All he needed was someone to ask, so he could fire the thing directly into their heart.
“I thought being cool was the most important thing. So much so that I actually used to hide books I was reading inside skin mags. Once I got sent to the principal’s office because I kept answering questions in this smart-ass way, like I didn’t know. But I did know. I always fucking knew. I fucking know now, but still get this clenching feeling whenever I go to raise my hand.”
She stopped then with the clothes. Her arm was still half in and half out of the sweater, but it didn’t matter. What mattered were those words, and the way they just upended her whole world. Everything she thought she knew about him, gone in an instant.
Not just gone: obliterated.
“You made fun of me for things you actually wanted to do. You called me a fucking nerd, like, a million times, and all the while you were just dying to do the same things.”
“That…was kind of the case, yeah.”
“Oh my god. Oh my god, Tate, why didn’t you just…” She threw up her hands, splashing water in two arcs. “Why didn’t you just join me? Why didn’t you stop and just come and talk to me like you talk to me now? You didn’t have to hide books in fucking skin mags—I would have let you read them right in front of me without a goddamn word about it. I would have been happy to have you there!”
“I know that. Do you not think I know that? You’re doing it right now. It literally took me like nothing at all to persuade you to accept me and let me sit with you and read with you and do all this nerdy shit,” he said, getting louder and louder as he went. He had to take a steadying breath, just to make the rest of his speech come out normal. “It wasn’t just you I fucked over. I fucked myself over. Our lives are forever changed because I was too much of a coward to really go for…to really…to really be who I wanted to be.”
“It’s not too late though.”
“That’s really kind of you to say, honey, but I know it is.”
“I’m not just being kind. Look at everything you are now.”
“I’m a wrestler now. That shit is set in stone—there’s no going back. My scholarship is based on it. My whole future is built around it. If I stop, my family will see it as me throwing away millions of dollars. I will be throwing away millions of dollars. And for what? A few books I want to read?”
“I don’t think it’s just about a few books you want to read.”
“Then what do you think it’s about? How else would you put it?”
“You hate wrestling, Tate. You hate it. Like, a lot.”
She could see he’d been about to say something more. Protest the point, maybe, in a pretty fierce tone. But then something seemed to stop him. It made him stutter when he finally did get some words out, always on the verge of shaking his head but never quite managing it all the way.
“I…I wouldn’t say that I…I mean not hate, exactly.”
“It sounds a lot like hate to me, bub.”
“No, no. I mean there are things I like about it.”
“Yeah? Can you name three for me right now?”
“Absolutely I…” he started, but even he seemed to know he was never going to finish. It took around five seconds to cover his eyes one-handed as realization set in. “Okay, maybe I hate it a little. Like, the weighins are usually not a lot of fun. I don’t think I’ve eaten cake in ten years. And then there’s my knees and most of my joints and the constant ringing I have in one ear. By the time I’m thirty I’m probably gonna have the body of an eighty-year-old, if I even make it that far, and—”
“Did you just say if you make it that far? If, as is in maybe not?”
“It puts a lot of strain on the body. And then there’s, like…head injuries.”
“And you think you like wrestling? You think it’s really awesome?”
“I think I made my bed, and now I have to lie in it. Nobody to blame for that but me.”
He shrugged one now visible shoulder, that self-consciousness partly gone. Though what did it matter, when it had been replaced by this awful fatalism? He sounded like someone being slowly marched to his death, and he capped it off by being more concerned about her.
“You, on the other hand, have plenty to blame on someone else.”
“Like what? What should I really blame you for?”
“Are you kidding? You don’t trust anything I do. You don’t trust anything that anybody does.”
“And you would know that how, exactly?”