As her running took off, life at home became troubling. Kellie's parents, Jeanette and Fred, divorced when she was 8. She remembers the arguing, the tension. She remembers being confused. Beyond that, she doesn't remember much.
What she does remember is the man who came into her life next. His name was Rick, and Kellie's mom fell for him. In a childlike way, Kellie did too.
"I was enamored," Kellie says now. "He was a baseball coach; I was a tomboy. I was into all that. He filled a void my dad wasn't there for."
Kellie's sister was wary, and stayed away to focus on her running. "She could tell he was sneaky," she says.
Looking back, Kellie sees the signs of trouble. She says Rick mistreated her mom, before and after they got engaged. "I saw him push her around, pull her hair, smack her," Kellie says. But Rick loved sports and so did Kellie, so they got along. They would go to the basketball court and he would encourage her to jump and touch the backboard. After workouts, he would stretch her out. She was in middle school, so she had no idea that might be inappropriate.
And then, during one of the post-workout stretching sessions, Kellie says her step-father "let his hand slip."
She was scared, and once again confused, but she let it go. Maybe it was a mistake.
Kellie poured herself into running. It was an escape for her, just like it was for Tonni, who ran to get away from the stress of watching her parents divorce. The worse things got, the more they ran.
But they couldn't run away. At one point, Kellie says, Rick rubbed Vicks on her chest.
This can't go on, she thought. It has to stop.
She told her mother what was going on.
"She blamed me," Kellie says. "I think she was thinking, 'How could he do this to a little girl and not to me?' "
Kellie figured she couldn't argue with her mom, who she worshiped. And if she told someone else, who knows what would happen? She was going to school in another district, where the academics and sports were better. What if she told on Rick and then had to move back to her original school?
So she didn’t fight. Rick touched her "more times than I can count." Kellie says it went on until she was a sophomore in high school.
***
It's a summer afternoon in Florida and Kellie Wells sits in a Crispers restaurant in suburban Orlando. She knows she's on the brink of something amazing, and she knows it will change her life. Up until now she's been an Olympic hopeful, but one of several in the U.S. She was only "an OK hurdler," in her words, as a student at Hampton University in Virginia. She was talented, but not elite. Then her coach, Dennis Mitchell, asked her a simple question: "Are you tired of being a lane-filler?" That set something off inside Wells and her career took off. She likely would have made the Beijing Games in 2008, but when she crossed the finish line second in the 100-meter final, she felt a searing pain in her right leg. She had torn her hamstring. She went from planning a trip to China to riding in an ambulance to an Oregon hospital.
"I couldn’t run for over a year," she says. "I was in pain all the time. I contemplated quitting. That was a year when I watched everyone else do this."
But on the way back to her old form, Wells decided to stop running away from her past. She decided that "Don’t tell anyone" was not going to work anymore. She decided to blog about what happened to her as a child. It took her three days.
"Kellie almost became terminator against it," Tonni says. "She almost had a chip on her shoulder where she had a tough edge."
So tough that she agreed to sit down and answer any and every question about Rick. That meant talking not only about what she confessed on the blog, but what she didn’t. Kellie says that one night, in her room, Rick went further than ever. Kellie says that in the 10th grade, she was raped.
That was enough. More than enough. Kellie told her mom the next day in the car, and got mostly silence. So she decided to move out. That would be the last night in her childhood bedroom.
A few weeks later, Kellie was driving home with her boyfriend when she saw a horrific car accident. She couldn't imagine what happened to the passengers inside, but like all onlookers, she soon forgot about it.
Then, the next morning, her father sat her down next to her brother and told her Rick was the driver of that car.
"Your mom is dead," he said.
Kellie turned to look at her brother, who was always able to keep a straight face through anything. He had a single tear falling down his face.
That's when she lost it.
"I'm going to kill him," she thought. "Wherever he is, I'm going to kill him."
But Rick was dead too.
Any relief Kellie felt at being rid of Rick drowned in sadness at the loss of her mom.
All that was left for her to do was mourn, and heal.
And run.