The Secret Runners Read online

  It was Finkelstein’s position that it would be an extinction-level event. And it would not be pretty. It would be twenty-four hours of terror and misery. For gamma radiation would not be kind to the fragile human body. It would hurt it in several different ways.

  First, electrically. That would be the real killer, Finkelstein said.

  Almost every cell in our bodies relies on electrical impulses to survive. The human brain uses electricity to send signals to the rest of the body. When struck by the gamma cloud, the average person’s brain would fry, and that person would literally drop dead where they stood.

  That would knock out 99.5 percent of the global population.

  But the gamma cloud was not, Finkelstein said, of a single uniform level of strength: it would be denser in some places and more diluted in others.

  This meant that different locations on the Earth would be hit with different levels of exposure, and thus some people—perhaps because they were hit by a lower level of gamma radiation or perhaps because they possessed a natural resistance to it—might survive the wave of death scouring the planet.

  That said, those survivors wouldn’t have a great world to keep living in. The same electromagnetic forces that would scramble the brains of most of the people on Earth would also have a devastating impact on every electrical circuit on the planet.

  In short, the gamma cloud would cause all electrical devices—TVs, computers, lights, power plants—to snuff out. Power would be lost. Mankind would be plunged back to the Stone Age.

  It was all pretty dire stuff.

  Twenty-four hours of death and suffering, plus catastrophic power loss, which was why all the crazies—religious and otherwise—were so lathered up about it.

  * * *

  —

  Of course, the media latched on to it.

  The late-night comedians had a field day, especially with the date Finkelstein had pinpointed for the coming apocalypse: St. Patrick’s Day. It was an Irish conspiracy, Stephen Colbert joked, designed to allow Irishmen to drink more beer.

  Every network morning show brought on an expert, astrophysicists from around the world who had aimed their telescopes at the sky. Many agreed with Finkelstein, but almost as many didn’t.

  Even those who agreed with him argued that the cloud might simply miss us. It happened with comets all the time.

  But Dr. Finkelstein stubbornly maintained that his calculations were correct.

  And, of course, the seventy-two-year-old scientist came under intense personal scrutiny.

  Every scholarly paper and article he had ever written was dissected. A plagiarism accusation from his undergraduate days fifty years earlier was dug up. A sexual harassment complaint—he’d been exonerated—was also found.

  Rival astrophysicists accused him of being a sad old man looking for attention in the sunset of his career.

  And then, maybe because of the intense media attention and speculation, Dr. Harold Finkelstein did the most unexpected thing.

  He died.

  He’d just finished an interview with George Stephanopoulos on Good Morning America and was taking off his lapel mike when he suddenly clutched at his chest, his face twisting in a rictus of pain, and collapsed to the studio floor. Dead of a heart attack.

  The cameras didn’t catch his fall, but images of him lying on the floor went around the world within minutes.

  And with the chief proponent of the end-of-the-world theory gone, and with enough naysayers stepping forward to take his place, the theory itself drifted out of the news cycle and became just another crackpot thing and—tinfoil-hat crazies and religious doomsday proponents aside—the world moved on.

  At least until March 17 came within sight, and then people began talking about it again, just in case Finkelstein had been right.

  * * *

  —

  My own feelings about the end of the world were mixed.

  Was it true? Was it a crock? By the time the media was through with it, the average schmuck couldn’t tell. When the New York Times suggests you weigh all the possibilities and the National Enquirer tells you to buy an underground bunker and line the walls with twelve inches of lead, who are you going to believe?

  Like many people, I had been leaning toward the it’ll-all-be-okay side of the argument until I spoke to my dad about it—my real dad, that is.

  Dr. Dwight R. Rogers had formerly been the dean of the School of Medicine at the University of Tennessee—his area of expertise: nuclear medicine—and on my last visit to Memphis, he had told me he’d looked at Finkelstein’s work and concluded that the man wasn’t nuts. He was correct.

  Dad told me that you could survive the plunge through the gamma cloud if you were inside a vacuum-walled chamber or if you had a naturally or artificially boosted immune system that protected the body’s electrical conductivity, especially in the brain.

  “Load up on calcium and phosphorus,” he said to me in his ultra-precise, earnest way. “They are vital to nerve-impulse transmission in the body and the brain, which is what gamma radiation affects. But mainly calcium, not too much phosphorus. Whole milk, yogurt, sardines—yes, yes, lots of sardines—and any kind of calcium supplements you can find at a pharmacy. Ease up on sodas, because they’ll lessen your calcium uptake. And maybe get your hands on some antipsychotic medication, something like risperidone or olanzapine, which also affect neurotransmitters. ADHD meds or antidepressants would work, too.”

  He was starting to babble, his brain moving faster than his mouth, as it often did. I just nodded encouragingly.

  Beside me, Red rolled his eyes.

  He was a lovely man, my dad, and a brilliant one, too, until the nervous breakdown.

  I understood Red’s point of view: it’s hard to take advice about surviving the end of the world from a resident of a mental asylum in Memphis, Tennessee.

  NEW YORK, BITCHES VS. NEW YORK BITCHES

  After the horror of that initial school assembly, I tried to forge my way through life at Monmouth with maximum invisibility.

  For a time that plan worked remarkably well, and I have to say I learned a lot, both academically and about the laws of the New York high school jungle.

  Red, of course, made friends instantly.

  Within three days, he had found a group of buddies from the school’s lacrosse team, which he joined a few weeks later. Among them was the captain of the team and Head Boy, the gorgeous Bo Bradford.

  I myself got to know the warring factions of the females in the junior year of The Monmouth School.

  The first thing I learned about them was that they were defined by who their parents were. Every time I was introduced to someone, it was followed by “Her father is on the board at Goldman Sachs” or “Her mother is the chair of the Met Charity Luncheon Board” or “Her mom is on the advisory board of the New York City Ballet.” It created the pecking order: as a general rule, the richer the parents, the more powerful the student.

  The biracial girl with the gorgeous twist-out from the assembly was Jenny Johnson. Her father (see what I mean?) was Ken Johnson, a white billionaire hedge-fund owner who had made his fortune during the 2008 financial crisis by betting against the market. He was vice chairman of one of the most important boards in the city: the board of trustees of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

  His wife was black and had been a model, hence Jenny’s beautiful complexion. Jenny was technically the richest kid at Monmouth. But—and it was a big but—her family’s money was considered new, which brought her down a few pegs.

  I liked Jenny.

  We shared a few classes and she had been very welcoming to me, and not in that nervous I-haven’t-got-any-friends-of-my-own-so-I’ll-befriend-the-new-girl kind of way.

  We had also bonded in rather unique circumstances.

  It happened one day in the girls’ restroom. I
’d been washing my hands when Jenny came out of a stall behind me and stepped up to the next sink.

  As always, I was wearing my watch. I never took it off. That was one of the advantages of the G-Shock: as well as being virtually unbreakable, it was waterproof.

  What I hadn’t counted on was the new brand of makeup I’d bought the previous day. I wore it on my left wrist, under my watch’s band. The foundation had run under the flow of water, creating an ugly nude-colored splotch on my watchband, and I hadn’t noticed.

  Jenny had, but instead of saying anything, she just grabbed a paper towel, came over, and dabbed the band clean.

  “Gotta be careful with makeup on the wrist,” she said. “Need a good, thick foundation that won’t run.”

  I noticed then that Jenny also wore a sizable watch.

  She smiled kindly at me. “I’ve been there, too.”

  * * *

  —

  There.

  I hadn’t always been a timid high schooler. In fact, back in Memphis, I’d been the exact opposite: popular, outgoing, confident, and vice president of my freshman class at a prestigious all-girls private school. I had happily campaigned—buttons, badges, balloons, and smiles—alongside my best friend, Savannah, a classic southern belle from a prominent family who was running for class president.

  We won, our clique was the most envied in the school, and all was right with the world. I was someone.

  And then I’d blown it.

  I caught Savannah and some of our friends at the mall one day teasing a disabled girl named Tilly Green. Tilly had a funny walk caused by some rare bone disorder. She dragged her left foot.

  “My God, Tilly,” Savannah said. “You are such a spastic.”

  I’d seen Savannah make hurtful comments before, but for some reason something about her taunts that day affected me. I mean, the kid was disabled. It was too much.

  When Tilly started crying, I stepped in front of her and said, “Hey, Savannah. That’s enough. Leave the poor girl alone.”

  Savannah glared at me. “I didn’t ask for your opinion, Skye. I think you’d better go now. We’ll meet you later.”

  And that was my Rubicon: the moment I could have walked away and left Tilly at the mercy of Savannah and the other girls and kept my life.

  But I stood my ground. “No, Savannah. I mean it. That’s enough.”

  It was a mistake. Savannah’s wrath was as swift as it was savage.

  From that day on, she made my life a living hell, both at school and outside it. I was excluded from her table at lunch. I wasn’t invited to parties. She even stripped me of my vice presidency on some technicality.

  And I learned that when your friend is the pack leader, part of the deal is remembering she is the pack leader. I had questioned the natural order of things and had to suffer for it.

  (My mother, amazingly, urged me to beg for Savannah’s forgiveness. “Savannah comes from a very influential family socially in these parts, darling. Say you’re sorry. Swallow your pride. Don’t throw your life away because of some crippled girl who doesn’t matter anyway.”)

  I actually tried to talk with Savannah, but she wouldn’t even see me.

  The social ostracism, the former friends who passed me in the hall as though I was invisible, the complete loss of status: it took a toll.

  I fell apart.

  I started eating badly and hiding at home. Going to school became an ordeal. I was fourteen, overweight and overwrought, lonely and catastrophizing about everything. And then, after some final casual taunt from my mother about my weight, I got there…

  …and did it.

  The thing was, I regretted it as soon as I made that first cut to my left wrist.

  But the damage was done. My wrist had bled uncontrollably and I’d had to go to the emergency room with, of all people, my mom. Months of therapy followed as I desperately tried to prove my sanity. School became even worse. The looks I received from Savannah and her followers were beyond cruel.

  I moved to New York eighteen months later with my mother and my brother, having learned a harsh lesson: never rock the social boat.

  * * *

  —

  “You’ve been there, too?” I said to Jenny.

  My cut had left a scar, hence the Casio watch and the makeup I wore underneath it (and my admiration for Monmouth’s long-sleeved uniform).

  In reply, Jenny Johnson showed me her own scar. It was on her right wrist, hidden beneath one of the world’s ugliest watches.

  “A moment of despair,” she said.

  “Nice watch,” I said. It was truly unfashionable, plain and black.

  Jenny grinned, flipping her wrist like a fashion model. “It was a gift from my dad. It’s made by the same company that makes Swiss Army knives. It’s not exactly the height of fashion, but it’s got a kick-ass secret feature.”

  Raising her eyebrows theatrically, she slid a small retractable blade from within the watch. It was maybe two inches long, and it slotted perfectly into the body of the timepiece.

  She explained, “My dad is paranoid about kidnapping or, rather, somebody kidnapping me. He made me take a ‘kidnapping awareness’ class. He also bought me this hideous watch: the hidden blade is for cutting a rope around your wrists or a gag in your mouth.” Jenny shrugged. “It also hides my scar.”

  I smiled. From that moment on, we had a quiet understanding.

  Beyond that, one of the things I really liked about Jenny was that, despite all her father’s wealth, she had a job.

  “My dad’s entirely self-made,” she said to me once as we ate lunch on the school’s rooftop basketball court. “He didn’t inherit a dime. He says a dollar earned is more valuable than a thousand dollars inherited, so even though he’s got gazillions, he told me that if I wanted to buy something, I’d have to get a job and earn the money to get it.”

  Jenny worked weekends as a waitress for a company that provided additional silver-service waitstaff for high-end private events: gallery openings, charity dinners, that sort of thing. It was good money, Jenny said, as much as fifty bucks an hour, because she would often be called in at late notice, when other waitstaff companies were caught short of personnel.

  Jenny also had a brash confidence that I admired, like the time she’d traded barbs with the mean girls at the assembly.

  Ah, yes, the mean girls.

  Every school’s got them, especially—I discovered—private schools with female and male students. Great white sharks are not as territorial as rich white girls are about their boys.

  The two girls who had hurled insults at Jenny at the assembly were as follows:

  One, Hattie Brewster—chunky, dark-haired, rich, and bullish. Her mother was a Carnegie or something. She was the one who had threatened to punch Jenny in the uterus.

  And two, Verity Keeley—skinny, auburn hair with highlights, huge almond eyes but a slightly horse-ish nose. Her father co-owned an oil company that went back to the days of John D. Rockefeller.

  By themselves, Hattie and Verity were your standard teen bitches who just happened to live in upscale New York City. While pretty, Verity wasn’t pretty enough to be an alpha, and Hattie—bigger, broader, with more masculine features—was basically a thug. Both were beta types, followers.

  And all followers need someone to follow.

  That was Misty Collins. She was something else entirely.

  At sixteen, she was the younger sister of the Head Girl, Chastity, and if girls coalesce around queen bees, then she was their empress.

  Misty Collins ruled the junior year at Monmouth.

  Her father was Conrad Collins, a direct descendant of a Mayflower pilgrim and one of the largest property owners in New York. Her mother, Starley, was a prominent socialite who came from another Mayflower family. The Collins pedigree was as gilded as it got in
America, their money old and untarnished by the stain of modern commerce.

  “American royalty,” I once heard a girl say in a hushed whisper as Misty sauntered by, trailed by Hattie and Verity.

  Misty had similar features to her older sister—honey-colored blond hair, blue eyes—but she wasn’t as classically beautiful as Chastity. For one thing, she was shorter, but mainly it was her eyes. Chastity Collins had bright, wide blue eyes, while Misty’s eyes were anything but bright.

  She had heavy eyelids and a lazy right eye that seemed to always be looking upward. It forced her to tilt her head forward to look at you and gave her a kind of permanent dull-eyed scowl.

  This, I learned, was the source of Jenny Johnson’s barb about Misty’s RBF.

  An RBF—I Googled it—was a Resting Bitch Face, and I had to admit, Misty had one. But it didn’t affect her standing in New York society.

  While the headmistress, Ms. Briggman, might have chosen not to attend the Met Gala, Misty had gone…when she was sixteen years old. That was back in May—before I had arrived in New York—but she and her clique were still talking about it in September.

  “Rihanna’s outfit was unbelievable,” Misty said one day as we were sitting in English class waiting for Mrs. Hoynes to arrive. “But nothing beats seeing Ryan Reynolds in the flesh. I mean, like, whoa.”

  Or on another occasion, in the junior common room: “You know none of those models and actresses actually pay to go to the Met Gala? It’s $17,000 per ticket. Some of them can’t even afford the plane fare. The sponsors pay for them, sometimes on Anna’s orders.”

  Anna was Anna Wintour, the famous editor of Vogue, who sat on a charity board with Mrs. Collins and often dined at their home.

  The home of the Collinses.

  Allow me to digress for a moment, because I should mention this, chiefly because it was directly related to how I came to enter Misty’s orbit and that of the secret runners.

  You see, like me, Misty lived in the San Remo building.