Breakdown (Crash into Me) (5 page)

He was smiling when I turned to him, making my next outrageous thought that smiling was his default expression. An epiphany, I quickly came to realize, that wasn’t so outrageous.

Unfortunately for me, we weren’t alone. Instead, William had brought with him Cosmo and a guy I hadn’t met yet. This new stranger was tall like William, but other than that, the most impressive thing about him was the gauges in his ears, making the earlobes wide enough to impress certain tribes in Africa.

William nodded like he was pleased with my answer, his thumbs emerging just enough from his pocket to point in my direction. “Glad to hear you’re feeling some concern for yourself, Jumper.”

I sneered, unsure of what else to say.

“Okay,” said the guy with the gauged ears. “I see why you missed inspection, but Fletcher really won’t let you race tonight?”

“Nope.” William stretched out the syllables until his lips popped out the sound and my stomach flipped. I pushed my thumbs into my belly-button and cursed at myself. After reading all those horror stories about what happens when you die on the pro-suicide websites, I had taken specific care not to eat all day. That’s what I was feeling now, right? Just nothing then more than average hunger?

“It’s fine.” William took his hands out of his pockets completely. “Let’s me bide my time, plan out some strategy.”

“Nah.” Gauged Ears shook his head until the excessive skin around the lobes jiggled just a little. I thought it was sort of funny looking, but neither of the other guys seemed to notice, so I didn’t say anything. “That’s such bullshit. Everyone knows Bloody Mary is the fastest lady around.”

I closed my eyes and tried to focus. “Who now?”

“Billy didn’t introduce you to the love of his life?” Gauged Ears chuckled through every other word. “No way.”

“Jumper already got introduced to Mary,” William said.

“Now I really feel left out.” Gauged Ears pretended to pout, and Cosmo and William rolled their eyes almost at the same time.

“Jumper, this is Mickey. Mickey, Jumper.”

Without actually speaking, Mickey nodded at me. His attempt at direct eye contact however was refused as I tried to decipher his tattoos. Only when it occurred to me that I was staring did I make myself speak.

“Is that your actual name or another ridiculous nickname?”

William looked at me and chucked. “What do you think, Jumper?”

I looked around me and tried not to feel too uncomfortable by guessing the names of the songs people blasted from their sound systems. Cars randomly raced themselves up and down the strip with little organization from what I could see—doing short runs down the street farther than my eye could see and back again. More than racers though, there seemed to be people taking pictures of engines and talking on their walkie-talkies.

“Could be either one,” I said after a second. “Mickey could be his literal name, or maybe he’s just a big Toni Basil fan.”

William’s chuckle met Cosmo’s cackle then. The inside joke between the young men gave me the opportunity to study them then, comparing and contrasting them against their obvious friendship. For example, while Cosmo’s laugh was high-pitched—not unlike that of a jackal or drunk, Mickey’s was just about the opposite—his laugh was as forced as a laugh track.

William’s laugh, on the other hand, had a certain glucose quality to it; thick and rich, I felt it stick to me, and the sweetness of it filled my bloodstream, making my sugar levels spike. The spike felt so good that, for the first time in over a year, it didn’t even feel so bad to be left out of the joke.

William managed to stop laughing long enough to answer me. “It has more to do with his resemblance to Mickey Mouse.” Then, as if he was just trying to mess with me, he winked. “Good guess though.”

“Hey, people,” A voice said behind us. “Rhatt and Eggs are up!”

“More nicknames.”

I thought I had mumbled it quietly enough to myself, but I guess I hadn’t, because William reached for my elbow. Before he even touched me, his eyes started looking for mine, and I was barely even aware that that the guys had run off with the remainder of the crowds.

“Rhatt is Rhatt because he looks like a rat, and Eggs is short for Benedict.”

I gawked at the hand touching my arm. Was he just trying to be nice or was it something else?

“Hey, Jumper?”

I swallowed hard. Why hadn’t I tried to soak up more of the sound of his laugh when I had the chance? With how serious he looked now, it felt like he might never laugh again. “Yeah?”

“Don’t jump in front of anybody’s car, okay?”

“You ask for a lot of favors, don’t you, William? First seatbelts, now this? Are you going to want my first born next?”

My eyes wandered from his hand to his face. William was smiling with just enough sarcasm and wit to seem charming. No wonder every girl who had walked past us so far had swooned at him and shot me a dirty look. No, I doubted William Do-gooder needed any savior stories to get women into his bed.

“How about we just see how our first date goes before we make any major decisions?”

I felt my brows fix together, my way of trying to make the blush stop. “I’ve known you less than an hour and I think you might be the biggest pain in the ass I’ve ever met.”

Though he fixed his brows together in an equal fashion, his smile remained. Yes, I decided, smiling was definitely his default expression. “The same could be said about you.”

I went to reply, but the crowd responded for me, cheering and yelling out catcalls while the sound of two distinct engines revved up.

“You wanna see a street race before you die, Jumper? Everyone should see at least one before they meet their maker.”

I tugged the remainder of my hair out of its ponytail. The second I did, the headache I wasn’t even aware of ebbed away.

“I’m not making any promises about not jumping in front of your friends’ cars.” I pulled the hood up over my head, my smiled concealed by the faux fur.

“Then I better keep you close.”

Then he took my thumb in his hand and pulled me into the crowd.

There were looks, from guys and girls, but they were strangely easy to ignore as his hand moved from around my thumb to interlace his fingers with mine. There, he held me tight, but not tight enough to be rough, just protective. I closed my eyes and let him pull me along like a lost kid. Continuously, I told myself this attitude of mine was my own low blood sugar, the fact that I hadn’t eaten all day combined with the fact that I had been so ready to die and hadn’t. I was disappointed, that’s all. Getting my hopes up that this attractive person might actually care about me would only make taking my life much more difficult.

Still, these rationales didn’t make his hand feel any less nice than it did.

We were right in the front when a scarcely clad girl—who didn’t look old enough to be out of high school yet—strutted out between two cars. The car on the left was a low thing that was blue on its sides with an orange stripe. To the right of it was lime green car, covered in product stickers for things I’d never heard of. This car seemed to generate a mostly Hispanic fanbase. I barely had time to guess why before the smiling, barely-out-of-high-school-girl blew kisses at the crowd, prompting both drivers to rev their engines until their tires smoked. I coughed at the smell of burning rubber, but no one else seemed to be bothered by it.

Unlike the movies, the girl didn’t take off a piece of clothing to start the race—not that she had anything else
to
take off. Instead, she waved a flashlight in the air, turning it on and waving the beams in the air. When she did, the cars took off squealing and peeling the tread off the surface so instantly that gravel flew up in the air. I tried to follow the blue and orange car in my line of sight but by the time my eyes looked for the taillights in the smoke, both cars seemed to have vanished completely.

It was about 50/50 in terms of who was cheering for whom, but before I could figure out which one was Rhatt and which one was Eggs, the race itself must have been over—the guy clutching a walkie-talkie shouting out the results to the crowd.

“It’s Eggs!”

They all roared on, William included. The entire time, however, he never let go of my hand, and I felt a strange combination of gratitude and aloofness, my ability to feel out of place dominating over his simple act of kindness.

There were three more races before the spell broke over the swarm. It seemed like within seconds of each other, the guys with walkie-talkies—those declaring the winner—stopped caring so much about the results and more about adjusting the buttons around the antenna on the devices they held. I opened my mouth to ask William about it when one of the regular looking cars parked by the starting-line started flashing its lights and honking its horn as though possessed.

Within seconds, people were cursing loudly, and answering their chiming phones. Even William barely had time to push me behind him before the stampede of people began running back to their car, waving to each other and yelling frantically over the growl of engines and stereos to hear one another.

“What’s going on?” I heard myself ask.

He smiled in the darkness. “Pigs in a blanket.”

William pulled me along with him again, enclosing his hand around my wrist without giving me a chance to complain or say anything smart. Between the yelling and the fascination of how his hand easily overlapped my wrist, my breathing became more difficult, my heart pounding a little faster.

While the panic made the feet of everyone move faster, my body reacted too—a whirlwind of frenzy tunneling in me at the sight. I watched with genuine amusement while girls struggled to keep their breasts in their tops and run away at the same time. I laughed while drivers accidently blocked each other in trying to evade the authorities, and guys who looked like they should be playing football yelled at each other in Spanish and some broken Italian.

Back under the bridge, William steered us back towards his vehicle, my mind not as grateful to see the white muscle car again as I should have been.

“We have to go.” William threw my hand in the direction of the passenger seat, and I felt myself smile. Though I couldn’t see him smiling, couldn’t sense it even, I still felt myself surging with energy—the spike of being with him and watching the races in my bloodstream still fresh.

“Obviously.” I laughed as if my remark were the funniest thing I had ever said, had ever even thought to say. If I had been in someone else’s shoes, I probably would have thought I was hysterical. At that moment, however, I didn’t care. I genuinely didn’t give a damn.

I have to say, it almost felt good. 

Getting in the car, I put my seatbelt on without instruction, trying to restrain my joy while the trunk of the car in front of us flew open and glass bottles were shattered against the road. William glanced at me but didn’t say a word. He even remained silent as the red and blue lights came into view over the hillside, the sirens echoing in the short distance. It occurred to me somewhere that I should have been feeling bad for him, bad that he had gotten stuck with the most pathetic person in the universe, especially if he was true in his kindness. Here William was just trying to be decent to me, and I was exposing him to a hunger-induced madness, a hysteria encouraged by loneliness.

William Do-gooder O’Reilly’s night had probably started out so promising.

I should have felt about as much sympathy for him as I did gratitude. Instead, my feelings were in-tune with my senses. My olfactory sense heightened, I could smell everything stronger than ever, feel the blood pumping through me, making me break out into a weird kind of sweat even though I was chilly. I felt energized. I felt excited. I felt something other than depressed.

Just when William’s car came to life, so did I.

Chapter Three

Naturally, I thought it was a trick of my mind, but as the blue and red lights closed in, I realized it wasn’t—we were driving straight towards the oncoming police. I stifled my laugh completely and straightened myself back into my seat. With a quick glance behind us, I could see that those who hadn’t gone yet were already being ushered by at least four cop cruisers. Unsure if I was supposed to be afraid or excited, I focused on every moment, every sensation of what I was experiencing. Also, the sternness in William’s expression reminded me of how bad it would be to get arrested. I watched with fixed attention as his gaze became completely concentrated on the road, the blue orbs of his eyes tight and fixed.

The two police cars turned down McKinley Street, ruining any remaining chance of an exit. I looked back from him to the road, more startled about William’s stern expression than the fact that we were about to play chicken with the police. Still, there was no hesitation as we continued heading straight towards them. I should have been scared, terrified, hardly wondering if they were staties or local and if more of them were coming and more if William was afraid. Did he care more about getting arrested than his life? About his car than his friends getting away?