Spontaneous (26 page)

D
o you want to know what I dreamt about? Do you want to analyze the images that flicked across my unconscious mind? Of course you don't. No one cares about anyone else's dreams because they don't matter. Not really. The only thing that matters is what comes next.

What came next was I woke with a start, exactly where I fell asleep—in the grass, on the top of that hill. Only now I was alone. I don't know what woke me. My dizziness made the possibilities as muddy as the earth. The rain was pounding and the grass was matted and brown. Maybe even a little red, like blood, but it was hard to tell in the darkness.

“Tess,” I called out. There was a patch of forest behind me and I pulled myself to my feet so I could get a clear view of it. I didn't spot anyone sneaking away or crouching behind a tree for a whiz.

“Tess!” I called again, louder this time, then took a step and
slipped. The wet grass sent me zipping down the hill. I had enough wits to slow my momentum by digging my bare heels into the ground and when I reached the bottom, I rolled into a patch of mulch, and lay there for a moment on my stomach, breathing in its sour earthiness. It worked like smelling salts, slapping me fully awake. I stood, but I didn't bother to wipe myself off.

“Tess!” I yelled, as loudly as I could, and I ran toward the hotel. I tried the emergency exit, but it was locked, so I circled around to the front of the building and passed through the parking lot. Amid the sea of dorky Priuses was a beacon of cool.

A Tesla.

There was only one person in Covington I knew who drove a Tesla. Sure enough, Rosetti was sitting behind the wheel, her face revealed with each pulse of the wipers.

“Tess!” I yelled once more, but I yelled it at the car, and it was the first time I noticed the similarity in the names.

The headlights flicked on and the Tesla crept toward me. I didn't budge. When it was a few feet away, it started to turn, trying to sneak around me, but I moved back in front of it and with a hand sliding along the curve of the hood, I made my way to the driver's side door and banged on the glass.

“Did you see her?” I asked. “Did Tess come this way?”

The window eased down and I got a good look at Carla. I'm calling her Carla now for a good reason. In the glow of the dashboard lights, she didn't look like Special Agent Carla Rosetti of the FBI. She looked like Carla, a woman who was wearing her hair up and had a smear of eye shadow across her lids. Lavender, to match her dress.

“What did you say?” Carla asked.

“Tess,” I told her. “She was with me, and then she was gone. Did you see her leave?”

I leaned in to check if Tess was maybe a passenger in the car, and as I did, I heard music coming from the speakers. It was like a low-volume dance party in there. I didn't see my friend but I noticed that Carla wasn't looking at me. With her chin bobbing to the beat, she was staring through the windshield at the hotel.

“People have been coming and going all night,” she said. “It's quite an event.”

That's when I realized I'd seen the dress Carla was wearing before. When I was stalking her online, I'd noticed it in a series of wedding photos. It was the bridesmaid dress she'd worn once. To a friend's wedding. A good friend? An old friend? A former friend? I had no idea.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“Stakeout,” Carla said. “Making sure everything is on the up-and-up.”

“But you're not even an FBI agent anymore, are you? I mean, Meadows seemed to indicate that—”

I stopped short because I spotted taillights nearby, moving on the far end of the lot toward the road that snaked away from the hotel along the edge of the gorge. There was no engine roar to accompany the lights. It was one of the Priuses, carrying someone away from prom.

“That could be Tess in there!” I shouted, pointing. “We should follow her. We can't let her get away.”

As I started moving toward the other side of the car, the sound of locks engaging stopped me in my tracks.

“I'm not going anywhere,” Carla said. “This is where I need to be.”

“There's nothing here if Tess isn't here,” I explained as I stepped back toward the driver's side window. “We need to catch her. We need to make sure she doesn't leave.”

“I am not. Going. Anywhere.” Carla's voice was full of insolence and her eyes remained glued to the hotel.

Thirty-six. Again, that's how old I had calculated Carla to be. Which isn't old, I know, but it's twice my age. If she were the Jane Rolling of her class, she could be my mom. By that logic, she could be a grandma. Yet, in truth, I know she would never have let any poopy diapers slow down her career. It was a career full of accomplishments, of busting baddies and making the world a better place. Admirable. Incredible, even, especially for a woman in a field dominated by men. Yet here she was, sitting in a hotel parking lot, on a “stakeout” of a prom. I can't say I had her entirely figured out, but the things I was discovering scared me. For too long, I had dreamt of being like Carla. Now I legitimately feared it was my fate.

Consider this: Back when I was in elementary school, I couldn't possibly imagine what it was like to be in middle school. Then middle-school me couldn't fathom my high-school incarnation. But at that moment, staring at Carla, I was staring at my future. Which was full of anger. Suspicion. Regret.

“Tess,” I pleaded.

“That's the problem with your generation,” Carla said, finally turning to me. “You assume everything should be given to you simply because you want it. But when you get what you want, do you appreciate it? No. You take a selfie and move on to something else. Entitled. Little. Brats.”

“Tess,” I said. “Tess.”

Carla stuck a finger out the window and rain dripped off the purple-polished nail. As she pointed at the taillights from the Prius that had briefly paused at the edge of the lot before turning onto the road, Carla said, “Fuck Tess.”

“What?”

“Fuck. Tess.”

Really?
Really?
Oh, she should have known better than that. I had suffered needles, concussions, dead boyfriends, and flip phones for this woman. Now she expected me to stand there and listen to that shit? Did she not realize I was a girl with absolutely nothing left to lose and daily training in Krav Maga?

My training had served me well. I stepped forward, swiped, and got a hold of that finger. For a moment, I felt like my uncle's dog must've felt after he caught a squirrel he'd been chasing for months around the backyard birdfeeder. As in,
Um . . . I actually did it? Can I possibly go through with this?

When Carla tried to wiggle her hand free and grunted, “You pathetic little child,” the answer became a resounding
You bet your sweet bippy I can.

I bent the finger back with mighty force. And it worked. Man, did it work.

“You are gonna get out of that car,” I told her.

Which was a foregone conclusion, given how much pain she was obviously in. “Okay, okay, o—gahhh!” she shrieked.

“Now!” I ordered.

With her free hand, she disengaged the locks. I gave her finger another push and she opened the door. One more push and Carla Rosetti, former special agent of the FBI, tumbled out onto wet pavement.

I could have kicked her. I could have stepped on her back and left a footprint on her dusty-ass bridesmaid dress. But I don't think she deserved that. And I am many things, but I am not a sadist. I am, as I told Dylan once, an opportunist, and opportunity was presenting me with a seat, a steering wheel, and an accelerator (or whatever the fuck you call a gas pedal on an electric car).

W
anna guess the last time I'd driven a car? No? Okay, then I'll just tell you.

It was the day I got my license. On a bright summer morning after sophomore year, I saddled up with the evaluator guy in Mom's Subaru. I adjusted the mirrors, drove a few blocks, parallel parked, used the turn signals, pulled back into traffic, made a few left hand turns, and returned to the DMV lot. The guy checked off some boxes on a sheet and shook my hand. Twenty minutes later, some glossy-eyed lady gave me a glossy license with a glossy-eyed picture of me on it, and I told Mom, “See, I can do it. Now drive me home.”

Nearly two years ago, in other words.

Goes without saying that I wasn't quite ready for NASCAR, but I figured I could at least catch up to a computer-navigated sedan that was obliged to follow all traffic laws. So I stepped on the accelerator and the Tesla's motor hummed in satisfaction. The car
had been waiting its entire battery-powered life for a moment like this, and it was a real champ handling the tight curve from the parking lot onto the road that snaked away from the hotel. Like that, I was in hot pursuit of those taillights.

Now I know what you're thinking.

Oh, you poor dope. Did you really believe Tess was in that Prius? It could have been anyone in there, right? Didn't you suspect it was more likely that something else happened to your friend? That some other, more terrible fate befell her?

Maybe I did, but I was only willing to accept one scenario at that point. I was focusing on the long odds, on the possibility that Tess had slipped off without saying good-bye because good-byes are a monster. Fuck good-byes and their gripping claws and endless slobber. I never planned to say good-bye to Tess and I assumed she never planned to say good-bye to me. But maybe Tess planned to leave me behind, to set off on a quest to fix this thing that not even the
professionals
and
adults
were capable of fixing. So feel free to pity me for chasing that sliver of hope, but please understand that I wasn't chasing a good-bye. I wanted to leave with Tess. There was nothing for me in Covington without her.

The stereo was still spitting out music, a god-awful tune where some woman kept hollering, “Everybody dance now!” Like a Navy SEAL changing the clip on an assault rifle, I ripped Carla's phone from the USB jack and swapped in mine.

“Play Drive, Fucker, Drive!” I told Siri as I hugged another curve.

The playlist was on shuffle and kicked things off with a song that didn't have any swears but had the throbbing beat I needed.
It spurred me on and I drove, drove, drove. Faster than . . . well, faster than that Prius. I wasn't looking at the miles per hour or even the dash for that matter. I was laser-focused on those taillights growing brighter and wider in front of me. I didn't even roll up the window, which was letting the rain whip against my face and shoulder.

That rain! Oh, that fucking rain was pounding so hard that the wipers had trouble keeping up. I let the taillights be my guide and I had to trust that the Prius's cameras and GPS knew where the road was because I could barely see any lines. I did know there was a cliff out there somewhere, skirting the edge of the pavement, and one false move would send me and my vehicle into the Patchcong River Gorge. I was trying not to think too much about that, though, because soon I was close enough to see more than the taillights, to make out a muddy silhouette illuminated by the sparkly lights inside the car.

I lay on the horn. I would have flashed my brights but I didn't know where my brights were and all my concentration was on that passenger, on making that passenger holler to the robot chauffeur, “Prius! Prius, my boy! It appears someone is tailing us. Would you be a sport and kindly stop so that I may tell this motorist to, how shall I put this,
go suck a dong
?”

But the Prius didn't kindly stop or even slow down, and when my incessant honking didn't make the passenger turn around, lean forward, or do much of anything, I considered a more drastic measure: Some bumper-to-bumper action. A love tap, if you will.

Self-driving cars are sticklers for safety, so I figured the Prius
would have to pull over if it sensed danger, and I accelerated until I was tailgating it like a world-class asshole. Only problem was, I didn't trust myself to finish the move. What if I tapped too hard? Would it send the Prius over the edge? What if I lost control? Where would that send me?

As much as I thought I was ready to accept any fate the world threw my way, I wasn't ready for death, and this moment proved it. Death was there if I wanted it. All I had to do was jerk the wheel and say “fuck this noise forever” and dive hundreds of feet down into the gorge. But I wasn't even willing to risk doing that by mistake.

I was determined to survive. So Tess was right when, after the crash with the Daltons, she had declared me a survivor. Not that I deserved to be. I couldn't understand why, of all people, I had made it this far. Why on earth was Mara Carlyle the one who was allowed to keep on going?

I took a breath, eased off the pedal, and fell back a few car lengths. Meanwhile, the singer on the stereo pleaded:

I'm right over here, why can't you see me? Oh-oh-oh.

I'm giving it my all, but I'm not the girl you're taking home. Oo-oo-oo.

I keep dancing on my—

I pulled the plug on my phone because those lyrics were a bit too on the nose, wouldn't you say? As I reached forward to turn the stereo off, I finally noticed the blinking lights on the dash. Even
now, I'm still ashamed I didn't notice them earlier, especially the big red one that lit up a display of the battery power:

0
MILES LEFT. CHARGE NOW
!

On cue, the car let out an electronic sigh, an okay-I've-had-about-enough-of-this-for-the-evening-now-get-to-walking kind of noise. Then it went dark. Every light and everything else that whirred and hummed cut out. No matter how hard I pressed the pedal, the car wasn't going to go any faster. All that was left was momentum and momentum was not enough.

So the Tesla slowed down as the Prius pressed on. I had no lights of my own, or even wipers, so I stuck my head out the open window and guided the car into a parking area for a viewpoint along the road. That enigmatic silhouette, that dark shape that could have been male or female, that could have been any one of the kids who'd attended prom, got smaller and smaller, and those taillights, burning red like little flames, followed the turns in the road and escaped into the rainy night.