She got dressed after breakfast, in the outfit from the shoot, because the photographer wanted to do some final shots outdoors in the rain, Priscilla had texted at six-fifteen, can you come dressed?? the light is AMAZING today, moody, gorgeous, trust me!!! So she pulled on the tights and the shorts and laced up the platform sneakers and shrugged on the leather jacket, which was stiff and new and creaked when she moved, and smelled of the inside of a department store. She looked at herself in the mirror on the back of her bedroom door. A tall, broad-shouldered, long-legged young woman with dark flawless skin and high, sharp cheekbones and a long braided ponytail wrapped in gold, dressed in two shades of leather, looking back at herself with an expression she did not quite recognize. Calm. A little defiant. The face she wore in the ring in the seconds before the referee said begin.
She did not look like someone who taught seven-year-olds on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons how to tie their belts. She did not look like someone who had spent the previous evening reading her grandmother's blood pressure numbers off a cuff and writing them down in a notebook. She looked like a stranger. A cool, dangerous stranger in a magazine.
She thought: Priscilla is going to love this. And then she thought, with a small lurch: I hope nobody who doesn't know me ever sees me like this and thinks it's real.
She picked up her bag, kissed her grandmother on the top of her silver head, took the keys to the SUV from the hook by the back door, and went out into the rain.
The SUV was her grandmother's. It was eleven years old, a big boxy dark-gray thing with a dent in the rear bumper and a crack running across one corner of the windshield and a hundred and sixty thousand miles on the odometer, and it smelled permanently of the peppermints that Odessa kept in a tin in the cup holder. Dara loved it. It was the car she had learned to drive in, in the parking lot of Hollins Junior High on Sunday afternoons, with her grandmother in the passenger seat gripping the door handle and saying, slower, slower, Lord, child, slower. It was the car that had driven her to every tournament she could not get a ride to. It was the car that would drive her today, after the photo shoot, three hours north to Coach Imura's lake cabin, where the two of them and her training partner Jasmine were going to spend a final week of camp before flying to Colorado. Odessa had insisted she take it. My car is reliable, she had said. Your car is a shoebox on wheels with a rattle in it. Dara's car was, in fact, a twelve-year-old compact with a rattle in it, and she had not argued.
The fuel light came on as she pulled out of Delmont Street onto the avenue.
She looked at it, the small amber pump-shaped symbol glowing on the dashboard, and sighed. Her grandmother never filled the tank past a quarter. Odessa believed, with the fixed certainty of a woman who had lived through the gas lines of the nineteen-seventies, that gasoline prices would always be lower next week, and so she bought it ten dollars at a time, a little here, a little there, and the needle on her gauge lived permanently in the red. Dara had told her a hundred times that this made no economic sense. Odessa had told her a hundred times that she had been managing money since before Dara's mother was born, thank you very much.
There was a gas station at the corner of Linwood and Fifth, about a mile ahead, on the way downtown. A small independent station, four pumps, a convenience store, a car wash that had been broken for as long as anyone could remember. Dara had filled up there a hundred times. It was cheap and quiet and the man who ran the store, Mr. Farouk, kept a jar of free lollipops on the counter for children and slipped Dara two of them every time she came in, even though she was twenty-two years old and had not been a child for some time.
She looked at the clock on the dashboard. Eight-fourteen. The shoot was at nine. She had plenty of time.
She turned on her signal, checked her mirrors twice, the way her grandmother had drilled into her in the parking lot of Hollins Junior High, and changed lanes, slowly, carefully, in the rain.
* * *
Across the city, at about the same time, Brooke Halston was standing in the marble bathroom of an apartment she could no longer afford, crying into a sink that cost more than her mother's car.
She did not cry for long. She did not have time. She had learned, over the last two years, to cry very efficiently, in short hard bursts of ninety seconds or less, in places where nobody could see her, and then to stop, and splash cold water on her face, and fix her makeup, and pick up her phone, and smile. She had gotten so good at it that sometimes she did not even notice she was doing it. She would be standing in line at a coffee shop, or sitting in the back of a car, or waiting for an elevator, and she would realize that her eyes were stinging and her throat was tight and that she had just, without any warning, cried. And then she would blink twice, and it would be over, and she would lift her phone and check her face in the camera and nobody would ever know.