Althea and Oliver Read Online Free PDF Page A

first name or a single personal detail or indulged in a moment of locker room gossip with the girls on her team, nor does she regard them with the thinly veiled parental affection that seems to run rampant on other sports teams. Their mutual lack of interest in the more sentimental aspects of high school athletics has contributed to an easy, brusque rapport in which Althea takes a strange pride that, even from her coach, she requires so little.
    â€œYes, ma’am,” says Althea.
    â€œWhat’s going on out there?”
    â€œI can’t see it.”
    â€œThe hurdles?” Mystified, Coach looks out to the track, as if to confirm that an obscuring fog has not swept over the campus.
    â€œNo, ma’am. In my head—I can’t see the jump in my head, the way I usually can.”
    Coach nods immediately. “You’re choking. Overthinking it. Stop doing that.”
    â€œI can’t focus.”
    â€œYou’re focusing too much.”
    â€œYes, ma’am. How do I stop?”
    On the track, the other hurdlers have circled around and are congregating at the starting line, chatting idly while awaiting further instructions. The rest of the team is spread out on the grass, stretching their hamstrings and inner thighs.
    â€œYou need to let your mind go soft. Like when you close your eyes to go to sleep at night. Like that, except standing up. And with your eyes open.”
    Miserably, Althea thinks of all the sleepless nights she has lain awake in her bed, held hostage by her inability to do exactly what Coach is describing. “Yes, ma’am.”
    Althea jogs back to her place on the line.
    Crouched in position, she tries to unclench her brain. Staring down at her fingers splayed lightly over the clay-red ground, she lets her vision go fuzzy the way it does when she and Oliver have their staring contests, but her mind refuses to follow. Something is different. She can feel her vanished talent like a phantom limb, the empty ache of its subtraction from the short list of her assets, and she knows with spiteful certainty that it is gone for good.
    Coach blows the whistle again, but this time Althea ignores the Pavlovian urge to lunge forward, fists pumping at her sides. Instead, she watches the other girls circling the track, then she turns, ignoring Coach’s shouts, and walks off the field.

chapter two.
    â€œTHE BAD NEWS, Oliver, is that it happened again. The good news is that the doctors can’t find anything wrong with you,” Nicky says.
    â€œYou mean they still have no idea why I keep falling asleep?”
    â€œAccording to them, you’re perfectly healthy.”
    Sitting at the porch table, Oliver’s mother is compulsively rolling her entire pouch of tobacco into slim, identical cigarettes and stacking them in a pyramid next to her half-empty bottle of pinot noir. The sun is well past its zenith, but still shines weakly through the branches of their street’s namesake magnolia trees. Nicky’s ashtray is already filled with a day’s worth of tiny white cigarette ends—too delicate, Oliver has always thought, for a word as crass as
butts
. Her wineglass is resting on the front page of today’s
New York Times
. She lifts it, revealing a series of overlapping red circles where the fibers have greedily sucked up the liquid. Bringing glass to mouth, Nicky does the same.
    â€œWhat’s with the alarm system?” He’d noticed it on his way out the front door, the pristine electronic keypad a disconcertingly futuristic addition to their living room. “We didn’t have that before. When did we get that?”
    â€œA couple of weeks ago,” Nicky admits. “Just to make sure you don’t wander off.”
    The phrase “wander off” makes Oliver think of six-year-olds on leashes in shopping malls. “But I was asleep.”
    â€œSometimes I have to wake you up so you can eat and go to the bathroom. Sometimes