Chapter 3
Eve idles the car in a dirt lot as Fletcher gets out.
He pauses. Taps the window. Eve rolls it down and he says, “Can you please bring the NSAIDs to the third checkpoint?” Fletcher doesn’t use brand names for things, as if they live in a world of copyright violence where Pfizer men will rappel down from the trees if he dares utter an “Advil.”
“I would love to,” Eve says. “I would love to bring the nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs to the third checkpoint.”
“Cool cool,” he says, and then he lopes to the start line with his little neon vest all stuffed with Maurten gels.
Version One: Eve is so charmed by her athletic, earnest boyfriend. Version Two: No one has ever looked sexy in a hydration vest.
On the drive to the third checkpoint, where she was asked to wait with two cheese quesadillas and a two-liter bottle of flat Coke (“cola”), Eve rolls down the windows and scream-sings high notes at the edge of her vocal range.
She catches a glimpse of herself in the rearview mirror and must admit she looks like a Woman on the Edge.
When Eve was growing up—Manhattan, Upper West Side—and then in college, she had a carefully constructed look.
Neon nail polish, gold jewelry, long wool coats in the winters, and crocheted everything in the summers.
Now her roots are growing out and she always has a sports bra tan.
All her makeup has expired. She is wearing silver earrings because Fletcher once mentioned, offhandedly, that he liked silver better than gold.
It’s not so much that Eve doesn’t like this version of herself—it’s that she doesn’t remember agreeing to it.
It feels like a version of herself that happened rather than one she made on purpose.
She parks at the aid station and leaves Fletcher’s quesadillas and Coke on a folding table with the volunteers, all of whom appear to be injured runners.
Fletcher won’t arrive for two hours at the earliest, so Eve takes a wander down the crisscrossing tracks until she finds a stream.
The air is cloudy with a thin, fine dust, and clumps of unmelted snow hide in the roots of the pine trees.
There is so little oxygen up here. Everyone is always going on about the mountain air, but Eve has always found the air at sea level extremely palatable.
She puts in an AirPod, brushes the dead pine needles from a flat rock, and sits with her legs stretched in front of her.
“Autocrat,” she says. “Auto . . . craaaaaat.”
The AirPod is looping a guitar riff from a song she wrote last year that everyone agreed was unsalvageable.
It was a love song. A bad sad song is still interesting, but a bad love song is unforgivable.
There is a version of this story where Eve writes a song about the smell of pine trees; about kissing Fletcher at the finish line; about love.
Eve knows because she wrote it last year and everyone hated it.
“Nonsteroidal,” she says. “Strava royal. Strava. Rooooooyal.” The guitar loops again. The inside of her brain shudders with a perfect yes-ness, like she has just sealed the lid on a to-go cup. Click. Strava royal, nonsteroidal, always get your way. Ski rat, autocrat, daddy’s Piaget.
She records it once and then rests her phone face down on her thigh and stares at the stream.
It’s not wise to make fun of one’s boyfriend in song.
A nice girlfriend wouldn’t call her boyfriend an autocrat; then again, a nice boyfriend probably wouldn’t treat his girlfriend like a subject.
Is she being unfair? Are her standards too high or too low?
What is love, actually? Maybe none of us know; maybe we all just keep dating people until we find a definition we’re willing to live with.
Eve hears a crack. A stick breaking. She glances up, expecting a runner. No one is there.
She returns to her phone, and then she catches a shift in her peripheral vision. A flash of bronze in the underbrush. This time, when she looks up, she sees two black-rimmed eyes staring at her from the other side of the stream.
So it’s a mountain lion, actually.
“Holyfuckingshit,” she says. She scrambles to her feet and holds her arms above her head in an attempt to look taller. “No. No, no.”
The mountain lion’s head vanishes as it crouches beneath the bushes, but Eve can see the tail slink closer. The tail vanishes. Just underbrush. Silence.
“Hey,” Eve says. She tries to clap, but it doesn’t make any sound because her stupid phone is in her hand and she’s afraid that if she puts it in her pocket she will look temporarily small. “Hey!” She wants to run. She’s almost positive you’re not supposed to run.
And then, to her left, on her side of the stream, Eve hears a meow.
Slowly, she turns. There, in the underbrush, are four small eyes.
Okay, yep, she’s going to run. Mama cougar separated from her cubs seems unlikely to be scared away by Extended Mountain Pose. Eve starts walking backward, trying to scale her way up the steep dirt track. The mother still has not reappeared on the other side of the water.
And then she does.
She leaps across the stream.
And Eve thinks:
Fuck, this is actually happening
She is aiming for my head
I am actually going to get killed by a mountain lion
I thought you were, like, thousands of times more likely to be killed by a vending machine than a wild animal
It’s true what they say about time slowing down
Fucking wildlife
Fucking Colorado
Fucking Fletcher
The mountain lion’s claws rake Eve’s shoulders.
What happens next is either a reflex or an accident.
Eve’s arm swings down to shove the mountain lion away, but her phone is still death-gripped in her hand, and that’s what connects with the side of the mountain lion’s nose.
Eve has dropped her phone on her face many times; the pain is universal.
The mountain lion rears back, and Eve scrambles up the hill. They watch each other as Eve takes another step.
“I’m going to go,” Eve says. She tries to lift her arms to look big again, except one of her arms won’t move. Her shoulder is bleeding melodramatically. Another step. The mother doesn’t move.
“Leaving. Never coming back. Okay?”
One of the cubs mewls again, and Eve flinches. The mother’s tail flicks.
“My mom simply would never have done this for me,” Eve says as she crests the ridge. “Goodbye. Thanks so much! This has been so fun.”
Eve keeps walking backward, counting her steps. At thirty, she turns and begins striding deliberately—not running, we’re not scared, we’re not running—to the aid station. When she gets there, two women with crutches leap to their unsteady feet.
“Hi,” Eve says. “I think I need a tetanus shot . . . ? Or rabies, or something. I don’t know. Anyway, I’m going to throw up, I think—just a warning.” And then she does. Fortunately, the aid station is prepared for this eventuality. Ultrarunners throw up all the time.