“How did it go?” she asks.
“Oh.” My cheeks grow hot. “I don’t know. Fine, I guess. The things I didn’t like, anyway. Didn’t make it to the other list.”
“Ah.” She smiles. “Well. Something to think about on the way home, then.” She steps back so I can get through the door. “Take care, now.”
23
Crsswre Ltd
When I get home, I park my mom’s car in the garage and then stand pointlessly in the kitchen for five or ten minutes. Both my parents are out, but the house still feels oppressive, like someone is watching me.
It’s freezing outside, barely above zero, but I put on a pair of gloves and head out onto the street. My parents live in one of those ridiculously expensive suburbs where every house is large and fancy and almost exactly the same. Everyone who lives here tries to personalize their lawns with these stupid garden flags with cheesy slogans on them like “LIVE LAUGH LOVE” and “MY GARDEN IS MY HAPPY PLACE.”
The one on our lawn says “GIVE GOD YOUR WEAKNESS AND HE’LL GIVE YOU HIS STRENGTH.” Lily bought it for my mother as a Christmas gift.
The kids at the house next door are playing hockey in their driveway. They wave at me as I pass. I can see in their faces that they want to come talk to me. They love asking me questions about racing. I look away before they can say anything. I just don’t have it in me today.
I keep walking, but it seems like every child in the neighborhood is outside, despite the cold. This is the problem with suburbs. You can’t get away from people, ever. Even the hikes nearby are always packed.
At the very end of the street, there are three lots for sale. They’re ugly but mercifully empty. One of them has a single scraggly tree. I sit down on the frozen ground and lean against it, but the angle makes my hip ache. After a minute, I think,Fuck it, and lie down right on the ground, using my scarf as a makeshift pillow.
The sky is a very pale, even gray. I almost wonder if it might snow. I hate being cold, but I do love snow. Especially at Christmas. When I was in London with Travis over Christmas, it snowed almost every night. He lives on one of those quaint, iconic London streets that could be in a movie or something. It had actual cobblestones, and everyone put Christmas lights up, and on the next street over, there were hundreds of lights strung between the houses, crisscrossing over the street. Every night, I’d go to the coffee shop and get a peppermint mocha, and I’d walk back under the lights with snow falling down, like some damn Hallmark Christmas movie come to life. If I’d ever let Travis come with me, it would have been exactly like one.
He always offered to come, and I always felt guilty saying no. But how stupid was he, thinking that wouldn’t look suspicious? It’s not a friend thing, flying halfway across the world to spend Christmas with someone and then walking under damn twinkly lights with them every night.
I exhale heavily, watching my own breath dissipate into the sky. Thinking about Travis so much is depressing. Is that what therapy is supposed to do? Depress you more?
If Travis and I were still together, I would text him that.
I guess that’s something else for the “things I liked” list. It was nice having someone to text all the time. I never was big on texting with old girlfriends. It always felt like a production with them, like it had to be a whole conversation, with a start and middle and end. But it never felt like that with Travis. I could send him off a random text after a race, and a few hours later, he would text back. Sometimes it was a response to what I’d said, or just something else random. Our schedules were so different, he never expected me to text back right away, and I never expected him to text me back right away. But it was nice to have someone to send my random thoughts to. And most nights, when we weren’t in the same place, we would end up texting for a while. Nothing deep or groundbreaking, just talking about our days, or whatever.
Sometimes it felt pretty cool, though. Almost like talking to a celebrity. I would watch F1’s press conference and he would give some bullshit non-answer to the reporters, then later he would tell me that yes, he was pissed off at Mahoney for causing that crash. Or yes, he did think he deserved that five-second penalty for the incident with Josh Fry.
Nobody else knew how he really felt. Nobody but me.
I sort of felt... I don’t know. Special, or whatever, when I was with him. Like, all the other F2 drivers were trying to get to F1, and wondering what it would be like, and sometimes I wanted to tell them, no, they were wrong about this or that. I knew what it was really like, because Travis told me everything.
It’s weird to realize now, but Antony Costa was one of the only F2 drivers I ever talked to about Travis. I didn’t tell him anything about us dating, obviously, but he knew that we were friends. I’m not even sure how it happened. I think I just mentioned Travis’ name one time, and then later Antony asked me a question abouthim. Antony was one of those nice guys who remembered little things about people. And it was kind of fun, talking about Travis to him. It was kind of nice that someone knew that we were friends.
I wonder, if Antony had lived, if we would have become better friends. We were chatting more and more the last year or so. He told me when he broke up with his girlfriend, and he was the second person I told when I got a call from Crosswire Racing about coming in for a “chat.”
The first was Travis. To be fair, he was sitting right beside me when it happened. It was one of the rare weekends we both had off, and I was at his place in London, sitting cross-legged on his bed while he made coffee in the kitchen. My phone went off as he came back into the room. I groaned as he sat down beside me.
“Who’s calling?” I complained. “It’s, like, five a.m. on a Saturday.”
“It’s eleven thirty on a Sunday,” Travis said. “You want your phone?”
“Mm.”
He handed it to me, and the caller ID said CRSSWRE LTD.
“Fuck.” I put my coffee aside, spilling a quarter of it on myself and another half on the bedside table. “It’s Crosswire. Fuck.”
“Don’t say that when you answer,” Travis said.
My fingers were shaking as I pressed Accept. Getting a call from Crosswire as an F2 driver was like—I don’t know, getting a call from the queen, or something. I wish I remembered the details, but it all sort of happened in a blur. The man on the phone was one of the higher-ups at Crosswire Racing, and I remember him saying they were impressed with the season I’d had, and asking if I wanted to come in for a chat about my future. I remember Travis shoving a piece of paper and pen into my hands so I could write down the time and date. I remember saying “Holy shit” about ahundred times after I hung up. I remember Travis grinning as he watched me pace the room.
“They’re going to ask you to be their reserve driver,” he said.
