Page 102 of Good Girl's Guide to Love
“Sounds like my kind of lady,” Ainsley adds as I pause for a breath. “If there’s music on, why wouldn’t you dance?”
I smile at that thought. Sometimes I don’t feel like I remember my mom at all. But then little moments like this I do. And she would’ve loved Ainsley.
“They were excited. And I was too. A friend of mine was having a party. Girls were invited over, but the guys were staying the night. You know, one of those parties in eighth grade when you thought you were so cool to be invited and the pretty girl was going to be there?”
“I do. Only mine was seventh grade, and his name was Ben. But I left once spin the bottle started. I was not comfortable in that situation. Seven minutes in heaven? I think not.”
I laugh, because only her. ”Are you going to hold it against me if I started the game at mine?”
She chuckles in my hold. “I kind of expected it.”
“Well, if I would’ve just stayed making out with Caitlyn Morrow, maybe things would’ve been different.” Not the best segway in the world, but I don’t know how else to really tell this story. “Things were going fine. Your normal thirteen-year-old party, until a few guys I knew signaled for me to follow them outside. I knew of them. Not my crew, and to this day, I don’t know why they were there. But me and a few of my friends followed them like the teenaged idiots we were.”
I can still feel the cold in the air as we walked outside into that frigid February night. But of course, I didn’t put on a jacket because I was a middle school boy. Jackets were for losers.
“They had a joint,” I continue. “I don’t know where they got it, or why they asked me and my buddies to come out and smoke it. Before I know it, I was a walking stereotype of the story teachers give you about when you’re first asked to do drugs. And, like the idiot I was, I fell for the peer pressure and took a few hits.”
Ainsley rolls into me, but making sure to lace her fingers with mine before I go on. It’s like she knew this is where the story is about to take a turn.
“Of course, we got busted, because we’re dumbasses. The party ended, but all of our parents were called to personally pick us up.”
I feel my throat starting to tighten up, but I breathe through it and lean into Ainsley’s touch, to keep going.
“My parents had to leave their concert early. I heard my mom screaming on the other side of the phone when she was told what happened. And remember, they weren’t supposed to pick me up. I was supposed to stay the night.”
Tears start welling in my eyes—just like they do every time I think about what happened next.
“It was February in Detroit. The roads were shit. And a car in front of them hit a patch of ice on the highway. Eight cars were in the accident total. My parents were the third car in the pileup and…”
I trail off as I can’t keep the tears at bay. Ainsley wraps her arms around me, holding me as I cry into her shoulder. I’m squeezing her so tight, having not thought about, let alone talked about, that night in God knows how many years.
“If I would’ve said no, not been a stupid fucking kid, they’d have stayed at the show. They wouldn’t have been driving then. They…they’d still be here.”
“Oh, Linc,” she says as she sits up against my headboard, moving me to lay across her lap. I feel her gentle fingers combing through my hair, the other rubbing my back. “I’m so sorry you had to go through that. Have had to live with that. I can’t imagine.”
“I was already a rebellious kid. Pushed the limits of what I could get away with,” I say through the tears. “But after that, the rebellion turned into anger. I had no limits.”
“Where did you go? After they passed.”
“My grandmother,” I say. “I was an only child. So were my parents. Grandma was the only one I had left.”
I’d spent plenty of nights at her house growing up. Grandma was never not in my life. But I remember the first time walking into her house, knowing that it wasn’t just for a visit. I cried that entire night. I believe it was around three in the morning when she came into my room and just sat with me. We cried together for what we both lost. She told me that parents weren’t supposed to bury their children; that she was supposed to go first. That teenagers shouldn’t be staring over graves of their parents. That sometimes the world wasn’t fair.
Those words have stuck with me for a very long time.
“She did her best,” I continue. “But I was so mad at the world. Getting in fights almost daily. Went to juvie for a few days to try and scare me straight. Nothing seemed to work. That is, until I discovered football.”
I go on to tell Ainsley about the high school coach who got me mostly under control. The fights never fully stopped, but while I was playing, or training, it seemed to keep my temper, and my fists, at bay. I tell her about my journey from high school, to junior college, all the way until Mississippi State.
“I’m glad you found an outlet,” she says. “And someone who believed in you.”
“It helped. But the problem with me is that I’ve never been one to make the best decisions. And while football might’ve kept me out of trouble, the temper and the anger were never too far away.”
“Is this the fight before the draft?”
I nod in her lap, figuring at this point she probably read about it. But no one has ever learned about the whole story. “We were at the combine. I still couldn’t believe I got an invitation. Only the best of the best get the invite, but that means you workout in front of scouts from the entire league. And I didn’t have a fallback plan. It was pro football or bust.”
On the field, I killed it that week. Ran the best forty time I’d ever run. Was catching everything. I was unstoppable. As for the interviews you do with teams? Those could’ve gone better. They all asked me about a few fights I was in during college. About how every coach they talked to made some sort of mention about my temper. I thought I’d talked enough to convince them I was worth taking a chance on.
