Page 22

Goodbye Yellow Brick Road – Elton John

We left Denver on a high.

I felt like Brooke had slowly, methodically and completely unpicked everything I knew about myself and the world, and reshaped it.

I’d been hiding behind Mouse for years, because other people seemed to know exactly who Mouse was, and I could fit that expectation.

It was the easy way out. But Brooke had shoved Mouse to the side, leaving me raw, exposed and completely free.

I couldn’t decide if that was exhilarating or terrifying or both.

Watching Brooke pass out at the sight of a huge needle had definitely made her feel more real, and her sulk afterward when Meredith had teased her about it just made me fall for her even harder. She was cute when she was grouchy.

The old Brooke was easy to have a crush on. This Brooke was easy to fall in love with.

Her attitude soured as we navigated out of the city and onto the highway that took us to the state border and cut through the wide-open Kansas landscape, and it amused me that I didn’t care about her wild moods anymore.

Brooke perked up when we were in cities, among crowds, or just talking to other people.

She brightened, almost visibly, and it was like I could see her pulling energy from those around us.

I, on the other hand, still loved these endless stretches of nothing. Just me and Brooke, and the Mustang, and the landscape, and the wildlife, and the sky. If I could have this forever and nothing else, I’d take it.

The cassette deck clicked, and I automatically reached for the glove box for the next one.

‘Any requests for the DJ?’ I asked.

‘Something fun,’ Brooke replied.

I pulled out a handful of boxes and set them on my lap so I could go through our choices. I had picked my favorites from the collection Brooke had amassed, and we spent enough time in the car that we had cycled through them all regularly.

‘Jessie,’ Brooke whined, while I took my time picking the next album.

‘Hang on.’

I grabbed more boxes and paused when one rattled.

‘What’s this?’ I asked, holding up a box I hadn’t seen before. It had a plain white paper insert, no album artwork, and it felt way too light. It must have been buried at the back of the glove box.

‘Oh, that’s … You can put that back,’ Brooke said quickly.

Brooke was a lot of things, but evasive wasn’t one of them.

‘Is it drugs?’ I asked, shocked.

She snorted with laughter. ‘No, it’s not drugs. Fine. Open it, if you like.’

‘I’m not going to touch your stuff if you don’t want me to, Brooke.’

‘It’s a very small car, Jessie,’ she said drily. ‘There’s no point in me hiding stuff from you.’

I watched her for another second, waiting to see if she’d change her mind, then I pulled the top of the case open with a satisfying click. Inside was one shiny bronze bullet. I didn’t touch it.

The game had changed again.

I had been going along with Brooke’s suggestions since we’d left Seattle, because it felt like she had things under control, like she knew what she was doing, and I definitely did not.

I wanted to be mad at her for keeping me in the dark – about the gun, then the plan to pickpocket, then Meredith, and now the bullet.

And I wanted to be frustrated that she still didn’t trust me. But mostly I was resigned.

‘Just one?’ I asked.

Brooke nodded. ‘It’s … insurance.’

‘I thought the gun was insurance.’

‘It is. Yeah, it is,’ she said, quietly confident, and glanced over at me. ‘I keep the bullet separate and hidden. I’m not going to do anything stupid with it, and there’s no chance of having an accident because I’m not going to even put it in the damn gun.’

A gun on its own wasn’t necessarily dangerous, I knew that, and neither was a bullet.

I didn’t like guns all that much. Having one changed how much trouble we could potentially get in.

Shouting at Brooke would be easy, if I wanted to.

We could yell at each other for a few miles while we sped down the highway, but at the end of the road there would still be a gun and a bullet in a cassette case, and accepting that now was the easy way out.

Brooke had fallen silent after her little rant, and I could feel the tension slowly smothering the car.

‘Okay,’ I said with a sigh that blew the tension away.

‘Really?’

‘Yeah. Did Meredith get this for you too?’

Brooke laughed, a little nervously. ‘All my sketchy shit comes from Meredith. You must have figured that out by now.’

‘You look a lot like her,’ I said, putting the bullet cassette back into the glove box.

‘I know. I look more like her than either Julianne or Hope. People always used to think she was my sister when we were growing up.’

‘I bet.’ I stuck a new cassette into the deck. ‘How are you related?’

‘Her dad and my dad are brothers,’ she said, her voice ticking up so I could hear her over the music. ‘Meredith’s dad is my uncle Tony. He’s the black sheep of the family.’

‘I can’t believe your family is big enough to have black sheep.’

She laughed. ‘Yeah. My dad is a family court judge, and his older brother is a surgeon. A pediatric surgeon. Uncle Tony used to race cars.’

‘No way!’

‘Yeah. He was good at it, too, took a couple NASCAR titles back in the day. My dad always talks shit about him, but Uncle Tony is, like, loaded . He made good investments with what he won from racing, and now he sits around and occasionally buys vintage cars to fix up when he gets bored.’

‘Is that how you got into cars?’ I asked, remembering how Meredith had said her dad had originally bought the Mustang.

Brooke’s expression fell. She gave me a fake smile – I could tell it was fake because I knew her real smiles now – and nodded. ‘Yep.’

There was clearly something going on there, and I could tell she didn’t want me to poke into it. Brooke was either wildly enthusiastic about anything to do with her car or completely shut off, and I could never tell which way her mood would swing or why.

‘Can I ask you something?’ I tried.

‘You can ask,’ she said lightly. The ‘but I won’t answer if I don’t want to’ was left unspoken.

‘Why …?’

‘Why cars?’

‘Yeah, I guess.’

Brooke tilted her head from side to side, stretching her neck. She glanced over her shoulder, then pulled into the outside lane to overtake a semi-truck before answering me.

‘I suppose I realized a year or so ago that I was being groomed for politics.’

I went on high alert at her choice of word – ‘groomed’ carried a lot of weight, and I wasn’t sure exactly what she meant by that.

‘It all started to click in place,’ she said, looking out the windshield and not at me.

‘Daniel will work in law, Julianne is in medicine, Hope will cover off the arts … and I didn’t have a clear path like they did.

I was talking to Meredith when she was home for spring break last year, and she kind of joked that my dad would love to say his kid was a senator or something, and I was like, holy shit, she’s right. ’

The worst thing was, I could see it. Brooke would be good in politics, with her charm and her debate skills and her good looks. She had the kind of personality that people would rally behind. It wasn’t such a stretch to imagine a Mayor Summer one day. A Senator Summer. Even a President Summer.

‘I’m guessing that’s not what you want,’ I said.

‘No,’ she retorted with a harsh laugh. ‘Definitely not. I had already started talking to my uncle Tony about him helping me to buy a car, because he knows everything there is about them. And he pulled up a picture of the Mustang on his phone. He said he was gonna buy it anyway, but if I helped him fix it up, it was mine.’

‘I wondered …’ I said, then trailed off, but Brooke waved a hand at me, encouraging me to continue. ‘I wondered if it was, like, some kind of … rejection of femininity.’

She laughed again, brighter this time. ‘No, not exactly. I just saw it as an opportunity to do something different – to get out of the house for a few hours and go somewhere my parents wouldn’t be breathing down my neck.’

‘Oh.’

‘Not such a big deal.’

Brooke’s wildly varying moods around her car were starting to make sense now. It wasn’t a girl-boss thing, like I’d thought, but something she’d used to get away from her parents. It was her independence.

‘So, when did you start your life of crime?’ I said, sensing Brooke wanted to move on to other topics.

I watched as her temperament neatly shifted gears again. She tipped her head back and laughed.

‘Oh my God, Jessie, you’re fucking hilarious. It’s hardly a life of crime.’

‘I grew up in the church, remember,’ I said. ‘Before last night, I’d never even stolen a candy bar.’

‘All right. Well, we were kids. Meredith was born in between me and Julianne, and her half-sister, Friday, is six months younger than me.’ She glanced over. ‘Uncle Tony doesn’t have more than one kid with any of his ex-girlfriends.’

‘Good for Uncle Tony,’ I said mildly.

Brooke cackled, clearly happier now she was back on familiar ground.

‘I know, right? Anyway, the four of us used to hang out in the summer, and Meredith was, like, the ringleader. Tony always encouraged her rebellious streak, so she had no problem being a rule-breaker. She would get us shoplifting lip-gloss, candy bars, that kind of thing. She learned how to pickpocket while away at camp.’

‘Oh, I did not go to summer camps like that,’ I said, reorganizing the cassettes.

‘Me neither!’

‘We had a lot of nature study and Bible study and singing around campfires.’ The first few summers I went to church camp I hated it, but I felt like I had to stick it out since our church had fundraised for the less fortunate kids to go.

After a few years, though, it became an escape.

No one called me Mouse at camp, and even though it was before the Creep came along, it was good to get away from real life for a few weeks. ‘It was better than being at home.’