“Um... I think the people that owned it before me probably changed it,” I say.
“When did you buy it from them?”
“Er... nine or ten years ago.” I won’t mention that it was already twenty years old back then. I clear my throat. “How often are you supposed to change it?”
John raises an eyebrow. “More than once a decade. Didn’t the engine light come on?”
My cheeks darken. “There was a light on. But I thought it was just like... a warning.”
“It is a warning,” John says. “It’s a warning that something’s gone wrong with your engine.”
“Oh, you know what I mean,” I say crossly. “I thought I had more time to deal with it.”
“How long has it been on?”
“Er—a few weeks,” I say. (Twelve weeks, if I’m being exact.) “Can you fix it?”
“Yeah. Just get it towed to the shop.”
My shoulders sag. “You can’t fix it here?”
“Nope.” John wipes his hands on the hem of his T-shirt. “My buddy has a truck, you want me to call him?”
“Like a tow truck, you mean?”
John nods.
“Well... I don’t know. I can just call a towing company.” And then miss my student loan payment and eat Kraft Dinner every day for the next month.
John frowns. “Those places charge too much. Liam won’t charge you anything. He races with me out at the track. Owes me, like, twenty-four hundred in spare parts.”
“Oh.” I shift awkwardly on my feet. I want to say no, but what choice do I really have? He’s offering me a perfect solution, even if I do feel really weird about accepting it. “Well... yeah, all right. I mean, if you’re sure that he won’t mind.”
“Lemme call him,” John says.
He heads back to his own car to get his phone. I glance at my own phone while he talks. It’s 11:07 p.m. John’s poor friend is probably asleep, and who knows where he lives? If he has to drive a long way to get here, he’ll probably be really annoyed.
And I’ll miss the Wordle deadline. Midnight will come and go and my streak will be over.
That’s less important than inconveniencing John’s friend, obviously.
(But mystreak.)
“Hey, man,” John says, wandering back to me with his phone to his ear. “Do you still have that flatbed, the one Randy and I used that time? Ah, sweet. Any chance you can come pick a car up?” He listens for a moment, then laughs at something the guy says. “No, did I tell you what happened with the radiator?”
The guy on the other end of the phone says something else, and John goes silent for a while. Surreptitiously, I swipe open my phone and go to Wordle. It’s not too late. I can do this. I already know there’s an F, R, A, and S, and I know that A is the third letter. I only need one more letter. I’ll just go through every unused letter in my head and see what words I can make.
Q, R, A, F, S.
QRAFS. SQAFR.
Nope. Nonsense.
W, R, A, F, S.
SRAWF. FRAWS.
Is FRAWS a word? It sort of sounds like it could be. Something from old-timey English, maybe, like a word in a Tennyson poem. I mean, the only Tennyson poem I know is that one that Anne of Green Gables recites at the start of the movie, and I only remember a few lines of it, but the wordfrawsdefinitely could’ve been in there. It still won’t help me much, because I know the word doesn’t start with FR, but I can’t think of anything else to try.
