Chapters 17-20 Summary

In Chapter 17, Evie's track coach is named Leigh, but she cannot tell her mother about joining the track team, now that her mother is so religious. When Evie shows up to practice, she sees runners practicing exchanging the baton in relay races: "Everyone seems to be connected to one another, in unison." (p. 127). Leigh tells her she'll need two kinds of track shoes, and he introduces her to the other girls, who say they are used to winning.

Evie says that her new shoes feel stiff and wrong, and they don't have the brand logos that the others' shoes have. Evie starts to run with the other, and after one lap of the eighth-mile track, she is struggling to keep up. When a fellow runner Mira tells her that her legs are long, she says that it is the "friendliest thing...