Page 56 of The Outsider

“How old were you?” She tried to imagine it. Tried to imagine Daughtry being intimidating, being there to take things from people. A menacing presence rather than someone who radiated... well, not menace. Yes, she had been a little afraid of him right at first, but not because she actually thought he was bad. It was because she was... well, because she was doing things that weren’t entirely aboveboard, so she had reason to be uncomfortable around him.

But the idea that he had been... something other than the man that stood before her now rocked her.

“I was old enough to know better. It went on until I was about seventeen. I was big for my age.”

She could believe it.

“What changed for you?” She found herself desperate to know. Because something had turned the whole world on its head for him, and she wanted to know what that moment was. Since she herself was in the midst of a come-to-Jesus, she was curious what had led him to his.

“We pulled up to the house one day, and there was a little girl at the place. She saw us coming. She ran away. I knew that if we were the kind of person that made little kids run away, then we weren’t the good guys. And I had never put a lot of thought into that.” He cleared his throat. “It was after that when Dan Patrick was killed, by somebody he went to collect from. At the behest of my dad. So basically, it was a combination of things. But that little girl’s face really stuck in my head. It changed things for me.”

He looked grim, and she found she wanted to reach up and smooth the lines that had appeared on his forehead. She also felt like she didn’t have the right to. They lived together. He had taken care of her. She still wasn’t quite sure what they were to each other. And he was telling her this now. This thing that seemed personal and real. She wanted to hoard it like food.

The corner of his lip tugged upward. “I wanted to be a good guy. But it was also my first real understanding that my dad was a bad guy. He wasn’t like your dad. I feel like your dad had a certain amount of pride in going against the law.”

She laughed. “Oh yeah. He loved to grandstand on why he was actually sort of a hero. Fighting the man and all of that.”

He shook his head. “My dad was never one to grandstand. He spoke with this very real conviction that made you feel like he couldn’t be anything but right. It was why when he showed his true colors it was always a bit of a shock. Arizona was in a terrible accident when she was seventeen. She had injuries, scars on her body—it took a long time for her to recover. He was horrible to her. He just said the most poisonous things. It was painful because there were other times when he seemed nice.” He stared at a point just past her head. “He was like a snake. Slithering in and out between the rocks. Sometimes he would catch the light and you would think he was pretty. But at the end of the day, he was a pit viper. And he was poison.”

“My dad had all kinds of justifications for what he did,” said Bix. “But I always knew. When you have to be secretive about what you do, when you don’t have any friends, when you’re not allowed to go to school, when you can’t tell anybody what your dad does for a living, you know that you are the ones that are wrong. I have clung to a whole lot of what he taught me because I didn’t want to feel like I was a bad guy either.”

But she didn’t know what else to be. Didn’t know what other move to make. Except now she did. Maybe that was what mattered. Maybe they were more alike than she had realized before.

“You’re not a bad guy,” he said.

Warmth bloomed in her chest. “Well. I appreciate that.”

The days flew by until it was time for them to go on their shopping trip, and she found herself frettingover what to wear. She had never done that in her life. But Daughtry always looked... well, like Daughtry. And she wanted to look like a woman who ought to be walking with him.

She chose another one of the dresses that she had bought. It was short and pretty, with buttons all the way down the front, and a flower pattern. She had bought a few dresses like this because they were frivolous. Because they were something she never would have picked in her other life, and she was working on making something new.

She felt a cracking sensation in her chest. Like something old and calcified was beginning to loosen. Beginning to ease. It was terrifying, and she wanted it. In spite of the terror.

They were going to buy supplies to brew beer, and she had put on her nicest dress. She rolled her eyes at herself as she looked in the mirror, and wished that she had just a little bit of makeup. Just something. A little bit of brightness to make him look at her and see that she was different.

What exactly do you think is going on?

Nothing. She wasn’t foolish enough to think that...

She shut down that train of thought. This was what she had always been afraid of. Cracking the door on hope. Because then all these other dreams would push in. And that was exactly what was happening. She had food and shelter, so she’d begun to think maybe she could have stability too. And then she’d started to think if she could have the job brewing beer maybe she could also go to college. And then she thoughtif she could begin to make friends here at the ranch, maybe Daughtry...

There was just a limit to how much she could put herself through. To how much she could test this new, fragile hope that was blooming within her.

She reaffirmed within herself that she was absolutely fine without makeup.

Because she didn’t need Daughtry to see her different. She needed to keep on trying to see herself different.

That thought pulled her up short, and as she walked out of her bedroom and into the living room, where she was waiting for him, she let that settle. She saw herself as a fighter. But more than that, she realized she saw herself as an underdog. It was something that had fueled her. The idea that she had an enemy, somewhere out there. She had gotten that from her father.

The idea that everything she did wasn’t just about surviving, but was about opposing someone who was pushing against her. For her dad, it had been the system. She had taken on a bit of that herself, but she realized that a huge part of how she functioned was fashioning weapons against imagined enemies.

What if she didn’t need enemies?

What if all she needed was to want something better for herself?

It was a radical idea. Something that made her feel off-kilter. She wasn’t sure she was going to accomplish it in a day. But someday, she hoped she could feel that way. That she could do things just for her. For her own well-being. For her own improvement. Her own happiness.

Happiness.

---