Page 5 of Ignition

What family? There was nothing left but my dad, who Ihardly knew these days, and the stranger parading around my home like she owned it.

Soon to be joined by her equally unappealing offspring, for fuck’s sake.

“I’ll be back when I’m back,” I said, ignoring his sentiment entirely, flinging my leather jacket over my shoulder from the back of the chair on the way out.

The garage was filled with cars, and I chose a set of keys at random from the hook. The lights flashed with a little beep on an electric blue sports car, and I climbed in, peeling out of the garage to take the familiar road to Nick’s.

It was nice to have the windows down, the breeze cool as it rippled through my hair, inviting some much-needed fresh air into the car.

I pressed a button and music from my playlist started at random, the sound pulsing through the car in an effort to drown out my thoughts about the woman in my house, her equally useless daughter on the way, and my father’s incredible misstep thinking that threatening me would buy them my kindness.

These people could be murderers for all we knew! Or master thieves planning to steal everything we owned. Or, more likely, run-of-the-mill gold diggers, looking to score big by stroking the ego of a man too up his own ass to notice.

At least that shit was obvious from the start.

Ivy.

Stupid, classless, faux-intellectual name.

I already fucking hated her. It was just a matter of time until she gave me more of a reason than just existing.

“You stupid fuckin’ piece of trash!”

I turned the key again andagain, expecting to hear the purr of the engine kick on—I even would’ve accepted a chugging or a high whine—but was met with silence after the initialtick, tick, tickof the ignition trying to breathe life into the car’s battery.

Fuck, fucking, fuckeration.

Maybe Ryker was right,I thought grimly. He usually wasn’t, at least not about anything involvingmanual labor.Or, really, any kind oflaborat all. But after six months and a couple grand sunk into parts with zero success at getting this piece of scrap to start… I was starting to think that it was hopeless.

Or maybe that I’d find more enjoyment in towing the thing outside and smashing it with a baseball bat than I would another half of a year of playing surgeon to a finicky Camaro.

In the car’s defense, she was old enough to have a learner's permit, and it wasn’therfault that my old man walked out on us halfway through her refurbishment.

Nah, that fuckshow was a mess he made by himself, shitting on my entire god damn life in the process.

The car, a 2010 Camaro SS, was probably most iconically known for its role in the rally yellow colorway as Bumblebeta in the Transformators movie franchise, but time on the silver screen didn’t help her run for shit. Besides, I thought that allthat robot stuff was sorta tacky, and hawked the special edition bullshit the second I could for a couple extra bucks to put toward new parts.

Probably even worse than stripping the car of its molded wheel center caps, fenders, and armrest was that once the old girl was up to speed, my plan wasn’t a breezy retirement of car shows. Nah, I wanted to race her. Like she was made for. No one painted goddamn racing stripes on a car unless they planned for you to be driving it fast.

And that yellow?

Fuckin’. Legendary.

I wiped my sweaty face with the hem of my shirt, the late afternoon sun pelting down onto the pavement out the open garage door and baking just about everything in the process. Luckily, it was Sunday, so the rest of the garage was quiet, leaving me to my thoughts and curses without having Frank or Bill breathing down my neck about what I could—or should—be doing to make the car go.

Even though they were just trying to help, and had more years under their belts as mechanics than I’d been alive, their good-natured advice always grated on me. This was supposed to be me and my dad’s thing, refusing to talk to eachother about our feelings and losing ourselves in work, and now that he’d gone ghost and it was left to me, it felt like something that I needed to do on my own.

Instead of companionable, easy to understand silence, it felt opressive now. He left me to deal with a whole new onslaught of unfamilliar emotions created by his sudden exit from my life, and my new role in the family.

Man of the house.

“Still not running?” Ryker’s voice crackled from my phone where I’d tossed it on the dash, and I jumped, totally forgetting he was still on the line.

“No.”

Like that wasn’t fuckin’ obvious, but Ryker wasn’t the most—what was a nice way to put it—perceptivealpha on the planet. Self-absorbed in the way that I’d only seen on reality TV.

Maybe it was a rich person thing, keeping your head down and your eyes on your own paper to the point that you abandoned your community. Coming from a family like mine, with parents who’d come to this country after being fed the never ending American propaganda mill about thedream, you learned that caring for others meant that hopefully when you landed on hard times that they would do the same for you.