Crash Test

by Amy James

It was true, I wasn’t known for being particularly friendly. It wasn’t that I was trying to be rude, I just always felt . . . out of place, I suppose. Uncomfortable.

Now she’s dating this Christian block of wood with zero personality and a two-million-dollar trust fund, and she’s always harping on about how there’s nothing wrong with being traditional, and that a true feminist knows that the greatest joy of being a woman is caring for a good man and bearing his children.

“I deal with two types of people in this work, Jacob. People who are unhappy because they don’t know what they want, and people who are unhappy because they do know what they want but they won’t let themselves go after it. You know where you want to be. You’re just making excuses because you’re afraid of failing.”

I let myself open up to him, because I liked how much he liked it.

“Did it help you stop fighting with them?” Kelsie laughs. “Fuck, no. But it stopped us from feeling like shit when we got into arguments. Because it’s not our job to make them happy, or to live our lives to please them. It’s only our job to acknowledge and respect their reasonable concerns.”

“How dare you speak to your mother and me like this?” he demands. “After everything we did for you. You got to race because of us, in case you’ve forgotten. We sacrificed everything—” “That’s not reasonable!” I snap. “I was six years old when I started karting. Do you think a fucking six-year-old understands the concept of time and money? I don’t even remember most of it. If you didn’t want me to do it, or if we couldn’t have afforded it, you were adults, you could have said no.” “You think I could say no to—to my little boy—” My mother’s voice breaks, but it does nothing to move me. This is all just a show she’s putting on for herself. “Yes, I think you could have said no. And I would’ve been mad for, like, a day, and then I would’ve watched fucking Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or something and forgotten about it. Because I was six.”

You two did a lot of things for me. But you didn’t do them because I forced you to. And it’s completely unreasonable to hold everything you did for me as a kid over my head, like some sort of lifelong ransom!”

“Put some more pizza in your mouth, Matty,” Heather says. “Stop the words from coming out.”