Page 4 of Furious

CHAPTER TWO

El

Once upon a time, the 2004 Yamaha YZF-R1 was superbike royalty. I’ve tattooed its stats on my brain the way a football fan memorizes their favorite player’s … ball speed or whatever (I don’t football). A 998cc, liquid-cooled, short-stroke, twenty-valve, in-line four-cylinder engine capable of producing 180 horsepower at an absolutely wild-for-the-times 12,500 rpm. A narrower motor, valve angle, fuel tank, and frame compared to the 2003, and massively strong. Fifty-six damn degrees of cornering clearance.

Not that I’ve ever actually tested the capabilities of this bike. At least, not alone.

Despite the dust motes that speckle the air, the liquid silver side panel in front of me is spotless. It’d better be. I polish the R1 every other week, even though it hasn’t seen its owner for three months now, roll it backward and forward to rotate the tires, run the engine, and service the chain—the reason I’m on my knees in a storage shed in North Carolina summer weather, soaked to my elbows in kerosene and sticky with chain spray.

I’ve just finished wiping the extra lube from the links when my phone bleats repeatedly. That alarm means I’ve got an hour and fifteen to clean up, change, and clock in at Putt by the Pond. Mopping my forehead sweat with my equally sweaty bicep, I scoop up my supplies and step carefully around the other dirt bike in the shed to put them away. My hand-me-down Husqvarna leans forlornly against its kickstand; probably it feels abandoned. It’s been in the dark for just as long as the R1, but I’ve got too much going on to get to Devil’s Paradise, our local motocross track. Between my part-time job at the local mini golf, go-kart, and pinball parks, the two-evenings-a-week volunteer program I cofounded for the sake of my looming college applications—and for, like, the general spirit of humanity—plus the, you know, family stuff, the summer before my senior year has been … complicated.

I set my supplies on the makeshift workbench I cobbled together from a row of leftover paint cans with Max’s old skateboard propped across the lids. Seems like everything in the shed is my sister’s old something. There along the back wall: milk crates full of her paperbacks and comic books and old concert T-shirts. Bagged up in a corner: her riding gear. Carefully packed into a box behind the spare gas cans: her motocross trophies and medals, dozens and dozens of them. Everything she’s outgrown.

Except the R1.

Stretching my back, I walk out of the shed into sunshine and cicada song. I blink in the light for a long moment, basking in the damp breeze and fresh air, before padlocking the door behind me. Then I walk across the grass, past Dad’s vegetable beds, and toward the house, where the shower calls to me.

But when I slip through the screen door, I stop on the mud mat at the sight of Mom. She stands at the kitchen counter in her workout clothes with a pile of mail in hand, her shoulders stiff in that familiar way.

“Anything in there?” I ask, absolutely failing to sound chill.

With a bone-deep sigh—she already knows I know—Mom slides the postcard halfway across the counter to me. “Wash your hands before you touch anything,” she warns.

I hold my hands out in front of me like surgeons do in medical dramas, careful not to brush against the furniture on the way to the sink (and fighting the deadly urge to throw my filthy arms around Mom in her cream yoga top). I even elbow the tap on. Toweling my hands on my pink shirt, I make myself walk slowly back to the postcard.

This one’s glossy, bright blue, and says Greetings from Boston in bold bubble letters. Inside each letter is a picture of a building or a bit of skyline. As much as I want to, I can’t flip it over with Mom right there, pretending not to watch me. So I wedge it into my back pocket and announce, “I’m gonna go shower.”

“You don’t need to run off, El,” she says.

“I’m not, I just … I have work at three, and I don’t want to be late.”

“Oh. Well, good. I’m glad you’re taking it seriously. I know it’s only a summer job, but—”

“Mom, I really gotta get ready,” I cut in, keeping (I think) all traces of annoyance out of my tone even though I’ve heard my parents’ I know it’s only a summer job, but speech a dozen times since vacation started.

She reaches out as I pass, but when she can’t find a clean place to touch me, she drops her manicured hand to her side. “Want me to drive you to work? I’ll pick you up after,” Mom offers.

“Why, do you need the minivan?”

My mom’s a science teacher at the middle school, which frees up her summers. Unfortunately, it also frees up her oatmeal-colored Toyota Sienna, which I share because we’re down to two cars since Max, and Dell’s Hollow has no public transportation unless you count the little bus that carts folks from the senior center to the grocery store once a week. Plus I think my parents like being able to ask where I’m going and exactly when I’ll be back, while pretending it’s all about the car. As if I’m ever going anyplace I shouldn’t.

“No, I don’t need it,” says Mom, “but I was thinking—maybe we could grab some ice cream, bring it home for Dad?”

“I told Zaynah I’d give her a ride home, though.” My best friend, Zaynah Syed, and I applied for our jobs together at our high school’s teen employment fair this spring. It was either Putt by the Pond or the town’s exciting new Applebee’s, and I’m allergic to barbecue sauce.

Mom shifts into tree pose without meaning to, tapping her nails against the counter. “You can invite her over for ice cream, if you like. We hardly see your friends these days.”

“Oh. Sure. Okay.” I offer a little smile.

“It’s a plan, then.” She turns back to the mail, sliding a finger beneath the envelope flap of some bill. “And please use one of the beach towels to wash up. If you have to mess around in the shed, I’ve asked more than once that you not get the good towels dirty.”

Well then! Mother-daughter moment over, I guess.

I take the stairs two at a time, and though I really do have to get ready, I pause a moment before skipping the second floor with my bedroom and bathroom to head up the spiral staircase to the attic. Which is really more like a loft; this became Max’s space when she was too old to share a bedroom with her five-years-younger baby sister. She painted the squat walls and sloped wood a banana pudding yellow, so when I push through the shower curtain that hangs on a circular rail around the entrance, I always feel like a little chick inside a yolk. Even though most of her stuff’s been shifted to the shed, the room still smells like her, I swear. Like her candles from the World Market in Fayetteville, and her clothes after riding—hot engine oil, smoldering brake pads, and exhaust—and like the jalapeño popcorn we’d eat while binge-watching our all-time favorite movies.

I’m talking, obviously, about the Fast & Furious films.

It’s been a year and a half since my sister dropped out of college and came home to Dell’s Hollow. It was immediately clear how tense things were between Max and our parents, but if I’m honest, I was happy to have her back. Even after she’d moved upstairs, her curtain was never closed to me. Whenever she was having a shitty day or could tell that I was, we’d curl up together in her daybed with her laptop. We’d watch Dominic Toretto and his found family pull off increasingly improbable stunts and heists while Max lamented every custom 1969 Ford Mustang run over by a tank, and every 2008 BMW M5 thrown through a building. We’re not Car Girls™, but we share an encyclopedic knowledge of the F&F movies and their many trashed classics.