Page 5 of Furious

Then there was Letty Ortiz.

The moment Michelle Rodriguez first stomped on-screen in her flame-painted motorcycle boots, camo pants, and resting go-fuck-yourself face, a little lesbian lightbulb clicked on over my head. Or possibly bi lightbulb, or pan—I haven’t nailed it down just yet. When Letty slid that black Honda Civic under the cargo truck during the electronics heist, I swear eleven-year-old me had a religious experience like I’ve never had during Shabbat services at Temple Beth El. Naturally, Max was the first person I came out to (as though she hadn’t noticed that whenever I looked at Letty, the tips of my ears turned as deeply red as the Nissan 240SX Letty drove in Race Wars). My sister tucked my hair behind my burning ears, smacked a sloppy kiss on each of my cheeks, and announced, “Okay El, we’re putting this marathon on pause to watch another classic: Blue Crush. It’s gonna change your life.”

Flopping back onto the daybed, now permanently in day mode, I finally turn over the postcard. I skim my thumb across Max’s chaotic handwriting on the address lines:

Eliana Blum

15 Cider Lane

Dell’s Hollow, NC 27010

As always, the message is nearly as short as the address, just a couple of scrawled sentences:

Miss you El. I heard that song in a diner last week, the one with the snake for a necktie, and thought about you. Hey, do me a favor and tell Jolene I want my jacket back? I think I left it in the shop.

No return address. There never is, though the postmark is from Boston, sent June 1—two days ago.

I sit upright as the realization hits me.

Bursting back through the shower curtain, I practically rappel down the spiral staircase and run for my own bedroom. From the color-ordered row of mini notebooks in my desk cubby, I pull out the red one with my postcard collection tucked inside. It’s not much of a collection, just five other cards sent over the last three months, postmarked from five different cities:

Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, March 6.

Tupelo, Mississippi, March 17.

Muskogee, Oklahoma, April 2.

Great Bend, Kansas, April 10.

Boston, Massachusetts, May 1.

The cards came so quickly at first, I figured they were sent from the road, slipped into a mailbox as Max passed through town. But twice is a pattern, right? That’s what my parents say, as in: Once is a mistake. Twice is a pattern. According to the cards, Max has been stationary for over a month now.

Huh. I would’ve thought she’d land someplace in the south, or anyway, a city with a racing scene.

As the box full of trophies in the shed attest, my sister is fucking extraordinary on a track. From the moment my parents bought a used kid’s mountain bike for fifty bucks and strapped a helmet on her so she could ride easy park trails with them on weekends, Max was absolutely fearless. She moved up to a little 70cc mini dirt bike when I was still a toddler, and she qualified to compete at Loretta Lynn’s—that’s the AMA Amateur National Motocross Championship in Tennessee—a month after her bat mitzvah. Then again when she was fifteen, and sixteen, and seventeen. That last year, she took third place in her category. Some of my earliest memories are of watching Max on her (now my) white-and-yellow Husqvarna, slicing through plumes of mud and gravel I could practically taste from the stands, soaring over the jumps and trusting the track to catch her.

It was Max who got me on the track, riding the 70cc we still had in the shed back then. And look, I wasn’t bad! I did some junior events at Devil’s Paradise in Deerfield, and even won medals of my own. They’re still tacked to the corkboard above my desk, alongside my Honor Society medallion, merit medals, and a community award for Zaynah’s and my volunteer program.

Still, I could never ride like Max. I wasn’t fearless enough to keep it pinned.

Max just had it. Her coach said she did, and so did the scouts who watched her race at Loretta Lynn’s. Everyone was pretty serious about her career; her coach even suggested homeschooling so that she could compete more often and rack up enough points to apply for her professional license even sooner. She’d been racing with the pros as an A-class amateur for a while and wanted to compete full-time as soon as she graduated high school. Everybody wanted it for her.

Except my parents.

They expected her to go to college. Max fought it—I know because I heard their barely muffled shouting matches drift up through the floor while I did my sixth-grade science homework in my room—but she went in the end. Which is I guess where the trouble started between them. And when she dropped out just before her last semester, it got a lot worse. Max never told me why she left college so close to graduating, except to say, “I just wanted to go off-road, El, you know?”

I didn’t know. Even then, I was already planning for college, asking my guidance counselor questions about sports medicine and programs near-ish home. But like I said, I didn’t care, because I had my sister back.

My sister’s favorite place in the world might be behind the handlebars, but mine is on the passenger seat. Just me and Max on the R1, the sky above us blue and smooth as sea glass, my hands fisted in her jacket—

I read the nothing-message one more time:

Miss you El. I heard that song in a diner last week, the one with the snake for a necktie, and thought about you. Hey, do me a favor and tell Jolene I want my jacket back? I left it in the shop.

She means Jolene Boyd, Max’s boss for the year she lived at home. Kind of a town icon, Jolene clips around the garage she runs in heels as red as her dyed hair. Jolene only works on cars, but she’s the one who tipped off Max that a 2004 Yamaha YZF-R1 was sitting in a friend-of-a-friend’s shop for a sliver of what it was probably worth. She even loaned my sister the money to buy it (our parents certainly weren’t gonna) and let me hang around while Max used the shop tools to fix up the bike in her off-hours. As she worked, Max would recite the superbike’s stats to me like a bedtime story, over and over again, and I’d ask her to tell me them just one more time.

The R1 is my sister’s greatest treasure. She asked me to take care of it for her while she’s gone, but she’d never have left it behind if she planned to stay away for months. I guess we both thought Mom and Dad would let her come home by now.