Chapter Twenty-Four

For months, I've been picturing this moment over and over again, like a movie scene I'm constantly rescripting. Max opens the door of her hotel room/apartment building/ramshackle but charming houseboat in [insert city here] to see me standing on the stained carpeting/sidewalk/quay. She blinks in the sunlight (or under the moody glow of streetlights), unbelieving. El, she gasps, what are you doing here? How did you find me? Until last night, my answer wasn't so clear (sometimes a train, or hitchhiking, or horseback, in one admittedly unlikely scenario) but after mumbling through an explanation, I deliver my line, which never changes: I'm here to bring you home. Face crumpling, Max throws her arms around me. Okay, El. She sobs. Let's go home.

The reality is a little different, it turns out.

For one, I never imagined JoJo waiting for me on the sidewalk. I hope I didn't hurt her feelings. I love Jo (oh my God, I think maybe I love Jo!?). I just knew that this scene had to happen between Max and me, alone. But I thought Max would be different, too. As she goes ahead of me up the cramped staircase, she almost skips up the steps. And she's humming. Off tune and frantically, like a song playing at 1.5 speed. Which doesn't seem like the behavior of someone about to be rescued from exile.

Okay, maybe my script was kind of melodramatic. It can still have a happy ending.

Max stops on the second-floor landing to unlock a scuffed front door. "This is me. We just have to keep it down, ‘cause my roommate works nights."

"Yeah, sure. How, um, did you two meet?"

She shrugs as the door rattles open. "Friend of a friend. Let's go to the kitchen—it's the farthest from her room. Plus I'm dying of thirst."

I follow her into an ordinary apartment, stepping over a jumble of shoes and boots in the entrance hall to get to the kitchen. It's small, with old dark wood cabinets. There are unwashed pots stacked on the yellowed stovetop, and unrinsed glasses in the sink. Which is fine! Mom used to get on Max's case about leaving dirty plates on the counter, or a peanut-buttery spoon in the sink when the dishwasher was empty and right there. When I'd come home from school, or a club meeting, or tutoring, or work, I'd head to the kitchen and clean up any debris before my parents got back from work. Now, I have to stop myself from attacking the cups and bowls. I remind myself that Mom and Dad aren't here for her to fight with.

My sister follows my sight line. "Best part of being a grown-up. Well, one of the best." She shoves aside a pile of magazines and mail on the counter and hops up to face me. "Okay El, spill. Are you in Richmond for a field trip? Are you running away from home with your cute little girlfriend down there? What's up?"

This is it: time to deliver my line. I'm here to bring you home.

But I'm blushing too hard at her suggestive smirk. "No, we're not, we just started …" I feel like last night in the hotel room is written all across my face.

She laughs, that familiar Max cackle that lights up rooms and racetracks alike. "I bet. Hey." Her eyes fall to my waist. "Is that my jacket?"

I hurry to untie the thick leather sleeves knotted around me. "Yes! You asked me to get it for you, and … here I am." I offer the jacket up in both hands.

"When?"

"Huh?"

"When did I ask?"

"The postcard. The one from Boston? You told me your jacket was at the shop. And I went, and that's where I met JoJo. She's Jolene's granddaughter, isn't that wild? But it wasn't there, and Jolene said your friends might have it. So we found them, and they made us race for it—it was seriously fucking cool, Jo is amazing, you'd love her—and we got it back, and they told us about the pawnshop. So I … I brought it back to you. Because you asked." God, I'm rambling.

But Max is still looking at me like I'm some kid she went to high school with and ran into at the grocery store, whose face and name she can't quite place. "Boston. Oh. That was kind of a weird time. I hated that city. It was too cold, even in summer, you know? I was ready to leave as soon as I got there."

"You wanted your jacket, though, right?" I insist. My arms are starting to shake a little, holding it out in front of me.

"Of course I did. Thanks." At last, she leans forward to take it, cradling the leather for just a second before setting it down into a pile of crumbs around the old-fashioned toaster. "Jesus, El." She shakes her head. "You're a good little sister. Better than I deserve."

"That's not true! You're the best."

She snorts, picking at the edge of the countertop where the Formica's peeling off. "I think our parents would disagree. Do they know you're here?"

I shake my head.

"Don't worry too much. I'm sure they'll blame it on me; I'm the Bad Kid, and you're the Good Kid."

"Maybe I was, but I'm not anymore."

She squints down at me appraisingly. "Well. Sorry about that, I guess. Or not. It's a lot of pressure being the Good Kid, huh?" she asks, sounding more like the big sister I love than she has yet.

"Mom and Dad just … sometimes it feels like I can't breathe when I'm around them, you know?" I confess in a rush.

"Sure I do. Like they're so busy telling you how much potential you have, but then you have to carry that potential around with you all the time, and God forbid you trip, and sometimes you want to throw it all away just so you can set it down."

Embarrassingly, my throat starts to feel hot and swollen, my nose runny. I nod in case I sound like I'm about to cry, because crying is not part of the script.

"I bet it's gotten harder since I left. Sorry about that, too." Max bears down, and a whole chunk of Formica crumbles away and falls to the floor.

"It's not your fault," I insist.

"I don't know about that, El. I made a lot of mistakes."

"So did I. I stole a car!" I blurt out. "We broke into a safe, and we stole a car so we could race it without a license."

She lifts an eyebrow. "That, I never did. You get caught?"

Again, I nod.

"Shit. Does that mean I'm the Good Kid now?"

It shouldn't be funny, but suddenly, neither of us can breathe for laughing.

"Shhh, my roommate!" Max gasps helplessly after a minute. "Now I definitely need a drink. How about you?" She hops down, leaving the jacket behind on the counter.

"Yeah. Sure," I say, palming the tears from my cheeks.

The last of my laughter dies as she digs through the fridge, because I realize she looks smaller than she used to. She's lost some of the muscle from her competition days, of course. That's not new. Max barely rode in college, and she wasn't exercising for hours a day just to ride the R1. But I don't remember her shoulder blades poking at her T-shirt like that, or her twig-like fingers wrapped around the handle of the fridge.

"There's something else," I say.

"Like, besides stealing a car?" she asks, still deep in the fridge. "Did you rob a bank on the way to Richmond?"

I pry the bike keys from my back pocket. "Actually, I brought you the R1. I drove it here from Dell's Hollow, and it was … really fucking scary, but I did it. And I was good at it. It's parked across town, so maybe we can go and get it together?"

Max stiffens. Then, slowly, she emerges with two cans of something called Irish Goodbye Stout. "You shouldn't have done that, El." Her eyes settle on the key in my palm, still attached to her old mini eight-ball keychain.

"I know. I'm pretty sure Mom and Dad will bury me under the vegetable garden when they find out, if they don't know already, but when they see why I did it—"

"Why did you do it?" she cuts in, blue eyes narrowing.

"I'm … I'm here to bring you home." It comes out so much smaller and weaker than I'd hoped. "If you drive the R1, Jo and I can find a train station or a bus station." Maybe there's a train or bus to a town nearby Dell's Hollow, where we can transfer. I'll keep looking until I find a way.

Max blinks back at me. Then she says, simply, "No, El."

This is not her line.

This is not the plan.

"But if we talk to Mom and Dad together—"

"I said no. Like, come on. I thought you got what it was like for me there, how I felt like I couldn't breathe in that house."

"Yeah, I know, but …"

"Fuck the whole town." Max cracks her beer, and the can crumples a little under the force of her grip. "Maybe you got in a little trouble, but you still don't get it. The hoops I had to jump through, the pressure—"

Now it's my turn to interrupt. "I don't get the pressure? Are you kidding me? The way people watch me, waiting for me to make a mess because …"

"Because of me. See?" She smirks, infuriatingly. "You're better off without me around."

"No, I didn't say that!" I feel my voice rising to a shriek. "I'm the one everyone's mad at. My best friend hates me right now. I'm grounded forever, so I have to quit my job. I might not get to see JoJo after this, for who knows how long. It's all my fault. I drove my whole goddamn life off track to find you."

"I never asked you to!" Max shouts. "Am I supposed to be happy you messed up? Am I supposed to be grateful? I didn't tell you to do any of that. I wrote something I can't even remember on a gas station postcard, El. So maybe you're right; maybe it's not my fault you fucked up your shit. You made your own choices, just like I made mine. That's life. You make choices and you don't look back."

In the hallway, a door bangs open against a wall. "Maxine, shut up!" someone hollers. The door slams again.

Max closes her eyes and hisses, "My roommate."

The big sister I love is fading away again in front of my eyes, and I just want to stuff her into her forgotten jacket so I can grab her by the collar and drag her back to the bike she loves so much. Maybe then she'll remember all of the good things she had in Dell's Hollow, the things she had no choice but to leave behind. There has to be something I can do, something I can say. "I … Okay, yeah, we both made choices," I whisper hoarsely around a lump the size of a Putt by the Pond mini-golf ball. "But you're my sister. We can fix it together."

"El." She shakes her head. "Look, I need to shower. I have a thing tonight."

"Not at Mama Maple's diner, though, right?" I practically sneer.

It's something Mom might've said to Max during one of their worst fights, those screaming matches after Max quit college. But this time it's coming out of my mouth.

My sister's eyes turn to ice. "Hang around here if you want—this isn't a great neighborhood—but I have to leave by seven. And don't wake up my roommate again."

Standing in the empty kitchen after she goes, I find I'm still holding the key to the R1 in one hand, and the Irish stout in the other.

I remember those nights when Max was restoring the bike at Jolene's after hours, while I was doing my calculus on one of the scarred workbenches. She'd hand me a beer from the shop's mini fridge to match hers. Mine inevitably warmed to room temperature unopened, as we both knew it would, leaving condensation rings on the battered wood. That didn't matter. It was just nice to be in the same space, to be as much like my fearless champion of a big sister as I could possibly be.

In my whole life, that's what I wanted most.

I set the key on the kitchen counter next to Max's forgotten jacket, along with the parking garage receipt. Now she knows how to get it back if she wants it—the thing I've taken painstaking care of for the past five months. Her last reason to come back home.

Then I leave her apartment.

JoJo is waiting under the tree outside, looking at her phone and sitting in a lawn chair to get a bit of shade. When she sees me come out, she jumps to her feet, an encouraging smile on her face. It starts to falter as she stares at me. "What happened?"

I plop down on the burning-hot concrete stoop, staring at the can still clutched in my fist. "I don't know."

Jo sits beside me and says again, "El, what happened?"

What did happen? I came all this way. I followed my script. Where did I go wrong? My body feels both heavy and hollow at once. Like my heart is a boulder in my chest, but also a cave. How did today begin as a rescue mission and end like this?

It can't end like this.

"What did Max say? Is she coming home?" Jo bumps my leg with her knee.

"She just needs time. I need time to make her listen. She's going somewhere tonight. I left her the bike key, but we can get another Uber, follow her, and I can try again—"

"What did she say?" This time, Jo's voice is painfully soft, just like Zaynah's whenever she talks to me about Max. Just like Jolene's, and like Mr. Keegan, the faculty adviser for the volunteer club. Just like everyone else.

I clutch the can more tightly. "It doesn't matter. My sister's stubborn, and she's probably afraid Mom and Dad won't let her come back. Maybe … maybe I can stay here for a while, prove I'm not going without her."

"El, have your parents called you yet?" JoJo asks, still stingingly gentle. "My dad and Grandma left voicemails."

"I'm sorry I got you in trouble again."

"No, that's not the point." She waves her hands. "We're in this together, and I'll stay awhile if you need to stay. But do you really think Max is gonna change her mind?"

"We aren't giving up on her."

"I'm not saying that, El." Jo scuffs her sneaker on the sidewalk. "I was at the Raceway just now, you know, and I was thinking about … about the stuff we have to let go of if we want to move on."

"I'm not moving on, Jo. She's my family," I insist. "She's having a hard time, and what am I supposed to do? Forget about her? Everyone else thinks so, and now you do, too? You don't turn your back on family."

We sit in silence under the burning Virginia sun for a moment that becomes eternity. And when Jo speaks again, it's no longer soft. It's the sound of something gone wrong, just before you crash.

"You don't think I know about family, El?"