“Sorry,” he shouts back, not sounding the least bit sorry. After a second, though, I hear Chloe yelling something I can’t make out, and suddenly Jamie’s drawing level with us, before pulling back in front, Chloe waving regally as they sail past us.
Oh no, they didn’t.
Alex’s muscles flex under my hands as he pulls on the handlebars, then we’re speeding up again and pulling out, ready to overtake.
“Alex, don’t,” I shriek, swaying dangerously to the side. “Just let them go in front if it’s that important to them.”
But Alex either doesn’t hear me, or doesn’t care, because the next thing I know, we’re passing Jamie and Chloe again… then they’re passing us. We continue in this way for the next ten minutes or so, as the tour leader guides us along the parched dirt track, which takes us through a sparse kind of forest, clouds of dust billowing up from our tires as we go. One minute we’re in front, the next they are; then we swap places and repeat the process, and by the time we reach our destination — at a rocky viewpoint which looks out onto the mountains — it’s become very clear to me that I’m not the only one who harbored dreams of riding a motorcycle in high school. Alex and Jamie obviously did too: and now that they’re here, they’re determined tomake those dreams a reality, with some weird kind of race that only they know they’re in.
Alex and I reach the viewpoint first, and he somehow manages to resist punching the air in triumph at his ‘victory’.
“What the hell was that?” I ask, dismounting and pulling my helmet off so I can give him the full force of my glare.
“What was what?” he replies innocently, unbuckling his own helmet. Underneath it, his hair is slightly damp, and his eyes very green. His bruise has almost gone now, and he looks every inch the sexy biker dude — right down to the amused smirk on his face as he looks at me.
“Oh, come off it,” I reply fiercely, tugging my fingers through my hair to try to smooth it out after the wind tore it apart. “You know exactly what I mean. You and Jamie and your little pissing contest back there.”
A short distance away, I see Jamie and Chloe pull to a stop. Chloe’s still clinging onto Jamie as if her life depends on it. Jamie doesn’t seem to have a problem with that.
I turn back to Alex, so I don’t have to look at them.
“Why are you smirking at me like that, anyway?” I say crossly. “It’s not funny, you know. You could’ve gotten us killed, driving like that.”
“I’m sorry,” he replies, looking like he’s stifling a laugh. “It’s just … well, here. See for yourself.”
He pulls his phone out of his pocket and opens the camera, reversing the lens before handing it to me.
“Oh my God, is that really what I look like?”
I stare at my reflection in the phone’s camera, horrified. My reflection stares back at me, hazel eyes shining out from the only clean spot on my face. Every other square inch of me is coated with a thin film of the reddish brown dust I’d noticed flying up from the floor of thedesert … or whatever this barren wasteland we’ve been traveling over is.
My hair, meanwhile, is so tangled by the wind I look like I’m cosplaying as Medusa — albeit a very grubby, ginger Medusa who would be spectacularly unlikely to inspire anything but laughter in her victims.
“Summer! Oh my God, look at you!”
Chloe comes strolling towards us, looking like she’s fresh from the salon. Her blonde hair has somehow managed to survive the ride intact, and it’s almost as if her skin has acquired the ability to repel dirt, because there’s barely a spec of it on her.
“Oh, wow,” says Jamie, joining us. “Look at you, Summer. Are you okay?”
Jamie also looks totally normal; as does Alex, come to think of it.
Wait: why am I the only person who looks like she’s been on one of those game shows where they tip a bucket of ‘gunge’ over your head when you get an answer wrong?
“I’m fine,” I reply, with as much dignity as I can muster. “Absolutely fine.”
“Are you sure?” asks Jamie doubtfully. “It’s just, you look—”
“Terrible!” Chloe finishes for him. “I could write my name in the dirt on your forehead.”
She looks like she’s about to try it, too, but Alex steps up to join us.
“She looks fine,” he says shortly. “It was pretty dusty out there.”
“Only because you kept trying to overtake us,” says Jamie. “You were churning up the ground with your tires.”
“Yeah, and if you’d just kept to your own pace,” replies Alex, fixing him with one of his trademark unflinching stares, “You’d have been fine.”
“Iwasfine,” says Jamie, easily. “I’m just pointing out that you didn’t need to keep on trying to over-take if you didn’t want to get dirty.”
