I was doing right by my parents. My family. They had no idea that by the end of fall, I’d be giving them the keys to their dream house. The decision to not go to college had been the right one. I’d made enough money to secure a future for myself, plus I was still racing so more was to follow, as long as I kept winning. Which I intended to.
Ending things with Nora Bennett had been the hardest decision I’d ever made. The one I’d struggled with for a while. Still struggled with, if I was being honest. She’d been my first love, but we were young. Did we even really know what love was? And, what was I supposed to do? Ask my seventeen-year-old girlfriend to wait for me? To give up on having her own life to pine for some dude out in Texas that was trying to capture lightening in a bottle? I couldn’t do that to her. She had a life in Halstead—family and friends. I’d done a pretty good job of not letting myself think about her, but being back in this place—this place where I’d loved her so long ago—had something flowing through me that felt a lot like regret.
You did the right thing.
I’d been telling myself that for years and I would keep telling myself until the visions of her in my head stopped. It worked before. It would work again. It had to. I was here for like five minutes in the grand scheme of things. Three months and I’d be back in Texas. I had zero time to be drudging up the past.
Brett brake checked me forcing me to stop abruptly before hitting my front tire against his back.
“You taking a nap?” he teased.
“No.” I shook it off. “Just thinking about what it was like to grow up here,” I confessed and waited for him to start busting my chops about the past. Instead, he gave me a knowing smile. A moment passed between us where I knew that he understood all that I’d sacrificed back then. I’d talked to him about when I first moved to his home state.
“Let’s go, daydreamer,” he finally said. His Texas drawl might have been charming to most, but it didn’t faze me. A smart ass was a smart ass.
“Yeah, yeah. I’m coming.” I rode past him to the track.
The track was in terrible shape. The hills had settled and rounded off from years of neglect, the whoop section was nonexistent and the berms that used to make taking the corners at a high rate of speed possible, now barely offered enough support for a snail’s pace. There where saplings as tall as me and weeds that were going to need a whole lot more than just pulling.
“Well, fuck. This is a mess.” Brett had already hopped of his bike and had his helmet in hand by the time I pulled up next to him.
“I can see that, Sally,” I replied. I climbed off the bike and hung my helmet on the handlebars. Brett Sallinger hated two things: losing and being called my favorite nickname for him. He bounced his shoulder off mine, giving me a friendly warning before he started walking the track.
“I can see it though,” he said as he reached the one-time peak of a double jump, stretching his arms out to either side of him. “This was probably bad ass.”
“It was.” It sucked that no one had maintained this place. It was a great track. So many hours and sweat had gone into making it my training area and playground. It wasn’t the Texas track I’d trained on for the past seven years, but it was something worth salvaging. “We’ll fix it. We’ve got nothing else to do, right?”