The End is Where We Begin by Maria Goodin (open ebook .txt) 📕

… blood was dripping from my hand…

… I stopped and looked back, but I couldn’t help him…

… we just ran…

All I could hear was our breathing, fast and heavy, as we bolted over the uneven ground in the darkness. Michael stumbled and fell beside me, and I turned to haul him up, panicking that he might have twisted his ankle on the clods of dried earth. But we kept heading forwards, barely able to see where we were going.

At first, Max kept up with us out of sheer fear and determination. But he couldn’t sustain it. He started flagging, slowing us down.

“Come on!” we shouted.

“I can’t,” he insisted, but he kept going all the same.

After what felt like an eternity but can’t have been more than four or five minutes, as if from nowhere, the canal appeared before us. There are no moorings along that stretch of the canal and no lights along the path, but the moon was reflecting off the water’s black surface and I could see enough to figure out where we were.

“Left!” I yelled as our trainers hit the path.

“We can stop now,” Max called breathlessly, desperation in his voice.

“No!” I told him. “Just keep going!”

“I can’t,” he insisted.

“You can!” I shouted. “Just a bit further!”

And so we carried on running. Not for long – maybe thirty seconds – before Max finally gave out.

“Stop!” yelled Michael, and Tom and I ground to a halt.

Max was bent over, trying to catch his breath. I ran back to him, took him by the arm and dragged him forwards, determined that we should keep going. He was wheezing heavily, but propelled by fear and adrenaline all I could think was that we had to keep running.

We staggered into the darkness underneath a tall, concrete bridge, but just as we were coming out the other side, Max was done. He yanked at my arm, forcing me to stop and look at him, and for the first time I noticed just how wrong his breathing sounded. And then he slid to his knees.

“Max, come on, we can walk now,” urged Michael.

“No, something’s wrong,” I said, crouching down beside Max.

“Christ, he’s having an asthma attack,” said Tom, crouching down as well.

I shook my head, confused. It had been so long since I’d seen Max have an asthma attack that I’d forgotten he even had asthma. In fact, if anyone had asked, I’d have probably told them he’d grown out of it long ago.

“Okay, Max, just breathe slowly,” Michael said, his own breath laboured. “Just… um… just breathe deeply—”

“He can’t breathe deeply, you moron!” panted Tom. “That’s the whole point about asthma.”

“What do we do?” I asked Tom.

“I don’t know!”

“Well, does he have an inhaler?”

“How would I know?”

“You’re at school with him every day! I didn’t even know he still had asthma!”

“Max, do you have an inhaler?” asked Tom.

Max shook his head slowly. His breathing sounded painful and abnormally noisy, like air trying to force its way through a pinprick-sized hole.

“Let’s just stop for a minute so he can catch his breath,” said Michael, looking around anxiously. “I don’t think they’ve followed us.”

“He can’t just catch his breath!” snapped Tom. “This is serious!”

“He’ll be okay,” I said, my own breathing starting to regulate. “He just needs to stop for a minute.”

Suddenly I was jerked into a standing position by Tom yanking me up by the arm.

“This isn’t good!” he whispered harshly. “We need to get help!”

“But he’ll be okay,” I said, confused. “It’s not like you can die of it. He just needs—”

“Of course he can fucking die of it! What do you think happens if you can’t breathe?!”

I suddenly remembered that day in the school playground when Max had his first asthma attack, and how Tom and I had run to get Mrs Dray. At home time she told my mum there had been an “incident”, and that I might be unsettled by it. But I wasn’t. Because my mum had given me Nesquik and told me asthma was nothing to worry about.

“Guys, I think we need to get help,” Michael said, his voice full of concern.

We looked down at him crouching by Max’s side; Max who had sat down on the path and slumped to one side, propping himself up weakly on one shaky arm, his head barely off the ground. The noise of his laboured breathing filled the night air.

“Okay,” said Tom, gesturing into the darkness, “that’s the entrance to the nature reserve up there, right? So there’s a footbridge just past the weir. Look, I’m gonna go get help—”

“I’ll go,” I said, quickly. “I can run faster than you.”

Tom and I were both on our respective school’s athletics teams, and we stared at each other now as if this was our final competitive stand-off.

“Okay,” nodded Tom, conceding. “You know where you’re going, yeah?”

But I was already running, my trainers pounding the towpath, the warm night air whistling in my ears.

“I always thought you were the ones who ordered me to get help,” I say, perched on the edge of the sofa, my forehead resting in my hands. “But it wasn’t you, was it? It was me. I thought I was the fastest runner—”

“And you were,” says Tom beside me.

“Fractionally. Whenever we compared times—”

“I lied. Whenever we compared times, I lied. Of course I wasn’t as fast as you. I couldn’t run as fast and I couldn’t cover the distances you covered, and I hated the fact that you were so much better at it than me. In primary school we were on a level, I might have even been marginally ahead of you, but once you went to St John’s you outstripped me by a long way. But there was no way I was going to let you know that.”

“You were the right person to go, Jay,” says Michael. “It had to be you.”

I glance up briefly. He’s kneeling in front of me, his face a picture of concern. Beyond him, Max’s parents