Page 10 of Furious

On my way to the employee locker room to change, I pat the Day-Glo orange machine. A tween in the seat races through Shinjuku in the ‘06 Dodge Viper SRT-10 from Tokyo Drift. It’s one of the easy tracks, but they plough spectacularly into a train as I pass.

I can’t help thinking that I’d love to watch JoJo play; I bet she picks the hard tracks every time.

Zaynah’s already in the locker room when I elbow through the door, re-pinning her daisy-print hijab in the mirror. She hasn’t been less than fifteen minutes early for a shift all summer. “Sixty-four seconds to spare, Blum,” she comments, nose wrinkling, “and please don’t take this the wrong way, but you kind of smell like a gas station?”

Lifting my T-shirt hem to my own nose, I groan. That extra layer of deodorant and dry shampoo clearly didn’t help. I pull out my flaming-red work polo before stuffing my backpack into my tiny locker. Zaynah shows up for her shift wearing her polo over a long-sleeved shirt so she can dress at home, in privacy, but she doesn’t care that I’m shameless (about my body, at least). I wrestle off my contaminated T-shirt as I catch her up. “I skipped a shower to stop at Jolene’s garage before work. Did you know she has a granddaughter?”

“Sure. I met her when we were kids, at one of our Hug-a-Horse events while she was in town with her parents.”

The first thing to know about Zaynah Syed is that she’s a Horse Girl™. Her family runs the Syed Rescue Farm, which is mostly a ranch for unwanted horses, but they’ve also got pigs, donkeys, chickens, and at the moment an alpaca pair named Bonnie and Clyde. They run on donations and grants and volunteers. Plus they do parties and events to take care of their animals, either until they find homes, or forever if they’re sick or old or just too wild to be wanted. It was Zaynah’s idea to cofound the Dell’s Hollow Volunteer Club with me, inspired by her parents’ work.

The second thing to know about Zaynah is she’s my best friend, even if we have spent our whole lives competing—in the classroom, in middle-distance events when we ran junior high track, in crushes (we never actually act on our crushes, and Zaynah doesn’t date; we just like to prove to each other that our crush of the moment is the deepest and truest and crushiest). A day doesn’t go by without us texting, even if we’re sitting in the same room, sending TikToks back and forth.

“Why were you at Jolene’s?” Zaynah asks. “Did the Oatmobile break down?”

“If only, but no. I was looking for something Max might’ve left at the shop. I, um, got another postcard today.”

Zaynah shines her big, thoughtful brown eyes at me, and asks carefully, “Oh yeah?”

“I think Max is staying in Boston.”

“Well, that’s … good.” She takes a paper towel from the dispenser by the sink just to twist it in her hands.

It’s not Zaynah’s fault she’s turned into an awkward turtle. Nobody really knows what to say about Max, at least not to my face.

My sister has something of a reputation around Dell’s Hollow, and not just because of her brilliant amateur track career. She might have taken the car out one night—the car my parents meant to let me drive once I had my license, but they loaned it to Max after she moved home—and she might have driven straight through the roundabout that circles Dell’s Hollow’s town green. She then might have crashed it into the Founder’s Fountain in the middle of the green.

But it wasn’t her fault! This was in March, during a rare snow for North Carolina, and she never could help moving just a little faster than the rest of us. She was barely speeding. She made one mistake, but anybody could.

I could, as hard as I try not to.

“I think it is good,” I tell Zaynah as I finish buttoning my polo.

“Sounds like it. El, just be … never mind. Come find me at the cone counter during break? I’ll make a kiwi cone for you.”

“Z, do not,” I say. It’s true there’s no actual kiwi in the kiwi flavoring, but I don’t believe that fruit should be neon green, as Zaynah well knows.

I choose to ignore the part where she clearly meant to say be careful. It’s nothing I haven’t heard before, and it’s nothing I need to hear again. I’m always careful. I follow every rule in the employee handbook, including leaving my phone in my locker, which nobody does but me, not even Zaynah. I have a 4.1 GPA going into senior year, and have had my application essays to UNC–Chapel Hill drafted for months, even though I can’t apply for early decision to their sports medicine program until October. I floss every day so that when the dentist asks me about my flossing habits, I can say I floss every day and snag that sweet nod of dental approval. I’m never late for curfew, I weed the garden beds every Sunday like clockwork, and I don’t lie to my parents.

I hardly ever lie to my parents.

After I clock in at the front desk, the shift manager sends me out to the go-karts. We have a jellybean-shaped asphalt track surrounded inside and out by a barricade of stacked tires. I relieve Jericho Brown, who works the opening shift, and take his place on the stool beside the narrow starting lane of empty karts. There’s an overhanging roof, so I don’t have to sit in the baking sun all afternoon, and it’s not a hard job. I lower the chain to let the next group in line onto the concrete loading platform, then help them each choose their karts. We have two speeds: a red 16-mph kart for kids, and a blue 24-mph kart for twelve and up. I list off the rules: no crashing into other drivers or the barricade, keep your hands and feet inside the vehicle, shoulder harness must stay buckled, etcetera. When I move the traffic cones that block the starting lane from the main track and flip the stoplight to green, customers get five minutes to race. I announce the last lap over the loudspeaker, flip the light to red, and put the cones back out in time for folks to pull back into the cart lane. Easy peasy, but since it’s technically the most high-stakes attraction in the park, I do have to pay attention.

On a summer day like this, there’s hardly ever a lull, and I’m relieved when I get to pull out the BACK IN FIFTEEN sign for my scheduled break. I’m all set to hang it on the chain then head for the cone counter when the small round bronze plaque set in the concrete of the platform catches my eye:

DEEDEE EMERSON DROVE HERE

I don’t remember seeing it in the fall, when I was just a customer. They must’ve had it installed this spring. Now I remember; it was after …

Oh my God.

It was after DeeDee Emerson died.

How had that slipped my mind? It’s true I don’t follow NASCAR, like I told JoJo, but DeeDee Emerson’s death made our hometown newspaper, the Dell’s Hollow Daily (it’s actually a monthly paper, but I don’t think anybody’s ever complained about the false advertising). DeeDee—JoJo’s mom—really was a hometown hero. It was a point of pride that a real live racing star had eaten the hush puppies at one of our two diners, and hugged a horse at our local rescue farm, and driven one of our go-karts. I mean, North Carolina is the home of NASCAR. And there I was, bantering with and harassing this nauseatingly cute girl about my sister’s jacket, completely forgetting the article that ran in the Daily when her mom crashed mid-race… .

“Hey, you,” says a voice right behind me.

Goosebumps shoot down my back despite the wet summer heat, and I swivel around so fast, my stool nearly tips. I stumble up onto the platform to keep from spilling over with it. “JoJo!” It comes out in a kind of squeal.