Page 24 of Furious

“But you’re not?” She sets the candle down and picks up another, patchouli and cucumber, which isn’t such a good one. Her nose wrinkles cutely.

“I’m pretty sure I’m a lesbian. Like, as much as I can be sure. Anyway, I’ve had girlfriends since, and Mom and Dad know about them. There was Danielle Pérez for a couple months, and then I dated Abby Bacon for a year and a half.” We used to joke about me, a Jewish girl, putting Bacon in my mouth, even though we never went that far. I flush a little to remember it with JoJo so close by. “I don’t have a girlfriend now, though. Um, what about you?” It’s not a slick segue, but she never did answer the question I asked outside Riley’s filthy apartment.

Done with the candles, she crosses the attic and drops down on the daybed beside me, propping herself on her elbows and tipping her head back to let the sun through the skylights shine down on her, like a satisfied cat. “No girlfriends. Not, like, steady ones. No boyfriends, either.”

“Now, or never?”

“I was pretty busy with training, and racing, and traveling with my parents and the pit crew.” Her closed eyelids scrunch for a second, but she sounds fine when she continues. “I am bi, though, and I’ve dated boys and girls and nonbinary people. But just like, casually. For fun.” Opening one eye to squint up at me, she challenges, “Is that a problem?”

“What? No, why—of course it’s not a problem,” I splutter. “Not for me.” And why would it be, Eliana, when this isn’t a date?

“Hey!” JoJo leaps off the bed, startling me when I’m already on the back foot, as Dad would say. “Does this thing work?” she asks, crouching over the Wii console on the floor beside the small TV and stand.

“Um, yeah. It’s a little old, from when I was in elementary school, but it works. I haven’t played in a while. We’ve got Mario Kart for it, though,” I say, happy enough to change the subject.

JoJo glances back at me, grinning. “How about a race?”

“Aren’t we supposed to be like, scheming right now?”

She waves her hand. “We’re excellent drivers. We can totally scheme and race at the same time.”

It takes me a few minutes to get things going, plugging in controllers and cables. While I work cross-legged on the floor, JoJo helpfully sums up our situation. “So Riley has Max’s jacket for sure, and maybe information about how to contact her. Unverified, of course. But he won’t give it to us unless we race him for it. And you said you don’t want to race the R1—”

“I can’t race the R1,” I correct, untangling the input cable.

“But I thought Max taught you?”

“She taught me to drive it. She used to take me to this abandoned half-built neighborhood development outside Dell’s Hollow, and I drove on the highway there and back. But I can’t ride it like she can. I couldn’t even race the Husqvarna like she could, and the R1 is so much bigger and faster. And I can’t lose her bike—even if we found her some other way, she’d throw me in the Boston Harbor when I told her.”

“I bet she wouldn’t,” JoJo says gently. “But okay, the point is, racing the bike is out. So we ask if Riley would accept different terms. Not bikes, but cars.”

Mario Kart loads at last, the opening theme blasting louder than I’d expected as Mario and Luigi jostle each other on-screen. “You said you have a car?” I ask, sitting beside her and handing over a Wii Wheel. “But it doesn’t run, and you don’t have a license.”

“There are some obstacles, yes,” she admits.

We choose our characters: King Boo for me, Princess Peach for her.

“So whose car is this?” Maybe I’ve made peace with the fact that JoJo is trouble—fun trouble, mostly—but I’m not about to steal a vehicle with her, even if she’d look extremely hot in Letty-style heist getup. I have the volunteering club to think about, and college applications, and good God, my parents … I don’t even want to picture the looks on their faces. It’d tear down every brick in the wall of trust that took years for me to build, painstakingly convincing them with every perfect test score and responsible choice that I wasn’t like Max even before they kicked Max out, because things had been rough between them for a while—since Max set her heart on going pro, at least. And all that time, I knew in my bones that of course I was no Maxine Blum. She’s got talent and guts, while I’ve got … prep courses and dental floss.

“It’s my car,” she insists, “because it was my mom’s.”

I look at JoJo.

She determinedly does not look back at me—just says, “Pick the Special Cup, not the Star Cup.”

I’m terrible at the Special Cup (it’s not like my dirt bike skills really transfer), but I switch courses on-screen, then carefully ask, “What kind of car is it?” as our characters materialize in the Dry Dry Ruins.

She shifts on the bed to get in driving position, and her bare leg presses hot against mine, our knees lightly overlapping. Though I expect her to, she doesn’t move hers away.

I don’t move, either.

We launch off the starting line on the green light and past the Yoshi Sphinx, zooming through the golden sand and dodging falling pillars and a Pokey while JoJo explains herself.

“It’s an AMC Hornet SC/360.”

“Is that a … fast one?”

JoJo snorts. “It is indeed.”