The Distance (4 page)

“Most people don’t use their real name on the street circuit,” I told him, “since it’s not exactly legal.”

“So, what’s your racing name?”

“Rocket.” I pointed a finger at him and said, “Don’t laugh.”

River grinned at me. “As in the Marvel Comics raccoon?”

“Maybe.”

Skye said, “I’m curious about street racing. Can Dare and I come along?”

His brother shot him a look. “Is the part you’re curious about the twisted metal after they wreck and the sculptures you could make out of it? Because aside from that, I can’t imagine that it would be very interesting to you.” When River realized what he’d said, he turned to me with wide eyes. “Not that you’re gonna crash this time. I’m sure it’s going to be fine. I didn’t mean to, like, get all morbid or anything.”

I just shrugged. “Crashes happen. That’s something every racer accepts. And now that you mention it, I wish I’d known Skye back when I wrecked. It would have been awesome if Gloria had gotten to live on in a sculpture, instead of just rusting away in some junkyard.”

“Why are your cars always girls?” Dare asked.

“I dunno, they just are. And you’re welcome to watch me race sometime, but tonight’s probably not a good idea. Nana would notice if the guests of honor snuck out. Besides, all I’m doing is going head-to-head against Trigger in a grudge match, assuming the cops don’t show up and end it before it even begins. The whole thing will be over in a few seconds, and for that you have to drive an hour each way to the middle of nowhere,” I pointed out.

“Is it going to be hard to get behind the wheel after crashing last time?” River asked. “If it was me, I think I’d be nervous, but you don’t seem to be.”

“I was rattled right after it happened, but I’ve gotten over it and I’m looking forward to racing again. For the past couple months, it’s just been me and a stopwatch while I fine-tuned Sharona, but it’s so different when you’re up against another driver.”

Haley took a sip of water, then said, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you don’t look like a street racer.”

“Sure I do. They aren’t these big, tough, alpha dudes like in the movies. Mostly, they’re seventeen- to twenty-four-year-olds who spend all their time under the hoods of cars, not in the gym bulking up.”

Dare asked, “How’d you start racing, anyway?”

“I began when I was seven with go-kart racing. It sounds hokey, but believe it or not, a lot of pro racers start out that way. When I got older and found I had a knack for fixing up engines, it just dovetailed with my love of racing. It’s been a big part of my life since I was a kid, apart from this last year when I needed to start from scratch with a new car.”

“Do you think you’ll ever try to race professionally, like Formula One or something?” River asked.

I stood up and stretched my arms over my head. “Nah. This is enough for me.” I turned to River and changed the subject by saying, “I think I’ll go in and start washing all that produce you brought, unless you want me to start somewhere else with prepping the food for the party.”

“That’s as good a place to start as any,” he said, and our little group headed into the house.

A quarter mile. One thousand, three hundred and twenty feet. That was the distance I needed to cover, as fast as I possibly could.

I whispered to my car, “You can do it, Sharona. I believe in you.”

My last race more than a year ago had ended violently and dramatically with my car rolling half a dozen times. The asshole who’d caused the wreck was just a few feet away, behind the wheel of a twin turbo Mustang Mach 1. Five hundred dollars was on the line, but I didn’t give a damn about the money. This was a grudge match, plain and simple. We were finishing what we started all those months ago.

I revved my engine and took a couple deep breaths. My heart was pounding and I fidgeted a bit, tugging at my seatbelt and adjusting the ball cap I wore backwards to hold my blond hair out of my eyes. Then I glanced at the car to my right.

The black Mustang’s V-8 engine was deep and throaty compared to my Civic’s. It had originally been built in the seventies, not my favorite era for Mustangs. But then, what a car started out as didn’t matter nearly as much as what it had been transformed into. My competitor had turned his car into a brutish lion. I’d turned mine into a cheetah.

I caught the other driver’s eye and stared him down. I knew him only as Trigger. He held my gaze unflinchingly, a muscle working in his jaw as he ground his teeth. I scowled at him before turning my attention back to the quarter-mile of asphalt ahead of me.

We were in a part of the South Bay forgotten by development, on an empty road at the foot of some scrubby hills. A heavy-set guy named Julio stepped out onto the road, a little less than halfway down the course. Only in movies and video games were races started by hot women in skimpy outfits. Julio was holding his phone and waiting for each spotter to check in. Half a dozen guys were watching for the police all around the raceway.

Any moment now. I adjusted my grip on the gearshift as adrenaline shot through me. God I’d missed this. When I revved my engine again, the purr was so sweet.

Julio signaled the start of the race by shining a flashlight at us, then booked it off the road. My heart leapt as I threw the Civic into gear and slammed the gas pedal to the floor. Sharona’s tires and the Mustang’s squealed as a cloud of smoke billowed behind us. Both cars found traction in the same instant and lunged forward. The Stang fishtailed coming off the line. I did too, but I regained control quickly.

Trigger swerved toward me sharply as our odometers shot past a hundred. He narrowly missed sideswiping my car, and I drew in my breath and eased off the gas as I jogged to the left, away from him. In the next instant, I regained my focus and floored it, but it was already too late. The other driver had pulled ahead. A couple seconds after that, it was all over.

I crossed the finish line right behind the Stang and cut the engine before launching myself from my car. Trigger got out too and glared at me as I ran at him. I didn’t care that he had a good four or five inches and fifty pounds of muscle on me, I was furious. “You did that on purpose,” I yelled. “You knew I’d flinch if you came at me, after wrecking me the last time! What’s the matter, too afraid of losing to run a clean race?”

“I
did
run a clean race,” he growled. “It’s not my fault if you can’t keep your shit together when you’re behind the wheel! And newsflash, I didn’t wreck you last time! You lost control when your tire blew, and
you
swerved into
me
! Quit blaming me for your own fucking mistake!”

“The race had just started when I had that blowout! I wasn’t going that fast, and no fucking way would I have spun out of control if you hadn’t tagged my bumper!”

He pushed his dark hair back from his eyes and exclaimed, “Are you high? It was a miracle you didn’t kill both of us!”

I tried to get in his face, which would have been easier if I wasn’t so much shorter than he was, and told him, “I know what happened. Lunging at me was a dick move! You have no business racing, since apparently you can only win by intimidation, and on top of that, you’re barely holding it together every time you get behind the wheel!”

Trigger yelled, “You don’t know shit! And why don’t you accept some fucking responsibility? The wreck last year wasn’t my fault, and I didn’t purposely come at you this time either! If you’re that skittish, maybe you shouldn’t be racing!”

My friend Zachary, who’d snuck out of the party with me, had reached us by then. He pulled me back as the four dozen guys who’d watched the race clustered around us, and said, “Come on, Jessie, let’s just go.”

I turned and walked away from the crowd, taking a deep breath and shaking out my hands. Adrenaline still flooded my system and was making me jittery. Zachary went with me, and my friend Kenji jogged to catch up with us. Since the last time I’d seen him, he’d bleached and colored his spiky hair a silvery white and looked a bit like a comic book character. “Dude, I thought you were going to punch that guy,” Kenji exclaimed.

“I don’t normally go around punching people,” I said, still trying to calm down, “but I almost made an exception back there. He really pissed me off.”

“He’s a dick. It’s like he thinks he’s too good for the rest of us,” Kenji said. “He never talks to anyone. He just shows up every week, wins a couple races and leaves with the money.”

“He wins?”

“Yeah, pretty much every race.”

I’d randomly started climbing one of the low hills beside the track, wanting to put some distance between myself and Trigger. As I replayed the race over and over in my mind, a bit of doubt began to creep in. After a while, I stopped walking and turned to my friends. “Kenji, you know what goes on out there. Am I totally off base here? He came at me, right? That’s what it felt like to me, but what did it look like from your perspective?”

He hesitated, chewing his lower lip before saying, “Honestly? I don’t know, Jessie. I mean, yeah, the Mustang totally swerved at your Civic, but he was fishtailing the whole time. One thing you’re right about for sure is that he’s barely in control of all that horsepower every time he races. He’s got a beast under that hood. It’d be tough for any of us to control it.”

I thought about that for a while, then asked, “What do you think, Zachary? What did you see?”

“To me, it looked like he was swerving all over the place. Did he come at you intentionally to try to rattle you? I have no clue. Only he could tell you that.”

I looked at the makeshift track below us as I mulled that over. It was bathed in an oddly yellow glow from the row of streetlights along the asphalt. Trigger’s Mustang was gone, and two other cars were getting in position to race. Kenji’s older brother had pulled Sharona off to the side, out of harm’s way. Her iridescent purple-to-green paint job shone even in that weird lighting. I took off my baseball cap and ran my fingers through my hair to push it back from my face, then put the cap on the right way around. Finally, I said, “I guess I really don’t know if he spooked me on purpose today, but that wreck a year ago was definitely his fault.”

“I always thought so, too,” Kenji told me. “Trigger’s probably the most aggressive driver out there right now. I’ve seen him bump other drivers plenty of times when he’s racing, and I’m pretty sure he does it just to intimidate them. It’s always at the start of the race, so it usually doesn’t do much damage, besides pissing off the other racer. You’re the only one who crashed as a result of it, since he tagged your fender just as your tire blew out.”

“So how the hell could he say the crash was my fault? I could have been killed! For that I don’t get so much as a ‘sorry’?”

“Apologizing would mean admitting it was his fault,” Kenji said. “But according to him, he never does anything wrong.”

I sighed, and after a moment I changed the subject by saying, “Check it out, they’re getting ready to go again. I think I recognize the orange Camry, that’s Rio’s car, right?” Kenji nodded and I asked, “So who’s in the red Acura?” The two cars were lined up at the end of the track, and Julio was in position with his phone, waiting for another all-clear.

“This eighteen-year-old named Six. He’s been showing up pretty regularly for the last couple months.”

“Why does he call himself Six?”

“No clue.”

“He any good?” I asked.

Kenji grinned at that. “You’re about to find out.”

Julio gave the signal and ran off the track as tires squealed and a cloud of smoke billowed from behind the racers. Both cars shot forward, but then the Acura took off like it had a jet engine. “Holy shit,” I muttered. Just a few seconds later, it finished a car length ahead of the Camry. “What the hell does he have under the hood?”

“About forty grand, that’s what. Everyone’s saying he’s a trust fund kid, and that he wins by outspending his competition,” Kenji said. “But they’re just jealous. The kid’s got balls, and he’s got skill. He might also have access to some serious coin, but that doesn’t change the fact that he’s a hell of a racer.”

Kenji’s phone buzzed, and when he pulled it out of his pocket, I glanced at the time on the screen and said, “Shit, we have to go. I didn’t mean to ditch my employer’s party this long.”

As we all started back down the dusty hillside, Kenji fired off a text to his girlfriend, then said as he returned the phone to his pocket, “So, are we going to start seeing you back here on a regular basis, Jess? I’ve missed you.”

“Yeah, I’m going to try to come every weekend now that I have a car again. It was just kind of depressing to be here when I knew I couldn’t race.”

“I can imagine.”

“Do you want to come back to the city with Zachary and me?” I asked. “The party’s probably just getting warmed up.”

“You mean the party hosted by the eighty-year-old grannie you work for? No thanks, I’m good.”

“He obviously hasn’t met Nana,” Zachary said with a little grin.

“You’re right, he hasn’t.” We reached the group of racers, and I went up to the eighteen-year-old with the Acura and stuck my hand out. “Hey, I’m Rocket. That was a hell of a race.”

The kid shook my hand and looked me over with a guarded expression. He was tall and lean with chiseled cheekbones and dark blond hair that dipped over ice blue eyes, and he wore a slick leather jacket that wasn’t doing anything to dispel his trust fund kid reputation. “Six. I saw you race once a couple years ago, I’m glad you’re back at it. Maybe we’ll have the chance to go head-to-head sometime.” He had a refined English accent, so as soon as he spoke, he seemed less trust fund and more heir to the throne.

“That’d be awesome. Oh, I assume you know Spike,” I said, introducing Kenji by his racing name, “and this is my friend Zachary.”

Six said hello to Kenji, and his eyes lit up as he turned to my companion. “What, just Zachary? No perfectly embarrassing nickname like Zippy or Z-force or Zoomer?”

My friend smiled shyly as a blush crept into his pale cheeks. He tried to hide it by tipping his head forward and almost disappearing behind a curtain of hair. It reached his chin, and was currently dyed black with a red streak along the right side of his face. “Um, no. I don’t race, so there’s no need for a nickname. You guys are rocking yours, though.”

“Why thank you,” Six said playfully.

Zachary glanced up from under his hair and asked, “Why are you called Six?”

“That’s a fairly involved story, which I’d be happy to share with you sometime,” he said, his smile unmistakably flirtatious. Zachary colored even more.

We chatted for a couple more minutes, and after we said our goodbyes and were back in my Civic, I grinned at my friend. “You totally got hit on back there. He was cute, too!”

“He was beautiful. But come on, eighteen? I’m five years older than him.”

“That’s not so bad.”

“Sure it is. What would we possibly have in common? Besides the age gap, he looks and sounds like he spends his time yachting, or jetting off to the south of France on a whim. Nothing about me would hold the interest of a guy like that.”

I said, “Not only are you making a lot of assumptions, but you’re a sweet, kind, amazing person, and he’d be lucky to know you.”

Zachary fidgeted with the zipper on his black jacket and said, “That’s nice of you, Jess, but come on. It’d be like ‘The Prince Dates the Pauper’, only worse, because in this case the pauper is an ex-prostitute. I’m sure that’d sit well with his highness and his family.”

“You’re rejecting yourself before he has a chance to.”

“I know.” Zachary looked out the passenger window, and after a while he turned back to me and grinned a little. “He looked like he could be Benedict Cumberbatch’s blond younger brother, didn’t he? He even had the accent! I about died when he started talking.”

“You like that guy! Should we go back? Maybe we can invite him to the party.”

My friend’s expression grew serious. “No, just keep going. It doesn’t matter that I thought he was cute. He’s too young, too rich, and too perfect. He’s not only out of my age range, he’s totally out of my league.”

I frowned at that, but did as he asked and got on the freeway. After a while I said, “Thanks for coming with me tonight. It was nice to have a friend there. I wasn’t sure if I’d still know anyone after a year away from racing.”

“It was interesting, thanks for letting me tag along. I’m sorry your race didn’t go better. I totally thought you had it, right up until those last couple seconds.”