Fast & Wet

by Kat Ransom

  Money could rain down from the heavens, yet Klara would not remove that tattoo any sooner than I would block Cole’s phone number despite his daily texts and voicemails that I do not respond to.

  “He’s going to win this one, too, isn’t he?” Makenna watches her TV on her side of the world, asking lots of questions along the way. She hasn’t invested several years of her life into F1, like I have, to know what’s going on half the time.

  “Yes, he is,” I don’t want to jinx it, but I know it in my bones.

  Cole has several laps to go, and Lennox is right behind him, again. Lennox only has to finish in fourth or better this race to clinch the championship, but that won’t stop him from trying to beat Cole.

  It’s not in their blood to give up, even when winning is a foregone conclusion.

  They simply don’t know how.

  Edmund and I have been communicating, even though I’m still on leave from Imperium. We’ve made some setup changes to the car that appear to be working. I can see it in the way Cole is driving confidently, sticking the car exactly where he needs it, trusting it will do exactly what he wants it to do.

  And, it’s not raining in Mexico City today.

  “Did you book your tickets yet?” Klara asks, drinking her black coffee. Since she got fired from the cafe, she says we’re off fancy coffee, and she never wants to see a cappuccino again.

  “No.”

  “Come on,” Makenna argues. “You know you’re coming.”

  I bite my cuticle and pretend to ignore them while I watch the race. Next weekend is the US Grand Prix in Austin, Texas, an hour away from Makenna. We’d always planned to meet up there this year.

  That was before.

  BC. Before Cole.

  “You’re going,” Klara agrees. She and Makenna start ganging up on me.

  Cole gains another quarter of a second on his lead. Dante may be able to snag third.

  “I need to work on the tire models.”

  “Oh, stop,” Makenna rolls her eyes.

  “No, it’s true. It’s important. And look at him. He seems to be doing fine without me, anyway,” I wave my hand toward the television, knowing I am acting like a petulant child.

  I’m not proud. But I am hurt.

  I hate that I say such awful things when I’m hurt. I’m not going to do that anymore, no matter what. I’m better than that. I will be better than that.

  “You will go. Or I will kick you out,” Klara points her finger at me.

  “Kick me out? I pay all the rent!

  “Tomato tomato,” she replies, using the same pronunciation for each word, blowing the colloquialism again.

  I stifle a smile down. I don’t want to smile yet. I want to wallow more.

  “I wish I had a few days to sit down and think all of this through, but I don’t. I’ve been so busy. We’re so close on the tire models.”

  “For the love of God, Emily. There’s nothing to think about,” Makenna fixes herself another margarita on screen. I can’t see it, but I know she’s rolling her eyes at me.

  “Nothing to think about? I just lost Cole, my family, probably my job. I need time to figure out what I’m going to do.”

  I know things aren’t over between Cole and me—they never are. I doubt they ever will be. But I still don’t know what will happen and now I have no safety net in place, at all.

  “You did not lose Cole. The man is like Pepe le Pew chasing you around the world. There’s no getting rid of him.”

  “What is Pepe le Pew?” Klara asks.

  “He’s a French skunk,” Makenna answers. “He’s forever chasing a lady skunk around even though she pretends she doesn’t want him.”

  “That’s not exactly accurate,” I argue. I’ve always wanted Cole. I can’t say it aloud, but there’s a single neuron in my brain right now admitting that I like it when he chases me.

  Maybe it’s my way of seeking revenge on him for leaving. Making him prove that he wants me.

  Maybe it just turns me on.

  I hate that Cole knew that about me before I was aware of it. And that he called me out on my bullshit. For being a control freak and needing to have everything planned and organized, I feel like I’m being swept out to sea right now.

  “He smells bad? Like a skunk?” Klara asks, still confused about Pepe le Pew.

  “No,” I can’t help but laugh a little. Cole most certainly does not smell bad.

  “Your mom tried calling me last night, by the way,” Makenna lets slip like it’s an afterthought.

  My smile falls. Now Ava’s going to harass Makenna, manipulate her? What’s next? Maybe she can try to run Makenna out of my life, too.

  “I didn’t answer, then I blocked her ass,” Makenna adds. “Rotten witch.”

  “Fitta,” Klara sneers. If I understand her correctly, she just called my mother the c-word, in Swedish.

  I don’t argue with her.

  “I still don’t understand it all.” And since I’m not speaking to my mother, the Major General, or Cole, I may never understand it all.

  “Why don’t you just ask him for the whole story?”

  “Because I don’t trust him. I don’t trust any of them. They’ve all been lying to me for years, in cahoots. How can I ever trust any of them again?” I wrap a throw blanket around myself and try not to break down again.

  I focus on the race instead.

  “Oh look, Dante’s in third,” Makenna claps, and the television cuts to a shot of the Imperium garage cheering.

  I catch a glance of Liam and Mila on screen, big smiles and high-fives going around. I miss them. I miss Edmund. I even miss Dante, as immature and ridiculous as he is.

  There’s only a couple of laps to go.

  Cole’s doing it, he’s going to win. He’s going a million miles per hour, putting his trust in his engineers, his mechanics, his team.

  The irony is not lost on me that I am not doing the same.

  I look at the phone in my lap and re-read the last message he sent me yesterday.

  Cole: Don’t think Em, just feel. Your brain is big, but your heart is bigger, let it lead. Just this once.

  And then he attached the video we made in his kitchen, but I’m obviously not sharing that with Klara or Makenna. Too much information, indeed.

  With one lap to go, Klara, Makenna, and I grow silent then explode into cheers when Cole crosses the finish line. He did it again.

  I hold my breath as he lifts both hands off the steering wheel and pumps them into the air, the car still flying around the track.

  I will have bloody stumps for fingers if I keep chewing them, put your hands back on the steering wheel, Cole.

  They don’t play his post-race radio message this time. Lennox has just won the championship, and the announcers are consumed with talking about that, playing Lennox’s team radio conversation, instead.

  I’m happy for him, and Mallory, but I want to hear Cole’s voice. I’m desperate to know if he’d mention me again.

  He and Lennox do a victory lap together—it’s touching. Then they all pull into parc ferme, Dante in third place, too. They’re all out of their cars, hugging, jumping, being swallowed up by their crews who are congratulating them all.

  I should have been there.

  “Oh shit, he’s going to do it again,” Makenna whispers.

  My breath stills.

  Please do it.

  But, as the camera faces Cole, he pulls his helmet off instead of pointing to my initials like he did at the last race. His balaclava comes off to reveal his sweat-soaked brown hair and piercing blue eyes. He rips his earbuds out.

  As the camera begins to pan away from him, he suddenly pulls it back to him. He shoves his helmet right at the lens. It’s a Dia de los Muertos design this week. He points at one of the skeleton characters with a big red heart inside its chest, the initials EW inside it.

  He did it.

  And then…

  “Oh my god,” Klara leans toward the television.
/>   “Is he…” Makenna whispers.

  He is.

  Cole is full-on kissing and licking the lens of the camera. Flicking his tongue up and down it like, like he’s having sex with it. Everything is blurry on the television now because the live camera is covered in Cole’s lips and saliva.

  The British commentators on television are laughing and apologizing for the suggestive gesture they’ve just shown to the entire world. You can hear women in the crowd squealing in appreciation. I’m pretty sure the collective panties of everyone in attendance just dropped.

  Then the screen cuts to a second cameraman’s feed, one that is not obscured by lips, tongue, and raw sex appeal.

  “I’m going to Texas,” I state, all of us in a trance watching the television.

  I don’t say it loud or proud. It’s a whimper and not a scream, but I said it.

  I have no idea what will happen. No matter how many scenarios I plan for in my head, I can’t predict it. For the first time in my life, I am making the decision to walk into the unknown.

  I’m terrified.

  But I’m even more terrified of what could happen if I don’t.

  I don’t want to go back to my life of hiding, being closed off, never taking any risks because there might be consequences, being so afraid of everything. Being afraid to fail.

  What if I fail now, at the thing I care about the most?

  Twenty Nine

  Emily

  This is a far cry from the private jet.

  Nice things are nice. Were nice.

  “Sir, this plane is not taking off until you turn off your cell phone,” The flight attendant chews out a jackass in a business suit next to me. The plane hasn’t even taken off, yet he is man-spread into the already cramped leg quarters of my economy seat.

  “Yeah, yeah,” he waves her off and continues his call with total disregard for the other two hundred people on the plane. With complete disregard for the fact that my flight is cutting it close to race time, as it is.

  “Sir!” The flight attendant yells.

  I need this plane in the air.

  Now.

  While waiting to board, Professor Tillman called. It’s the unknown type of silica Concordia is using. It’s not bonding right with the silane or the rubber. He said he sent me an email with the materials broken down, and now, I just need this godforsaken jackass next to me to get off his phone so that we can take off. So I can connect to the wifi and finally solve the riddle.

  Because I put my phone into airplane mode, like a civilized person.

  Like a good girl.

  “Lady, never mind my phone. Go get me some pretzels or something,” the jackass waves his fingers at the flight attendant.

  That’s it.

  Look away, good girl.

  “Get off your goddamn phone!” I bark at him.

  He wrinkles his nose at me. The flight attendant smirks.

  “Hey,” he protests when I rip it out of his hands, turn it off myself, and hand it to the flight attendant.

  “It’s off. Please, can we go now?”

  She nods, smirks at the jackass in satisfaction, and continues down the aisle with his confiscated phone in her hand.

  “You can’t…”

  “Sit there and shut up,” I kick his leg back into his own seating area.

  “Crazy bitch,” he mumbles.

  Yeah, you have no idea, asshole.

  As soon as we hit cruising altitude and are given the all-clear, I drag my laptop out from my carry-on and pay the extortionate wifi fee.

  Despite the jackass leering at me the whole time, I spend hours dissecting the raw material composition Professor Tillman sent. I forgo pretzels, free wine, and bathroom breaks. I dismiss the possibility of deep vein thrombosis from sitting in one position for hours on a long-haul flight.

  The answer is here, I can feel it. If the wifi speeds weren’t so freaking slow, this would be quicker.

  Silica is crazy-expensive. Still, I’m surprised to see the lab report showing that Concordia isn’t using pure silica from sand. They’re using something else, something synthetic. For the price Concordia charges, the tires should be made of gold, diamonds, and unicorn tears.

  Googling the only remaining chemical structure in the list of unidentified compounds, I find it.

  Corn husks? What the hell.

  There’s one company that had been experimenting with sourcing silica from rice husks, but that didn’t work. And corn is different.

  “Lady, let me out, I need to piss.”

  I think better of it, then I begrudgingly stand to let the jackass out. “Hurry up.” Jerk.

  Finally, he sits back down and buckles back in. His legs stay in his own area.

  Adding the corn husk silica to the computer-simulated tire model, I start running the program. At first, it seems stable enough.

  When I throw added heat at it, or wear, the structures start breaking down, though. The molecules in the corn silica start changing, disintegrating, the molecular bonds to the rubber break down.

  When I throw water into the mix, I’m not sure if it is my heart that just dropped or the plane.

  Real silica reduces chemical incompatibility between the tire and water. But Concordia isn’t using pure silica. Concordia is using cheap corn husk silica, its molecules are not as impervious.

  The jackass next to me grabs his armrest. It was the plane that dropped, after all.

  The overhead seatbelt light dings, the plane rocks.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, the pilot has turned on the seatbelt sign. Please return to your seats while we pass through some turbulence. We’re expecting some rough weather for the rest of the flight, so please keep seatbelts fastened for the remainder of the flight. We should have you in Texas within the next hour.”

  Rough weather? Oh, god.

  I pull up the weather page on my laptop. There’s a huge red, swirling storm graphic circling over the bottom half of Texas.

  No, no, no.

  I can’t call anyone, warn them. All I can do is text or email over this shitty wifi.

  Emily: It’s corn husk silica. It’s breaking down in water. You have to warn them!

  Doc: Corn? That’s unheard of.

  Emily: It isn’t stable under extreme conditions. It’s very unstable in wet conditions. Please, it’s raining in Texas. They can’t use these tires! DO SOMETHING! I’M ON A PLANE!

  Doc: I’m calling Concordia now.

  I check my seatback pocket for the sick bag because I may very well throw up.

  “You aren’t gonna barf, are you, lady?”

  “Shut up!” I scream back at the jackass.

  Do not barf, Emily. Pull it together, this is your time. You got this.

  I send a group text to everyone in the paddock that I have in my contact list. Cole, Edmund, Liam, Mila, Mallory, Dante, the other engineers, and mechanics. I text everyone I can think of. I email everyone I can think of.

  Anyone.

  Half of the texts can’t be delivered because their phones aren’t on global plans, or they can’t receive the wifi-based iMessage, but some of them go through. It has to be enough.

  I get some replies, mostly all question marks. I mumble to myself, curse at my phone. The jackass next to me is clearly now afraid for his life with me, the crazy bitch, sitting next to him.

  I demand someone find Edmund and show him my texts.

  Cole, answer me. Please, answer me.

  Thirty minutes until we land, that gives me enough time to get to the track and stop this before the race, worst case. I don’t know how, but I will make them listen to me.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your Captain speaking. Got some bad news for you. It’s raining pretty hard in Austin right now, so we’re going to need to circle for a bit until conditions settle down. Should have you on the ground safely in a jiffy, just sit tight.”

  I bang my head onto the seat in front of me and grip my tray table.

  Those rotten assholes, Olivi
er in his expensive suit and Rolex… They have money for that but use cheap materials to save a few bucks in their product. The very product that separates all the F1 drivers from the unforgiving asphalt they speed over at two hundred miles per hour.

  I remember what Mallory said—There are no ethical billionaires, Emily.

  For the next hour, I refuse to have a panic attack. I don’t have twenty-four hours, but I set the alarm on my phone, and I give myself five minutes.

  When that alarm goes off, that’s it. Panic and fear are going to have to take a backseat because I have to prepare and focus on the race.

  It goes off just as the flight attendants ask everyone to put their seats in the upright position and stow their large electronics. We’re finally descending and landing.

  When I push past the crowd on the jet bridge and race through the Austin airport, I feel the phone in my back pocket vibrating and catching up with cell signals, but there’s no time to stop running.

  Exiting the airport doors, Makenna is waiting for me in her car, just like she said she would be.

  “Go!” I cry out as my door shuts behind me. It’s pouring buckets, and everyone is driving like a complete idiot like Texans have never seen rain.

  “Jesus, I should have brought an arc,” Makenna says as she navigates the traffic to the circuit. It’s not that far, but with my flight delay, there are only twenty minutes left until race time.

  “Go around them, drive on the shoulder, hurry!” We aren’t going to make it in time.

  Cole has not texted me back. Mila must have his phone already because he’s getting ready to get into the car.

  I cannot bear the thought of something happening to him, ever. But not like this. Not with us not speaking.

  Me, not speaking.

  Finally, pulling into the Circuit of the America’s VIP entrance, we park the car in a grassy area that is now a swamp of mud and silt, and we race to the Pit Crew security gate.

  They scan my access badge, and I fly through the metal turnstile.

  “She’s with me,” I tell security when Makenna tries to follow.

  “Badge?” The security guard asks again.

  “I don’t…” Makenna stutters. We’re both dripping wet, waterlogged.