>>10477520"Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in." That's how it went, right?
Hailey and Miss USA had tried to warn Colby before, of course. What she'd taken as bullying had turned out to be an earnest warning. Everybody had said this wasn't her world. She was a nerd, a tape collector, a fan; she wasn't cut out for this business and she was going to get hurt. And hadn't she? Physically, and emotionally?
Two matches in the big leagues under her belt, and she had a back injury that wasn't healing, a couple thousand dollars in high interest credit card debt, a lease that she hoped HALCYON would be generous enough to let her void, and some deep misgivings and regrets about how things might have been better.
It'd be fine, of course. Dad would help her out, one more time. She was still on Mom's insurance. And she could work in the shop, or she had her degree to fall back on, to land on her feet.
An idealist would hate the idea of giving up on your dreams. But any time a person makes a choice, they're giving up something, right? If not being a pro wrestler also meant not being the punching bag for a lunatic wrapped in the flag who commanded seemingly infinite resources, not becoming the kind of person that mocked a dead colleague before the body was even cold, or not accumulating a forever-growing list of injuries that wouldn't heal, maybe it was worth giving it up. A memory flashes in her mind: orange hair and an English accent.
[Hailey. I'll have to write her when I get home.]
[And what? Thank her for stopping me for becoming a notch on the bedpost of one of Priscilla Divine's stormtroopers?]
[No. Thank her for warning me away before I turned into Hailey myself. She's as tragic as any of them.]
A woman speaks behind her, in the line to the ticket counter.
>"Um, miss? You're up next."Colby pauses.
>"Uh, no. You go ahead."The woman looks at her strangely as she walks ahead of her in line.
Colby looks up at the clock.
