In My Skin Read Free Page A

This is my new life. Welcome to adulthood. My apartment was about fifteen minutes from downtown, in a gated complex, as part of team housing. It was nice and came fully furnished, but none of my stuff was there yet because I shipped it all, so I had only the things in my suitcase, and most of those were dress clothes. I’m not sure what fancy events I was planning to attend, because the only place I ended up going was my own pity party. I didn’t know anybody in Phoenix yet—training camp was still a few days away—and I just felt so sad and alone. I might as well have been on the moon. My phone was my only connection to the world, to my old life. I would call my girlfriend and say, “I want to come back to Waco.”
    I didn’t sleep in my bed the first three nights I was there, because it didn’t feel like my bed yet. I just slept on the couch in the living room and watched TV. I was flipping channels and found this show where this dude goes to crazy areas of the world and tries to survive in the wilderness: Man vs. Wild. He was stranded on an island somewhere, and I was lying there on the couch, talking at him. “I feel the exact same way, mister. I’m a castaway in this apartment. I’m alone just like you!” It was probably the worst thing for me to watch.
    I kept telling myself everything would be fine once my stuff arrived and I met all my teammates. And I’m happy to say it was; Phoenix was a good landing spot for me. But that didn’t make those first few days any easier. The hardest part was being so far away from my friends and family back in Houston, especially my mom. I would call her to check in, and I could hear the sadness in her voice, the lump in her throat. I knew she was missing me. She is very emotional. Ever since she was diagnosed with lupus, after my freshman year at Baylor, we’ve been really close, and I’ve tried to be strong for her. But I wasn’t feeling strong right then. I didn’t even want to call her, because it hurt to hear her hurting. At one point, my second night in Phoenix, she called me, and I just sat there on the couch, looking at my phone and thinking, Nah, can’t do it. Can’t do it. I’ll call her back later.
    I feel guilty remembering that now, because my mom is the one person who has always been there for me, no matter what, loving me without question, just giving and giving. She wouldn’t describe herself as strong—in fact, she was sick a lot when I was growing up, in a lot of physical pain, serious back problems—and yet she has always been my rock. She has always let me be me, let me figure out who I am, when so many other people were telling me who I should be. I have never felt judged by her. Never.
    OF COURSE, LIKE A LOT of kids, I took that for granted when I was younger, how patient my mom was with me. Let me tell you, I gave her hell. For one thing, I had a lot of energy; I couldn’t sit still for very long. I was always into something, running around outside, chasing squirrels, digging up worms, climbing trees. But the thing I did best was pushing her buttons, trying to see how much I could get away with when my dad was at work.
    I spent a lot of time occupying myself as a kid. We lived in the Bellewood section of Houston until I was in seventh grade. We had a one-story three-bedroom house on a cul-de-sac in a good neighborhood. My father was a cop with the Harris County Sheriff’s Office (as I got older, he worked a number of law enforcement jobs), and my mother stayed at home, taking care of me and my sister and the house. My parents are both from Texas. They met when Mom was a cashier at a Houston grocery store and Dad was doing security work there. He had a son and a daughter from his first marriage, and they were around a lot, because Dad was on good terms with his ex-wife. But my brother, DeCarlo, is seventeen years older than me, and my sister SheKera is ten years