1: Runner
WHO AM I? Well, that is what you’ll have to figure out. I only know that I live in a world that is out of touch with its past and needs to get back into touch with its current teen and young adult generations.
There are things about me that I could tell you right now, and there are things that I’m not ready to tell at the moment. Then there are things that I don’t even know myself yet.
Me, I’m not one of those people. I am me. I can tell you that I have medium length, light brown hair, blue eyes, and I am about 5’6”. My name, you will find out later.
I fell in love with a certain sport that allows 20-something grown men to drive around in circles for about two hours in really fast cars in different parts of the world every weekend for about ten months of the year.
That sport?
Formula 1.
Yeah, you read that right, F1. I love it. I even made a lego F1 car by hand from my pure imagination and creativity a long time ago. I’m a nineteen-year-old girl who has never had a boyfriend.
And somehow, I’ve spent the last four years completely fascinated by one person.
The one and only honey badger, Daniel Richards
I can’t explain why.
At least, not yet.
How did I get into liking F1? This is a long story, but I will make it as short as possible.
My mom, Lorna Jameson, married a driver named Ashton Sterling when she was my age. When mom was twenty-three, she had me.
I was born after my dad died in a racing accident.
That’s the version of the story everybody knows.
What actually happened to Ashton Sterling is something I’ve spent most of my life trying to understand.
I never knew him.
See, single mothers who raise fatherless children have a very difficult time. So, Lorna—that is what I call my mom, don’t ask why—decided to find love again and found my step-father, Johannes Jameson. They fell in love and eventually got married when I was three.
Johannes is a very wealthy man, and Mom was already doing well for herself. Together, they built a life that most people would probably call extravagant.
People see that part of my life and assume they know where my money came from.
They’re wrong.
But that’s a story for another time.
Johannes, or as I call him, Johnny, was a gambling man and would bet on the races, usually winning the bets, amounting to as little as $1.2 million and as much as $5 million at a time. Per race that is.
When I was about eight or nine, Johnny started to teach me how to gamble, in good ways though, to calculate how much money to bet, and to whom to place the money on. I got really, really good at it, earning myself a couple hundred dollars here and there, because I was using my own money that I earned from daily chores, and part of my inheritance from my dad that I got when he passed. Thank you pops!
As I grew older, I started to bet more and more, and won more and more. Now, my total estimated net worth is about $56.9 million and there are no guys trying to get with me, for some reason. That reason being that I don’t want a guy who wants me only for my money, but rather for love.
There was one driver I never bet on.
Daniel Richards.
Not once.
Never.
People might assume it was because I thought he was unpredictable, or because I didn’t trust his team. It wasn’t either of those things. I simply refused to put a price on Daniel Richards.
I never really understood why I felt that way. Mauve I didn’t want money to have anything to do with the one person I had spent years admiring. Maybe, deep down, I knew that some things were worth more than winning a bet.
Yes, I come from a rich family that is heavily invested in Formula One. By betting on the races and who may win. Like last race, I bet that Red Bull wasn’t going to make the podium, and I had put down $50k for Jax van den Berg finishing at P8, where did he end up? P8. And because of that, I got back that fifty grand and also earned $2.5 mil from all the lost bets on Jax van den Berg.
Now, I will tell you non-personal things about me, like the evening sunset that has a perfect mixture of reds, blues, purples and pinks is the best thing to see at night. I have to tell you one thing though, Charlie Lavoie’s sunset lap is my absolute most favorite lap to watch over and over again because of the colors in the sky at the time.
I am a night owl who loves classic rock music. I really don’t have a permanent home so to speak, but I do have a quaint little apartment in Italy, near the Monaco track.
Some people think I travel because I love the sport. I mean, that’s part of it.
The other reason is something I don’t talk about. Staying in one place for too long has never felt right to me.
Wherever an F1 race is, that is where my home is for that week. And this week we were in Brazil. But now the schedule has a break and now I am off to my favorite country, Australia, only because that is where the season opener is heald and also because that is where Daniel RIchards lives.
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***Two days later***
I made the decision to go to Melbourne just for fun because there is a break in the race schedule for the next couple of weeks. But on the plane there, I changed my mind.
My decision is that I will purposely miss my layover flight to Melbourne and stay in Perth when my plane lands there, and hope for the chance to meet the Honey Badger himself. I can already see it now, and hear the greeting.
“Enchante!” is the first thing that I will hope to hear and I just hope that it will be Daniel who greets me. That would be amazing because I am wearing his clothing brand with the name and he usually wears the brand too.
But as I walked through the terminal, all I heard was the hustle and bustle of Perth International. No Danny, no one greeting “Enchanté”. Just noise.
And too many people. I had to get out of the main terminal and get some decent food in my system. So I steer myself and my two suitcases of clothes to a cute little coffee shop. The sign is a warm coffee cup that says “HOMETOWN EXCELLENCE” in soft neon lights. I hope they aren’t too expensive.
Turns out, once I got inside, they only served coffee, croissants, and little cookies. Not exactly what I was looking for, but it sufficed.
