Heartbeat

Annie learns in school how to use footnotes, which she finds fascinating and amusing. She imagines her feet covered in small notes and begins putting footnotes on all her homework. She has dreams of footnotes appearing around objects as she runs, and when she rests on a bench, her feet are covered in them. In “Skeleton,” her mother shows the family a sonogram of the baby and tells them that they can all come later that week to hear the baby’s heartbeat. Annie’s art teacher gives each student an apple and tells them to take the apple home and draw a picture of it every day for 100 days. Annie draws an apple that afternoon, but she isn’t happy with the final product.

When Annie and her father come with her mother to hear the baby’s heartbeat, she is surprised by the rhythm. She expects it to sound like her own heartbeat, but instead, it beats fast, like the baby is running. She imagines the baby, her parents, and her grandfather as being her team. At school, the girls’ track team coach approaches Annie and asks her to join the team.