by Heidi Acosta
“Well that isn’t a very nice way to talk to the guy who is loading you fucking car, is it, Doll Face.”
I clench my teeth together. “Do it now.” I poke him in the chest, on the name tag. “Nash,” I spit out. “Or else …”
He leans in so close I can smell the sweat on his brow mixing with the sweet smell of his soap.
“Or else what, Doll Face?” he mocks me.
Startled, I step away from him, reaching for my cell phone to call the police.
“I have rights. You can’t just go around stealing people’s car! I’m an American citizen!” But my cell phone is in my purse, which is in my car that is now almost completely on the truck.
“Wait, my purse is in there! Can I least get it?” I beg.
He smiles a crooked smile at me once again and unhooks a chain from the truck placing it on the back tire. “Sorry, Doll Face, all property inside the vehicle now belongs to the bank. If you made your payments like a good, little rich girl, you would still be looking pretty driving it around. It’s a damn shame, too. I bet you look incredibly sexy behind the wheel of that car.” My face flushes and my skin feels itchy. I know that the unattractive hives I get when I am nervous are popping up and down my neck. “Tell you what, maybe we can work out a deal. How about I pick you up tonight and you show me how bad you want your purse back?” He smiles, showing off a perfect row of pearly white teeth.
“Pervert,” I gasp. From the chuckle he lets out I’m sure this isn’t the first time he has been called that.
“Only when it comes to hot, desperate girls like yourself,” he mocks me.
Maybe it’s the smart ass smirk on his face, or that I really am desperate to get my purse back. Licking my bottom lip, I step closer to him. Despite being a complete prick, he is actually hot … if you like that sort of thing. I can’t help for a moment but take in his features. The well-defined muscles of his arms lined in deep colors of the tattoo that cuff his forearm. A strong jawline with a little bit of morning stubble left on it.
I lean into him, not sure of what I’m about to do. Then, without a forethought, I swing with all my might. My fist makes contact with his chin, and instantly pain shoots down my arm. Fuck! I have never hit anyone in my life, my hand throbs, but it is something else that breaks deep inside of me.
“You hit me, you crazy bitch! Ohhh, well you can forget about it now, Doll Face, deal is off. You can kiss your Louie bag good-bye. I bet I can get a pretty penny for that on eBay.”
“You wouldn’t,” I gasp again. How did he know I had a Louie?
“Oh, I would.” He laughs, climbing into the cab of the truck and starting it.
Hearing the truck start, I become even more desperate. I have to do something; I need to stop him from stealing my last possession. I jump up onto the bed of tow truck, scrambling to the driver’s side of my car.
“Get the hell off my truck,” he yells, climbing back out. I desperately pull at the door handle, but it’s stuck. Shit, it’s locked. “Get down!” Nash yells as he climbs up into the bed with me.
And then I see it, my saving grace, I think it’s called a crowbar. Whatever it is, it’s black and heavy, and I pick it up and start swinging. It’s the glass of my driver side door it comes in contact with first, shattering the window, raining glass everywhere. I let out a shrill laugh. I have never in my whole life done anything like this before. Nash is shouting at me, but I ignore him; I’m the one in control. Reaching inside the shattered window, I grab my purse. Then race to the other side of the car I tighten my grip and take another swing. The hard liberating metal in my hand makes contact with the glass window, shattering it.
“Crazy ass bitch!” he calls out again. For a moment, I’m shocked that I actually am doing this, but it quickly wears off, and I let out another laugh and make my way over to the front of the car and introduce the metal bar thing to the headlights. Headlights meet metal bar thingy; metal bar thingy meet headlights. I swing with all my might each time I make contact, something inside me snaps. It’s no longer about my purse, or losing everything, or my family torn apart; it goes much deeper than that. Anger that I have had buried for years boils up and shows its ugly face.
I’m about the smash the back window when Nash reaches me. “What the fuck? Are you freaking crazy?” he shouts. I swing around holding the tool out in front me. If this pervert comes near me, I’m swinging, and he knows it too because he hesitates for a moment before charging me. I swing, missing him, and he grabs my arms bringing them behind my back. Ouch! I drop my weapon but cling desperately to my purse. There is no way in hell I am letting this go.
Picking me up, he drops me off the truck to the ground with a thud. Gasping for breath, he points at me with a shaky hand. “What the fuck, are you fucking crazy?” he says again, and maybe I am. Maybe this is what crazy looks like. “You can be charged with assault and vandalism. That is prison time you could be looking at, sweat heart. You’re fucking lucky that I’m the one towing your truck. Shit.” He wipes sweat from his brow. I look up at him to tell him I don’t care. He has a red welt on his cheek that has begun to swell, and a small pang hits me in the chest. He hits the back of the window and yells at the guy in the truck, “James, let’s get the fuck out of here.”
With one swift movement, he swings himself into the open passenger side window of the truck and my car begins to back out of the driveway. I think I’m screaming profanities at them as they pull away, but I’m not sure. I collapse to the ground, hugging my bag to my chest and cry.
“What the fuck?” I punch James on the shoulder as hard as I can when I slip into the wrecker. He jams it in reverse and backs out of the driveway. That crazy ass chick stands in the driveway watching us leave, her red hair a mess from the tiff we just had. Her blue cardigan hangs off her shoulder, revealing the creamy white skin underneath. She has on little white shorts that make you wish that they were just a little shorter, but from the look of the mansion, we just pulled away from she wouldn’t dare. I bet the girl is wound so tight she doesn’t even know what fun looks like. I bet if she pulled out whatever stick was jammed so far up her cute ass, I could make her have some fun. She definitely would be a challenge, and I do love a good challenge. She is hot as hell but fucking crazy. I would have taken her home and banged her if she was lucky, but I don’t do crazy.
“It looked like you had it handled,” James smirks at me. “I didn’t know that you needed back up against a hundred pound chick.”
“Fuck you,” I growl as I rub at the spot on my cheek she hit. She had quite the right hook on her, and I wasn’t expecting her to hit me. I’m not going to lie, it kind of turned me on, the way she took me on like that. I glance at her in the review mirror one more time. She is now on the ground hugging that giant, ugly ass purse of hers to her chest. I don’t get why girls feel the need to carry around bags the size of a suitcase. Really, what do they carry in there that it needs to be that big?
A pang stabs me in the chest as I watch her. She looks small and helpless, and I was an asshole to her. I mean, the girl just had her car towed. I’m thinking about telling James to turn around when he cuts through my thoughts.
“Stop,” he says, lighting up a cigarette. The kid has a serious nicotine habit. I roll down the window the rest of the way, not wanting to join him in his one-way ride to cancer.
“Look you want to kill yourself be my guest, but can you not take me with you? Second-hand smoke is a bitch.”
He shrugs and exhales, filling the cab with a gray cloud of death before the wind snatches it and pulls it out the open window.
“You are avoiding the subject.” He blows another breath of smoke toward the open window.
“Yeah, and what exactly am I stopping?”
“You are barking up the wrong tree thinking of that girl like that.” He shakes his head.
“Yeah, and when the hell did you become a mind reader?”
“You’re thinking about your next screw, but that girl is too good for you.
”
It pisses me off that he thinks that she is too good for me, and maybe she is, but I don’t want to hear it from him.
“Now you see that’s where you are wrong. I want to hit that more than once. Do you think that she tastes like strawberries? I bet she does with that red hair of hers,” I say, covering up what I really thought. Like he might somehow be able to steal a glimpse into my mind and see that I was thinking about how I can be the girl’s savior … and yeah, I wouldn’t mind banging her either. She probably does taste like strawberries and whip cream. She is probably is the sweetest thing I will never get to taste, and that makes me want her even more.
“There is something seriously wrong with you,” James says. That is the difference between us—where he is level-headed and thinks each action through before he acts, I work on impulse. It works because I get him to have a little fun, and he makes me stop and think about what I’m about to do, but on this one he is wrong. If I ever see that chick again, I will have her begging me to take her. I never meet a challenge I couldn’t conquer, and I’ll conquer her, and I will be her hero.
We drop off the Mercedes SL Roadster in the yard; something only a rich stuck up girl can afford. Actually, she can’t, which is why we towed it back to the tow yard. I tell James to leave it in the back, as it just doesn’t seem fair to the other cars to have it looking down on them. I know it’s weird, but I have a thing for cars … actually, anything with a motor. My one true love is my KTM 250. She is not much to look at—we have been through a few wrecks together—but she is beautiful to me.
After James sets her down, he pulls the wrecker around front, leaving me alone with the car. I should go inside and do the paperwork and turn the keys into Pula, but instead, I open the door, brushing off the glass that litters the black leather interior. Damn, I have to give it to her, that girl did a lot of damage.
The car is even sweeter on the inside. It has every single upgrade that is offered, and it still has that new car smell mixed with something sweet, like vanilla and jasmine. I bet it’s her perfume. Groaning, I lean my head back on the headrest. Why am I sitting in her car smelling her perfume? What the hell is wrong with me?
“Hey, are you going to sit in there daydreaming about having that type of car, or are you going to actually do the work and earn a car like that?” James’ little brother Dirt asks, coming up to me.
Dirt got his nickname because he was always dirty when he was a little snot nosed kid, dirt was always stuck to his face with some disgusting, sticky substance. He eventually got older and found girls, and was no longer a little dirtball, but the name still stuck.
“How about you keep your trap shut before a shut it for you?” I say.
Dirt is fifteen and thinks he is the shit, so it’s our job to knock him down a few pegs. Dirt is so full of himself; he has that punk ass haircut that hangs in his face, causing him to flick it out of his eyes every other second. It’s just something else for us to give him shit for. It makes our job easier, and that job is to kick the crap out of him and keep him in line. Dirt flips me off, and I’m out of the car chasing his little punk ass down. I slip on some gravel, scraping up my arm pretty good in the process, and Dirt laughs like a hyena. When I catch him, he is so getting the shit kicked out of him. Besides, it will help me get the redhead out of my mind.
After I catch Dirt and I rough him up a bit, we make our way over to the barn that sits directly behind the shop. Really, it’s not even a barn so much as it’s a shack. It looks like it should be condemned and torn down just like the rest of the place. The barn is painted the same pale gray color as the house, and shop. Someone gave my dad about thirty gallons of flat gray paint for not towing his car when I was a kid. That summer sucked—James and I spent it painting everything that was nailed down to the property. It will stay this color until the next time some guy talks my dad out of a tow. It’s also one of the reasons that James and I do most of the tows that come in now, or we really would be in the poor house.
The barn holds our dirt bikes; it’s where we work on them and strip cars for parts when they are not claimed by the owners. It’s also the place that holds all my mom’s old paintings. She tried to turn the barn into a studio, like hanging up color would change the fact of where she was living. That she was drowning in a sea of gray. When she left Dad couldn’t take them down, it was like he didn’t want to admit that she left him. I thought about tearing them down myself, or tossing paint on them, but what good would that do, she wouldn’t know about it. And I couldn’t blame her for leaving Phenix City. Hell, I wanted out at the town, too. Maybe I was mad at her for having the courage to leave. Dad couldn’t blame her, either. This was not the life she wanted for herself; raising four boys, three of them not even her own, living in a gray junkyard.
I push the memory of my mom from my head and make my way over to James and Playboy, who already have the carburetor out of the Playboy’s bike which is laying on a blanket. “Time for surgery, boys, the Doctor is in the house,” I say as I leap over a pile of spare car parts. The bike, which Playboy had saved up for with money he earned stripping cars here at the yard, is shit, but it’s his own. There is nothing like your first bike. When you ride your own bike for the first time, it’s like losing your virginity, but better because you can make it last and last.
“Screw you, Nash. I wouldn’t let you near her if you had a wrench made of pure gold,” Playboy growls. I laugh at his attempt at trying to be a hardass and ruffle up his hair.
“I wouldn’t need to work on a piece of shit bikes if I had a gold wrench.” Playboy shrugs me off. The kid is full of testosterone and is always looking for a fight lately. He needs to fix her himself; I know that better than anyone. James rolls his eyes and lights a cigarette before instructing Playboy to pour some gas over the exposed pistons to clean them.
I go over to my own bike and pull her out. I still have on my monkey suit, so I pull on the sleeves and zip it up. Riding is a high like no other, the speed, the smell of three stroke oil burning on the motor. The adrenaline that pumps through your veins as you shift gears and make turns that a car could never make. The freedom is like no other. I kick her over with one swift move, and she purrs to life, and it’s just me and her, everyone else disappears. She is the only woman I need now. Red is now a distant memory.
I know that Dirt hops on a bike behind me; I can hear the rattling protest of his own bike as he tries to keep up. I shift down, spinning out on the dirt floor, and take off out the open barn doors. I push the engine as hard as it will go, and right before it screams in protest I shift gears, and I jerk forward. I’m flying. I ride until the bike is lighter, meaning it’s almost out of gas; Dirt eventually gives up a few miles in and turns around. The sun is setting, leaving me to ride in out of the shadows from the setting sun, but no matter how far and hard I ride I can’t seem to outrun the thoughts of Red.
I must have fallen asleep because I’m being shaken awake, and the room is turning a deep shade of gray from the setting sun. “Pardon me, miss.” A dark-haired older man in a blue suit is shaking my shoulder. “I’m sorry, you are going to have to leave the premises. The property belongs to the bank, and you are trespassing.” He gives me a weak smile.
“Oh.” I sit up, still clutching my high school yearbook as if it can offer me protection from what is happening. Standing, I grab the small cardboard box that contains my high school memorabilia, report cards, a few pictures, and my elementary school spelling bee trophy. Everything else the bank must have claimed already or my mother had thrown out.
The man follows me down the stairs and to the front door. I watch him put a padlock on the door that is no longer ours. My throat aches and I feel like crying again. I don’t know what to do, or where to go. I think I might have even forgotten how to walk. He looks at me strangely, and I wonder how often he has seen this story played out. Perhaps he is numb to the process, to the lives that he has seen ruined, to the hurt and pain.
“Do you need a rid
e somewhere?” he asks finally. I shake my head no because I’m not sure where I would have him take me. My mother must be in Florida by now. Did she feel any guilt for abandoning me? Did she glance at me—her youngest daughter—in the review mirror, or did she leave without looking back?
Once I’m on the road and in front of what used to be my house, and I’m sure that I’m covered in the dark so no one can see me, only then do I let more tears come. Once they start to fall, they don’t stop. This time is no different than any other in my life; if I need to cry, I have to hide it and bury the pain that bubbles at the surface. I try to fight it, but there is no use. It’s not until I see car headlights that I quickly wipe away the tears and turn off my emotions. God forbid anyone see me showing my feelings; it’s something I learned well from my mother. Hide all emotion, never show anyone what you really feel.
The driver speeds up the road, going much faster than the normal speed limit. The jerk swerves, and I have to jump into the nearby ditch so that I’m not hit. I want to yell, “Slow down asshole,” but my mother would have a heart attack if I ever dared to speak in public like that.
You know what, there is no longer any trust fund to hang over my head. “Asshole!” I scream at the top of my lungs at the red taillights that speed down the road. The car slams on the brakes and the whole street lights up red. Shit. My heart races as reverse lights appear and the deranged driver flies backward toward me. Shit. Shit. Shit. What did I do?
I do a quick review of the self-defense course that was required freshmen year, ready to use it to the fullest. The car stops in front of me and the dark tinted windows roll down, blasting an old Brittney Spears song, and the thick smell of rose and sandalwood spills from the window. “What the hell? You could have been hit by some deranged driver walking down the road in the dark like that.” The instant I hear the voice, I relax, realizing that the driver is my best friend from high school, Kiki. He leans over, trying to open the passenger door, but the car jerks forward with a high-pitched squeal from him. Slamming the car in park he hops out, running to me.
