The Ride That Lit Us Up

My iPhone buzzed in my pocket like an angry hornet as I stood in line at the mechanical bull, which was honestly the worst decision I'd made since agreeing to let Sarah talk me into coming to the county fair in the first place.

"You're not actually gonna ride that thing, are you?" Marcus appeared behind me with that stupid smirk he'd been wearing since seventh grade, when he'd decided making my life miserable was his personal mission. "You'll last two seconds. Maybe three if we're feeling generous."

My hands shook as I pulled out my phone. Sarah had already made me promise to livestream it, because apparently my humiliation was content for her TikTok. The comments were already rolling in: "u got this jordan!!" and "lol rip" and my personal favorite, "is he gonna cry??"

I stepped up to the bull—a hulking mechanical beast covered in fake leather that somehow still managed to smell like desperation and cheap carnival rides. The operator, some guy with a beard that had seen better decades, strapped me in and winked. "Hold on tight, kid."

"I don't wanna do this," I muttered to myself, but Marcus was already filming with his own phone, his laughter carrying over the carnival noise.

Then it happened.

Lightning cracked across the sky like the world's biggest photobomb, and suddenly the entire fair went dark. The music cut. The screams stopped. And for one perfect, terrifying moment, there was just me, strapped to a plastic bull in total darkness.

"POWER'S OUT!" someone yelled.

My phone lit up the darkness with comments flooding in: "WHAT HAPPENED" and "JORDAN U OK" and then, somehow, Marcus's voice cutting through: "Hey, you good over there?"

When the emergency generators kicked in thirty seconds later, I was still on that bull. And I wasn't just holding on—I was laughing.

"You gonna get off or what?" Marcus asked, but he wasn't smirking anymore.

"Nah," I said, feeling something electric running through my veins that had nothing to do with the storm. "I think I'm just getting started."

By the time the ride actually started moving, my livestream had somehow gained two thousand viewers. But that wasn't the crazy part. The crazy part was Marcus filming it too, cheering louder than anyone, because somewhere in that darkness, we'd both realized the same thing:

The real show wasn't the bull ride. It was what happened when the lights went out and we stopped performing for once.