“Go away, Terry, and if you really
give a shit about Nicky, don’t come back.”
Terry glanced at his truck and
then back to Vic before trudging away with his head down. He thought about
going home, but instead he just rode around aimlessly, ending up at the old
track he’d always loved. He was glad to see that it was mostly deserted; only one
car sat in the gravel lot. Too bad he recognized it as River’s. He was about to
put his truck in reverse when River appeared from behind a jump and headed
toward him, his hands shoved deep in his pockets.
Terry watched with apprehension as
River approached the passenger side of the truck and climbed in uninvited.
“Glad you could join me,” Terry
grumbled. “Yeah, sure, climb right in.”
“Dean’s been talking about
replacing you,” River began, not even beating around the bush.
“Yeah, I know. I’ll work it out. I
already promised to help him on some stuff after hours.”
“That doesn’t help us avoid
getting backed up while we’re waiting for you to come in,” River pointed out.
“Look, I’ll be there when we open
on Monday. Nicky isn’t doing PT anymore, so—”
“Why the hell not?”
“’Cause he gets there and refuses
to do anything but sit and tell the therapist that he can’t do the exercises,
so they want him to wait to come back until he is willing to try harder.”
“So push him to try harder! What
the hell, Terry? Isn’t that what you’re supposed to be there for?”
“It isn’t that simple!” Terry
snapped.
“Why?”
Terry sighed and stared out the
window, listening to River drum on the dash until he finally decided to answer.
“Because Nicky only wanted my help because he knew I would feel too guilty to
make him do anything he didn’t want to do. I can’t help him,” Terry admitted. “He
won’t put in the effort. Hell, he’s completely given up on himself. He asked me
to help him kill himself.”
River went still, the drumming
dying away until only the echo remained. “When?”
“A week ago, when he called work
the day you took my phone.”
“Did you tell Vic?”
“No, I… I just started picking him
up for PT and trying to hang out with him when he’d let me.”
“You should have told Vic.”
“What the hell was Vic going to do
about it? What the hell are any of us going to do about it? He doesn’t have any
family. No one can force him to do anything he doesn’t want to.”
River sighed and combed his
fingers through his hair. “You should’ve known you’d be the last one he’d be
willing to listen to.”
“Yeah,” Terry muttered. “But all I
kept thinking about was that it was a way I could make things right.”
“You didn’t think he’d use it
against you?” River finished for him. “Yeah, that doesn’t sound like Nicky,
more like some shit you’d do.”
Terry hung his head. “I’m scared,”
he said softly. “I think it’s going to get worse. He doesn’t give a shit about
himself right now. I don’t trust him not to do something stupid when no one’s
around.”
“All the more reason you should
have told Vic,” River admonished. “For fuck’s sake, Terry, his well-being is
more important than whether or not he’s pissed-off at you!”
“I know; okay? I-I…” Picking at
one of the scuffs on his jeans, Terry looked up at River with desperate eyes. “I
broke up with Dirk, made him move out and everything. Finally admitted to him
that I never stopped loving Nicky and had completely screwed everything up by
being jealous. I told Nicky too. Not like he even acknowledged it, but I’d
hoped knowing would…” Terry sighed heavily and waved his hand toward the
window.
“You’d hoped it would what? Make
him forgive you? Take you back? Forget all the shit you put him through? You
guys were bad for one another, Terry, and more so, you were bad for him. You
were selfish and self-centered, narcissistic and downright rude, and he fuckin’
let you. Never once did he try to point out what a douche you were being. He
just followed along and hero-worshipped like almost everyone else. Away from
you, Nicky was awesome, down to earth, laidback, and cool. With you, he was
just a shadow. To be honest, I hated when you guys were together. I always
wished you’d just get the hell out of his life and stay out of it.”
Terry frowned and met River’s blue
eyes. “Is that the way all of you see me? That I’m just some asshole who wants
people to follow him and tell him how great he is?”
River fixed him with a pointed
stare. “It’s kinda how it comes across.”
Terry shook his head. “I liked the
attention from winning races. It was nice to be good at something. I never
thought I was being arrogant about it.”
“Yeah, well, you were. You’ve been
that way as long as I’ve known you, which is why I never came around to hang
out unless Nicky was on his own. Maybe you should work on changing that before
you hook up with someone else and end up breaking them down, or repeating the
cycle all over again.”
“Got no plans to hook up with
anyone for a while,” Terry admitted.
“Good, ’cause you seriously need
to figure out what was so fucked-up in your life that you crashed a bike into
someone you supposedly loved, just to try and prove you were the better racer.”
Terry had no answer to that. He’d
never considered that there was anything wrong with him that pushed him to work
so hard or strive to win all the time. There was nothing wrong with
competition, healthy competition anyway, but then there was nothing healthy
about the way he reacted to losing, or what he’d done to Nicky in response to
it. In the back of his mind he heard a faint old voice, and pictured the proud,
weatherworn face of the woman who used to take care of him. An image of his
grandmother in a flour-stained apron, hands on her hips, feet wide in a defiant
stance as his parents packed him up to go home, came unbidden to his mind.
“He’s
got thirty more minutes of sitting to do,” his Grammy told his parents.
“Oh,
come on, Mama, we’ve got to get going. No one has time for this,” his father
complained.
“Which
is precisely the problem,” the older woman informed them, standing between them
and the corner, where she’d ordered him to sit. “You spoil the boy so much he
thinks he’s always got to have his way. It’s high time he learns that the world
doesn’t revolve around him.”
“I’m
sure he gets the point,” Terry’s mother insisted, “but we really have to be
going now.”
Terry’s
grandmother checked her watch and then shook her head. “In twenty-seven more
minutes.”
“For
crying out loud, Mom!” Terry’s father threw his hands up in the air. “We have
someplace we need to be, and if we don’t hurry we’ll lose our reservations.”
“So?”
Terry’s grandmother began. “What you’re saying is that some fancy dinner is
more important to you than making sure your son learns discipline. Well, I’m
not too busy to see to it that he learns his lesson. If you’re in that big of a
hurry you can go on to your dinner and come back for him when you’re through.”
“What,
and waste all that gas? Come on, Miriam. You’re being ridiculous. What could
the boy possibly have done to make you be so hard on him?” Terry’s mother
asked.
“I’m
not being hard on the boy. I’m trying to make the boy think about what he did,”
Terry’s grandmother pointed out. “I sent the kids down to the fishing hole
after lunch, told them I’d call them back when the cookies were ready. Well,
they came running hell bent for leather as soon as I called for them, only
Jenny was just a little bit faster than both the boys and your Terry decided to
give her a shove because he was none too happy about that. She hit the corner
of the porch and scraped up her arm pretty good, and he refused to apologize,
so he got no cookies and I told him he could either say he was sorry and mean
it or sit there until six ten. Well, it’s only five fifty-seven, which means
he’s got thirteen more minutes before he can get up.”
“You
made him sit there all this time and refused to give him a treat!” Terry’s
mother exclaimed. “That’s cruel. You can’t just withhold food from a child.”
“It
wasn’t food, it was a snack, and I’ve never seen anyone waste away from lack of
cookies.” Miriam huffed. “What if Jenny had hit her head on the steps? She
could’ve split it wide open and had to get stitches. How would you have wanted
me to handle that? You let him get away with too much, the both of you. Someone
has to hold him accountable.”
And hold him accountable she had,
and made him sit the full amount of time before letting him go.
It was the last time his parents had
allowed him to go there without them. From that day forward he was sent to
daycare after school, or signed up for after-school activities provided as a
thinly veiled child care service. To tell the truth, he’d missed his cousins
and the warmth of his grandmother’s kitchen. It had been years since he’d gone
back to visit and it had never again felt like home the way it had when he was
a child. Maybe he should head out there, spend the weekend with her if she’d
let him, go fish by the creek and sit on her old porch swing with some
lemonade. Maybe she’d even have some advice for him if he could just figure out
the right questions.
“…ey, Terry, are you even
listening?”
Terry jerked. Blinking, he stared
around at his surroundings, trying to remember what the hell he’d been doing
before his mind had drifted back a decade. River was looking at him
expectantly, but for the life of him, Terry didn’t have a clue what he’d said.
“Huh?”
“Yeah, I’ll take that as a no.”
“Sorry. Just spaced out there for
a moment.”
River glared, gripping the dash.
“No shit. But what else is new, right? The conversation isn’t about you, so it
doesn’t matter.”
“No, I just...” Terry rubbed the
back of his neck, trying to decide how much to tell River. “I was thinking
about what you said. It reminded me of the past is all—mistakes I made when I
was a kid. Mistakes I guess I keep on making.”
“Well, get your head on straight
and think about what’s best for Nicky, ’cause that’s the only thing that should
matter to you right now.” Before Terry could say another word, River shoved
open the door and climbed out. “I mean it. Think about what Nicky needs, and
what he doesn’t. Then do the right thing for once.”
The force with which River slammed
the door rocked the truck, but Terry couldn’t even be angry about it. For the
longest time he just sat there, thinking.
Enter Gray, and a chance meeting at a roadside diner that leaves Nicky with something more to focus on. As the sting of Terry’s betrayal fades, Nicky finds himself drawn to Gray, returning to the diner in every free moment he can spare. It’s almost perfect, but nothing ever lasts, not in Nicky’s world, especially when Terry isn’t done making him pay for his success.
In the aftermath, Gray is left helping Nicky pick up the pieces, but nothing will ever be the same. Will Nicky be able to see beyond his dreams of twisting in the air and dangling from beneath his bike.... to learn that when you Race the Sky…gravity always wins?
One of the things that has always fascinated me was the
skill and fearlessness it must take for someone to get on a dirtbike and pull
of some of those tricks. I love watching them. I find myself glued to the
screen, cringing whenever they crash, and while I ride, I certainly never
attempt anything so trilling.
Still, it’s the things I love that find their way into my
work, more often than not, anyway, though sometimes, it’s the things I hate
that find a home in them too. In this case, jealousy and the need that some
people have to just be better at everything than others. Now please don’t get
me wrong, I love competition. I love sports and I loved taking part in them and
other forms of competitions when I was younger, but there is a line between
being competitive and being the kind of snake in the grass that terry proves to
be.
His need to be the best drives him past reason and one of
the hardest parts about writing him was having to look back on some of the
people I’ve known in life to draw such negative qualities. It sucks that there
are those who don’t think they can get ahead unless they cheat, sidestep the
rules, take shortcuts, and do everything in their power to undermine the person
they are trying to beat out. And what is winning anyway?
Is it still a victory if it doesn’t come honestly?
What is a winner and how do we define winning in a landscape
of often times malicious individuals?
I felt like those questions and more kept coming up over the
course of writing Racing the Sky. I
guess I was trying to understand what is lacking in an individual that they
feel the need to do such things, because I’m not sure it’s all about feeling a
sense of entitlement. I think it’s about there being a hole they are trying to
fill and going about it all wrong. I think it’s about being empty and selfishly
trying to fill a need while leaving oneself blind to the world around them.
I’m sure it’s a mix of things, really, it was in Terry, and
I’m really looking forward to seeing what others end up feeling about him.
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