The Goldfish and the Fox

I'd been **running** from everything since freshman year—expectations, conversations, basically any situation where I might have to speak. Cross country was perfect: nobody expected you to talk when you were gasping for air at mile three. But senior year, Coach Williams decided I needed to be a "leader." Capital L.

"You've got the heart, Marcus," he'd say, while I stared at my shoes and wished I could dissolve into the bleachers.

The day everything changed, I was wearing my dad's old fishing **hat**—this beat-up beige canvas thing that made me look like I was cosplaying a suburban dad at a barbecue. It was my armor. If I couldn't be cool, I'd be aggressively uncool. Commit to the bit, right?

I was sitting behind the school, watching the cross country team stretch without me, when I saw her: Chloe, the girl who'd sat behind me in AP Bio since September, never saying more than three words. She was crouched by the creek, her backpack abandoned on the grass.

"You're Marcus, right?" she said without looking up.

"Uh, yeah."

"My **goldfish** is in there."

I paused. "Your... what now?"

She finally turned around. Her eyes were red-rimmed. "My dad said he was 'setting him free' but basically flushed him instead, except he survived somehow and now he's living in this nasty creek and I can't just leave him here to get eaten by a heron or whatever, okay?"

I didn't know what to say. Nobody had ever entrusted me with something this bizarre and important before.

"Okay," I said. "Okay. What's the plan?"

We spent twenty minutes constructing an elaborate rescue operation involving a net made from Chloe's hoodie and a pickle jar she'd "borrowed" from the cafeteria. We were elbows-deep in muddy water, definitely going to miss fifth period, laughing like idiots, when a red **fox** appeared on the opposite bank.

It just watched us, head tilted, like we were the weirdest thing it had ever seen in the woods.

"He's judging us," Chloe whispered.

"He doesn't understand the stakes, Chloe. This is Gerald's life we're talking about."

"His name is Gerald now?"

"Every rescue operation needs a mission name,"

We never caught Gerald. But we did skip the rest of the day to get ice cream, and I discovered that Chloe had this dorky laugh that made her snort, and that I was capable of talking to someone until my throat hurt instead of my lungs.

The next day at practice, I took off the hat.

"You look different," Coach said.

"Yeah," I said. "I think I'm done running."