The Shortcut

Here is a story. As you read, ask what you would do.

Fiction, founded on truth. The people in this story are imagined; the choice they face is real.

Eli had been at Maplewood for six weeks, and the only place he didn’t feel new was the cross-country trail. Running was the one thing he’d brought with him when his family moved, the one thing that fit in no box and never had to be unpacked.

The Harvest Meet was the biggest race of the season. The course ran twice around the school grounds: across the fields, behind the old equipment shed, then down along the creek before looping back to the start. Eli had walked the whole course the day before, the way his old coach taught him. That’s when he saw it, the gap.

Behind the shed, the fence had a section missing, and a dirt path cut straight through the brush to the far side of the loop. Going through it would skip the whole creek stretch. Nearly a minute, maybe more. No marshal stood back there. No parents. From the finish line you couldn’t see the shed at all.

He might never have thought about it again. Then came the race. On the first lap, breathing hard in fourth place, he watched the three runners ahead of him duck through the gap, one after another, easy as birds through a hedge.

One of them was Dex, the fastest eighth-grader at Maplewood. Dex glanced back, caught Eli watching, and grinned. Not a mean grin. A friendly one. An invitation. Everybody does it on this course, the grin said. It’s practically part of the race. Come on.