Page 16

Sixteen

Now

The Subaru spins almost a complete three-hundred-and-sixty degrees. We screech to a stop in the breakdown lane in a cloud of burnt rubber and something that smells distinctly mechanical. I’m honestly not sure how I stopped us.

Autopilot for the win, I guess.

I also have no idea how we missed the deer. I swear I saw a tuft of white hair as we spun out but there’s nothing in the road, living or dead.

I smash the gas pedal to the floor and we take off again. If I can put some distance between us, maybe I can find a driveway to hide in before he can catch up.

Jena’s spewing a string of fuck s without breathing between them. I reach over and take her hand. “Are you okay?”

She grips it so tight I’m going to lose circulation to my fingers. “Yeah. Did a fucking deer just hit us?”

“As if tonight isn’t strange enough.”

The speedometer climbs past fifty before I can bring myself to look in the rearview mirror. Reverse lights fill the road behind us. The Bronco makes a U-turn and the roar of their engine tells me we won’t have time to hide before he’ll be on us again.

The steering wheel jerks under my hands, and a heavy clunk comes from somewhere beneath me, pulling my attention from the mirror. My check engine light blinks on and I groan. What the hell did they do, knock loose an axle?

Jena looks down, like she’ll be able to see through the floorboards. “What the hell was that?”

“No idea.”

I half expect the engine to start smoking or the car to blow up, but it doesn’t. We keep going, but the check engine light stays on. Are we leaking fluid of some kind? I don’t know enough about cars to wonder at the issue, but I know that light is the least of my worries.

My back window fills with high beams again.

This time, instead of fear, rage hits first. Maybe I’m all feared out. Maybe my body can only handle so much panic before it turns into something else. Regardless, that taut string of my patience reaches its limit and snaps.

I grit my teeth. “Who the fuck does Brandon think he is anyway? The guy got suspended for pooping in the urinals at Waldorf. His graduating GPA was 2.6 and all his electives were PE related. No fucking way does he win tonight.”

I sit up straighter, my mind spinning with a plan.

“What are you going to do?” Jena asks, sounding more nervous than she did a second ago. Maybe I sound as on edge as I feel.

“I’m not letting that dirtbag threaten me. Take the wheel.”

“ What?! ”

I reach down and hit the button for the seat adjuster. The driver’s seat slides back until my foot slips away from the gas pedal. I unbuckle my seatbelt and scoot to the edge of my seat to maintain my speed, then hit the cruise control. I lock it down at eighty-five. “You heard me. Take the wheel at the next straightaway.”

“You’re actually scaring me right now.”

“I’m about to scare him too.” I reach for her hand again and squeeze it. “He needs to be stopped, and I have a plan. But I can’t do it and drive at the same time. I need you to help me.”

I guide us around a bend. There’s a long straightaway that follows. When she doesn’t answer me, I glance over. She gapes at me in the darkness. I hold her stare for as long as I can without driving off the road, and she groans.

“Dammit… Fine!”

She unlatches her seatbelt and grabs the wheel with one hand, holding it straight, and I all but dive into the backseat. She slips one leg over the console, and the second she’s more on the left side of the car than the right, I lean forward and grab the wheel from the backseat so she can fully get into the driver’s seat. She switches off cruise control just as we hit the next curve. The momentum of the turn throws me against the rear door.

The back of my head smacks the window with a thud. “Ah, fuck.”

“Are you okay?” Jena asks, sparing a glance over her shoulder before her eyes are back on the road.

I rub the sore spot and sit up on the edge of the cluttered backseat. “Yeah. All good.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Teach him a lesson about tailgating.”

One good thing about the Bronco driving so close is that I don’t need my phone’s flashlight to see back here. The mess in my backseat is bathed in blistering white high beams. I duck my head to keep the worst of it out of my eyes and start to rummage for something heavy.

The plan is simple: throw stuff at him until I spiderweb the windshield.

If he can’t see us, he can’t chase us.

Bonus points if I shatter it entirely.

I dig through piles of dance team workout clothes, binders from school projects, and discarded Dutch Bros cups until my gaze lands on the big donation box I forgot to drop off. A box full to the brim with Chef Boyardee, Spam, and canned peas. I immediately imagine a shower of metal cans hurling through the windshield and into his stupid surprised face.

Perfect.

I gather up an armload of cans.

“Brooke, I don’t think this is a good idea,” Jena says. “We’re going too fast. You’re going to get hurt.”

I lean into the space between the front seats. “I’ll be fine. I’m just going to donate a few things,” I say, brandishing my weapon. Spaghetti sauce. The big can.

From this angle, I can see her eyes go big. “Brooke…”

“This will work. I promise.”

She groans and takes a turn that pushes me into the side of the passenger seat. “We’re going a thousand miles an hour on a shit highway, and you want to fling stuff out the window at the car behind us?”

“Absolutely not. I want to throw it from the sunroof.”

She glares at me.

“Do you have a better plan?” I ask.

“Yes! We keep going until we get service again, and you give him what he wants.”

What? I wait for her to say more, because no way is she suggesting I actually confess. Jena slips into silence and my grip tightens around the metal can in my palm.

“You want me to bow down to Brandon Heck and tell the cops I had something to do with what happened to Claire? Are you out of your mind?”

“No, I want you to tell the cops whatever you have to say to get us out of this, and then take it back later. Tell them you were under duress, that he was going to run us off the road if you didn’t make up a story. I’ll vouch for you. At least it’ll get him off our damn backs. Literally.”

I want to shake her. “That’s not how the law works, Jena. You can’t confess and then take it back. The police will have questions. They’ll reopen the case. And when word gets out that I admitted to some nonsense, it’ll be all anyone ever talks about. I could lose my spot at Yale. My dad could lose his seat on the bench if anyone so much as whispers that he may be involved. Hell, my mom might even get fired from the school, and then we’ll be no better than the Heck family. And it’ll all be because of that fucker back there.” I stab my finger at the back window. “Do you really want me to blow up my entire life? Because fighting back seems like a much better option. This is self-defense.”

I press the button to open the sunroof and wind rushes through the car, drowning out whatever Jena says next. I don’t have time to argue with her. Of course she’d think fake-confessing is the way to go. If she were the one being harassed, she’d shed some tears in a police station, maybe share a well-timed video of us being rear-ended while on the road, add a little help from my dad, and she’d be on her merry way, living out her culinary school dreams without any fallout.

I know. She’s done it before.

Because nobody cares what the Howtons do. Nobody cares what kind of drama she gets into. It’s not the same for me.

Everyone loves to see a prominent public family topple, and in this county, the Goodwins have the furthest to fall.

My hair whips around me as I pop my upper body through the sunroof. The wind forces tears to my eyes and I blink them away as fast as I can. The Bronco looms behind me, but I can’t see inside past the headlights. Not that I need confirmation. Only one person would be stupid enough to pull this shit.

I grip the first can, throw my arm back, and let it go. The can flies toward their windshield, but the Bronco dips to the left and it bounces off the side view mirror and vanishes into the darkness.

Fuck.

I toss the cans in my arms one by one, but somehow he manages to dodge all of them. I slide back down into the car to reload, barely holding back a scream of frustration.

“Brooke, wait! This is so not a good idea,” Jena yells, the second I’m back inside.

“When you come up with a solution that doesn’t involve me blowing up my whole life to make the Heck family feel better, I’m all ears. Until then…” I pop back through the sunroof and try again.

This time I anticipate the swerve and aim a little more to the left. The can hits metal, not glass, bouncing off the top right of their windshield frame. The next can misses the Bronco entirely.

Fuck my life.

I slide back through the sunroof and snatch up an armload of canned green beans and ravioli. Watch that fucker dodge all of these, rapid fire.

“Brooke!” Jena shouts.

I pause, crouched to pop up through the sunroof again. A can almost tumbles over my elbow, but I catch it. “What?”

“What if you make him crash? You could end up in even more trouble. We need to find a different way to stop him.”

“A broken windshield is how we stop him. And if he crashes, he brought this on himself.”

I hop back through the sunroof. My face stings as my hair whips me in the face. I hurl one can after another at the Bronco, and when they swerve to avoid them, I aim for where I think they’ll swing back. One can misses. The second glances off the top of the windshield. The third hits the hood and bounces straight over the car. The fourth hits dead on, but it doesn’t damage the windshield. My arms start to ache.

The Bronco slows, dropping back a bit, and I hurl my last two cans at the same time with every bit of strength I have left in me. They soar through the air and hit one after another.

The first spiderwebs the glass.

The second goes straight through and into the passenger side of the cab.

The Bronco slams its brakes and suddenly there’s a hundred feet of space between us. I cheer, throwing my arms in the air, and drop back into the Subaru.

“I did it! I fucking did it! They’ll have to stop now!”

I look out the back window. The Bronco’s headlights disappear as we round the next corner. I wait several long seconds, but they don’t reappear.

A hysterical laugh bubbles out of me and I scramble into the passenger seat. “We got him!”

Jena grins and lets off the gas. “Maybe. He might be back.”

“Not before we’re out of reach. He can only drive so fast on this highway, especially if he has to stop to kick out the windshield. There’s no way he’ll catch us before we can find help. Maybe a house with a landline, or we can—”

Jena’s still slowing, but we round the next S-turn going at least thirty miles an hour over the limit, and halfway through the curve, we blow past a police cruiser parked in a dirt turnaround by the side of the road. Red and blue lights flicker to life behind us. Followed by a siren.

“—get arrested,” I mumble.