The narrator, Rebecca has just experienced a painful breakup, but her friends’ empty clichés and platitudes encouraging her to get over it and move on only make her feel worse and more isolated. Instead, she turns to the internet for solace and information. Rebecca decides to type her ex-partner’s name into the search bar. Searching for information about an ex online surely isn’t as deplorable as showing up at their house unannounced to harass them, she thinks. She also rationalizes that since she financially supported him through graduate school, she has a right to know what he’s up to and if he’s finished his thesis. Unable to resist peeping into his online life, Rebecca tumbles through pages upon pages of search results, quickly filtering out those that have nothing to do with him.
Eating instant noodles from a Styrofoam cup, Rebecca ruminates over grief. To her, people willingly console others when they’ve lost a loved one through death. But when someone has lost a loved one through a breakup, they are avoided instead. Rebecca isolates herself from her friends and coworkers, finding comfort in the internet and the answers she hopes it might provide. After sifting through the search results, she finds her ex’s name listed on a cross-country running club’s roster. She takes this small piece of information and uses it to create elaborate fantasies about what her ex has been doing since he moved out of their shared apartment.
Certain that he’s taken a step back from academia, Rebecca imagines her ex engaging in post-run barbeques and physically exerting himself past the point of exhaustion. Julie from work calls, interrupting Rebecca’s daydreams. Rebecca divulges her new plan to Julie: she’s going to start jogging then join a running club. But before she can go for her first jog, she has to go to the mall to buy the shoes. Maybe later, she thinks. Falling back into her fantasies about her ex, Rebecca pictures herself overtaking him in a race. He watches her, impressed by her poise and speed. In another version of her fantasies, Rebecca delivers a low blow by asking about the status of his thesis, having found out through more internet digging that he did not present it at the last conference he attended.
Looking through the stack of CDs her ex left behind, Rebecca stumbles across the CD of a country girl group she and her ex had seen together. She remembers enjoying their lip-gloss, big hair, and twang while her ex spent the entire evening complaining. Afterward, he even took to calling them the “Tammy Wynette Hormone Band” whenever Rebecca would play the CD at home. Listening to the “high and lonesome sound” of their music now, Rebecca muses over memories of her ex that make her realize that perhaps she deserves better than “a guy who checks his watch every three minutes” while they’re out together. She wonders what the girls in the band are t doing now. Rebecca figures they’re probably doing better than her current state, dressed in stretched-out sweatpants and eating a spinster’s serving of dehydrated space food.
Drifting in and out of her cross-country running daydreams, Rebecca realizes something: she doesn’t have any idea what someone actually does during a cross-country race. Running through various scenarios in her mind, she’s interrupted by a phone call from her boss. He reminds her that she’s exhausted her sick leave and is required to be back at work on Monday. While still on this call, Rebecca slips back into her reverie, checking her ex’s running results online yet again. She sees that he is now ranked 42nd on the roster, and imagines him wallowing in defeat and calling her to reconcile. Deep inside an elaborate reconciliation fantasy, her boss briefly pulls her away from her imagination and back to real life.
After the phone call with her boss, Rebecca resolves to call the running club to ask about joining. On some level, she knows it’s illogical to pursue this—her ex-partner made it quite clear he did not want to salvage the relationship and has no intention of allowing her back in his life. Yet she’s still convinced that the next phone call she receives will be from her ex, certain that his cross-country failures have “beaten [him] into remorse and resignation” even though she knows he never played sports. She knows he actually hates sport altogether, and refuses to do “anything he wasn’t an expert at.”
Returning to the search portal, Rebecca refreshes the page with the running results from last week. She notices something that she hadn’t before: a title heading on the results page. Two words shatter her fantasies: “Under-fourteens.” Shocked, Rebecca stares at those two words, which tell her that she’s been mistakenly following the running career of a child with the same name as her ex-partner. Rebecca clicks out of the screen, illuminated by the blue light of her computer shutting down. The machine’s little melody plays, indicating that the computer has turned off and that it’s finally time for her to move on.
