The Morning Race

The Morning Race

The alarm is the size of a deck of cards and it lives on the windowsill above my head like a small, opinionated roommate who has never once respected a weekend. At 6:47 on a Monday in March, it begins to vibrate and chirp in that particular pitch that exists somewhere between "wake up" and "you're already late." I slap it once with my palm. It falls behind a stack of dance magazines and immediately grows louder, because that is what alarms do when you try to silence them with violence. They call your bluff.

I am June Hayes. I am fifteen. I am on the varsity dance team at Lincoln Heights High, which means my sneakers — the specific ones, the canvas pair with the blue laces my grandmother tied for me last summer — cannot be anywhere in this house that is not immediately retrievable in under ninety seconds. They are not. I know this the way a person knows the weather is changing before they look outside: a bone-deep certainty that something important is about to be missing.

Down the hallway, a door opens and closes with the focused urgency of a person who has already done math about traffic. My mother is leaving for a twelve-hour shift at Saint Vincent's, which means she has been awake since five-thirty and has already won three rounds of the morning before I have entered it. I can hear her moving through the house in the specific rhythm of a Monday — keys, badge, scrubs in a bag, a kiss she will try to deliver to my brother on his way out the door, which my brother will duck in exactly the way he has ducked every Monday kiss since kindergarten because he is nine and kisses are, in his considered opinion, an inefficient use of cheek.

I roll over and look at the ceiling. There is a small water stain above my bed in the shape of what might generously be called Florida. I have named it Florida. Florida and I have an understanding: she does not drip on me, and I do not move.

Forty-five seconds pass. They are the most expensive forty-five seconds of my day.

Then the house begins to collapse, the way it always collapses, and it collapses loud.

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6:47 AM — The First Domino Falls

My mother's voice comes up the stairs first. It is not, technically, a yell. It is more like a focused beam of sound, the vocal equivalent of a flashlight pointed at something small. "Milo Alexander Hayes." She uses his full name only on Mondays and only when she has lost something — usually patience, occasionally a shoe. "If those shoes are not on your feet by the time I count to ten, I am going to drive you to school in your pajamas and explain to your teacher that I tried."

"Shoes!" Milo shouts back from somewhere downstairs, his voice small and defiant. "I *had* them! They were right here!"

"Hands," my mother corrects, already moving on. "I did not ask what you had. I asked what is on your feet. There is a difference."

I can hear the soft drumbeat of my father typing in the kitchen below. He is already at the counter with his laptop open, a small glass of cold brew sweating next to the keyboard, and a green Shure microphone clipped to the collar of his flannel shirt. The little light on the camera is on. He is in a meeting. He has been in a meeting since before I went to sleep last night, or at least it feels that way. There is a permanent, low-level hum of "talk later" coming from that corner of the kitchen, like the refrigerator has learned to say his favorite phrase.

I swing my legs out of bed. The wood floor is cold. I reach under the bed with one hand and feel around for my dance sneakers. My fingers find a sock, a hair tie, what might be the lid of a highlighter, and a single LEGO brick. No sneakers.

The sneakers are not under the bed.

The sneakers are not by the door.

The sneakers are not in the closet, because I checked last night before I brushed my teeth, which means somebody in this house has done the thing where they pick up the most obvious object in the room, carry it with them through the house, and put it down in a place so unreasonable that the sneakers themselves, if they could speak, would file a complaint.

I go downstairs. The kitchen is the kind of organized chaos that looks, from above, like a board game in progress. My mother is standing at the island in navy scrubs, packing a lunch that is mostly crackers and an apple, because nobody in this family eats the lunches my mother packs, but she packs them anyway because love, in our house, often looks like a Ziploc bag no one opens. My father is two feet away from her, talking into his headset in a voice that is one octave lower than his real voice, the work voice, the voice that says "absolutely, Karen, the deck is on slide fourteen." He is nodding at the screen as if the people in the screen can see him nod. They cannot. They are at most a thumbnail.

Milo is sitting on the bottom step of the staircase with one sneaker on and a sock puppet made of the other sock. He is wearing his backpack over his pajama top. He has not, technically, brushed his teeth. He has, technically, located one shoe.

"Milo," I say. "Where's the other one?"

"Upstairs," he says.

"Which room upstairs?"

"A room."

"Milo."

"A *different* room."

I go back upstairs. I check the bathroom. I check my parents' room. I check the hall closet. I find Milo's missing shoe in the dryer, which means either Milo put it there on purpose, which would be a kind of art, or one of my parents was doing laundry at midnight and failed to mention it, which would be a kind of crime. I bring the shoe downstairs. I hand it to my brother. He puts it on the wrong foot. I do not correct him. There are limits to what a sister can do before seven in the morning.

I open the bread drawer. I want toast. I want toast because toast is fast and the bus comes at 7:15 and I have not done anything except carry a single shoe down two flights of stairs and the morning is already leaking out around my ankles.

I put two slices of bread in the toaster. I push the lever down. I turn to find my dance sneakers.

I do not find my dance sneakers.

What I find, instead, is the smell of something that is no longer bread.

I turn around. Smoke is rising from the toaster in a thin, polite curl, the kind of smoke that says, "I have been trying to get your attention for ninety seconds and you have ignored me." I hit the lever. The toast jumps up. It is black. It is the exact color of my mood, which is also black, which is also something I have to scrape off a toaster crumb tray at seven in the morning while my father, three feet away, says into his headset, "Yes, I can hear you, Karen. I think we need to circle back on the Q3 targets."

He has not looked up.

He has not looked up since yesterday.

I throw the toast out. I put two more slices in. I set the timer on my phone to two minutes and twelve seconds, because I have learned, the hard way, that a toaster is not a clock. I look at my phone. There is a text from my friend Priya that says "did u do the calc homework" and a calendar reminder that says "Dance practice — 3:30 — do not be late (again)" and a notification from my school that says "Bus 14 arriving in 14 minutes." Fourteen minutes. I have fourteen minutes and the missing thing that makes fourteen minutes impossible is a pair of canvas sneakers with blue laces.

"Mom," I say. "Have you seen my dance shoes?"

My mother is pouring coffee into a travel mug with one hand and texting with the other. She does not look up. "Check the car," she says, which is her answer to approximately forty percent of all questions asked in this house. Check the car. Check the couch. Check the laundry room. My mother's love is not in the form of an answer. Her love is in the form of a probability distribution. There is a place the thing probably is. Go find it. She believes this is kindness. She is, in some way, correct.

I check the car. They are not in the car. They are not under a seat. They are not in the trunk. They are not in the glove compartment, be