Читать книгу I Am Nobody. Confronting the Sexually Abusive Coach Who Stole My Life онлайн

63 страница из 89

I didn’t see the dead eyes of a shark hunting its prey. Instead, I saw the compassionate eyes of somebody who knew what was going on inside my head because, in his telling of his story, he too had been a brilliant student and a top athlete, and nobody but people like us could understand just how difficult it is to be a jock in a geek’s world and a geek in a jock’s world.

“People like us”—those words haunt me still.

Maybe the problem was that I wasn’t enough of a jock to truly be a jock? Maybe I wasn’t enough of a geek to truly be a geek? Maybe I was nowhere, lost, and without his help and guidance I would always be lost, alone, one of a kind? Maybe I was just nothing special? He understood me, he knew what it was like to be caught between two worlds, he would help me with both worlds. I was one of a kind, but he was too, so the two of us would be one of a kind. “People like us have to stick together to help each other,” he said.

“People like us…”

After a short while, everything he said made perfect sense to me. He was increasingly becoming the major voice and guiding light in my life, and I was slowly becoming isolated from the people closest to me. My coaches couldn’t know, my family couldn’t know, the others on my team couldn’t know about our relationship, and that was pretty much it for me at that time. If any of them ever found out, it would be all over.