Three weeks with my brother - Nicholas Sparks [63]
He finally took me up on it. Once my brother started running, he quickly made the top seven. Our team went undefeated, and for the most part, Harold did as well. Harold broke course records at nearly every meet, and ended up finishing second in the high school national championships.
While Micah didn’t focus on running the way I did, with a desperate determination to excel in it, it nonetheless changed him for the better. He was part of a team, a team that counted on him, and—not surprisingly, considering the way he’d been raised—he took the responsibility seriously. Little by little, he began courting less trouble, and the more successful the team became, the more he took pride in being part of it. It didn’t seem to matter to him that I was faster than he was; in fact, he was always the first to congratulate me on how I’d done.
More important to me, however, was that we were spending time together again for the first time in years. And best of all, enjoying it.
My sophomore year was transformative. Not only did I learn to love athletics and running, but it was the first time in my life that I outperformed my brother physically.
At the same time, I continued to focus on getting good grades. Unfortunately, it was becoming more and more of an obsession; not only did I want straight As, but I wanted to be the top student in every class.
I also began devouring novels. My mother, like my father, was an avid reader, and she frequented the library twice a month. There, she would check out anywhere from six to eight books, and read them all; she particularly loved the works of James Herriot and Dick Francis. As for me, I discovered the classics—Don Quixote, The Return of the Native, Crime and Punishment, Ulysses, Emma, and Great Expectations, among others, and grew to love the works of Stephen King. Because I’d been raised on old horror movies, they struck a chord with me, and I’d read them over and over as I anxiously awaited a new title to be released.
In my sophomore year, I also had my first real girlfriend. Her name was Lisa and, like me, she ran cross-country. She was a year younger than I, and, as fate would have it, her father was Billy Mills, my boyhood hero.
We dated for the next four years, and I not only fell in love with Lisa, but with her family as well. Billy and Pat were different from my parents in that they genuinely seemed to revel in my accomplishments. More than that, Billy would talk to me about my training and the goals I wanted to reach, and had a way of making me believe they were possible.
My life was growing busier; between school, running, homework, and Lisa, I didn’t have much time for anything else. Nor did I have any money, and I came to realize that this situation wasn’t exactly conducive to dating. Since our parents didn’t give us allowances, nor would they open their wallets if we wanted to go to the movies, I decided to follow my brother’s lead. After the cross-country season ended, and on top of everything else I was doing, I got a job as a dishwasher at the same restaurant where my brother worked. In the beginning, I worked until closing two school nights a week; within a few months, I was working thirty-five hours a week, and had been moved up to busboy. Eventually, I became a waiter, and with tips was earning a tidy sum for a high school student. Every minute of every day was accounted for—I was on the go from seven in the morning until nearly midnight, seven days a week—and this schedule would remain essentially unchanged until I graduated two years later.
On our training runs, Micah and I often talked about both the past and the future; sometimes we talked about our dreams, other times we talked about money.
“Do you ever stop to think about how poor we were when we were younger?” he asked me.
“Sometimes. But to be honest, I never really knew that we were poor until a couple of years ago.”
“I hated being poor,” he said. “I’ve always hated it. I don’t know what I’m going to do when I get older, but I’m not going