He’d kept up with the livestream on his phone for a while, but when the broadcast cut to a close-up from a drone hovering over his shoulder, he found himself watching a real-time video of William Mackler watching a real-time video of William Mackler.
It made him feel stretched thin, hollowed out, unreal.
Also, his hair looked like shit.
“It wasn’t this hot in Ibiza last week,” announced Eli, the trust-fund kid.
William stepped up onto the running board—careful not to take his hand off the window—and peeked over the top of the car.
Eli, a perpetually amiable guy of nineteen or twenty, chomped peppermint Altoids with mechanical compulsion. William assumed that Natalie Sharpe had been getting absolutely pulverized with minty breath for the past twenty-seven hours. It might have been okay at first—better than bad breath!—but like every other nervous habit he’d witnessed during the endless time-smeared day and night of the Derby, it must have become madness inducing. He put himself in her place. The thought of being enveloped by a minty cloud—microscopic Altoid particles clinging to his skin—made him feel prickly. He stepped down and turned his attention back to his side of the car.
Staring at Raef Henderson’s back was like taking a Rorschach test with sweat stains instead of inkblots. The imprints of the man’s shoulder blades made cartoonishly arched eyebrows. The outline of his spine sketched a prominent nose. The dark stain above his waistline puddled out into a mouth.
William was gazing into the sweat-formed face of a clown.
He closed his eyes. The clown was etched behind his eyelids. His tired mind made the face throb with garish makeup, diabolically cheerful yellows and reds.
William’s brother had a creepy antique lamp on his dresser, which spun slowly and played a tinny rendition of “Send in the Clowns” when you wound its butterfly crank.
He opened his eyes. The sudden burst of radiant sunlight banished the melody. He made sure to avoid Henderson’s back and rested his gaze on the astronaut. A light breeze plucked at strands of her hair. She had really nice hands, with perfectly manicured nails and a Hershey’s Kiss–size engagement ring that caught the sun and sent light pinwheeling across the pavement.
The story her hand told was this: I am not only an incredibly accomplished scientist and space explorer, I am also engaged to a hedge-fund manager or quite possibly a Saudi prince.
After twenty-seven hours of idly studying hands, William was starting to think of himself as an expert on divining truth from hangnails and knuckles and jewelry and scabs. He was like a palm reader, but for the entire hand. It was what his mother would call a holistic approach.
The reason he thought of himself this way might have been because people’s hands really did reveal hidden dimensions of their souls, or it might have been because it was eighty-seven degrees Fahrenheit and his brain was boiling inside his skull.
BRAAAAIIINNS, he thought, using an internal zombie voice because that kind of thing was hilarious after twenty-seven hours in an Indiana parking lot.
Henderson turned his head and shot William a quizzical glance over his shoulder. The clown face on his back wrinkled into a nightmare visage.
“You okay there, bud?”
William blinked. Had he just said BRAAAIIINNS out loud? It must have been very strange for the man to hear that. William hadn’t spoken for several hours.
“Fine,” William assured him. “I was just hungry.”
Henderson’s bushy eyebrows scrunched into an elongated V.
“For brains,” William said.
One side of Henderson’s mouth twitched.
“I was thinking of eating your brains,” William clarified.
When he found out he’d been selected as one of thirty semifinalists who’d be flown out to the parking lot of Indiana’s largest mall to compete in the Driverless Derby, his first instinct had been to go in cold and improvise his way to victory. That was how he’d learned to skate and win paintball tournaments and swing out on the rope that dangled from the bridge over Cayahota Creek so he could point his body into a dive that barely rippled the surface of the water. But for once, he tamped down on reckless urges. He told himself that he’d only get one shot at this, so he’d better have a plan.
He decided to throw his fellow semifinalists off-balance by presenting himself as a slippery character, a suave con man type, wise beyond his years. But when he’d arrived in the parking lot, taken his position in his assigned spot at the front passenger window, and plunked his hand against the glass, “suave con man” had quickly degenerated into “oddball douchebag.”
Henderson regarded William impassively for a moment, then turned back toward the astronaut without a word.
William looked down at his feet. He wasn’t sure why, but his persona had fallen completely flat from hour one. He considered the fact that 4.3 million people and counting had witnessed his cringe-inducing behavior. His friends at home found it hilarious, they assured him, but so what? That was three people out of 4.3 million who didn’t think he was the world’s biggest tool.
He considered the fact that there would definitely be a YouTube supercut of his greatest hits, preserved for future generations to stumble across. It probably already existed, along with an auto-tuned remix.
His knees felt brittle, like they’d snap in a strong breeze.
Henderson launched a quest to impress the actress, talking at her over the top of the car, digging deep for Hollywood-sounding phrases like “points on the backend” and “optioning the life rights.”
William had never before considered the sweat capacity of a mustache until this moment, when the man’s upper lip resembled one of those long gray hairballs that cats coughed up, slimy with stomach juice.
“When you’re dealing with international revenue streams, you want to make sure you’re nailing those foreign exemptions!”
Please God—William Mackler’s prayers to a God he didn’t believe in had taken on a pleading dimension over the course of the Derby, which made him uneasy—sew this
