Page 37 of Furious

“Sure I’m sure,” JoJo answers. “Grandma’s out of the country, and the employee most likely to be working on something after hours is me. But anyway, that’s what our lookouts are for, right?”

“Right!” James cheers way too loudly, and Zaynah death-grips the steering wheel again.

Let the heist begin.

While Zaynah waits in the driver’s seat and CJ and James station themselves among the shrubs planted along the side of the garage (supposedly prepared to text us if anybody pulls up out front, but probably anxious to smash faces), Jo leads me to the gate to open the combination lock. I shine my phone light on the lock to help her, and we giggle before switching to stealth mode once the gate swings open. By which I mean ducking between the half-repaired cars and crouching down beside the towering wheel of a lifted Jeep.

“Where’s the Hornet?”

She points toward a steel-frame car shelter with a waterproof shell in the back of the lot opposite us, out of the way from the cars they pull in and out to work on. I’m tempted to break off to look at it, this piece of JoJo’s past and heart. But JoJo is already combat-rolling across the blacktop toward the back entrance to the garage, even though not a soul is outside to spot us. I hover in my squat, watching her turn over and over as gracefully as a banana going downhill with this swelling feeling in my chest. A moment later, I lower myself to the ground to join her, scraping my knees and elbows across the asphalt with every revolution.

Jo groans as, finally, we reach the building and she stands to punch in the back door code. “I think I skinned my hip back by that Camry.”

I gasp. “Oh my God, what if they sweep for DNA?”

We lock eyes, then break down in laughter, forcing JoJo to wait until the half-entered code clears and begin all over again.

Once we’re inside, it’s obvious that she was right. The garage is empty, the lights off and the neon Coca-Cola and Texaco signs mounted to the brick walls grayed out. But we can see well enough with our phone lights. JoJo punches another code into the alarm panel on the wall with plenty of time to spare. Then we pick our way around carts and creepers and a Chevy Silverado with its hood up on our way to Jolene’s office. The last time I was here—the first time I’d been in Jolene’s office, if the millionth time I’d been in the garage—I wasn’t looking for a safe. Now I see a black box the size of a mini fridge beside the filing cabinet, with a digital lock.

“You know the code for that, right?” I whisper.

“I don’t. But I’m sure it’s written down somewhere.”

“Does she have a notebook? A desk pad? We can do a rubbing, find out the last thing she wrote—”

“Chill, Detective.” JoJo laughs. “Though you’re adorable as ever in PI mode.” She plops down in a rolling chair behind her grandma’s desk, pulling out the top drawer to peer inside.

I circle the desk, scanning for anything useful on the scattered pink Post-its while floating just a little over the fact that JoJo called me adorable. I don’t find a conveniently written out string of numbers. There are neat stacks of paperwork, and two wire pen cups—one with actual pens in it, the other with multiple lipstick tubes in shades from fuchsia to bright orange to fire-engine red.

There’s the cluster of little picture frames, too, and I lean forward to look at them. Jolene and Florence a decade or so ago, sharing a whole baguette Lady-and-the-Tramp style in front of a café with a French name, possibly in France. JoJo’s mom and dad posed with what must be toddler-her at a backyard barbecue of yore. I recognize her dad, of course, but he looks younger even than I’d expect, somehow taller, and totally happy. Her mom looks just as she did in the many press photos I found in my (very rational and totally not obsessive) Googling. There’s the picture I saw of Jo and her mom that first day, and another of teen JoJo from just a year or two ago, standing on the top spot of an awards podium in a red-and-black tracksuit, hair loose and clearly helmet mussed. She looks ecstatic, smile bright and shoulders loose, totally at home on the podium.

Max was like that, too. Is like that. She belongs on a track.

“Hey, JoJo?” I ask, already regretting it, but determined to push through. “When did you fill out that application?”

“Huh?” She’s busy rooting through the middle drawer now, apparently to no avail, since she slides it closed and opens the bottom drawer.

“That application, for the F1 training program. CJ said you carry it around, and I just wondered. Did you fill it out in Charleston, or in Dell’s Hollow?”

Now, she stops to look up at me. “Um. Well, I didn’t think I had a shot at getting my license in Charleston, after—you know, after Mom.” As her eyebrows scrunch, my regret doubles and triples and quadruples; this was not the time or place for this conversation, which isn’t really my business, anyway, and is totally selfish and silly. “When we moved here, Dad and I made our deal about the volunteer program, and that’s when I thought maybe I had a shot. But I guess I didn’t want to push him too soon.”

I deliberately keep my eyebrows un-scrunched, even as I remember the afternoon we met, when she showed up at Putt by the Pond and raced me only to get out of showing up for the program. And at Devil’s Paradise, how she told me that she’d never asked her dad about going pro. Which technically wasn’t a lie, but clearly, she’s been wanting to.

“I don’t even know if I’d get in,” JoJo continues, “I just … it’s a possible future plan. Like how you fill out a bunch of college applications, even though you’re only gonna pick one school. I bet you have a list of places you’re still choosing between, right?”

“I’m applying for early decision to UNC–Chapel Hill this fall,” I correct her, “so just the one. Their sports medicine program is ranked fifteenth in North America, they’re in the top 10 percent of universities in the country, and I can get scholarships on top of low in-state tuition, if I keep my grades and extracurriculars up, so I could go right into my masters and PhD.”

“Oh.” JoJo blinks up at me. “That’s … rigorous. El”—she scoot-hops around to better face me—“is this something we need to, like, talk about? Are you—”

“No!” I nearly shout. “Oh my God no, of course not. Forget I said anything, I was just babbling. I shouldn’t be babbling during a heist, I know, but …?”

I feel the heat of her gaze on me for a moment before she shoves back from the desk, sighing. “Well, I didn’t find anything. But never fear, I bet I can hack the combo.”

“By ‘hack,’ do you mean ‘guess’?”

“Naturally.” She wheels across the office, then sits cross-legged in front of the safe to inspect the electronic lock, frowning. “Hmm, she mostly uses birthdays in her passwords… .”

“Birthdays? Really, Jolene?”