I always train hard, but the morning after my fight with James, my run wasn’t really training so much as self-punishment. I was mad at myself, mad at him, and more than a little scared that maybe he’d been right.

There’s always been a love-hate thing between me and running. First off, if you don’t get it over with at the ass crack of dawn, the Oklahoma summer sun will melt you into a puddle of good intentions. Plus, it hurts. I mean, have you ever seen a happy jogger? We scowl. We pant and grimace. In fact, if you ever see one of us smiling, you should assume we’re a complete psychopath and run for your life.

On the other hand, running’s the best way I know to clear my head and get closer to fine. Which is why I was already two miles into an eight-mile run by 6:30 AM, with the Arkansas River on my right and early Riverside Drive commuters speeding by on my left. The temperature hadn’t dropped much during the night, and the humidity made me feel like I was sucking air through a wet sponge.

It was perfect.

At the start of mile three, I ditched my warm-up playlist, queued hardcore training songs, and started the fartlek run my cross country coach had posted the night before. Yes, fartlek is a ridiculous word, but it’s basically just a fancy Swedish way of saying “play with your speed.” Which I did, using landmarks along the river to separate each segment.

The first interval was a hard sprint. I switched to a jog at a downed tree limb. Went to a fast jog at a flock of Canada geese. Cranked into a sprint again at the haunted stone mansion across Riverside. Kept it going until I thought I’d die.

The sculpture of the bobcat catching a pheasant midflight was my turnaround point. It was also where I tried distracting myself from James by thinking about how I was about to spend the rest of my summer with safety goggles, micropipettes, and the scientists who loved them.

All things considered, working in a virology lab was better than answering phones and entering data at Chase Oil. And it beat the hell out of doing legal research for Mom while she entertained me with her all-time favorite hits, including:

and

and

All three of which were completely unnecessary, since I’d learned early on that the best way to keep her from putting too much pressure on me was to do it myself.

Then I got sick of thinking altogether and decided to fly, legs pounding, arms pumping in a dead sprint, until my muscles and lungs screamed for mercy and there was only a quarter mile between me and home. That was the best part of the whole ordeal—the part where I was too exhausted to think about anything except a cold shower, obscene amounts of orange juice, and the post-run buzz I’d have for the next hour or so. For that short, precious quarter mile, I floated along the bike path while the city woke up around me. I didn’t worry about the skeleton in the back house. I didn’t stress over my sucky summer internship. And I reminded myself that no matter how mad James and I got at each other, we always worked things out. Dark corners and all, we were in it for the long haul.

“Which doctor?” the receptionist at the front desk asked. Again.

I told her Dr. Kumar (again) and that my mother had arranged for me to intern with her that summer. The receptionist stared at her computer screen like it was a Magic 8 Ball. “I just started here two days ago, and I don’t know any Dr. Kumar. Was it maybe Dr. Kim? We’ve got one of those.”

By that point, I’d already pulled up my “Dr. Kumar” folder to show her the forwarded emails from Mom, the three letters of recommendation I’d gotten from teachers, and the waiver my parents had signed so I could work there. The receptionist wasn’t interested.

“Hang on,” she said, and disappeared into the back.

A not-unpleasant-looking man in a white lab coat came out a few minutes later and shook my hand. He seemed too young to be a doctor, but the coat made me hopeful he might actually have a clue.

“I’m Dr. Revard,” he said. “And you are…?”

I told him my name and that I was there to start my summer internship with Dr. Kumar. A cute little wrinkle creased his forehead as he motioned for me to follow him to a bench near the research building’s front door.

“Rowan,” he said, “I’m sorry, but Dr. Kumar had to take a leave of absence a few weeks ago. Her mother’s ill and…”

I stopped listening then, because no matter what words Dr. Revard used, the message was going to be Blah, blah, blah, you’re screwed. Sure, I hadn’t wanted to work there in the first place, but I wasn’t exactly opposed to racking up volunteer hours and science cred for my college applications.

I was just wondering if James’s restaurant was hiring when the words opening at the Jackson Clinic snapped my attention back to Dr. Revard’s voice.

“It may not be what you’d planned,” he said, “but they’re pretty desperate. And I could check to see if any of the physicians up there will let you shadow them after your shift.”

He jumped up, grabbed a business card from the receptionist’s desk, and scribbled something on the back. “Here’s the address. I can call now if you want and see if they have time to interview you this morning. Wait… scratch that. Why don’t you just head up there and I’ll let them know you’re on your way?”

I took the card. The address was somewhere way up in North Tulsa.

Dr. Revard gave me a little grin that, under normal circumstances, I would have considered extremely attractive. “I really think you’d learn a lot there,” he said.

I smiled and thanked him and told him that sounded great, because even though working at a medical clinic in the part of town voted most likely to get you shot hadn’t been on my summer bucket list, at least it was something. Maybe even something I could get a decent essay out of. Plus, I’d be helping out in exactly the kind of place James goes all gooey over, so he could pretty much suck it on that count.

Living in a bubble my ass.

The thing about Tulsa is, it’s really three cities in one.

The newest is South Tulsa, where the houses are fresh-built and come in Tall, Grande, and Venti. People there might work downtown, but at night they escape the urban wilds and head back to comfortable developments named for the wildlife their construction displaced. Quail Commons. Fox Meadows. That kind of thing.

Midtown, where I live, is what you get when you squish neighborhoods from every twentieth-century decade together, starting with the 1910s. In a seven-minute drive, you can go from fancy to comfortable to small to meth-house scary.

Then there’s North Tulsa.

Cross the railroad tracks and the northern curve of highways built to shunt commuter traffic away from city streets, and you’re there. It’s the kind of place where, if people bother talking about it at all, they either say how dangerous it is, or describe it in their it’s-such-a-pity voice. Mom says North Tulsa actually has the lowest crime rate in the city, and she knows her shit. But it is poor, and full of people with skin a few shades darker than pale. And I can’t lie—until I went up to the Jackson Clinic that day, I’d never driven there on my own.

I followed the map on my phone north past Greenwood, where businesses rebuilt after the riot but had closed one by one over the years. Beyond that, the streets were wide and quiet. There were no gang fights, no tweakers lurking in doorways or carjackers waiting on corners. It didn’t feel dangerous so much as forgotten.

I passed the Dollar General store that had been on the news after a seventy-three-year-old reserve deputy shot Eric Harris in the back nearby; a used-tire lot with a hand-lettered LLANTAS BUENAS sign; a trailer surrounded by hundreds of old barbecue grills; a tiny library branch with a sign in front advertising their summer reading program. The clinic was a quarter mile beyond that.

It was new, with bright yellow siding and a freshly blacktopped parking lot. There was a fence around the perimeter, but only a short one. There were also purple and yellow pansies along the sidewalk, and a girl with a giant rainbow Afro painted on the bus stop shelter out front.

The inside was nice, with cheap but decent waiting room furniture, a stack of fresh coloring pages on a kid-sized plastic picnic table, and crayons that still had points. An old man with dirty fatigues and a nicotine-stained beard waved at me like a Walmart greeter. “Sign in, darlin’,” he said. “I forgot to when I showed up last week, and they still haven’t called my name!” His laugh was wheezy and strained, and ended in a coughing fit. I started toward him to make sure he was okay, but he waved me on. “I’m fine, young lady,” he said between gasps. “You go on.”

I worked my way through the crowded room toward what was apparently the reception desk. It wasn’t behind glass, and there was no annoyed-looking lady waiting to check people in. There was just a man. A really tall one who looked like he’d taken a long walk through hell and survived. His skin was pocked, his nose was crooked, and a thick, jagged scar ran from his chin down into the neckline of his shirt.

Still, his eyes were calm. His face was relaxed. And the anarchy symbol tattooed on the left side of his neck was a nice counterpoint to the praying hands on the right.

“Sign in.” He pointed to the clipboard on the counter.

“I’m not sick,” I said. “I’m…”

He looked up and smiled a black-toothed meth-addict smile. “Family planning clinic runs Wednesdays and Fridays. You need an appointment?”

My face got hot. “I’m not pregnant—”

He cut me off with a raised eyebrow. “Thus the term family planning.”

That’s when I realized he wasn’t serious. He was giving me shit, and I liked him for it. So I grabbed the sign-in sheet and the pen chained to the desk with a string of paperclips and wrote:

He took one look and burst out laughing.

A woman in pink scrubs called out, “Crystal Montoya?” and waved over the anxious-looking woman who stood up. Then the two of them disappeared behind a door.

The desk guy was still chuckling when he spoke. “Rowan Chase, I’m Truman Atwell. People usually just call me Tru. Can you type?”

“Pretty well,” I said, getting the distinct impression I was being interviewed for a job I wasn’t even sure I wanted.

“Can you answer phones?”

“Yes.” I looked around at the waiting room full of people.

“Can you get your bright-eyed self here by seven thirty sharp, Monday through Friday, and not complain if I make you stay past three from time to time?”

“I guess…”

He took my right hand in both of his and shook it solemnly. “Then, Rowan Chase, I think you and I are going to get along just fine.”