Cross the Line (Alex Cross 24)

McDonald gestured across the track. “Like those folks over there with the hand timers. All of them are D-One coaches. Oregon. Texas. Georgetown. Cal. Stanford. Every one of them is going to watch Jannie run.”

“Does she know this?” I asked.

“No. I’ve got her running against the clock and herself.”

“What’s that mean?” Bree asked.

“I’ll tell you if it happens,” the coach said, looking back to the track and clapping his hands. “Here we go. Nice and easy.”

Jannie lined up on the stagger in lane four. At the starter’s gun, she broke into her long flowing stride and kept pace with two high school seniors from California and another from Arizona.

She was third when they crossed the finish line and didn’t look winded at all.

“Eighty percent,” McDonald said after looking at his stopwatch. He leaned over to me and said in a low voice, “With that run she’s got every coach over there interested enough to start giving her calls in the coming months, maybe even make a few house visits.”

“But she’s a sophomore,” I said.

“I know,” McDonald said. “But later on, if she runs the way she did the other day in training, you could have every coach over there camped out in your front yard.”

I didn’t ask him for more. No particulars. The entire conversation had me nervous in a sour-gut sort of way, and proud, and nervous all over again.

We used the two-hour break to have lunch with Damon and two of his new friends, his roommate, William, and fellow basketball player Justin Hahn, from Boston. Both were good guys, both were very funny, and both were capable of eating a staggering amount of food. Damon too. They ate so much, we almost missed the finals.

Jannie and seven other girls were heading into the blocks when we hurried to our seats. She drew lane three of eight. The girls took their marks. The gun went off.

Jannie came up in short choppy strides, tripped, stumbled, and fell forward onto her hands and knees.

“No!” we all groaned before she sprang up and started running again.

“Oh, that sucks,” Damon said.

“There goes the scholarship,” his roommate said, which annoyed me but not enough to make me lower my binoculars.

Ali said, “What happened?”

“She got off balance,” said Coach McDonald, who was also watching through binocu

lars. “Kicked her heel and…she’s maybe twenty yards in back of Bethany Kellogg, the LA girl in lane one. Odds-on favorite.”

The runners in the outer lanes were almost halfway down the back straight when Jannie finally came out of the curve in dead last. But she didn’t look upset. She was up to speed now, running fluidly, efficiently.

“That’s not going to do it, missy,” McDonald said, and it was almost like Jannie could hear him because her stride began to lengthen and her footfalls turned from springy to explosive. She didn’t run so much as bound down the track, looking long-legged, loose-jointed, and strong as hell.

Through the binoculars, I was able to get a good look at her face; she was straining but not breaking with the effort.

“She just picked off the girl from Kentucky in lane four,” McDonald said as the runners entered the far turn. “She’s not going to be last. C’mon, young lady, show us what you’ve got now.”

The stagger was still on, but the gaps between the athletes were narrowing fast as they drove on through the turn. Jannie was moving up with every stride. Coming onto the homestretch, she passed a Florida girl in lane two.

Damon’s roommate yelled, “She’s freaking flying!”

We were all on our feet now, watching Jannie dig deep into her reservoir of grit and determination. Thirty yards down the stretch, she surged past the Texas girl in lane six. She went by an Oregon racer in lane eight at the halfway mark.

“She’s in fourth!” Ali shouted.

The top three girls were neck and neck, with Bethany Kellogg barely leading and ten feet between Jannie and the girl from Alabama in third.

With thirty yards to go, she closed that to six feet. With fifteen yards left, she’d pinched it to three.