“This is my karmic payback for not figuring out the whole psycho-stalker thing sooner, right?”
I try to move the car back onto the road and its tires skid. Smoke flies up from beneath them.
“Okay, little car, you are protesting roads. They are death traps for animals. They are environmentally unsound impervious surfaces that cause runoff. I understand this. But could we protest in the summer?”
I try to back up again.
One of my tires falls into the gutter thing on the side of the road.
My whole body shakes. I try to move the car. It lurches to the side.
Okay. Two of my tires are now in the gutter on the side of the road.
“Yoko! Do not do this to me!”
Wait. I’ve named the car. Why Yoko? I have no idea. Yoko was always there for John, unlike the way the Subaru is here for me.
“Come on, Yoko. Let’s imagine there’s no gutter. It’s easy if you try. No empty air below your tire. Above it only car.”
I put it in reverse. I put it in forward. I try to rock the stupid car back and forth. I shut off the Green Day. Maybe Yoko doesn’t like Green Day?
“I hate Maine!”
I smash my fist against the steering wheel.
The horn blares, probably scaring all the little squirrels in the woods. I don’t care. I hit it again.
“Stupid, stupid Maine,” I mutter and bang the steering wheel another, time and then another until red marks start showing up on the sides of my hands.
Things are so not good. The sun is going down. It’s freezing out. My car is all stuck and tilted like everything in the world is somehow horribly skewed and wrong, which I guess it is.
I mean, I am in Maine in a car stuck on ice.
I am beating up Yoko, which is just so wrong.
And I can’t use my cell phone.
Why? I forgot to charge it.
Could life be worse?
I try to move again. The car lurches but slides right back.
The air screams of burned-rubber smell.
How ridiculous.
“I hate ice!”
I smash my head against the steering wheel and that’s when I start to cry, bawl really. I cry and cry and cry. Because I’m stuck on the ice and my dad is dead and my mom sent me here, without her, where there are people who seem normal but are capable of suddenly believing in pixies, and I miss Charleston and warm air and flowers and roads that have no ice on them.
I used to be the type of person who was always in motion, always doing things, writing letters, running through the streets, laughing with my friends, moving. Always forward. Moving.
Then I got stuck. My dad died and the only words I hear are death, deadly, stillness. To never move. No forward. No backward. Just stuck. Gone forever, like my dad, a blank screen on the computer, an old photograph in the hall with no spirit in it, an ice patch on a road to nowhere, nothing. Just gone.
The sun is setting and it’s only five o’clock.
How do people live here? It should be against the law to live anywhere that the sun sets so early. If I were a dictator I would totally make that law. Since I am not a dictator, I stumble into the cold with one of the flares from Betty’s emergency kit and light it. I check out under the tire. I get back in the car.
Someone knocks on Yoko’s window.
I jump in the seat and scream. I probably would have hit the ceiling but I’m wearing my seat belt. I cover my face with my hands, horrified. Someone raps on the window again. Finally, finally I get enough nerve to look.
Nick Colt stands next to my car, all casual, like standing in the ditch is part of his everyday routine. I put down the window.
Cold air rushes in. I shiver.
“What are you doing here?” I ask, stunned. He saw me scream. He looks like he thinks it’s all funny, his cheek twitching like I’m some big joke.
“Is that any way to greet your rescuer?”
He smiles. His smile is perfect.
“I’m sorry. I’m just— Oh, I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” I shake my head. “I’m freaked out. I’m sorry.”
“Obviously.” His voice is steady and low.
I wipe at my face. “I’ve never driven on ice before. Back home I’m a perfectly good driver.”
“I’m sure you are.”
“I am. I am a very competent person.”
“I’m sure.” He has a dimple on his left cheek when he smiles.
I force myself to look away from the cute boy, look away from the dimple. “Really. And I don’t usually scream when people knock on my window, either.”
I start to open the door but he puts out both his arms to hold it shut.
He glances at the woods up the road a bit. “Stay in your car, Zara.”
“We’re not going to be able to get it unstuck. You’ll have to give me a ride to my grandmother’s house.”
“It’s better if you stay in the car.”
I glare at him. Things shift inside me. What a bossy jerk. “I can decide if I should stay in my own car or not.”
“Let me try to push you out. It’s better for both of us if you can drive your car home,” he says, looking up the road again.
This time I follow his gaze. My gasp rips through the quiet. A shadow leaps off the road and disappears into the trees. Oh my God. “Was that a man up there jumping into the woods?”
Something flashes in Nick’s brown eyes. Anger? Will? I don’t know. God, I don’t know anything. “It was nothing. Put up your window. Put your car in neutral. I’m going to try to push you out.”
“But the man up there. He could help us?”
“There was no man up there.”
His jaw tightens.
I swallow. “And if he wanted to help he wouldn’t be jumping into the woods, right?”
“Right.”
“Okay,” I say. “Fine. But there was a man.” My voice comes out angry and raw and then I add, “You aren’t strong enough. This is a heavy car. It’s a Subaru.”
“I know it’s a Subaru, Zara. Just let me try.”
He glances up at the woods again. The tension in his shoulders eases a bit and then he reaches into the car and touches my cheek. His voice comes out much softer. “You were crying?”
I jerk my head away, late, just a little too late. His fingers feel like electricity against my cheek, like a magnet I can’t be near.
“I don’t cry,” I lie, and start to put up my window.