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The first time Riri ran with Sister Mary-Agnes outside school, she treated the distance like an opponent. The route began on a ploughed road at the edge of Whitehorse, where winter had packed snow into a hard pale surface and tire grooves had frozen into shallow ridges. Evelyn knew exactly where they were going, exactly how long Mary-Agnes expected to be out, and exactly when Riri was supposed to return. This precision slightly irritated Riri because she interpreted it as evidence that adults still considered her a child. She did not say so. She was too pleased by the fact of the run to risk sounding ungrateful, and some part of her also understood that Mary-Agnes's insistence on clear arrangements was not distrust. It was the opposite of creating something private between them, though Riri did not yet have language for why that mattered.
She had prepared as if the route were a trial. Her shoes were checked twice, laces retied, layers argued over with Evelyn and finally reduced to what Riri believed was the minimum respectable amount of winter clothing. She arrived carrying the kind of barely contained energy that made standing still look difficult. Mary-Agnes was already there in dark running clothes under a light jacket, her habit nowhere in sight for once, and the transformation startled Riri more than she had expected. The teacher she knew from the classroom had legs. This was not new information in any reasonable sense, but adolescence was full of unreasonable discoveries. Mary-Agnes looked lean, practical and completely at home in clothing chosen for movement. Riri found herself staring at the laces of her own shoes until she trusted her face again.
Mary-Agnes asked whether she had eaten breakfast. Riri said yes. She asked whether Riri had run this distance before. Riri said no, then added that she could handle it. Mary-Agnes did not challenge the claim. She told her the route, pointed out where they would turn, and began at a pace Riri immediately considered too slow. For the first several minutes Riri kept beside her out of politeness. Then the road opened into a long gentle stretch and her body made the decision before her judgement did. She lengthened her stride. Hockey conditioning had taught her to attack effort in bursts, to explode into space and trust strength to carry the rest. She pulled ahead with the pleasurable certainty that she was demonstrating something.
Mary-Agnes did not follow. Riri glanced back once and saw her maintaining exactly the same pace, face composed, arms moving efficiently. The sight produced an unpleasant suspicion that Riri's demonstration was not being received as intended. Pride kept her going. She reached the first rise already breathing harder than she wanted Mary-Agnes to hear, which was difficult because Mary-Agnes eventually came alongside without appearing to have changed pace at all. She did not tell Riri she had been foolish. She only asked how far Riri thought they had gone. Riri guessed. Mary-Agnes gave the actual distance. It was shorter than Riri's estimate by enough to be insulting.
They continued. The road climbed more gradually than a rink ever did, offering no boards, no whistle, no shift change, no bench. Riri discovered that strength could be spent in ways that produced nothing except the need for more strength later. Mary-Agnes's breathing deepened, but the rhythm remained controlled. Riri began to hate the back of her jacket with great affection. Every time she thought the older woman must finally be tiring, the same steady distance remained between them. When Riri forced herself to close it, Mary-Agnes told her to stop racing. Riri protested that she was not racing. Mary-Agnes looked sideways at her and said, "Then you are exhausting yourself for recreational purposes." Riri had no answer that preserved her dignity.
The lesson began there, but it was not delivered as a lecture. Mary-Agnes shortened her stride slightly until Riri could settle beside her. She told her to notice breathing before pain, shoulders before legs, the surface before speed. On packed snow, effort changed whenever the footing softened or a tire ridge forced the ankle to adjust. Riri had been treating the road as a neutral strip on which her body acted. Mary-Agnes made her pay attention to the road itself. She asked whether Riri had noticed the temperature rising since they started. Riri had not. She asked which side of the road had more wind exposure. Riri looked and saw it only after being asked. The questions irritated her at first because each revealed something she had failed to observe. Then irritation turned into concentration.
Running beside Mary-Agnes was different from being taught by her at a desk. They did not have to look at each other. Silence was allowed to stretch until it stopped feeling like a gap. Riri could ask something and then spend several hundred metres deciding whether she agreed with the answer. She discovered that Mary-Agnes did not fill space merely because she was the adult. This made Riri talk more, not less. She asked about how long Mary-Agnes had been running, whether she had raced seriously, whether nuns were allowed to enter ordinary races, whether she had ever broken a bone, whether she liked hockey. Mary-Agnes answered some questions fully, some briefly, and one with a simple, "That is none of your business," delivered without anger. Riri felt the boundary and, unexpectedly, liked it. Mary-Agnes could be close company without turning herself inside out for a curious girl.
The physical fact of being beside her was more difficult. Riri had a crush by then, though she still moved around the word when thinking privately. She was old enough to recognize attraction in the way her attention behaved. Mary-Agnes's face interested her too much. Her hands interested her. The line of muscle in her calf when they climbed interested her so much that Riri nearly put one foot into a deeper patch of snow while looking. She recovered with a hard step and pretended nothing had happened. Mary-Agnes asked whether her ankle was all right. Riri said yes. The heat in her face had nothing to do with running.
What kept the infatuation from becoming unbearable was that Mary-Agnes never acted as though she could see it in moments where Riri most feared she could. If she noticed Riri's sudden awkwardness, she did not exploit it. There was no teasing intimacy, no suggestion that Riri was special because of feelings she had not chosen. Mary-Agnes treated her as someone worth teaching. That treatment was both less than Riri wanted and far more valuable than the fantasy version of being singled out. Riri did not know enough yet to articulate the distinction, but she felt safe inside it.
Halfway through the route they stopped briefly near a turnout where snow had been shoved into a high dirty bank. Riri bent with her hands on her thighs, breathing hard enough that any claim of effortless endurance had become impossible. Mary-Agnes stood upright and drank from a small bottle. Riri expected satisfaction. Instead Mary-Agnes asked whether she felt dizzy, whether her fingers were warm, and whether the tightness in her chest was ordinary exertion. The questions were clinical, almost boring. When Riri answered, Mary-Agnes told her to walk for two minutes before they started again. Riri objected that she could run. Mary-Agnes said, "I know. That is not the question." The sentence lodged in her.
Capability, Riri began to understand, was not a command. Being able to go harder did not prove going harder was sensible. This ran against much of what came naturally to her. Her body had rewarded intensity for years. She was strong enough that effort often solved problems. A puck battle yielded if she leaned correctly. A heavy box moved if she lifted it. A hill was not impressed by confidence. Distance was even less impressed. Mary-Agnes treated restraint not as the opposite of strength but as the thing that allowed strength to last.
On the return route Riri followed the pace she was given. The change was humiliating for approximately five minutes, then pleasant. Her breathing settled. She began noticing things Mary-Agnes had asked about earlier: where the snow was polished smooth by wind, where one side of the road held softer drifts, how a stand of spruce reduced the cold against her cheek before she consciously registered shelter. The landscape became more detailed once she stopped trying to defeat it. Riri had the unsettling sense that Mary-Agnes had altered not only the run but the way she was looking at the world around it.
Then a woman appeared ahead of them. She was perhaps Mary-Agnes's age, bundled lightly, running alone in a red hat. The distance between them narrowed very slowly. Riri would later remember this as the first crack in the perfect image she had built of Mary-Agnes, and one of the reasons her affection became more durable. Mary-Agnes had spent nearly an hour insisting that pace was not a contest. She had explained conservation of effort with the calm authority of natural law. Yet after noticing the red hat, her stride changed by a degree so small Riri might have missed it if she had not spent months studying the woman. The change was not enough to count as sprinting. It was enough to count as interest.
Riri looked sideways. Mary-Agnes kept her eyes ahead. Riri said nothing. The woman in the red hat remained twenty metres away, then fifteen. Mary-Agnes's breathing did not alter visibly, but Riri could feel the pace. Delight rose through her fatigue. Sister Mary-Agnes, disciplined runner and enemy of pointless competition, wanted to catch her.
Riri behaved with enormous restraint for almost a minute. Then she asked, "Are we still not racing?" Mary-Agnes's mouth tightened at one corner. "We are maintaining a useful pace." Riri could have laughed loudly enough to ruin the moment. Instead she nodded with grave obedience and stayed beside her. They passed the woman eventually when the road broadened. Mary-Agnes greeted her politely. The other runner greeted them back. Nobody acknowledged that anything had occurred. Riri carried the discovery home like stolen treasure.
The run ended with Riri tired in a way hockey had never produced. Her legs felt used all the way through rather than battered in particular places. Mary-Agnes made her walk the final stretch before stopping, then asked her to describe where she had wasted effort. Riri named the opening mile, the first hill and the several times she had accelerated simply because being behind felt intolerable. Mary-Agnes nodded. She did not praise the honesty. She treated it as the expected outcome of paying attention.
Evelyn arrived precisely when arranged. Riri climbed into the passenger seat with damp hair at her temples and a satisfaction she tried to disguise. Mary-Agnes spoke briefly with Evelyn outside the car, not about anything private, only how far they had gone and how Riri had handled it. Riri watched through the windshield. Seeing the two women speak to each other made the shape of the outing clearer. Mary-Agnes had not borrowed Riri from her family into some secret world of special understanding. She had taken a pupil running with her mother's knowledge and returned her as promised. The openness should have made the whole thing less romantic in Riri's imagination. Instead it made Mary-Agnes seem even more trustworthy.
On the drive home Evelyn asked how it went. Riri said it was good. Evelyn glanced at her, waiting. Riri added that she had started too fast. Evelyn said she was shocked by this unprecedented development. Riri rolled her eyes, then spent the next ten minutes explaining pacing in enough detail that Evelyn's smile became increasingly obvious. Only when they were nearly home did Riri mention the woman in the red hat. She described Mary-Agnes's tiny increase in speed, the solemn claim about maintaining a useful pace, and the eventual pass. By the end she was laughing.
That laughter mattered. Until then, Riri's adoration had depended partly on imagining Mary-Agnes as a person whose judgement emerged complete and untroubled in every situation. The run gave her something better. Mary-Agnes could be disciplined and competitive, wise and faintly ridiculous, strict about pace while still wanting to catch a stranger on a winter road. Riri did not admire her less for the inconsistency. She liked her more. Perfection had distance built into it. A woman with a competitive streak could run beside you.
At school on Monday, Mary-Agnes was back in her habit, standing at the board while students copied a set of dates. Nothing in the room marked that Riri had seen her in running clothes or heard her breathing on a hill. Mary-Agnes did not refer to the outing until class ended, when she asked, in front of two other students still packing, whether Riri's legs had recovered. Riri said yes. Mary-Agnes told her that meant they could add distance next time if Evelyn agreed.
Riri kept her expression under control until she reached the corridor. There, surrounded by ordinary lockers, wet boots and the noise of other students, she allowed herself one hard private grin. Next time. The phrase was practical. It promised nothing except another run. To Riri, that was enough to brighten the entire week.