And at that moment, I needed every ounce of my speed to take me away from what I’d seen.
Because what I’d witnessed wasn’t just the two-for-one end of my relationships with my boyfriend and my best friend.
I guess you could call it the proverbial last straw.
My dad, a Maryland state trooper, had died in the line of duty when I was eleven. All dads are special, of course, but my dad actually was an extremely special human being. Exceedingly kind, deeply moral, and a gifted, natural listener, he was the person everyone he came into contact with—coworkers, neighbors, the mailman, complete strangers—turned to for comfort and advice.
Which was what made his unexpected death even more devastating. It tore something deep and fundamental inside of my mom. Once an intensely religious teetotaler, she started drinking. She put on eighty pounds and stopped taking care of herself. Everything came to a head in the spring of my junior year in college when she committed suicide in my dad’s old Ford F-150 with the help of a garden hose.
Maureen and Alex had bookended me throughout my mom’s funeral arrangements. Since I had no brothers or sisters or close relatives, they had been more than best friends to me. They had been the only family I had left.
The trip down here had actually been Maureen’s idea. She knew the anniversary of my mom’s passing was approaching, and she wanted to cheer me up.
It was all too much. The pain of the betrayal I’d just witnessed hit me again like a wrecking ball. I began crying as I ran. Tears mixed with the sweat that began to drip off my face and onto the sandy blacktop and the tops of my bare feet.
I dropped to my knees onto the sand when I arrived at the beach. It was empty, just me and the dark ocean and the star-filled sky. Staring out at the black water, I remembered when I’d almost drowned at an Ocean City beach when I was nine. I’d been caught by a riptide, but my dad had saved me.
I breathed the night air in and out and listened to the lap of the waves, feeling more alone and desperate than I ever had in my entire life.
There was no one at all to save me now.
About twenty feet to the right beside me, I noticed a fat, concrete buoy-shaped marker.
SOUTHERNMOST POINT, CONTINENTAL U.S.A., was painted on it. 90 MILES TO CUBA.
I was standing, soul wrecked, about to take a shot at swimming those ninety miles, when I stuck my hand into the pocket of my shorts and realized something fascinating.
I had Alex’s car keys.
The keys to his Z28 Chevy Camaro, which had brought us down here from the University of Florida in Gainesville. He’d gotten his “baby,” as he called it, from sweating four summers at his dad’s landscaping business. I’d sweated four years, trying to get his numb jock skull through premed, so the sudden idea of taking the sleek red car out for a little spin instead of going for a swim seemed eminently logical. To my shattered heart, it seemed downright brilliant.
I ran even faster back to the hotel parking lot. After I sailed one of Whore-reen’s bags out the window, I gunned the Z28’s engine like I had pole position at the Indy 500.
Then I did what any self-respecting, suicidal, recently orphaned, currently being-cheated-on twenty-one- year-old girl would do.
I neutral-dropped my boyfriend’s Camaro out of the lot in a cloud of rubber smoke.
Chapter 4
AFTER A FEW FISHTAILING TURNS, I found an open road next to a beach and drove the Camaro properly— namely, like I’d stolen it. I didn’t drop the hammer. I very nearly busted it through the meticulously vacuumed floor.
Its 5.7-liter V8 engine roared hungrily, demonically, as it rose in pitch, the intro to a heavy metal song.
“Crazy Train,” I thought as I slammed back into my seat. Or was it “Highway to Hell”?
Parked cars that I blurred past started making that zip zip zip zip NASCAR sound.
I tried to decide what I wanted to wreck more at that moment: Alex’s pride and joy or myself. The notion of ending the utter silliness of my bad-luck life seemed very tempting. From where I was sitting without a seat belt, life was pain, and I was seriously thinking about ending mine as visibly and messily as possible.
The Z28’s speedometer was hitting three figures, its rear end starting to rise like an airplane on takeoff, when I caught some movement on the dark beach to my right.
I squinted at the motion through the windshield. It was a blur, something small running. Was it a rabbit?
No, I realized as I got closer very quickly. It was a dog, a collie with a red bandanna around its neck. I recognized the belly-flopping dog from the bar at the exact moment it changed course, like a guided missile, and shot out into the beach road.
Directly in front of the car.
Immediately, instinctually, I slammed on the brakes and spun the steering wheel to the right, trying to avoid it. A high howl of evaporating tire rubber filled the car as the Z28’s rear end fishtailed to the left like it was on ice. I tried to straighten it, but I must have overcompensated because the car suddenly reversed momentum and went into a rubber-barking, skidding, counterclockwise spin.
I’d lost complete control of the car. My head flew back onto the headrest heavily, helplessly, like I was on a carnival teacup ride. I held my breath as I felt the right side of the car swell, threatening to flip. Instead, it did a 180 and kept right on rotating. It was when the car completed a full 360 that I saw what was looming ahead.
And I screamed.
Lit in my pinwheeling headlights, as if he’d been conjured there by a magician, was the dog’s owner, the biker from the bar with the gray braided hair.
The last thing I remember was pumping the brake again and again, savagely, as the ridges of the spinning steering wheel flickered painfully over the insides of my fingers.
I closed my eyes as the Camaro’s swinging front end clipped the man in the waist with a sickening, heart- skewering thump.
There was a brief crumpling sound of rolling weight onto the metal hood followed by a squeegee-like squeak as the man slid up the ramp of the windshield.
And then there was silence. Nothing but horrible, deafening silence.
Chapter 5
I FORCED MYSELF to open my eyes.
The Camaro had come to a shuddering stop another fifty feet to the north.
I stared at the empty road in front of me, my foot pinned down on the brake, my hands as tight on the steering wheel as a pair of vise grips. The only sound was my panicked breathing as sweat seemed to pour from everywhere at once, the inside of my elbows, the backs of my knees, even my ears.
The Camaro idled in the empty road, its engine chugging loudly like an animal catching its breath. I thought the windshield would be cracked, but it was unmarked. So was the hood. Besides losing a couple of inches of tire rubber and brake pad, the car seemed to be doing fine.
It was as if nothing had happened at all.
As if.
I didn’t want to look in the rearview mirror. I stared at Albert, Alex’s stupid grinning orange University of
