The flight to Houston is quick, and I have an aisle seat all to myself. I spend the trip looking out the window, trying like hell to forget all the bad things in my life and focus on just the good things, however few of them are left. My parents thought it was weird that I’m choosing to banish myself to the middle-of-nowhere Texas for the summer, but they didn’t try to stop me. I have a suitcase of clothes and my dirt bike and gear are being shipped over in a few days. If I can’t find some land at this new house to ride, there’s a few tracks close by.
I try not to feel like it’s a bad omen when I get to the car rental place and the only thing they have available to rent all summer is a shiny red Chevrolet Malibu. Otherwise known as a soccer mom car. It’s about as un-manly of a car as you can get, besides one of those smart things that’s the size of a dog crate, and now it’s mine for the time being. I spend about two seconds considering buying a truck while I’m here, but I have one at home and it’d be a huge waste of money.
So ugly rental car it is.
I guess I should be thankful that my phone still gets signal all the way out here, otherwise I’d be screwed without my GPS. I’d known Salt Gap, Texas was in the boonies, but as I drive out here, I realize exactly how far out it is. There is nothing but fields and fields of land, farms, gigantic mansions with long driveways and wrought iron fences. My grandfather wasn’t a rich man, but the paperwork makes his house look fairly big. There’s one thing for sure: Salt Gap has nothing in common with Los Angeles. Like… nothing.
There are no night clubs, no bars, no malls or shopping centers. I don’t pass any fancy restaurants, just some hole-in-the-wall diners and cafes that you see on movies and never really expect to see in real life. There is a McDonald’s, so at least this town has somewhat been brought into this century. Even though this town is nothing like where I’m from, I feel like I can breathe a little easier here. There won’t be any distractions, nothing standing in my way of getting a fresh start. I’ll be alone in the house that I now own, and I’ll have my dirt bike and that’s all that matters.
The GPS shows me my new house and I pull into the driveway. It looks pretty big from here. Two stories, older and kind of Victorian with a big porch. The trust that held this account until I turned eighteen had hired a lawn crew to keep up the landscaping, so the yard looks nice. You can tell the house has been vacant though.
I park and grab my stuff from the back seat, then make my way to the front door. My key works, which is a relief because for a moment I feared it wouldn’t. The place smells like an abandoned house, like an old bookstore mixed with pine trees. It’s not a horrible smell, but I’ll open some windows to air the place out.
It’s fully furnished with dusty couches and chairs, and there are old people knick-knacks everywhere. I venture around, and check out the place. It’s not bad as far as the floorplan goes. Kind of a cool house. All the stuff is super outdated though, but it gives me an idea of what my grandfather was like when he was alive. There’s a stuffed deer head above the fireplace, and that kind of gives me the creeps. But the home has a very country feel to it. Kind of like a farm house.
I head to the back door and step onto the back porch. Relief hits me as I look at exactly what I’d hoped I see. Acres of land with nothing in the way of riding my dirt bike. There are only a few trees, and they’ll be easy to ride around. No lakes or driveways or anything to get in the way. I can’t wait to rent a backhoe and start digging a track. The front yard is also pretty big because all of the houses on this street are set back far from the road and they all have big back yards. My neighbors aren’t very close, and there’s no home owner’s association here like there is back in LA. No one can stop me from digging a track. I’ll make a lake in the front of the house and use the dirt to build some jumps in the back yard.
I’m starting to get totally pumped about how great this is. I’m far away from home but no one besides my parents knows where I am. I can ride here instead of going to a track where people will recognize me and want to get autographs or grill me about how I got kicked out of racing. Here, I am invisible.
But first, I’ll need some stuff. I make a list of groceries and toiletries like towels and shampoo. There’s probably towels here but I’m not about to use them because by now they’re probably more dust than towel. I’ll also buy a new TV because the one in here is both tiny and square and so old it should belong in a museum. I plop down on the couch and look around.
This will do.
I can spend my summer here alone with just my thoughts and my dirt bike. I’ll get my life back together. When the summer ends and the new season starts, I’ll be shape again and faster than ever. My agent will have convinced the board to let me race again.
Yep. Everything will work out just fine.
Chapter 4
One week later, I’m all settled in. I feel like some kind of badass adult doing everything all by myself. My dad has always talked about finding independence and becoming a man and all of that, and I think I finally understand what he means. I feel pretty fucking bad ass being out here alone.
Of course, I couldn’t do everything alone. Turns out you need a license to operate heavy machinery, but renting the backhoe came with the guy who runs it. He’d never built a dirt bike track before, but we watched some YouTube videos—because everything on earth can be found on there—and we figured it out. There’s now a lake in the front yard that’s about half filled with water from a recent rain, and now I have five jumps in the back yard. It’s a small track, but it’s tight with sharp corners just like the arena cross tracks back home. We roughed up the grass with the blade of the back hoe and made a pathway between the jumps. It’s a little rudimentary, but it’ll work. And the more I ride on it, the more I can wear the dirt into a real dirt bike track.
The only shitty thing? My bike still isn’t here. The shipping company had some problem with heavy rains and construction so my delivery has been delayed. I spend the days watching HBO, which I had installed the day after I got here because really, what kind of a life is it without HBO? And I spend my nights outside near the fire pit, burning some of the firewood my grandfather left piled up near the shed. You can see the stars out here. You can’t see anything in LA besides airplanes. It really is beautiful being out here in the middle of nowhere.
It’s also lonely.
The Ex still calls me every day, usually a few times. She’s resorted to texting now, too, and I’ve held strong and ignored every single one. I can’t lie—sometimes I feel like answering. Sometimes I want to talk to the bitch and ask exactly why she did it. She’d seemed genuinely unremorseful when it all went down, so it doesn’t make sense now that she’s calling me so much. You don’t call someone you cheated on, right?
So yeah, deep down, this stupid part of me wants to talk to her. I just want to know why. But every time I feel like caving and answering her call or responding to her text, I stop myself. I get this vision of Luke Brady sitting next to her, laughing at everything I say. I picture them working together to piss me off more. Every time I do that, it’ll piss me off just enough to stop myself from talking to her.
But then it’ll be late at night and I’ll be sitting by the fire all alone and I wonder if she misses me. If she ever cared about me. If any part of our relationship was even real. When we were together, I was busy all the time. I rode my dirt bike every day, hit the gym every day, raced every weekend. That kind of schedule is hard for girls to handle when they’re dating a motocross guy, but The Ex never seemed to mind it because she was already in this world since her little brother was also a racer.
Plus, she left me for Luke, who also rides so that can’t possibly be it. I think I was a good boyfriend. I tried, at least. I was loyal and I didn’t flirt with other girls. I listened when she talked and I had flowers sent to her house when I didn’t get to see her that week. But what do I know? Maybe I suck at everything. Which is why I’m focusing on dirt bikes from now on.
I focus on working out while I wait for my bike to be delivered. I hit the protein shakes before and after my workouts, and I jog a few miles a day to build up cardio. Contrary to what people think, you actually need to be better at cardio than weight training to be fast on a dirt bike. Racing takes a lot out of you, so you have to train hard.
I’ve taken over one of the guest bedrooms and cleaned out some of the weird stuff that was in here. Now there’s just a bed, a nightstand and dresser. I had a new mattress delivered and bought some new sheets for it. The dresser that’s here is filled with sheets and linens and I’ve been too lazy to unpack it and put my stuff in, so I’m living out of a suitcase. But I did make my own personal touches to the room. I brought some posters of Zombie Radio, which is arguably the best rock band on the west coast, and I also brought my good luck poster. It’s from when I was thirteen years old and Jeremy Sola gave it to me at the supercross races. I was star stuck because Jeremy was a professional racer at the time and I told him I wanted to be just like him. He told me about the importance of training and working hard, and then in addition to signing a poster of himself for me, he grabbed one of the bike model’s posters and signed it as well.
The bike models are just hot women who wear skimpy clothing and prance around the dirt bikes at local races. They’re on calendars and posters and magazines, always posed next to a bike. My poster has a Yamaha F250 dirt bike on it, with this blonde big boobed model leaning over the front of it. Jeremy signed the poster with these words of advice:
As soon as you look at this poster and see the bike before the girl, you’re ready to be a pro racer. -Jeremy Sola
It’s kind of dumb I guess, but now I realize more than ever how true it is. I need to focus on the bike. On the sport. Not the girls. Not any girls.
Now that my room feels more like mine, I really enjoy living here. I had thought about taking over the master bedroom but it was just too weird sleeping the room my grandparents used to live in, so yeah. I didn’t. My mom has offered to come down and help me clean out the place. We could have a garage sale and get rid of all the junk and then fix up the house to be my vacation home or something. I told her it’s a great idea, but I’ll have to wait until the summer is over.
This is my summer to be unplugged from everything but motocross.
