Wren Ng was nine. Her hair was black and in two plaits, and she wore a mustard-yellow raincoat with the hood down on a dry morning, because her mother had bought it in April for weather that never arrived. It was cross-country day. The course went up the Bridle Path on the Port Hills and back down past the old gun emplacements, and the best time from last year was nine minutes and forty-one seconds. Wren had looked at that time every day since Monday.

She put two fingers on the inside of her left wrist and started to count. The health book on the hallway table said a heart beats about seventy times a minute, and she wanted to know what hers did. She counted for fifteen seconds. She got twenty-four beats. There are four fifteens in a minute, so her heart was doing ninety-six.

Ninety-six was too many. Her mother's heart beat at sixty-four. She had heard somebody at the clinic say a good heart sits in the sixties, and hers was in the nineties. She had carried that round with her for four days.

On the Monday she told Ruby Ashby that she was not running. Ruby said that was a shame, and then went down to the start with everybody else, because Ruby did not carry things round for four days. Wren sat on the wall the whole way up with her hands inside her sleeves. She could hear her breathing, and under her breathing something faster that would not slow down when she told it to.

Mrs. Durbin came down the path at the end of the race with her bag on her shoulder. She was the school nurse. She pressed a steel chestpiece against Wren's ribs and held the rubber tube to her ear. “Big breath out,” she said. Then she took out her watch and held it where Wren could see it. “I am going to count for thirty seconds now.” Mrs. Durbin moved one finger up and down as each beat came. “Forty-seven,” she said. “That is ninety-four a minute.”

“I got ninety-six,” said Wren. Mrs. Durbin did not tell her it was all right. She took Wren's wrist in her own hand and put her fingers back on the same spot, pressing down hard. “Press like that,” she said. “Now count.” Wren counted. She got twenty-three beats in fifteen seconds, and twenty-three fours is ninety-two.

“You have shut the pipe off,” said Mrs. Durbin. “Press that hard and you feel the near side of the beat and lose some of the far side. Ninety-two, ninety-four, ninety-six. One heart. Three ways of listening to it.” “Is ninety-six too fast?” said Wren.

“It is a nine-year-old's heart,” said Mrs. Durbin. “It is about the size of your fist and it is not finished with you. It goes quicker than mine because it has less of you to push. Yours is ninety. Mine is sixty-four. Neither of them is broken.”

On the Thursday Mr. Beaton took the cross-country runners up the hill for a practice run. It was Wren, Ruby and six others, and Mr. Beaton had a stopwatch on a lanyard round his neck. At the top she put two fingers on her wrist while she was still moving. She counted for ten seconds and got twenty-six. There are six tens in a minute, so that was a hundred and fifty-six.

“That cannot be right,” she said. But her legs were still going and she was breathing through her mouth, and every beat of it was doing the work of going up. Mr. Beaton wrote eleven minutes and four seconds on his card. Ruby did eleven minutes and fifty-two seconds. The winner of the year did nine minutes and forty-one, and Wren had been sure she was going to beat him.

Six minutes later she was sitting on the wall with her back against a fence post. She put her fingers on her wrist and counted for fifteen seconds and got twenty-one. Twenty-one fours is eighty-four. She wrote the numbers on the back of Mr. Beaton's card. Eighty-four sitting still. A hundred and fifty-six at the top. Ninety-six in the schoolyard before she started.

Then she subtracted, because she liked subtracting. A hundred and fifty-six take away eighty-four is seventy-two. The hill had put seventy-two beats a minute into her, and her heart had taken all seventy-two back on its own in six minutes, without being asked to. She pressed hard one more time, out of habit, and counted twenty-two in fifteen seconds, which was eighty-eight. She knew that one was wrong. She put the pencil down and left the wrong number there.