Chapter Fourteen

"You're gonna get us pulled over for going too slow, Getaway Driver," I complain.

Zaynah white-knuckles the wheel as though she's smuggling a van full of escaped convicts across state lines and not a couple of sunscreen-and-french-fries-smelling teens, our still-wet hair dripping river water on her dad's car's upholstery. "No, I'm not. Just don't draw any attention to us." She darts a glance at the rearview mirror, in case the cops are in hot pursuit, I guess.

"Well, I was gonna rip off my top, lean out the window, and flash the good people of Dell's Hollow as we go by, but now that you've told me not to …"

"You still can!" Jo pipes up from the back seat.

"DO NOT," Zaynah commands.

You'd think we blackmailed Zaynah into driving us when she was the one who insisted, while everyone else left their cars outside the diner; I think she wanted an excuse to stay in the car, rather than actively heisting with the rest of us.

I look back to catch Jo grinning at me. And I wish more than anything that in this moment, I didn't feel a sharp pang … of something. I mean, what's to be sad about? We're here, we're full of burgers and sun flushed and loopy after a day at the river. I'm still buzzing a little from the rope swing; it took me right back to the drop-off at Devil's Paradise. I remembered the nerves, but somehow after just a few months away, I'd forgotten the adrenaline rush, and how good it can feel to step off the edge of something solid and let yourself fall.

But.

I can't keep from thinking about the application form in Jo's bag, the one I now know exists and can't forget. She told me about her F1 dreams the day we met, and about the academy, and it's not like I expected her to factor me into her future plans after a few dates and a handful of short-but-impossibly-fantastic make-out sessions. That would be irrational. Illogical. I just didn't know she was walking around with the application form filled out already, or that the program would start so soon… .

Stop it, I scold myself. Just enjoy this. Quit overthinking and over-worrying. Be fearless like Jo. Be fearless like—

"There!" Jo shouts, draping herself across CJ in the middle seat to point dramatically at the garage coming up very, very slowly on our right. "Park behind the building so nobody sees us."

"How could they, in this stealthy vehicle?" James giggles.

I pat Zaynah's dashboard and croon, "You're so stealthy, you're doing fiiiine."

With a startling lack of speed, she turns into the garage parking lot and pulls around back, stopping next to a chain-link fence that surrounds the customer cars. The floodlights are already on, illuminating Fords with fender dents and Jeeps up on jacks, their windshields painted pink and orange under the sunset.

"You're sure nobody's inside?" CJ asks.

"Sure I'm sure," JoJo answers. "Grandma's out of the country, and the employee most likely to be working on something after hours is me. But anyway, that's what our lookouts are for, right?"

"Right!" James cheers way too loudly, and Zaynah death-grips the steering wheel again.

Let the heist begin.

While Zaynah waits in the driver's seat and CJ and James station themselves among the shrubs planted along the side of the garage (supposedly prepared to text us if anybody pulls up out front, but probably anxious to smash faces), Jo leads me to the gate to open the combination lock. I shine my phone light on the lock to help her, and we giggle before switching to stealth mode once the gate swings open. By which I mean ducking between the half-repaired cars and crouching down beside the towering wheel of a lifted Jeep.

"Where's the Hornet?"

She points toward a steel-frame car shelter with a waterproof shell in the back of the lot opposite us, out of the way from the cars they pull in and out to work on. I'm tempted to break off to look at it, this piece of JoJo's past and heart. But JoJo is already combat-rolling across the blacktop toward the back entrance to the garage, even though not a soul is outside to spot us. I hover in my squat, watching her turn over and over as gracefully as a banana going downhill with this swelling feeling in my chest. A moment later, I lower myself to the ground to join her, scraping my knees and elbows across the asphalt with every revolution.

Jo groans as, finally, we reach the building and she stands to punch in the back door code. "I think I skinned my hip back by that Camry."

I gasp. "Oh my God, what if they sweep for DNA?"

We lock eyes, then break down in laughter, forcing JoJo to wait until the half-entered code clears and begin all over again.

Once we're inside, it's obvious that she was right. The garage is empty, the lights off and the neon Coca-Cola and Texaco signs mounted to the brick walls grayed out. But we can see well enough with our phone lights. JoJo punches another code into the alarm panel on the wall with plenty of time to spare. Then we pick our way around carts and creepers and a Chevy Silverado with its hood up on our way to Jolene's office. The last time I was here—the first time I'd been in Jolene's office, if the millionth time I'd been in the garage—I wasn't looking for a safe. Now I see a black box the size of a mini fridge beside the filing cabinet, with a digital lock.

"You know the code for that, right?" I whisper.

"I don't. But I'm sure it's written down somewhere."

"Does she have a notebook? A desk pad? We can do a rubbing, find out the last thing she wrote—"

"Chill, Detective." JoJo laughs. "Though you're adorable as ever in PI mode." She plops down in a rolling chair behind her grandma's desk, pulling out the top drawer to peer inside.

I circle the desk, scanning for anything useful on the scattered pink Post-its while floating just a little over the fact that JoJo called me adorable. I don't find a conveniently written out string of numbers. There are neat stacks of paperwork, and two wire pen cups—one with actual pens in it, the other with multiple lipstick tubes in shades from fuchsia to bright orange to fire-engine red.

There's the cluster of little picture frames, too, and I lean forward to look at them. Jolene and Florence a decade or so ago, sharing a whole baguette Lady-and-the-Tramp style in front of a café with a French name, possibly in France. JoJo's mom and dad posed with what must be toddler-her at a backyard barbecue of yore. I recognize her dad, of course, but he looks younger even than I'd expect, somehow taller, and totally happy. Her mom looks just as she did in the many press photos I found in my (very rational and totally not obsessive) Googling. There's the picture I saw of Jo and her mom that first day, and another of teen JoJo from just a year or two ago, standing on the top spot of an awards podium in a red-and-black tracksuit, hair loose and clearly helmet mussed. She looks ecstatic, smile bright and shoulders loose, totally at home on the podium.

Max was like that, too. Is like that. She belongs on a track.

"Hey, JoJo?" I ask, already regretting it, but determined to push through. "When did you fill out that application?"

"Huh?" She's busy rooting through the middle drawer now, apparently to no avail, since she slides it closed and opens the bottom drawer.

"That application, for the F1 training program. CJ said you carry it around, and I just wondered. Did you fill it out in Charleston, or in Dell's Hollow?"

Now, she stops to look up at me. "Um. Well, I didn't think I had a shot at getting my license in Charleston, after—you know, after Mom." As her eyebrows scrunch, my regret doubles and triples and quadruples; this was not the time or place for this conversation, which isn't really my business, anyway, and is totally selfish and silly. "When we moved here, Dad and I made our deal about the volunteer program, and that's when I thought maybe I had a shot. But I guess I didn't want to push him too soon."

I deliberately keep my eyebrows un-scrunched, even as I remember the afternoon we met, when she showed up at Putt by the Pond and raced me only to get out of showing up for the program. And at Devil's Paradise, how she told me that she'd never asked her dad about going pro. Which technically wasn't a lie, but clearly, she's been wanting to.

"I don't even know if I'd get in," JoJo continues, "I just … it's a possible future plan. Like how you fill out a bunch of college applications, even though you're only gonna pick one school. I bet you have a list of places you're still choosing between, right?"

"I'm applying for early decision to UNC–Chapel Hill this fall," I correct her, "so just the one. Their sports medicine program is ranked fifteenth in North America, they're in the top 10 percent of universities in the country, and I can get scholarships on top of low in-state tuition, if I keep my grades and extracurriculars up, so I could go right into my masters and PhD."

"Oh." JoJo blinks up at me. "That's … rigorous. El"—she scoot-hops around to better face me—"is this something we need to, like, talk about? Are you—"

"No!" I nearly shout. "Oh my God no, of course not. Forget I said anything, I was just babbling. I shouldn't be babbling during a heist, I know, but …?"

I feel the heat of her gaze on me for a moment before she shoves back from the desk, sighing. "Well, I didn't find anything. But never fear, I bet I can hack the combo."

"By ‘hack,' do you mean ‘guess'?"

"Naturally." She wheels across the office, then sits cross-legged in front of the safe to inspect the electronic lock, frowning. "Hmm, she mostly uses birthdays in her passwords… ."

"Birthdays? Really, Jolene?"

"Grandma's brilliant, but she's still a sixty-something who asks me to explain her smart TV remote once a week. Let's try mine." She punches in the numbers (while I make a note to research the romantic compatibility of Virgos and Sagittariuses) and is rewarded with a flashing of red from the screen. "That's what I get for being egotistical. I'll try my dad's."

"Hold on a sec." I sit beside her to get a closer look at the brand name on the lock, then pull out my phone to Google it, my stomach sinking. "This is one of those locks that shuts you out if you put in the wrong combination four times in a row."

"For how long, exactly?"

"You want me to pause in the middle of a heist to read product reviews?"

"That would be wild card behavior." Jo sighs. "We've just gotta go for it." But her dad's birthday doesn't work, and neither does Jolene's. "Crap. Okay … Dad's an only child, so maybe it's my mom's." She starts to punch it in, but I catch her wrist.

"Or maybe her longtime partner's?" I gently suggest.

"Oh. Yeah, that's more likely. I just hope I remember Flo's birthday… ." After thinking for a moment, she punches in a date—and we both hold our breath… .

Until the light flashes green, and the lock clicks open.

We squeal together, and JoJo throws her arm around me, hopefully forgetting all about this awkward half conversation. We pause long enough for a quick-but-life-changing kiss before JoJo scoops a key on an antique-looking American Motors keychain off one of the shelves and closes the safe. Clutching hands unnecessarily, we sprint back through the garage at a half crouch, as though somebody might be peering through the windows. I realize that besides Googling safes, we haven't checked our phones once for a text from CJ and James, and my volume is off, so who knows if our lookouts could have warned us, anyhow.

Some heist squad.

Out in the back lot again, I stop JoJo before she heads for the fence, where Zaynah waits impatiently beyond. "Hold on, I want to see it. Can I see it?"

JoJo grins, like maybe she was hoping I'd ask. "Sure, I'll introduce you to Betty."

Forgoing the combat roll this time, we dart between the cars to get to the shelter in the back. Not only is it a nice shelter, one with sides and a zippered door and all, but the machine inside has a fitted car cover protecting it. Reverently, JoJo begins the process of untucking and rolling it back, then holds up her phone flashlight so I can see the Hornet in its beam. And it's …

I mean. It's attractive. Pretty compact for a muscle car, with a long, straight hood and sloping rear. The angles are crisp for a two-door sedan, and even in poor light, the electric-blue paint and black stripe shimmer. It reminds me of the R1 in my backyard shed; JoJo has clearly taken excellent care of this vehicle, even while slowly gutting and repairing it.

But as far as ‘70s muscle cars go, it's not exactly a Dodge Charger R/T. And we're about to risk an awful lot on a fifty-year-old sedan racing a modern GSX-R.

JoJo must see the doubt on my face, because before I've uttered a word she says defensively, "Look, this car has a history. Just because it's not famous doesn't mean it's not fast. It came out of the Hudson Hornet, you know, and that was a stock car racing star. Won all but one AAA race and over 80 percent of the NASCAR Grand National events the year after it came out. Then like a decade after AMC dissolved Hudson, they brought back the Hornet to replace the Rambler. The ‘71 took the ‘70 model and put in a 360 cubic-inch V-8 and a 2100 two-barrel carb. It made 245 horsepower, while barely weighing over 3,000 pounds. But this model has the Go Package, which bumped it up to 285 horsepower with a four-barrel carb and a ram-air induction scoop, plus dual exhaust pipes instead of a single and a four-speed transmission. It could do a quarter mile in fourteen seconds, and Mom got it down to thirteen. They only made around three hundred of these with the Go Package, which is why it's so rare. You haven't heard of it because it was overlooked and underestimated, not because it isn't amazing. Betty has the heart of a winner," she insists, staring lovingly down at her mom's car.

"And … does she still do thirteen?" I ask, afraid to insult the machine she's memorized, just like me and the R1.

"She can, and she will. I can do it, El." She turns her burning gaze on me. "Will you trust me?"

Though it's hard to think under the heat of her green eyes, I know, in some part of myself, that I don't know JoJo well enough to justify trusting her completely. Not with this crush like coals in my throat, or with my sister's jacket, or my family's future.

But I deeply, desperately want to.

So I smile and nod. We leave the Hornet behind for now—JoJo will come back to collect it before the race, since she can't exactly park the car in her own driveway. We throw ourselves into Zaynah's car, beckoning wildly for CJ and James to join us as they stroll out of the shrubbery, then shriek at Zaynah to go, go, go! As we cruise out of the lot at a painfully sensible speed of 15 mph, I push down that familiar part of me. The small, scared El who counts herself out of jumps she hasn't even tried and can never keep her goddamn foot on the gas, not once in her whole life.

She's always been the part of myself I hate most, anyhow.