by Kasie West
“Moore, it was a joke. You know, the best pickup line ever.”
“Oh. Right. It’s just this truck: nothing can happen to it.”
“I know. It’s fine. You’ve done fine.” He kissed my cheek.
“Don’t distract me. I have to drive.”
He rested his hand on my knee, which wasn’t any less distracting. “Didn’t we already hear this song? Is the radio playing repeats?”
He was right. We had heard it. Or at least the first part of it, not the whole thing.
“That happened last time we stopped too. Is it a . . .” He pushed a button and the music stopped and a tape came sliding out of the slot on top. “It’s a tape.”
My breath caught. “It is? It must’ve been his. Does it say anything on it?”
He took it out and flipped it once. “No. But someone made it. There are too many artists on it to be one album.”
“Do you think Eric made it?”
“I don’t know, but if he did, he had excellent taste in music.”
“I was going to say the same thing.”
He smiled and put the tape back in the player. “Thanks for letting me be part of tonight. I had fun.”
“Me too. I guess you need to take Heath Hall away now.” I nodded toward the dash where he and his empty eyes still gazed at us creepily.
He loaded him into the backpack and zipped it up. “Do you have anyone you want to nominate to wear this?”
“Besides you?”
“I just walked into an icy cold lake. I’m good.”
I squeezed his hand. Was he good?
“I think I’m going to pass on the torch,” he said. “Let someone else be the mask’s keeper.”
“Really?”
“I was hanging on to it for so long because I felt like it was the only purpose I had in my life. I think I was scared to let it go. But it’s time for Heath to move on.”
“Do you know who you’re passing it to?”
“I’m not sure. What do you think about Amelia?”
The suggestion surprised me, but then it didn’t. “She’d actually be pretty perfect.”
We pulled up in front of his house and he didn’t make any move to leave. Instead, he turned toward me. “I’m so proud of you. This”—he pointed to the floor of the truck—“was amazing. Best fear I’ve ever witnessed. You crushed it. Not that I’m surprised. That’s what you do.”
I wanted to feel good about his compliments, but dread was creeping its way into my shoulders, tightening them with each passing second. “It’s not over yet.”
“What are you going to do? About your parents? How are you going to talk to them? Are you going to leave the truck for them to find?”
“No. Maybe. I have no idea.”
“Someone once told me that you didn’t need to know the future, you just had to move forward.”
“Smart advice.”
“I thought so.”
“You should keep that person around in case they have other smart pieces of information to share.” I had started the sentence as a joke but realized I was unsure of where we stood, what he wanted moving forward. Was this just a unique, rule-breaking night because of the mask and the challenge?
He pushed the hair back from my forehead, his eyes on mine. “I have to keep her around. She owns me.” He kissed the corner of my mouth. “You own me.”
I let out my breath and leaned into his kiss.
His phone rang again.
“It’s like she knows.” He laughed and answered it. “Mom, I’m home. I’m right outside just saying good night to Hadley.”
Had he ever used my first name before? It sounded weird coming from him.
“More like forty-five minutes. And I’m here.” He paused to listen to whatever she was saying. “Well, if I’m already grounded for a week, then I’m just going to make out with her for ten more minutes.”
I gasped. He put down his phone.
“You did not just say that to your mom.”
“No, I didn’t. She’d already hung up.”
I grabbed a handful of the front of his shirt and pulled him toward me. I gave him a soft kiss.
“I thought you were going to hit me. This is way better.” He kissed me twice more. “I better go, though. I wasn’t kidding about the Mom-being-mad part.”
“I know. Good luck with that.”
“You too.”
“Thank you.”
He started to get out.
“Wait!” I called.
“What?”
“I need your phone number.”
He laughed. “We did this way backward.”
We switched phones and entered our numbers, then he left, throwing a smile over his shoulder as he did. A few minutes later my phone rang. Across my screen the words My Hot Boyfriend calling came on. I laughed and answered. “Hello.”
“Do you agree?”
“About which part?”
“All of it.”
“Yes.” My cheeks hurt from the smile there. “Did you get in trouble?”
“Just a week. That’s doable. Are you home yet?”
“No.”
“Call me if you need me, after your parents get home,” he said.
“Okay.”
“Good night, Moore.”
“Night.”
Thirty-Four
As I pulled up to my house, I expected sirens to sound, my parents to come rushing out yelling and screaming. But all was quiet, as I had left it. Everything was exactly the same. Not even Amelia’s car was back. It was almost like it hadn’t happened at all. Something should’ve been different to reflect how different I felt.
I sighed. Now I had to decide what to do with the truck. I had been planning on putting it back on the platform, but maybe I should leave it in the drive. It would force me to have the conversation with my parents that I’d been putting off practically my entire life.
My dad would be the first to see it the next night. It would shock him. Maybe even put him on the defense right away before I had a chance to share my feelings. Or maybe it would make him sad or scare him. I thought about every possible reaction my dad might have to seeing the truck, after eighteen years, not where it belonged. And regardless of how I felt, I didn’t think that was fair to him. I couldn’t go from saying nothing to doing the most dramatic thing possible. Both he and my mom deserved to be eased into what I needed to tell them. They didn’t deserve a lightning strike.
I put the truck in park and got out. The ramps were where I left them in front of the platform so I moved them around to the back. Then ever so slowly, positioning the truck just right, I drove it forward. When I got to the top of the ramps, the truck stopped, not having enough power to get over the lip. I needed to give it more gas. I gripped the wheel and pressed gently on the gas pedal. It still wasn’t enough. I’d gone up the ramps too slow. I thought about backing up and going up again, a little faster. First, I tried one last time with a little more pressure on the gas pedal. The truck lurched forward. I gasped and slammed on the brakes. It stopped just in time, inches from the front edge. I caught my breath.
Now I needed to back it up just a few inches. As I started to shift the truck in reverse, a set of headlights swept across the yard and a car pulled up to the front of the house. Amelia. Her eyes were wide as she climbed out of her car and saw me, the headlights of my brother’s truck like a beacon across the lawn. I held up my finger, telling her to wait a minute, then looked over my right shoulder to back up. I lifted my foot off the brake pedal, but instead of moving backward, the truck jumped forward. The wheel jerked and the left front tire was off the platform and on the ground before I could step on the brake. The right tire was now suspended in midair in front of the ramp. I slid to the left, my body slamming into the door, my head hitting the window.
No. This couldn’t be happening. I applied the gas, slowly trying to ease the truck forward, hoping to just get it all on the ground and start again. The left tire spun and spun, obviousl
y not fully on the ground, which meant the platform must’ve been holding up some of the center of the truck. No.
Amelia knocked on the driver’s-side window. I rolled it down with the cranking handle.
“What are you doing? Your parents are going to kill you.”
“Not helping. How do I move it?”
She backed up, assessing the position of the truck. “One of the back wheels isn’t fully grounded. You’re stuck.”
“Thanks. I caught that.”
“Your parents are going to kill you.”
“You already said that.” I turned off the engine and opened the door. I fell out, barely catching myself before hitting the ground. Then I, too, backed up to assess the position of the truck. “What if I moved one of those ramps so it’s facing backward under the left front tire and then drove forward a little?”
“Then what?” she asked.
“I don’t know.” I grabbed a fistful of my hair and a pain shot through my right shoulder. I pinched it hard. “Then put the other ramp forward under the right tire?”
“Then you’d just have this same situation but in reverse.”
“You think?”
“I don’t know. We can try it.”
At two o’clock in the morning we gave up. The truck hadn’t moved from its original lopsided position and I was pretty sure the only thing we’d managed to do was tear up a section of grass under the left tire. “It’s fine. We’ll fix this. We have all day tomorrow.”
“Is it time to tell me yet what you were doing?”
“I was facing my fear. Being Heath Hall.”
“What?”
I thought about telling her who and what Heath Hall was and represented but I felt like that took away from the secrecy pact of it all. She’d know in a couple days when that backpack and instructions ended up in her care. So instead, I said, “My parents choose my brother over me every time.”
She didn’t argue. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m tired of it. I thought if I drove this truck tonight that I’d be facing a fear, the fear of competing with his memories my whole life. I thought I’d be facing the memory of my dead brother once and for all. Telling him in a way that I had won. Or maybe that it shouldn’t be a competition at all. I don’t know. It sounds weird, I know.”
“So wait, you drove this truck around? Like out of this yard?”
“Yes, I was just getting back when you pulled up.”
“Wow, Hadley. And how did it feel?”
“Freeing.”
She smiled. “I bet.” She put her hands on her hips and looked at the truck again. “And now you’re trying to put it back?”
“Yes.”
She hesitantly asked, “What about your parents? Don’t you want them to know?”
“I think the message would be a little too shocking. I want to ease them into it a bit by talking to them first.”
“Probably a good idea . . . except.” She gestured to the truck. “Now you’ll just give them a heart attack.”
“I know.” I let out a defeated breath of air. “This will not go over well. It would’ve been one thing if I had just left it parked in the driveway. That would’ve been shocking enough. But this?” I couldn’t even finish that thought out loud. This would be like a punch to the gut. This looked like a broken truck. A wrecked truck. This would be more than a shock. I felt beyond terrible. That’s why I was going to fix this. I had to.
Amelia walked around the platform again, as though some new idea on how to solve this would suddenly come to her after over an hour of trying to figure something out and failing. “Where did you go?”
“All the places I wanted to go and never could. I took Jackson.”
She clapped and gave a little jump. “Tell me everything.”
I climbed up on the platform and into the bed of the truck. It teetered just a bit with my weight but the way it was sloped forward provided a really good angle to sit. I patted a space next to me.
She raised her eyebrows. “Are you sure? I’ve never been inside his truck before.”
“Neither had I. Come on. Let’s talk. I want to hear all about your night with DJ as well.”
She joined me, then laid her head on my shoulder. “You have no idea how proud I am of you right now.”
I gave a single laugh. “For what? For taking my brother’s truck and failing to put it back right?”
“No. For realizing that you don’t have to earn your parents’ love.” She squeezed my hand. “And if they don’t kill you first, I’m sure they’ll realize that too.”
“Thanks. Very helpful.”
“Maybe Jackson will know how to right this truck. We should call him.”
“At two o’clock in the morning? I think I can wait until a decent hour. My dad won’t be home until tonight anyway. I have time.”
Amelia stretched and leaned her head back to look at the sky. “This is a great view.”
I looked up as well. The stars were bright tonight. “How long have you known that my swimming was about my parents? My brother?”
“First of all, you love swimming. Don’t let this make you think you don’t. But in a race, as soon as you tap the wall, your gaze goes first to the scoreboard. If, and only if, your name is in the top spot, do you look to the stands.” She took my hand in hers. “Maybe now you can swim for yourself, Hadley. Enjoy it even more.”
Thirty-Five
I awoke with a pain in my neck and two mosquito bites on my right arm. A bird chirped from the tree above. I groaned and rubbed at my neck while I sat up. The hard metal floor of the truck bed was not a comfortable mattress.
My phone, sitting next to me, informed me it was only seven a.m. The sun or the bird or the mosquito bites must’ve woken me up because this was too early to get up on a Saturday morning. Amelia still slept next to me, hugging a pillow, the blankets pulled up over her ears. The night slowly came back to me: taking the keys, driving my brother’s truck off the ramp, getting my brother’s truck stuck on the platform, then spending hours talking to Amelia in the back of it. At some point during the night, I had run inside, grabbed some blankets and pillows because we were cold, and brought them back out to the truck so we could finish talking. We must’ve fallen asleep.
My head ached. The events of last night did not seem better this morning. The sun only made everything that much clearer. The huge patch of grass stripped away, now muddy and dark beneath the front tire, looked so much worse in the light of the day. I let out a small whine.
I carefully climbed out of the truck and walked around it once. What I needed was some leverage, something to pull it off the platform. If my dad’s truck were here, we could use it. But it wasn’t. Who else had a truck?
I knew Jackson would still be asleep, plus he was grounded, but I sent off a text anyway so that the second he woke up he might be able to help. Maybe he knew someone. This would be fixed today. I had about eleven hours. We could right this in eleven hours.
So . . . do you know anyone with a big truck?
My text probably woke him up because minutes later he replied. Why?
I answered: Let’s say, hypothetically, of course, a truck you were trying to put back on a platform was now stuck lopsided on said platform.
I’d text my hot boyfriend so he would come over and help me.
You have a hot boyfriend too? Unfortunately, mine is grounded so he can’t help me. Do you think yours can help me?
Funny. So are you just messing with me to be funny or is this hypothetical situation a sad reality?
Yes to the second option.
That sucks. I’ll be over in a minute.
You’re grounded.
I’ll ask my mom. She forgets everything when she’s sleeping.
Amelia sat up in the bed of the truck and stretched with a loud sigh. I tucked my phone into my pocket.
“Hey,” I said. “Your parents have a truck.”
“Yes, it pulls the trailer with Cooper’s quads.”
&
nbsp; “Do you think they would let Cooper borrow it to come help us?”
“Of course. I’ll call him.”
By the time Jackson arrived ten minutes later, my hair and teeth were brushed and Amelia and I were sitting up in the truck bed watching him walk the path to us.
“He’s cute,” Amelia said. “Even when it looks like he just rolled out of bed.”
He was wearing the same sweats from the night before but with a green T-shirt that I was sure would make his eyes look amazing once he was close enough for me to see them. His hair was a curly mess on top of his head and I could still see some mud streaks around his ankles from our time at the lake last night. I looked at my ankles and realized I sported the same streaks.
He had on a lazy smile and my heart constricted in my chest.
“Wow, Moore, you did this all by yourself?”
“Shut up. We have a plan.”
He did a full loop around the truck. Then another. “What’s the plan?”
Amelia raised her hand. “A big truck and a rope.”
“So I take it you don’t want to tell your parents, then?” he asked me.
“I do,” I said, meeting his eyes so he could see the sincerity in mine. “I just don’t want this to be the first thing they see.”
He nodded. “I understand.”
Amelia hopped down from the truck. “I am going to get us donuts before Cooper gets here. I sense this is going to be a long morning.”
Amelia walked to her car parked on the street, then climbed in and drove away. The second her car rounded the corner Jackson said, “Are you going to come give me a hug or do I have to come up there?”
My cheeks went warm. “I wasn’t sure if . . .”
“If what? Did you not tell Amelia about us yet?”
“No. I told her.”
“You did?”
“Should I not have?”
In three big steps he was up on the platform and in the bed of the truck with me. I let out a yelp of surprise but then threw my arms around him.
“I thought I’d wake up this morning and find out you put the truck back perfectly in its place and wanted to not only pretend you hadn’t driven it, but pretend nothing had happened at all.” He interlaced our fingers together and leaned up against the side.