump in his throat.
But then Cassidy’s eyes met his, and she seemed to notice the hammer in her hand and the nail smashed into the fence. She blinked away her tears and laughed at what she’d done.
“Anyway,” she said, “sorry to get so grim. Definitely didn’t mean to get that gory.… Must be the Halloween vibes.” She grinned at her joke, and just like that, the cheerful girl everyone else knew was back again.
Ash didn’t understand how, after all she’d been through, Cassidy could still be one of the sunniest people he’d ever met. Always a smile on her face, and never a cruel word about anybody.
But maybe it wasbecauseof what she survived that she could cut through to what was truly important.
Cassidy started trying to pry out the banged-up nail.
“Oh!” she said a second later, as if she’d just had an epiphany. “I think I also like running because my family’s loud. I love them so, so much, but when I’m running, especially on trails through the woods, I have my own space. Does that make sense? Or maybe you don’t need it, because you’re an only child.”
“No, I get it.” Ash’s house was generally a placid place: his mom read a lot, and Neel’s hobbies were things of soothing rhythm, like sanding pine boards, or the gentletap-tap-tapof wood joinery. But Onny and True—well, they were the definitions of big personalities that took up a lot of any physical—or even mental—space.
“When I’m in my studio,” Ash said, “I shut out the world. I turn my phone off. I don’t have a clock. It’s just me and what’s right in front of me. I think everyone needs a place of solace like that.”
Cassidy nodded as she tossed the loosened nail onto the pile of others. “Yeah… that’s totally it. When I’m running, I sometimes pretend I’m the wind. I jump over streams and weave through rocks. The leaves rustle as I blow by, and I sort of lose track of myself. It’s like…”
“It’s like time itself flows over you,” Ash said. “You’re a small part of a universe that’s so much larger than you, and yet, youarethat universe. You’re the wind that’s always been, or the color that’s always dazzled under the sun. There’s no difference between you and what surrounds you; one molds the other, and in that solitude, you disappear and yet you become everything, all at once.”
She looked at him with her mouth slightly parted.
Was it pretentious, what he’d said?
Cassidy shook her head at Ash. “That was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard.”
“Oh,” was all he managed. Ash scrubbed his hand through his hair, bashful. “Um, well, thanks.”
“It’s exactly how I feel when I run. I’ve just never been able to explain it. How did you know?”
“That’s what it feels like when I make art.”
Cassidy turned away from the fence and contemplated his studio for a minute.
