Running With Bulls

The bull weighed twelve hundred pounds of pure muscle and bad attitude, and somehow I'd volunteered to run at it.

"You got this, Maya," Jake whispered, handing me his lucky cowboy hat. "Just remember what I said."

I took the hat, my fingers trembling. The brim was stained with sweat and dirt and years of rodeo memories. Jake Martinez, the guy I'd been secretly spying on via Instagram for three months, was trusting me with his lucky charm.

My golden retriever, Buster, watched from the fence, tail thumping against the wooden rails like a metronome counting down my remaining seconds on Earth.

"I can't believe I'm doing this," I muttered, adjusting the hat. It slid down over my ears. "I look ridiculous."

"You look ready," Jake said, and something in his voice made my stomach do that annoying flip thing.

The truth was, I wasn't ready. Two weeks ago, I was just the quiet girl in AP Bio who spent lunch period in the library, the one nobody noticed unless they needed homework answers. Then Jake had sat at my table by accident, and somehow I'd ended up here, at his family's ranch, about to attempt something that defied all laws of survival.

The bull snorted, pawing at the dirt. My therapist would call this a growth opportunity. I called it a death wish.

"Running is the easy part," Jake had told me earlier. "It's what you do while you're running that matters."

"And what's that?" I'd asked.

"Not dying."

The gate swung open. The bull charged.

I ran.

Buster barked like crazy, cheering me on. The cowboy hat flopped against my head. Jake's voice carried over the wind—"LEFT! LEFT!"—and somehow my body obeyed, dodging the massive horns by inches.

For five seconds, I wasn't the quiet girl. I wasn't overthinking every move. I was just running, heart hammering, lungs burning, completely alive.

Later, breathless and miraculously uninjured, I handed Jake his hat back.

"You're insane," he said, grinning. "But you're definitely not the library girl anymore."

Buster bounded over, slobbering all over both of us. I laughed so hard I couldn't breathe.

Maybe growth opportunities weren't supposed to make sense. Maybe sometimes you just had to grab life by the horns and run like hell.