THE OUTSIDE LANE

Synopsis

The packing shed lets out at five. Practice starts at six. Yesenia Marroquin has made that drive four days a week for three years and has never once been late to either one. She runs the four hundred. She has one qualifying race in May and she has drawn lane eight, on the outside, where there is nobody ahead of you to chase and no way to know how you are doing until the last hundred meters. Nobody who could help her is going to be in the stands. And there is a residency form in a filing cabinet in Edinburg with an address on it that is not hers, signed by a coach who knew.

Who this is about

Yesenia Marroquin is seventeen and runs the four hundred for a school in Hidalgo County, Texas. She works the packing shed until five and gets to practice at six. Nobody has ever come to watch her.

What goes wrong

She draws lane eight at the regional qualifier, which means running blind with nobody ahead of her. It also means the officials will look closely at whoever comes out of it first.

What's at stake

Her address is not in the district and her coach signed the form knowing it. Winning gets her looked at. Being looked at costs him his job and her the whole season.

Why it keeps going

Each episode is one more week of six o'clock practices, one more race nobody drives out to see, and one more day the form sits in a filing cabinet in Edinburg.

Takeaway

Running in the outside lane means nobody can pace you, and it also means nobody can see what it cost you to get there.

Shelves

Themes

Story, in the creator's words

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Characters

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Tech stack

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