Page 17 of Furious

Maybe Dad is onto something with making me do volunteer work. Or maybe it’s just the thought of seeing El again. But whatever it is, I know the answer.

“I’ll be there.”

“Good,” she says, holding up her clipboard. She waves it in my direction. “We can make a plan of attack for the asshole street-racer slash secret boyfriend.” Her smile is weak, but at least she’s making jokes. “Plus I have your number now.” She walks away, heading toward Zaynah and the other members of the club.

“I guess that means this was our first date,” I say to myself as I get on my bike and ride away.

CHAPTER SIX

El

Blum family dinners used to be a strict No Phone Zone. If my parents caught us peeking at our screens, we lost them till after cleanup, and we had to spend the rest of the meal answering trivia questions on any subject of their choice. Pop songs of the ‘80s, or state capitals, or the bones of the foot—Dad’s pet category, as a podiatrist. Very educational and completely obnoxious.

Not anymore. After we ran down the standard dinnertime questions—How was your afternoon? How are your friends? Anyone know what the weather’s like tomorrow?—Mom pulled out her tablet to read an article in The Post and Courier. Dad’s thumbing through a catalog of heirloom vegetable seeds while ignoring the homegrown eggplant stir-fry on his plate. At least I’m trying to be sneaky in case either of them looks at me.

Luckily, they don’t.

I scroll through Max’s Instagram with my phone just below the tabletop. She didn’t post often and hasn’t posted at all since February. The star of her feed was definitely the R1: dull and dinged up at first, then scattered in pieces across the floor of the shop, then whole and perfect, molten silver in the sunlight. Out of habit, I unlike a photo of Max beaming proudly beside the bike just to like it again. As if my sister ditched her phone and is ignoring her email, but still checks her Instagram notifications.

There’s a few pictures from Jolene’s garage, too. Max arm-deep in the engine bay of a bubblegum-pink Jeep, or racing a coworker across the shop floor, both on their backs on mechanic’s creepers. I took that one. I’m here, too, in a selfie of us at the lake, and another of us on her attic daybed, stuffed together into the wearable blanket she got me for Hanukkah. And there’s me on the Husqvarna at the track last summer.

But I’ve seen all of these already. What I’m looking for is the unseen. Some dude I’ve never met named Riley who, as JoJo said at the farm this afternoon, gives off “dirtbag” vibes. Like a scraggly mustache and a Confederate-flag neck tattoo? Max’s judgment wasn’t 10/10 (hence the destruction of the Founder’s Fountain), but she would never—

“Pass the hoisin sauce, El?”

I snap my head up to find Dad looking at me. Of course, he can’t see my screen or read my mind, so I smile through my suddenly pounding heartbeat and shove the sauce across the table. He smiles, too, splattering sauce onto his cold stir-fry. I shovel half of my plate into my face before he goes back to his catalog, and I can safely return to snooping.

When pictures from the last year turn up nothing, I switch over to the photos she’s tagged in. I recognize a few of the accounts, like her friends from the garage, or Devil’s Paradise, and there’s a post from a motocross blog captioned “Where are they now? Teen track stars who never went pro.”

Rude.

There’s one photo I’ve never seen, posted from an account I don’t recognize: ShellybeanXOX. Max sits in the bed of a mud-splattered acid-green truck, a small crowd stuffed in beside her, all of them flipping off the camera. Which, whatever, it’s nothing my classmates haven’t done, even if I would never. Colleges look at your social media accounts, and that’s a fact. But the boy with the weirdly shaped, scraggly beard crushed up against Max does look a little extra friendly. His arm is across her shoulders, hand fisted in the fabric of her jacket sleeve. The jacket.

I tap on the account, where ShellybeanXOX is definitely the star of her own feed. But Max is there pretty regularly along with the rest from the truck, sitting on plastic lawn chairs on a strip of dirt in front of an average apartment building. Or in the parking lot of a twenty-four-hour diner, posing beside their bikes—Max with the R1, Bad Beard and some of the guys with GSX-Rs (figures they’d be Gixxer boys). It’s hard to find pictures where Max is there and Bad Beard isn’t. It’s also hard to find pictures where they don’t all have a bottle in hand, even though I never saw my sister drink. She was like, this fifteen-year-old kid racing star into “eating clean” whenever she wasn’t jogging around town or doing chin-ups in the basement.

I mean, she is twenty-two now, and hell, I’ve had a beer or two at a party in the woods behind Jenni Lynn’s house. No big deal. It’s just … surprising.

Though I don’t recognize the people, I actually do know the place where my sister seemed to spend a lot of time—the Piney Bend Apartments in Deerfield, not far from Devil’s Paradise. It’s across from the 7-Eleven where we’d always stop to get Gatorades and trail mix after a track day. Max never told me she had friends who lived there.

I copy the link to the picture of them all stuffed into the clown truck, then pull up JoJo’s freshly saved number and send it along.

EL: I think I found something

The dots appear and disappear a few times, long enough for me to anxiously scarf down a whole slab of Mom’s garlic bread. Then she replies.

JoJo: What, the guy with the knockoff Iron Man beard? Is that Skeezy Riley?

EL: Maybe. They definitely hung out, but I never met him

JoJo: I bet she wanted to spare you from suffocating on his body spray. Look at him, you know he smells like patchouli and manstank

EL: He definitely does

JoJo: So …

JoJo: When can you pick me up tomorrow morning?

It’s flattering that she’s ready to ride at dawn for me (or like, 10:00 a.m.). Though it’s also possible—probable, even—that she’s a new girl in a small town with no car, and is just incredibly bored. Either way, I hide my smile by stuffing more garlic bread into my mouth until I can get my face under control. Then I ask my parents, who are busy chewing silently, “Can I take the car tomorrow morning?”