Page 59 of Colt
She reaches across the expanse of the car and puts her hand on my knee. “I know. Watching that happen to you was the single worst thing that I’ve ever experienced.”
She watched her mom die. Slowly. It was a tragedy. And she’s saying my accident was the worst thing she’s ever seen?
“It was so violent,” she says. And there was nothing we could do. We were just so helpless. It was so fast and brutal. Disease is a terrible thing. It can move fast, and it can move slow. In my mom’s case, it took years. Years for it to finally be finished with her. Years for it to all be over. That’s been my experience with loss. But that… It was so violent. So sudden. I’ve seen you ride I don’t know how many times. Nothing like that. Ever.”
“I know. I mean, obviously I never expected that. You know that it’s possible. They’re animals. In the minute you bring animals into anything you’ve brought in a variable that you can’t control. You can’t predict it. You can anticipate it. Probability goes right out the fucking window. The odds are in your favor, I suppose. But the reality is, the next bull could have done thesame thing to his rider, and the next, odds be damned. Because animals are random. Just because it doesn’t often happen, doesn’t mean it couldn’t. I was cocky. I was egotistical. And I thought that I was bulletproof. But now I don’t think that I am.” I pause, trying to gather my thoughts, my emotions. “I don’t know how to stand in front of the firing squad knowing that I can be killed.”
We just sit there like that for a moment.
“If you don’t want to go back, you don’t have to.”
“I know. But I’m scared of being somebody that I don’t recognize. I’m afraid of losing my edge. I’m afraid of… It’s the one place that I put all of my intensity. My ambition. Because I always had to be easy. I always had to make things easy for my mom. I just wanted to… Delight her, I guess. Make her happy. I wanted to give her the kid she deserved to have. For sticking with me. For being there for me when my dad wasn’t.”
“You’re allowed to be unhappy. You’re allowed to have problems. You’re allowed to be difficult.”
“I’m not, though,” I say, the words torn from me. “I’m not.”
I take a deep breath. “You were really the only person I could ever be… You’re the only person that I tease, really. You’re the only person who sees that part of me. Because you’re the only one that I feel safe with.”
Those words sit strangely on my tongue. I feel like I’ve admitted some kind of weakness. This deep fear that I have of being too difficult, of being abandoned. This need. It’s not just about my mom, it’s about me. I want everybody to look and see how special I am. Because if they see how special I am then I’m somebody who didn’t deserve to be abandoned. And that means putting on a show.
A performance.
I’m not the Golden Boy of Gold Valley by accident.
I am very much that on purpose, and it’s hard-won. And I don’t feel like I have it in me anymore. I don’t feel like I have it in me right now. I’m not sure that I ever will again. That’s why we had to come out here to go grocery shopping so that I didn’t feel like I was going to crush someone beneath the weight of their own disappointment for how I’m just normal.
“I’m a narcissist,” I say.
“No, you aren’t,” she says, finally pulling the car out of his parking space and heading out of the parking lot.
“I think so much about putting on performances for other people, but all that is is… Making myself really important to the story.”
“We’re all the main characters in our own story.”
“Yeah. But it’s not like there’s a spotlight on me all the time.”
“There actually is, Colt,” she says. “I don’t know if that really helps you right now. That visual. But I’ve always felt like you had a spotlight on you. Like you were the sort of magical being that everybody wanted to be around. You were always half of the conversations in the halls at school. And you weren’t even at my school half the time. People were obsessed with getting information about you. Girls would harass me all the time. In fact, I had to worry about girls becoming friends with me so that they could have sleepovers at my house, just so they could have sleepovers at your house. You’re one-of-a-kind. You are special.”
“But everyone is.”
She looks over at me. “Not in the same way.”
“That’s not true. I’m not… I’m just performing. That’s what everyone likes. Always a joke. Always a smile. Always a new win. Captain of the football team, whatever. It’s just a tap dance routine. And when the tap dance routine is over who’s going to stay?”
“Me.”
I look over at her, our eyes meet for a moment before she turns her focus back to the road.
“Thanks.”
“No problem.”
She takes me to a restaurant with hamburgers – no argument – and I order a cheeseburger while she goes with salad.
“I’m making you a salad tonight,” I say.
“I know. But we are also making pasta with cream sauce. So, I’m going to pace myself. Also, we have that cake.” The cake at least, is a pretty cheery addition to things.
