Page 34

Chapter Thirty-Three

Darien

I shift in my seat next to Peter, who’s grinning and waving to audience members and journalists already. I doubt Peter Albrecht has ever had anything negative published about him. The dude lost his seat in Heidelberg in what I firmly believe was the most unfair, wicked twist of fate in 2022, but not before immediately getting an offer from Revello to join Diana on their team for 2023 and onward. Like I said, it’s impossible to discount the guy. Not to mention he’s already got a Championship under his belt, because of which racing with him as my teammate was like having a caring troublemaker of a big brother. I give Peter brownie points because he could have made this injury an enormous deal, but so far he’s been more down-to-earth about it all than I have myself.

‘Hey, man!’ Peter beams, his brown curls bouncing as he reaches out and daps me up. ‘It’s hot this weekend, huh?’

‘Funny. It’s roasting,’ I correct him with a smirk. ‘Guess we gotta be ready to shred rubber.’

The abnormal heatwave sweeping though Imola is the first matter addressed in the conference, the proverbial ‘small talk’ about the weather that comes before the real stuff. It ends up being me, Peter, Andrea (ex-Revello driver, currently at Jolt Archambeau), and Formula 1 new kid Atticus Demopoulos. Atticus is a baby, only nineteen years old, racing under the Greek flag for Flashpoint, an entry-level team. He’s already nabbed points, though. He was P9 in the last race, driving what is essentially comparable to a well-furnished tractor. Naturally, the interviewer, a familiar torturer of souls named Brian Crowberry, picks on Atticus about this first.

I fight the urge to roll my eyes at Crowberry’s dumb questions and instead search for Shantal in the crowd. She’s still been parsing away at simulation programming, as she is during most of the off-time on the weekends, so I’m not sure she’ll have made it, but it only takes me a minute to find her among the reporters.

Immediately, I’m reminded of last night (and of how deeply I wanted nothing more than to give Henri a good shake). Man, I’d thought I was tripping the entire event, completely off my game, left totally speechless by Shantal, wondering if maybe, just maybe, she felt something, too. I’d have gotten an answer if it weren’t for Cristo Montalto drinking way too much.

‘And Darien. We wanted to reach out to you for a bit of a progress check, pop in and see how the arm is looking,’ Crowberry finally prods me. Ah, there it is.

‘It’s well enough that I can drive a two-hundred-mile-an-hour car without crashing into a wall,’ I quip with a subtle raise of my eyebrows. I’m not very well media trained. Even when they gave me advisers, I wasn’t much good at listening to their directions. It was a slip of the tongue, I’ll say, when I’m put on the spot.

Crowberry plays it off well with an excessive laugh. ‘We’re sure! We do have to ask, though, Darien. What’s the secret? How did you recover so quickly? Are you concerned with reinjury?’

I want so badly to yell ‘NO COMMENT’ and end the conversation right now. Reinjury? Who asks a person that? Instead, I decide I’m going to be a good kid and answer him (mostly) civilly. ‘Secret’s surrounding yourself with people who promote recovery. Choosing a circle that will encourage you when you’re in pain and you just wanna stop. Maybe keeping away from the kind of folks who try to pull you back when you want to be taking steps forward. Folks who, I don’t know, are concerned with reinjury.’

I finish off my thought with the world’s fakest smile plastered to my face.

That one gets the barest gulp out of Crowberry, and he moves on as quickly as he’d turned my way. We wrap the conference with another brief discussion on weather and tyre deg, and with that, my hour of misery is over. Mostly.

‘You know, my hair was pink, like, three years ago.’

Shantal slowly turns to me as if I’ve just declared I’ll be shaving it all off, and she’s going to be the one who does it for me. ‘ Pink? ’ she says with such conviction that I’m sure anyone standing in the hall of the motorhome can hear it.

We’re in my personal room, the door ajar to the commotion outside. I made it through the practice sessions – I did FP1 and 3 while Henri picked up 2 so I could rest. I showed up for quali, able to push hard enough to get myself into P5. It’s not a bad job. None of it was too far off from the sim prep I’d done on the Imola track, and with the new splint Celina has me wearing, I haven’t been in much pain at all. I should be completely hell- bent on gearing up for the two-hour marathon that will be my first race back.

But all I can focus on is Shantal, acutely aware of every single detail about her. The way her hair has started to sweep past her shoulders in gentle waves, with two small braids tied up on top, the glimmer of her brown lip gloss, every crease in her team T-shirt falling perfectly across her body, the slight tense of the defined muscles in her legs when she does an about-face to give me a shocked glance.

‘It looked so good, Shantal,’ I argue from where I sit on my training table. ‘I made it work so well.’

‘Whatever you say.’ She glances at my hair with concern. ‘Next thing I know, you’ll have the R9 haircut.’

I burst out laughing at that one. Her eyes are telling me I’ve certainly lost it, but it’s too funny a nod to pass off. ‘I asked my mom to get me the R9 – in the sixth grade.’

‘Don’t tell me she let you!’ Shantal yelps around a bite of her banana as she waves it in the air like a sceptre. ‘No! Your mum can’t be enabling this!’

‘She didn’t let me,’ I grin. ‘But maybe she should have, I would’ve made that work, too.’

‘Keep lying to yourself.’ She holds the banana out to me. ‘Take a bite.’

‘I ate, like, five minutes ago—’

‘Take a bite,’ she insists, and I can’t refuse. I reach over and oblige, chewing on the fruit as I hop off the table and to my feet, and we walk towards the garages.

Just outside, in the pit lane, a crowd of sponsors, celebrities and team members are starting to gather, all eyes on the main straight, a good section of track from the finish line, where Revello’s Cavaliere , their knight – a legitimate man in actual Italian armour, no kidding – has mounted his horse, with Fabrizio Revello’s own family sword in hand. The grandstands roar as the Cavaliere trots full pace on his horse before reaching the finish and slicing through a ribbon held up by volunteers at the line to deafening cheers. It’s an Imola tradition for Revello, but it strikes me as so American it’s funny.

‘That’s so “college football” of them.’

‘You do that in football?’ Shantal says in horror.

I shake my head with a laugh when I realize we’re a whole pond apart in terms of understanding. ‘American football. We’re weird. Anyway … I have a favour to ask.’

‘A favour? Or a bargain?’ she teases, tugging the shoulder of my race suit jestingly.

‘Maybe.’ I meet her eyes dead-on. ‘If I win this race – if, man, because Jolt and Revello are top form – will you do me a solid?’

‘What solid?’

I lean in so close I can count her freckles and smell the peaches from her shampoo. She raises an eyebrow with the kind of sass that makes me grin like an idiot. I gesture towards the Brazilian flag that has been hung above the car.

‘I’m going to need you to hand me that flag.’

‘For what? For your lap?’ She gapes. ‘I couldn’t. Your crew needs to do that—’

‘You are in large part the reason I’m even driving today.’ I take one of her loose curls in my fingers and brush it from her face, letting my hand – my once-bad hand – stay at her cheek for just a moment. ‘If you don’t hand me that flag, Shantal, I swear to you, I won’t do the victory lap at all. It’s you or nothing.’

‘Or nothing ?’ She stares at me in disbelief. ‘Then do me a solid.’ She gets up on her tiptoes and plants a kiss on my forehead, her jesting smile turning to one of determination. ‘Race so hard that you have no choice but to give me the chance to hand you that flag.’

I nod, acutely aware of how red I must be going, despite having my M?e’s blush-resistant skin tone. Turning pink like a middle-schooler with a fat crush right in front of said crush. I don’t have any actual words. She takes them away from me every time, even if she doesn’t realize she’s doing it.

‘You are gonna be so good ,’ is the last thing Shantal says to me before my team sweeps me away, passing me my helmet and ushering me into the car. I can still see her out of the corner of my eye on the pit wall, giving me a little wave that I return with a wiggle of my fingers. I pull on my balaclava and helmet, which now bears a new cursive script on the bottom of the back, right near my neck: Pressure Makes Diamonds .

Even as I sit down in my ever-familiar car and get out onto the track, make my slow formation lap before pulling into the grid, I can’t get my mind off the way that the hammer could possibly come down before sponsors and bosses and probably God while I pretend to race like I’m in perfect physical shape. I guess that’s the thing. I don’t need to pretend. I earned my right to come back here the hard way.

It’s easier said than done. My breath quickens when the first red light comes on overhead. It’s only been seven or eight weeks, but it feels like I’ve lived an entire lifetime in those weeks. I’ve been to hell and back. I can viscerally feel again the pain I felt when I pushed my muscles like that, pushed them in ways they didn’t want to be pushed.

But as the red lights continue to flicker on, they morph into the truck’s headlights on full blast, they get closer and closer till I’m suddenly upside down, till my arm feels like it’s been stuffed in a snowblower.

I blink, tensing both of my arms for good measure. Come on, Darien. Come on.

All five red lights go out, and I floor it, pushing all other thoughts from my mind as my car surges forward. I need to do this right. Maybe P5 is better than what we’d expected, but it’s not good enough for me.

The pack of cars is tight heading into Turn One. I already hear a distant screeching of tyres behind us that I can’t pay attention to if I want to stay on the track. I wrench it around the turn and slip past Peter, into P4.

‘You’re on the move now,’ Afonso encourages me over the radio. ‘Let’s keep it clean, keep it clean, Darien.’

I do … I keep it completely clean as I wait for the next advantageous turn to dart around the inside and get past Miguel: P3. We’re on podium places now, but that first lap has ended, and deltas between cars are growing as we enter Lap Two.

‘Only push for one more lap. Let’s just try and catch Romilly ahead,’ says Afonso.

Although we try, we can’t clear Alex Romilly in the next lap. From here, it’s going to be all about endurance as Afonso commands me to stick to Plan A – save the tyres as much as possible so we can pit a few laps after Alex and get the speed boost that comes with brand-new slicks.

Unfortunately, it’s around the time we make said pit stop that my arm decides it would like to protest.

I was fine all race, but as I manoeuvre the car out of the pit lane and back onto the track, the glancing pain I’d gotten on the sim that first run starts to streak through my arm. At first, it’s a faint throbbing, but soon, it has me gritting my teeth. I can’t concentrate like this.

‘Closing on Romilly. Delta one-point-five seconds.’

Damn it . If there’s an overtake coming, I need to be locked in. Half-ass taking a gap, and you’ll be upside down in the wall before you know it.

‘Hang on, Dar,’ I mutter to myself. ‘You got this.’

I let the machinery around me fall away and leave the pain behind me on the track, just like I’d done at winter testing. We’re on a track walk, and my two feet are on the ground, nothing but sunny Imola for miles.

Beside me, I see Shantal, her wavy hair dancing around her face as she smiles, dimples creating tiny yet perfect grooves in her cheeks. I picture her the way she was the night of Carnaval: happy, as she deserved to be all the time, comfortable. I draw my energy off the bliss I see in her eyes. I remember feeling that bliss when I got into a kart for the first time, but I also remember feeling that bliss when I saw her for the first time.

She slows my shallow breaths and quells my rapid pulse. Something about her makes me feel like she knows every corner and trapdoor of my heart, even though I’d never met her before January.

Before I can so much as process it, I’ve darted around Alex. I’m a good four seconds from the race leader, Diana. It’s a lot, but I’m not giving up. The opportunity is still there.

Shantal , I think to myself. She’s in the garage. She’s there .

I feel her hand in mine, the way it had been during those awful PTs, her eyes boring into mine with conviction.

I can’t sacrifice the chance to see her holding that flag.

Turn One of my third-to-last lap is a dance with disaster. Even though I’ve caught up to Diana from a healthy couple of doses of DRS, she’s sliding around on the inside. I’m boxed out. I need to move. I need to find myself a gap.

The second I’m able to go wheel to wheel with Diana, I cross her car on the turn exit, in perhaps the riskiest cut I’ve taken in my entire racing career. My heart is thudding in my ears. My breath is hitching. Afonso cheers into my radio, and I keep on the throttle all the way through.

It’s a fight to the finish, but none of it rivals that Turn One move.

P1.

The feeling is unreal. I pump my right fist in the air as I cross the line, and I start my victory lap much the same way.

‘He’s back, ladies and gentlemen,’ Demir says over my radio. ‘You’ve made us very, very proud today, Darien. Very proud to call you our driver.’

‘YES!’ I yell. Tears of relief? Joy? Pain? I can’t tell what they are, but they prick my eyes. ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you.’

‘We have a request for you.’ Afshin’s voice crackles. ‘Could you give us a dance at the finish?’

‘I can try,’ I laugh. The dance is an age-old joke that’s followed me around since I was a kid, and I’d copy the Brazilian footballers’ goal celebrations when I won a race. Ever since F3, I’ve gotten up on my chassis and tried my best to hit one every time I place first.

I’m thinking of which one I’ll do this time when I roll up to the fence to get my flag, and I see Shantal, and pretty much every potential dance move sprouts wings and flies straight out of my brain.

She reaches out towards me with the blue, green and yellow banner in hand. Her hair flutters in the wind generated by the cars. The sun reflects off the glittering diamond in her nose. Her cheeks are flushed pink, her eyes full of pride. She stands on her tiptoes, creasing her white Adidas shoes. I watch her shout something I can’t completely hear, watch her lips move as she smiles wider than I’ve ever seen her smile.

I can’t tear my eyes from her as she hands over the flag. In the minute that makes up that lap, I think I might be the happiest guy in the world. I’m the walking, talking embodiment of delusion, but that doesn’t matter. Her smile is more beautiful than the trophy they’ll give me up on the podium, anyway.