It's All About Him Read Online Free PDF Page A

games with a date, and I’d have to face the stands, cheering for the crowd, watching Alan with some other girl. He always found some way to impress me and get me back . . . and then he’d do whatever he could to make me feel insecure.
    To use today’s psychological terms, I think the word to describe it would be codependency . We attempted to meet some of our needs in ways that weren’t healthy, mature, or mutually satisfying. There was a certain “relationship addiction” for me in particular. As the years went by, I needed Alan in order to feel good about myself, in the same way that people who are addicted to alcohol have to have a drink in order to face their day.
    So, woven in the tapestry of our love story, there were some dark threads that would get knotted later on. There were also many bright threads, sweet times, and shared hearts. And early on in our relationship, Alan’s strength and love bolstered me through the hardest time I’d yet known.

Chapter 4
SHOCK

    I need some sunshine on my face
To help me dry my eyes
I need a blue sky over head
So I can clear my mind
    Alan Jackson, “Rainy Day in June”
    I t was Valentine’s Day, 1977. I was at a friend’s house when I got the phone call. My twin brother, Danny, sixteen years old, had been riding his Honda 125 motorcycle, his blond hair blowing back in the cold wind. He didn’t have his helmet on. He was less than a quarter mile from our house when a young driver approached from the other direction. The driver was traveling west; blinded by the setting sun, he turned and never saw Danny on his motorcycle until he hit him.
    Danny had no time to react. The car crashed into his left side, knocking him off the motorcycle and up into the windshield of the car, over its hood, and into the ditch at the side of the road. Still conscious, he was in so much pain he wished he was dead.
    My Twin Brother
    Danny and I had spent all our growing-up moments together. I was a classic tomboy when we were young, wrestling and running with my twin brother everywhere we went. We’d ride bikes with no hands, seeing who could beat the other. We played football with the neighborhood boys, climbed trees, and rode our Honda cycles all over the front and back yards. Daddy would take us to his little pond in the country, where we’d fish and skip rocks on the surface of the water.
    As we got older, I resigned myself to being a girl, and our interests diverged. But we still had that inexplicable closeness of twins, and now that Danny just might die,my brain could barely take it in.
    My mother and daddy were already heading to the hospital. I called Alan, and he came to get me.
    My older sister, Jane, was living in Carrollton, about thirty miles west of Newnan. Alan and I called her and told her that we were on our way over. We made it to Carrollton in record time. When we got out of Alan’s car, he held me up as we walked to Jane’s door. Jane and I held each other, crying. The teakettle, left boiling, whistled on the stove. Alan went into Jane’s bedroom, grabbed a suitcase out of the closet, and started packing it with clothes, makeup, and toiletries.
    We threw ourselves into the car. By the time we arrived at Newnan Hospital, the ambulance had left again. The Newnan doctor had told my parents that the only thing they could do was amputate Danny’s leg. It was too mangled to save, held together only by a thin piece of skin. Our older brother, Ron, insisted that they transport Danny to a larger hospital in Atlanta. Maybe more could be done for him there.
    We took off for Atlanta. When we finally got there, Danny was lying on a gurney in the emergency room. He had been given morphine for his pain, and was drifting in and out of consciousness. He told us not to look at his injuries, but we couldn’t help it. His hand was the size of a basketball, every bone crushed. His leg was bloody and mangled, with a piece of