From The Order of the Key:
In my dreams, I ran with my father.
Or at least I thought it was my father. I never had the chance to meet him before he took off and kept on running, right away from Mom, from me, from kissing away boo-boos, and sneaking me cookies from the cupboard when Mom wasn’t looking. Or whatever it was people did with their dads. I wouldn’t know.
But in the dream, we were together. His voice light and teasing, an Irish brogue, an accent unlike anyone else’s in my life. He prodded me to hurry, to run faster, to keep up with him.
The air was clear and we didn’t run on a track. Our feet snagged on fallen tree limbs and slick patches of wet leaves, through the clearing in a forest I didn’t recognize. We would take off, so fast it was like flying.
It wasn’t real. For one thing, nobody moved that way. I wasn’t The Flash, though that would be awesome. For another, I’d lived in Bronx, New York my entire life, and the only stretch of open green space like that in the Boogie Down was the Botanical Garden or the Zoo. They didn’t just let you blast through the trees there.
In The Bronx, there were track meets on asphalt schoolyards, or wood gym floors with bad polish jobs. Which was where I pressed my fingertips, my heels resting on the starting blocks, waiting impatiently for the whistle to blow.
Maybe that dream was why I loved this so much.
If I won this eight-hundred-meter race, I’d get the sweet spot in the first city-wide competition of the school year. I rocked up onto my toes and back down.
I could do this.