Page 2 of The Maverick
"Where'd you go to school?"
I felt it move through me like cold water.
I had a prepared answer. I'd developed it over years of moments exactly like this one, refined it the way you refined anything you had to use often. "Oh, I didn't end up going," I said, light and easy, like it was a choice I'd made rather than a door that had never quite opened for me. "Went straight intoworking. Figured I'd learn on the job." I smiled. I delivered it perfectly.
He nodded and went back to his menu. The moment passed.
I carried it with me for the rest of the shift.
It wasn't his fault. He hadn't meant anything by it. People asked, the way they asked where you were from or what you did—reflex questions, filler, the conversational equivalent of treading water. He hadn't looked at me differently after. He'd just looked back at the menu.
But I'd heard it the way I always heard it, layered and private:Where'd you go to school?Which meantWho are you?Which meantWhat are you worth?
And I knew what the honest answer was. I was a girl from a mountain holler in East Tennessee who probably could have gone to University of Tennessee on a music scholarship if anyone had told her that was a thing she could apply for. I was a girl whose parents were kind and simple and hadn't known the questions to ask. I was a girl who'd learned "Rocky Top" on guitar at nine years old and sang it at every school talent show and had more natural ability in her left hand than most people developed in a decade, and none of it had mattered—because ability without access was just a room with a locked door.
I'd grown up with a lot of locked doors.
I counted my tips in the parking lot behind The Carolinian, in the cold, under a lamp that buzzed faintly overhead. I sorted the bills the way my daddy had taught me—ones on the outside, larger bills folded inside. When I was done, the number was better than I'd hoped and still not enough.
Four hundred and twelve dollars.
Now, three hundred and seventy-nine.
I stood there a moment in the January air, and I looked up at the sky. You couldn't see many stars here. Too much light. I missed the sky over Caton's Chapel, where the dark was realand the stars were stacked three deep. There, you could almost convince yourself that a life could be enormous, if you wanted it badly enough.
I tucked the money into the inner zip pocket of my bag and started the walk back to the apartment I shared with three strangers I'd found on a Facebook group for short-term roommates.
It wasn't bad. It reminded me of home, actually—the noise, the overlap of other people's lives, the way the refrigerator was always organized according to someone else's logic.
There was a girl named Tasha who left her dry shampoo on the bathroom shelf and didn't seem to mind when I used it. There were two guys—Devon, who worked restaurant hours like mine and understood the exhaustion of a double shift without needing it explained, and Geoff, who was from New York City and worked in something finance-related that I didn't entirely understand, and who quoted books in conversation like someone who'd grown up in a house full of them.
Geoff made me self-conscious. Not because he was unkind—he wasn't—but because he was so thoroughly from a world I'd only ever glimpsed at the edges, and I was aware around him of every gap in my education the way you were aware of a missing tooth. I found myself choosing my words more carefully when he was in the room. Laughing a half-second after everyone else while I worked out the reference.
I turned onto my street and my guitar case waited in my mind like a promise. Tomorrow was my day off. I'd emailed two coffee shops and a wine bar about playing for tips, and one of them had written back.
Thirty dollars guaranteed, plus whatever I made from the tip jar.
I'd take it.
I always took it.
Because somewhere underneath the stone in my chest and the three hundred and seventy-nine dollars was a voice that still believed in something, even when it was inconvenient, even when it was impractical, even when no one around me could explain how that belief was supposed to get me anywhere.
The voice sounded a little like my idol, Dolly Parton.
I smiled in the dark, to no one, and kept walking.
2
TOMMY
Icame to Zion to kill a man. The hiking was a bonus.
Eight days in, I'd run Angels Landing twice, Observation Point at sunrise, the East Rim Trail when I wanted thirteen miles of nobody, and a few smaller scrambles whose names I'd forgotten the second my boots came off.
The red rock did something to a man, if he let it. Made him quiet. The kind of quiet you couldn't buy in a city or fake in a chapel. I'd grown up with sky like this—Valentine, Texas had its own version, flatter and meaner, but the same big lid pressed down over the same kind of small man—and I'd missed it without knowing I had.
It reminded me of home in pieces. The smell of dust warming in the morning sun. The way the light came in low and stayed gold longer than it had any right to. The silence between two strangers nodding on a trail, the kind that saidwe don't have to talk and we don't have to pretend we want to. Texas had taught me that silence early. Zion just gave it back to me, polished.
