Chapter 5

“Does tequila count?”

This got the tiniest chuckle, which I took as a good sign. “No,” he said, “although that might be next. If you’re not a shooter, what are you doing here?”

If I could have thought of one, I probably would have served him some line of bullshit about wanting to follow in his family footsteps or some similarly faux-noble motivation, but I figured he might as well know where I was coming from. He was by far my best-ever chance at actually making it to the Olympics, but I wasn’t going to try to live some elaborate lie for the next three years. He could take it or leaveit, and if he was going to dump me as a potential prodigy, it might as well be now, I figured, while I still had time to learn how to paddle a canoe or ride a BMX bike or something similarly implausible.

“First off,” I said, “I wasn’t lying in my e-mail.”

“You weren’t?” he asked. “So you do have a passion for shooting that won’t be denied, you’re just scared of guns?”