by Mary Strand
“Or hanging out with sisters who’d all rather be with their boyfriends.” I pulled away from her, wondering if Liz would try to stop me from going back out the front door. “Don’t do me any favors, Liz. I don’t need your help.”
“Yeah, you’d rather go it alone. Without your sisters, without your so-called friends—”
“I have a lot of friends.”
I felt my face flame as the lie rolled off my tongue, but Liz didn’t have to treat me like a charity case. Despite what Tess and Kirk had done, my friends would all be back when Lydia came home from reform school. If she ever did.
Liz shook her head. “If you want to be friends with any of those snakes, we need to talk.”
Jane and Charlie came inside, their cheeks rosy. With a nod from Jane, Charlie headed in the direction of the kitchen to join Alex in exile. Jane picked my jacket off the floor, hung it over the doorknob, then perched next to Liz on the third step. I backed up, wondering if I had the guts to grab my jacket and sprint for freedom.
“If you run, I’m faster.”
I glared at Liz. “Like you know what I’m planning to do.”
“I’ve nailed it so far. Every step of the way.”
Jane held up a finger. “Except for the paint job. She surprised you with that one.”
They both laughed, cutting me out of the joke. Or, more accurately, making me the butt of it.
“Whatever. You guys don’t know me.”
“And whose fault is that?”
Jane shook her head at Liz. “Everyone’s. We’ve never all hung out together. We went through the same thing with Mary, and Mary didn’t even have Lydia.”
“I’m not sure how that cuts.” Liz eased herself to her feet, stretching as if her muscles had somehow tightened up in the two minutes she’d been sitting there. Right.
Mary and Josh walked inside just then, and I eyed my jacket, the open front door, and freedom.
“Don’t even think about it.”
I didn’t. I just ran.
With a quick grab for my jacket, I shoved past Mary and Josh, who were too startled to stop me. The cold bit into me the instant I made it outside, but I didn’t stop to put on my jacket. Liz was too fast, and the three guys could probably outrun me, too. And . . . I didn’t have the keys to the Jeep. Damn. As breath spurted out of me in clouds of white steam, I kept running and tried to think through my options. I had even fewer than when I ran away Monday morning. Like maybe zero.
Halfway down the block, something slammed into my back, arms wrapped around me, and I went down face first into a snowbank. My assailant landed on top of me.
Liz. I was gonna kill her.
I opened my mouth to scream, but my mouth filled with snow. I spit it out, choking, until Liz rolled off me and thumped my back. Twisting painfully, with my hands caught under my body, I squirmed until I got a decent shot at her.
I took it. A punch square to her gut.
“Hey!” From the roar of Liz’s laughter, my blow hadn’t been all that. “I warned you not to run.”
I flopped over on my back, my jacket still clenched in my hands, intensely aware of snow going down my neck and seeping through my shirt. I sucked in a deep breath of ice-cold air. “I don’t have to do what you say.”
Liz was lying on her side next to me, on top of the same snowbank, her head propped on her elbow. She looked as if the snow didn’t even register. “No, but that little move was pretty pointless. Which you knew before you did it.”
I shrugged.
“Hey, let’s get out of this snowbank before we freeze to death.” Liz leaped to her feet in one smooth motion, then held out her hand to help me up. She brushed some snow off my back, giving it an extra thwack I didn’t need. “Now that we’ve gotten your revenge, I’d like to be warm while we plot your comeback.”
I walked away from her, back to the house, swiping my hand at a tear of anger or frustration or maybe just hurt. “Good luck with that.”
“Honestly.” Liz caught up with me with a few long strides. “I think it’ll turn out okay.”
I blinked. Maybe Liz wasn’t as smart as I thought. Because nothing in this scenario was ever going to turn out okay.
“We need a plan of action, and this time—what the heck—I’m thinking we should include Cat in the plan.”
Arms crossed, I barely glanced at Liz across the dining room table from me. Everyone was together again—except Mom and Dad, who were still missing in action—and Liz and I had changed into dry clothes. It was almost as if we hadn’t gone to the party, humiliated Tess and Kirk, and come home to a screaming match that ended with me facedown in a snowbank.
“I don’t think Cat needs a plan.”
Everyone, including me, whirled to look at Alex.
He held up his hands. “You tried to help. Like you said, Cat didn’t appreciate it. So let her come up with her own plan. Or let her fly without one.”
I’d been doing that this whole term, and look where that got me. Still, I smiled at Alex. He was on my side, and I hadn’t had anyone on my side since Lydia left. Or maybe ever.
No one said anything, which was surprising, considering Liz was here. When the silence deepened, Liz finally spoke. “She’ll just run away again.”
Alex shrugged. “So? I hear the waterparks in the Dells are pretty good this time of year.”
Next to him, Charlie laughed. “And she’s already got the Jeep tricked out.”
Josh opened his mouth to say something but stopped when Mary touched his arm. Knowing Mary, she didn’t want all the guys to be on my side.
“Don’t look at me like that.”
Startled, I realized Mary was talking to me.
“Like what?”
“Like, no matter what, you’re still cooler than me. Like you’re cooler than all of us.”
“I never said I was cooler than all of you.” No one could ever top Liz and Jane, even before considering Charlie’s computer-game company and Alex’s Lamborghini.
Jane shook her head. “No offense, but `cool’ is a concept reserved for high school. And it doesn’t seem to be doing you a bit of good, Cat.”
“In case you didn’t notice, I’m in high school.”
Alex leaned forward. “That’s another thing Cat can figure out for herself. In case you guys haven’t noticed, she doesn’t want your advice. If she wants our help, she’ll ask for it.”
A lightbulb lit up in my head. “Do you mean it?”
“No.” Liz put a hand over Alex’s mouth. “He didn’t mean it. I know that look on your face, Cat, even if Alex doesn’t. You didn’t mean it, did you, Alex?”
He was grinning behind her hand.
“Idiot.” But Liz grinned, too, and pulled her hand away.
Alex nodded at me. “What is it you want?”
I sucked in a quick breath. Now or never, and he’d offered, after all. “To borrow your Lamborghini? On Monday?”
Dead silence. Even from Liz.
Alex kept staring at me, then finally laughed as he slapped a hand on the table. “Done.”
My jaw dropped open. “Done?”
Liz grabbed Alex’s sleeve. “Have you seen her drive? Have you seen what she did to the Jeep?”
Alex just kept grinning. “Like I said. Done. But you might want to skip the paint job. My Lamborghini is already black.”
I spent the rest of the weekend trying to catch up on the homework I’d missed, working at Nickelodeon Universe at a job that—thanks to Dad—I miraculously still had, and wondering why I’d asked Alex for his Lamborghini.
I mean, what was I going to do with it? I couldn’t exactly steal it and run away again, since I had a feeling Alex and his wildly rich dad had more SWAT teams at their disposal than the entire U.S. military. Besides, we already had a Jeep, and it was already—conveniently enough—painted black.
Even one headlight.
Monday morning rolled around without me figuring any of it out. But when my bedroom door slammed open and Liz to
ssed a set of keys on my bed, I knew Alex had kept his promise.
“I don’t know what you’re going to do, but be careful.” Liz waited until I sat up and rubbed the residue of an entire night’s insomnia out of my eyes. “And I don’t just mean with the Lamborghini.”
I opened my mouth to respond, but my brain wasn’t cooperating.
“Do you know how to drive a stick shift?”
“Uh—” No. Crap. Well, unless I counted all the times last summer Dad had tried to teach me. I’d never made it past grinding the gears and stalling out completely on hills. “Sure. Like, I totally know how.”
Liz’s eyebrows rose. “That’s not what Dad said.”
I shrugged. “He was probably too focused on yoga position number four hundred seventy-nine to hear your question.”
“Right.” Liz kept staring at me. “Don’t wreck his car, okay?”
“I’m not going to.”
“And take care of yourself.” Liz glanced out the window, then finally looked back at me. “I’m sorry you’ve got so much shit going down in your life right now. I could—”
I held up a hand. “No, you can’t.”
Liz blinked a few times, and I could’ve almost sworn I saw a tear in the corner of her eye. No way. Liz was impervious. Invincible. Totally unlike me.
For once in my life, I wished things were different between her and me. And for once in Liz’s life, she backed out of my room without saying another word.
By the time I showered and dressed, Mom had left for work, but Dad was still on his yoga mat when I went downstairs.
“Mary already left for school.” He frowned at me from cobra position, but it could’ve just been the strain of the pose. “Liz told me about Alex’s car, but you and I both know you can’t drive a manual transmission.”
“I—” The lie stuck on my tongue and didn’t budge.
“If you want to impress your friends, I’d like to point out that grinding the gears of a Lamborghini in the school parking lot isn’t the way to do it.”
My mind flashed back to the way Dad’s Honda Civic stuttered and jerked the whole way down the street when I tried driving it last summer. Talk about embarrassing, and I hadn’t even seen anyone I knew.
I bit my lip. “Maybe you could teach me?”
Dad glanced at his watch. “You have fifteen minutes to make it to school. And, no, I’m not letting you skip again. I’ll give you a ride, but Alex’s car stays here.”
“You couldn’t give me a ride in—”
“No.” Dad’s eyes lost their stern look, though, and twinkled. “I’m not trying to impress anyone.”
I rolled my eyes as Dad stood up, giving me a scary view of baggy sweatpants and a T-shirt with holes in the pits. “Good. If you are, you might wanna rethink the wardrobe.”
Luckily for me, he actually laughed.
Tess wasn’t in school Monday. I didn’t catch sight of Kirk, either, but he wasn’t in any of my classes. Thank God I hadn’t risked utter humiliation in the Lamborghini when the kids I wanted to see me driving it weren’t even around.
I wondered where Tess was. Any other kid who’d been skewered Friday night the way Liz skewered Tess might spend the day faking sick and huddled under the covers. Knowing Tess, she was at a spa with her mom. In New York or L.A.
I kept my head down, even though no one made rude comments or even snickered. In Drawing, Megan didn’t say anything. I started to wonder if Mr. Paymar had threatened the whole student body with expulsion if they said anything to Cat Bennet today.
Naaa. It would’ve encouraged kids to say something.
I went straight home after school in the black Jeep with Mary behind the wheel. We pulled up in front of the house, where Alex’s Lamborghini still sat.
Dad was standing in the front hall, dangling car keys in the air, when Mary and I walked in.
“Still want to try driving a manual transmission?”
I shrugged. If I never saw Tess or Kirk, was there any point in driving the Lamborghini to school? Besides, I’d had my one shot at the Lamborghini today, and it would disappear again by evening.
“I tried last summer when the roads were clear and dry. They’re icy now.” I tried to picture stopping on a hill on these roads and kept seeing myself sliding straight back down into some old lady using a walker to cross the street. Bam. End of her life, end of mine.
Dad kept jangling the keys. “They’re not too icy, and you’re certainly not afraid of driving the Jeep in the winter.” He lifted his eyebrows. “It’s just a matter of using the clutch correctly. Once you get the hang of it, you’ll probably prefer a stick shift.”
Yeah, and hell was gonna freeze over the same day.
I grabbed the keys out of his hand just to stop the jangling. After dumping my backpack in the middle of the front hall, I opened the front door again, then waited for Dad to grab his jacket and follow me outside. To my doom.
Ten minutes later, I was sitting in the driver’s seat of Dad’s Honda Civic in the huge Kowalski’s parking lot, my hands clenched on the steering wheel, going nowhere.
Dad blew out a breath. And another. His yoga breathing, which he used in tense situations, tended to make the situation even more tense. At least for me.
“You watched me drive here, saw how I shifted.” He cleared his throat. “You’ll need to put your right hand on the gearshift. If you can pry it loose from the steering wheel.”
“Ha ha.” But he was right. My knuckles were white from gripping the stupid wheel so tightly, and I wasn’t sure I’d ever have full use of my hands again.
“You can do it.”
I glanced sideways at Dad, who smiled at me. Almost the way he smiled at Liz, because he liked her so much. With me, the question seemed to be up in the air.
I let go of the steering wheel, bending and flexing my fingers a few times to try to get the circulation back, then gingerly set my right hand on top of the gearshift knob.
“You might want to put your left hand back on the steering wheel. Autopilot on cars is still a few years in the future.”
I frowned. “You’re a real comedian, you know that?”
He held up his hands. “Just trying to get you relaxed. I’m surprised, Cat. You’re usually more fearless.”
“I think you’re confusing me with Lydia.”
“I never have.” His hand reached out and patted mine on top of the gear knob. “As little girls, you were much more fearless than Lydia. She just developed a talent for, ah, getting into scrapes and dragging you along.”
“She didn’t—”
“Drag you along?” Dad shook his head. “Except for the drinking episode a few weeks ago, you’ve never been the one with the bad ideas.”
“Oh? Are you forgetting last week?”
Dad chuckled, amazing me. “That’ll go down on the highlight reels, but it wasn’t exactly a bad idea. You found yourself in an untenable situation—from your perspective, at least—and you left. You hid yourself as best you could by painting the Jeep, you found a job and a place to stay, and you didn’t steal someone’s credit card to do it.”
He didn’t know about the cash I’d swiped from Mom. Thank God I paid it back before she noticed.
Dad nodded. “From a certain angle, you actually handled yourself quite well last week.”
“I’m pretty sure Mom doesn’t think so.”
Dad glanced out the windshield, opened his mouth to say something, then shut it again. “Well. Back to your driving lesson. Left hand on wheel, right hand on gearshift, left foot pressing the clutch all the way to the floor. Now, drive forward when you’re ready.”
I hit the gas. And didn’t go anywhere.
“You need to slowly release the clutch.”
I lifted my foot off the clutch. The gears ground and scraped, the car lurched forward, and the engine killed.
“It’s not easy at first. Picture yourself slowly pressing down on the gas pedal at the exact same time you’re slowly releasing the clutch
. Then, whenever you shift gears, you press down on the clutch as you release the gas pedal. Think of it like a pendulum, in a way.”
A pendulum. He thought he was talking to Liz or Mary, the only girls in our family geeky enough in math and science to even think about a pendulum, let alone use it to learn how to drive a stick shift.
“Based on your frown, I gather the concept isn’t working for you. I suspect explaining it in yoga terms won’t help.” Dad’s mouth twisted as he thought, then he held his hands in the air, parallel to each other, and lifted the left one as he pressed down the right one, then reversed it. “It’s all about balance. Like in your drawings. Each side of a drawing, in its own way, balances out the other.”
“It doesn’t necessarily—”
Yeah, it did. I pictured in my mind the portraits and other drawings I’d done last week in the Dells. Left and right balanced, and so did top and bottom. Not mirror image, but they balanced. At least in my opinion.
But Dad wouldn’t know that. Dad was into engineering and yoga and daughters who liked math and science and, in Liz’s case, sports. He liked Jane, too, but she never did anything wrong. It was easy to like her.
“Can you picture it? The concept of balance? Driving a manual transmission is all about balance.”
“You never said that last summer.”
“You weren’t hell-bent on driving a Lamborghini last summer. I’m just trying to help, honey.”
He was, I had to admit. I looked at my right hand on the gearshift knob, eased my left foot off the clutch, and drove forward. About three feet.
But I did it. Without grinding a dang thing.
“Excellent.” Dad patted my arm. “Now let’s try driving to the far end of the parking lot.”
And I did. Okay, I stalled out once, but only when a nasty SUV zipped in front of me, and I didn’t grind the gears too much. Bottom line, I made it. I just wasn’t sure I’d be able to handle a hill or a turn or the parking lot at Woodbury High.
“Turn around now and go back.” Dad leaned back in his seat, his own knuckles starting to look a bit less white. “We’ll go back and forth until you feel comfortable. Or until you hit an SUV, whichever comes first.”