The Stopwatch

Tessa Halvorsen checked her watch after every single lap, the way some people check their phones for messages. At the end of each practice, she copied her times into a green notebook, and whenever a number went up instead of down, she sulked all the way home. So when Coach Pell announced that the team would leave their watches in their bags for the rest of the season, Tessa was the first to argue, "How will I ever know if I'm getting faster?" Coach Pell lifted the old silver stopwatch that hung around her neck on a faded red cord and said simply, "I'll know."

For three weeks, Tessa ran without her numbers, and it felt like walking through a dark house. She kept guessing at every turn of the track: too slow, too fast, too slow again. Coach Pell clicked the stopwatch at the beginning and end of every run, but she never once read a time aloud. Instead she offered comments like "Your arms were loose today" or "You gave up on the last curve again." Tessa rolled her eyes whenever she thought the coach wasn't looking, because loose arms were not something you could write down in a notebook.

At the league meet, Tessa lined up for the 1,600 meters, four laps of the track, with nothing on her wrist at all. During the first lap, she reached for a watch that was not there, so she concentrated on her breathing instead. During the second, she noticed her shoulders creeping up toward her ears and deliberately let them drop. By the final lap, two runners were still ahead of her, and her legs felt as heavy as wet sand. On the last curve, exactly where she usually gave up, she pumped her arms harder and caught one of them a single step before the finish line.

Afterward, still gasping, Tessa found Coach Pell beside the fence and immediately asked, "What was my time?" The coach unhooked the stopwatch and placed it in Tessa's hand, and Tessa saw that the glass was cracked and both hands were stuck at zero. "It hasn't worked in years," Coach Pell admitted. "I just like the click." Tessa stared at it. "Then how did you know if I was getting faster?" "I watched you," the coach said with a shrug. "Somebody had to, since you were only watching your wrist." That night, Tessa opened her green notebook, and next to the date, where a time usually went, she wrote four words: loose arms, last curve.