Three medals and one Layla. That was how her cousin put it afterwards, laughing, meaning nothing by it, and Layla laughed too, because the alternative was worse.
She had run the 800 metres in 2:21.4. Her previous best, set in March, was 2:26.8. She had taken five and a half seconds off her own time on the one afternoon of the year that mattered, and she had come fourth.
The girl who came third was from a school in the north and had run 2:20.9. Half a second. Layla had done the arithmetic in her head before she had finished walking off the track, because that is what the mind does when it is not ready to feel anything yet.
Her coach, Ustaadha Mariam, found her sitting on the low wall behind the stand with her spikes off and her socks in her hand.
"What was your split?" Mariam asked.
Layla said nothing.
"Your first lap. What was it?"
"Sixty-eight."
"And in March?"
"Seventy-three."
Mariam sat down on the wall. She did not say well done, which Layla was grateful for, because it would have been a thing said to make her feel better and she would have heard it as that.
"Do you know what beat you today?" Mariam said.
"Half a second."
"No. What beat you today is that you ran the last hundred metres like someone who was afraid of the result. You had more. I watched your shoulders come up at the bend and you started fighting the air instead of running through it." She paused. "That is a fixable thing. Half a second of ability is not a thing at all. Half a second of technique is nine weeks of work."
Layla looked at her socks.
"I wanted a medal."
"I know."
"Everyone will ask what I got."
"Yes," said Mariam. "And you will say fourth, and they will say never mind, and that will be the whole conversation, and it will be over by Sunday." She stood up and brushed the dust off. "And then on Monday you will still be a girl who took five and a half seconds off her time in six months, and I will still be the only person who knows exactly how, and we will go and get the rest of it."
Layla did not feel better. She wants to be clear about that, whenever she tells the story now. She felt exactly as bad walking to the bus as she had felt on the wall.
But somewhere on the road home she took out her phone and wrote, in the notes app, last 100 — shoulders, and then, underneath it, 68/73, and then she put the phone away and looked out of the window.
In February she ran 2:17.2 and came first, and nobody asked her about her splits at all.