Cam
“Your glasses are broken.”
“Yeah.” Not much he could do about that, was there? “I taped them up.”
“It’s regulation that the whole team has to wear the same thing. Yours can’t be broken.”
Yup. He was aware.
“You don’t have a back-up pair?”
“Not all of us have an extra three hundred bucks sitting around, jackass.”
“Okay, okay.” Josh held his hands up, relenting. “But seriously. You can’t go out like that. We won’t match.”
“Well then, I guess we won’t match!” Cam shot back.
“Fine, okay. Cool your jets.” Josh shouldered his tote, headed for the changing room door. “I’ll tell the guys we’re all going without sunglasses today.”
For some stupid reason, this pissed Cam off even more. It was a reasonable solution to a problem outside his control. But the exchange—a spat fueled by prerace nerves—exploded in his brain, turned into something bigger.
The conversation was proof that what he’d said to Teagan last night was true.
That no matter how hard he tried, how vulnerable he was in front of the crew, or how much he palled around with them doing stupid dances and playing pranks, his life would always be harder than theirs.
Because, like it or not, life wasn’t fair.
He knew there were plenty of others far worse off than him. Life didn’t really care who you were. Rich people got sick. Nice couples who should be blessed with children weren’t. Wars, famines, earthquakes—indiscriminate. Kings, queens, lottery winners—random. And yet?
There were good, hardworking, honest people like his dad who worked their fingers to the bone all day, who beat themselves up at night out of frustration that the life they’d promised their families was always just out of reach.
The Josh Regises of this world didn’t get that.
Didn’t take the time to see it. To see him.
If he was in Josh’s shoes? Money no object? He liked to think he’d at least have the grace to be grateful for it. To notice when people like Cam worked their ass off for something and didn’t get it because they didn’t have the right advantages in life.
“You think you deserve to be in stroke, don’t you?” Cam said, as Josh headed to the door.
Josh turned, gave him a hard stare, and waited to see where this was going to go.
All the way to the cold hard truth. “You don’t deserve it, Josh. You don’t deserve to be in the eight seat.”
“Excuse me?”
Cam crossed over to him, squaring up so they were eye to eye. “I have stronger technique. I’m faster than you. I’m. Just. Better.”
Josh lit up one of those whiter-than-white smiles of his. The kind you half expected to make a “ting” noise, like in a toothpaste commercial. “Sorry, Cam. Coach picked me. I’ve been working my ass off.” The smile dropped away. “I absolutely deserve to be in that seat.”
“No. You don’t.” Cam had sat behind him in enough losing races to know he was right. “The only reason you’re in that seat is because you were born lucky. Not because you deserve it. Maybe that’s true of everything you have. They’re yours because of your name, not because you deserve them.”
His words landed hard. Josh’s head snapped back like it had been punched.
Cam left the room, headed down to the lake. He and Josh would never be bosom buddies, but something told him he’d cut too close to the bone.
There’d been a flash of something in Josh’s eyes when Cam’d laid into him. A bolt of terror. Like the one thing he’d been trying to keep hidden from the rest of the world wasn’t a secret anymore. Because if Cam had seen it? Other people could, too.