YA Review: Running Past Dark (Han Nolan)

Scottie is starting back to high school after truly horrific events; her sister was driving a car with the popular football coach, Jory Wilson, in the passenger seat when she drove straight into a wall, killing them both. There were some odd things about the accident scene, but Scottie is getting the most grief about information she revealed afterwards; her sister Cait had been raped by the coach. Reeling from the deaths, many people in the school have chosen to give Scottie a hard time, including her former friends Amber and Jasper, who got a lot of help from the coach, and Lissa, whose father was the coach’s best friend. Even Dr. Mead, the principal, holds Scottie responsible for “drama” going on in school, such as dog poop being put in Scottie’s locker. After several humiliating experiences, Scottie finds herself saying that she is going to run an ultramarathon. She even attends the Exercise Physiology class, run by Dr. Senda, and runs a 5K race on the track wearing jeans an old tennis shoes that she wore on hours long walks in the woods all summer. She finishes, but falls near the end and bashes herself up. The other students make fun of her, but Senda admires her tenacity. Her mother, an art professor, is on unpaid leave, and spends most of her time drinking or going out with her boyfriend, Mac, instead of paying attention to Scottie. Scottie has been self-harming, pouring boiling water on her hands and making the blisters worse, and running gives her the same kind of release that causing herself pain does. She buys equipment, commits to running a longer race, and even gets a job at the local running store, working for Senda’s son, Ichiro. This also causes some problems, as Amber works at the store, and Coach Wilson’s widow shows up there. Scottie does have some support from her friend Nico, a gymnast who suffered an injury in Cait’s presence on the very day of her accident. Scottie joins a running group, and continues to put up with problems at school, but things get worse when Mac tells her that he has taken her mother to a drug rehab facility after an accidental alcohol poisoning overdose. Not knowing what to do, and feeling unsafe in her home, Scottie sleeps at the running store. She is found by the owner, Claude, whose son Jacques was devastated by his coach’s death. He and his wife take Scottie in, and she is relieved by to have some stability in her life. She is in therapy, which helps a little, and continues to run, which helps a lot. Eventually, she and Nico uncover information about the day of the accident. Was Cait really guilty? The truth is even darker than anyone imagined.