Riding With Brighton
Haven Francis
For all the too kids.
Prologue
Jay
WHEN I woke up Friday morning, I knew it was going to be the day I would finally change my life.
Which, in retrospect, seems like a totally unattainable goal for the day. I mean, who can really change their life in a single day? Just to be clear, I’m talking about for the better. Fucking up your entire life in one day—that’s totally doable. Really, all it would take is 140 characters exposing your dirty black soul on Twitter. You wouldn’t even have to leave your bed.
Realistically, fucking it up would have been the more likely outcome considering the exact changes I needed to make. Again, I’m only realizing this in retrospect, which I’m suddenly starting to despise. Why the delayed reaction, common sense? Seriously.
In my defense, I was blinded by an epiphany. I shit you not. It’s the only explanation for the clarity that pushed out all the regular crap that usually occupies my brain.
Has that ever happened to you? Have you ever opened your eyes and immediately cringed because suddenly the exact depth of suck-ass your life has reached is slapping you repeatedly in the face? Trust me, it sucks. I mean, you go to bed in a comfortable state of denial thinking life’s great. In my case my girlfriend had watched me hit the game-winning double, and afterward my teammates and I had knocked back a few beers before heading home to our McMansions in Folsom Hills. Life is dandy. You sleep like a damn baby—that’s how comfortable you are in your warm shit pile of a life.
And then—ka, fucking, boom—you wake up and… oh hell no, how the hell did this happen? Someone bring me a fallout shelter because I need a safe place to escape from my life for the rest of eternity.
But no fallout shelter comes, and eventually you’re forced to see that your entire life must be destroyed and then resurrected. And all you can think is Thank God this mayhem came in the form of an epiphany, because you’re definitely gonna need some divine powers to help you out.
It was all a mess, but the thing that was really screwing with my head was why it all had to change. I mean, I knew why. Deep down I’d always known why, but I had managed to live in the safety of denial for years.
Not anymore. The veil of delusion was lifted and suddenly, everything was blindingly clear.
And what was clear to me that morning was that I had forfeited the life that should have been mine. In fact I had veered as far as I possibly could from my should-have-been life. The path I’d chosen was definitely not the one less traveled. I took the path that had been tromped over a million times. It was a sharp right turn, backward a good mile and a half, around corners, down hills, through a forest, and across the universe from where I’d really wanted to go.
But suddenly I was forced to go there. The maze I would have to navigate in order to backtrack be damned.
Once the shock and terror passed, I felt inspired. I was all-knowing and all-powerful and anything was possible. Reality could suck me, because I wasn’t taking its crap anymore.
That Rambo bullshit lasted for a good hour. And then I walked into school.
I could feel my confidence crack as soon as the big metal door closed behind me. But a crack wasn’t going to stop me from doing what had to be done because, dammit; I had an epiphany. I was working alongside higher powers, and it was now or never.
But hell, I mean I couldn’t just change everything immediately. So I wrapped my arm around Sadie and walked to my literal circle of friends who were huddled in the middle of the commons like they were every morning. At first I looked at them with my brand-new superior eyes and thought, I’m better than this. I have more to offer the world than my exceptional athletic ability, good looks, and diligent study habits. I have nothing in common with these people. My should-have-been-life is so much better than this.
While thinking these thoughts, I was midsentence—talking to Jones about the party he was having on Saturday—when Mack slapped me on the chest. He started insulting my performance from the night before, which was obviously bullshit because I always kill it on the field. I insulted him back. This was the banter we were comfortable in. Friendly digs were thrown around for a minute, and then he brought Sadie into it, telling me she needed to do a better job of “warming me up” before our next game. I didn’t defend my virginal girlfriend but instead told him I was always plenty warmed up (wink wink). Which probably should have been the first, or now that I’m thinking about it, at least the third (seriously retrospect, damn you) sign that my life was not, in fact, on the fast track to change. But really I didn’t see it until I began to turn my head back to Sadie.
That’s when my world went into some weird stop-start motion of clarity:
Jesus, all these guys are wearing the same damn outfits: basketball shoes, perfectly distressed jeans, and brand-name T-shirts under their letterman jackets.
Holy shit, almost all of them have their arms wrapped around popular, beautiful cheerleaders.
And, for fuck’s sake, they’re all talking about last night’s game or Jones’s party.
It freaked me the hell out because—God, this is just too sad—they were clones. They could have all been the same damn person. It was eerie as hell. And at first it felt like more proof that I deserved better.
But then, when I finally looked at Sadie, I saw my arm: my letterman-jacketed arm was wrapped around a popular, beautiful cheerleader, and it all hit me again without warning—because that’s how theses god-awful epiphanies work.