He shook his head. “That will never happen, Hana. I will never forget you.”
Chapter 6
Present day - May
Turns out Molly really does have something for me to do in the house with her, so I don’t feel as bad for ditching Lincoln’s lunch date request. From the clean, non-exhaust-smelling living room, I help her sort five stacks of flyers into envelopes for the track’s quarterly mailing to everyone signed up on their list. The great thing is that it still counts as work so I’m still on the clock.
Luckily, Molly keeps the television on her favorite show, some drama about women lawyers, and she doesn’t bring up Ash, or Lincoln, or anyone else for that matter while we work. Unfortunately for me, my brain only wants to think about Ash and Lincoln. I try so hard to make up games in my head as I grab the papers, fold them together and stuff them in envelopes. I try to focus on the show, but I get the feeling it’s the kind of show where if you haven’t watched it from the start, you’re totally lost.
The sad part is that I’ve been doing pretty well lately—at least I was before I came back home for the summer. Ash is a part of the motocross world. And when the motocross world is out of sight, it’s out of mind. Now I’ve willingly flung myself wholly back into the scene. I live and work on a freaking motocross track. Why did I ever think coming home would be easy?
After my hard day’s work of stuffing envelopes and boasting about not getting a single papercut, Dad has me join him in the score tower for some catching up about college. It’s nice, hanging out with him; I barely saw him at all this last semester except for Thanksgiving and Christmas, and back then, I spent most of that free time with Ash.
He takes a sip from his soda and makes a grimace. “Ugh, this shit is like poison.”
My eyebrow quirks. “The soda, or the fact that it’s diet?”
Dad shakes his head and takes another sip even though it makes his face squish up in resentment. “This diet crap. Molly is making me eat and drink healthier now. Hey, I have an idea,” he says, his eyes going wide. “Help me refill all the two liter bottles with real Coke. She’ll never know the difference.”
I give him a warning glare. “She’ll know, Dad. She will so know.”
He makes a gagging sound. “That woman . . . always looking out for my best interests . . .”
“I know, what a bitch.” I roll my eyes and Dad bursts into laughter.
“She’s great, though, isn’t she?”
I nod and crack open a can of diet soda just to be supportive of him. I’d really rather have the kind without the weird acidy no calorie taste, too. “Molly is great.”
Dad runs a hand through his short hair, which is turning more gray than brown. He gazes out at the track. “So, you got any plans for tonight? Some Friday night shindig that I should be worried about?”
I lift my shoulders. There was a time when Friday nights meant date nights and late night movie watching while cuddling up with Ash. They’re the only off days on a weekend during racing season. Now, I hadn’t even realized it was Friday. “I’ll probably just hang out with Shelby,” I say. “No one has invited me to one of these shindigs you’re talking about.”
“Maybe we’ll throw our own party. You, your friends, and your dear old dad. We’ll have non-alcoholic drinks and play Scrabble . . . eat some kind of gross healthy food.” Dad winks at me and I shake my head in a violent but playful no.
“I am way too cool to be seen partying with my dad.” My phone beeps from inside of my pocket.
“I know, I know.” Dad waves a dismissive hand at me. “You’re off the clock now. Go have fun and enjoy being young.”
*
After a shower, I text Shelby before blow drying my hair. We’d talked earlier—an in-depth chat about how Jake had taken a family trip to Florida and brought her back a pink gold bracelet that was beautiful and romantic, she’d said, and its importance/purpose definitely had to be scrutinized with her best friend for an hour.
We’d gotten so swept up in analyzing the meaning of the bracelet—does he love her? Does it mean he wants to take things to another level? Is an engagement ring coming next? —that I totally forgot to ask what she’s doing tonight. Back before she and Jake got serious, I could count on Shelby being free anytime I was. Now, it’s a game of chance with weighted dice. I usually lose.
By the time she replies to my what’s up text, my hair is almost fully dry.
Cleaning out my closet. You?
I’m doing nothing…which is why I need my best friend! Wanna hang out?
My stomach twists as I send the text. If she declines, I’ll be left home alone with just my stupid thoughts to keep me company. The longer it takes her to reply, the more stressed out I get.
Finally, she replies.
Ugh, I already promised dinner at Jake’s. He’s cooking and everything. Wanna hang out later? It might be late.
Turns out trying not to get my hopes up doesn’t really help. Sure, I text back. Just let me know when you’re free.
Will do! Love you!
I tell her I love her too, and then I cringe as I realize what I’m about to do next. I haven’t talked to my friend, Alyson, in months, not since I ditched her party invite and subsequently politely declined every other invitation she sent my way. But these are hard times, and a girl could go crazy sitting in her room all night, so I find her name on my contacts list and send a message, an SOS of sorts, hoping that she’ll drag me to shore and save my night.
Her reply is instant, in true fashion to how she always has her phone in her hand.
OMG wish I could hang out! Forgot you’d be back in town but I’m in Mexico visiting my grandma for a few weeks. Hit you up when I get back!
I sigh, a long drawn out rush of annoyance and self-loathing, letting my shoulders sink until I’ve expelled all of my air and have to gasp for another breath. One thing that made college life great was that I was never really bored. I either had assignments to do, or I could walk around campus and look at art exhibits or peaceful protests, or even just bring my laptop to the coffee shop and hang out and people watch for a while. Now that I am home, there is nothing to do.
I hear the sound of my little brother rushing up the stairs, and without thinking about the lame factor of what I’m doing, I push open my door and meet him in the hallway. “Wanna hang out? We can rent a movie, even one of those dumb action movies you like.”
“Wow, you make it sound so fun,” Teig says, making a face as he sidesteps me and goes to his bedroom. “I’m staying at Lawrence’s house tonight. You can drive me if you want.”
I lean against his doorframe and cross my arms. “You’re too cool to hang out with your big sister? Fine, I guess I’ll have fun without you.”
“You could go on a date with Lincoln,” he says, shoving clothes from his dresser into a backpack. “Or call Ash and spend all night on the phone like you used to.”
“No more talking about Ash,” I say, my voice firm enough to make him look up at me. “I know you’re joking most of the time but just—don’t do it anymore. His name is no longer allowed around here.”
“My lips are sealed.” He grabs his phone and then unplugs the charger and shoves both of them in the backpack before zipping it shut. “But just so you know, I don’t think he’s over you.”
I ruffle his hair as he walks back to the stairs, although the gesture is vastly underwhelming when the little brother is as tall as I am. “What makes you think that?” I ask, following him down to the kitchen.
He shakes his head. “I’m not allowed to say the A-word,” he says, giving me this evil little look that makes me love him and also kind of want to punch him. “Maybe if you change your mind later, I’ll tell you.”
“Excuse you,” Molly says, peering over the back of the couch at us. “Teig is not allowed to say the A-word or any bad word for that matter.”
“We weren’t talking about curse words,” I say after we bid him farewell, telling him to have fun at his fri
end’s house. Dad’s driving him to Lawrence’s and as I sit next to Molly on the couch for the second time today, I kind of wish I would have driven him if only for something to do.
When Dad returns, we all sit around the table and have dinner together. Molly pours me a glass of wine and we hang out for a while. The irony of how pathetic I’ve become is not lost on me. It’s when the following Friday rolls around and I find myself in the exact same place, same chair at the same table, eating another one of Molly’s half-way healthy but still delicious dinners, I know I have a problem. I should be out doing something, not just sitting here. I could crash Shelby’s date. It’s not like I’d walk in on them doing anything dirty since Shelby’s all about waiting until marriage. I could hop in the truck and drive four hours to see my old friend Felicia, who still lives next to my mom’s house.
But neither of these sound like any fun. After dinner, I end up in my bedroom, endlessly surfing through the show options on Netflix, only to end up staring at the screen for half an hour, lost in thought.
Teig and I hadn’t mentioned the A-word since last week. No one’s mentioned it. Not even Shelby, when she met me for frozen yogurt after work last Tuesday. I can almost pretend he never existed at all.
Against my better judgement, I walk over to my desk and power up my laptop. Maybe I’ll send him an email—something friendly and maybe talking about the track’s summer events or something stupid. It’s less personal than a text and it’d let me hear from him. We’re supposed to be friends, after all.
Only, I bypass my inbox and go straight to social media. A feeling of hesitation claws at my insides, as if my brain knows I probably shouldn’t be doing this. But if anything, that only makes me more curious. I haven’t seen Ash’s Facebook page in a while. Normally, those parts of my brain that know better do their job and make me stay away. Tonight, they’re on vacation.
The first thing on his page is a post from a men’s fitness magazine that tagged him in it. The link on the article doesn’t have a picture, but the title is all I need to see to make my stomach clench up.
Supercross superstar Ash Carter’s washboard abs—and how you can get them!
When Ash was my boyfriend he never had “washboard” abs. They were good abs, no doubt, but you couldn’t exactly wash an article of clothing on them. Skeptical, I click the link, even though deep in my core I know I probably shouldn’t.
And there he is, in all of his laundry-cleansing glory. My boyfriend, well ex-boyfriend, sitting on a weight bench wearing black shorts and Nikes, his glistening rock-hard abs the focal point of the entire shot. His dreads are short in the picture, a change I’m not used to seeing yet, even though I was the one who cut them a while back. They’re pulled back so that the angular features of his jaw make his causal smile look even more enticing. His blue eyes are looking off into the distance, at another girl for all I know, because the look on his face is pure serenity. Innocence and Bad Boy somehow all wrapped up into one. His skin is darker and his forearms are veiny from a recent workout.
He is drop dead gorgeous. He’s modeling for magazines now. He’s the recipient of three hundred and ninety-three comments at the bottom of a website article that I know better than to read. And he’s no longer mine.
We’d said the breakup was mutual. But it wasn’t.
Chapter 7
The next week home passes almost exactly like the rest of them had. Work, home, sleep, work, home, sleep. Occasional talking to Shelby at the track. We even got one lunch on Monday where Jake was on the track riding with a trainer and she was free to hang out with me for a whole forty-five minutes. I made the mistake of telling her about Lincoln after he walked by us on the bleachers and called out, “Hey, Hana!” as if we were friends or something.
Shelby seemed to think that being friends with Lincoln was a good idea, so maybe she also thinks Ash has moved on. I shut that down quickly by changing the subject to the first thing I can think of: how annoying it is when your bra underwire starts poking out of the fabric at the end.
Now that I’m stuck back at home for the summer, I find myself longing for school more than anything else. There was a time shortly after my breakup with Ash when I thought that I’d go crazy if I had to spend one more night in my dorm room with its insane asylum white walls and the chill in the air at night that never seemed to go away. Funny how now when I’m in my own bedroom, with its calming gray walls and beautiful Paris décor and a functioning air conditioning unit that keeps the temperature nice at all hours of the day, I still feel like I might go insane.
Maybe I am insane.
I need a freaking hobby.
When I clock out of work around five in the afternoon, I rush home and shower quickly. Then I make the executive best friend decision to call Shelby instead of texting her. This is important, dammit, and a text won’t do.
“Oh my gosh, are you dying?” Shelby answers, saying the words in one breath. “You never call.”
“I am dying,” I say, keeping a straight face as I apply mascara in front of my vanity. “I am dying of boredom and malnourishment for lack of best friend time.”
She laughs. “Well you’re in luck. I was just about to text you.”
“Mmhmm, sure,” I say, rolling my eyes. Then I curse silently because the stupid gesture made me mess up my eye makeup and now I have to start all over again. “Can you maybe ditch Jakey-poo for a couple of hours, please?”
“For the record, I have never once called him Jakey-poo. And secondly, yes, let’s hang out.”
“Can I stay at your place? I’m sick of being home.”
Her hesitation is almost palpable through the phone lines. “There’s a new cupcake shop that just opened off Mixon-Cemetery Road. We should check it out.”
“Why can’t we just hang out in your room?” I ask. I’m about to argue that I don’t want to go anywhere, but if that was the case, why am I doing my makeup?
Shelby sighs. “Ash comes home tomorrow so . . . you probably don’t want to stay over.”
I watch my own expression go from curious to jaded in the mirror and I try to shrug it off. Maybe Jake isn’t the only reason I haven’t seen Shelby as much lately. Maybe some of it is on my end, avoiding the one person who reminds me of him. “Fine,” I say, faking a smile for the mirror. “Let’s go get a damn cupcake.”
*
“Why is it called Mixon-Cemetery Road?” I ask as I turn my truck onto the narrow road on the outskirts of town. There’s an old liquor store on the side of the road, the kind that looks so rickety that one swift kick to the doorframe might bring the whole thing down. Ahead of us, the road is draped in a canopy of oak trees that have probably been here longer than Mixon has been a town.
“There’s a cemetery at the end of the road,” Shelby says. She’s watching her phone, tracking the app that’s showing us the way. Nana’s Cupcakes didn’t appear on the map since it’s so new, but we found the address on the online edition of the Mixon Daily News and typed it into the GPS.
We pass an old country house with newly painted shutters and a wraparound porch. There are a few more houses scattered about, but mostly it’s just fields and cows kept in barbed wire fences as we drive for a few miles.
“Are you sure we’re going the right way?” I ask, slowing down for a sharp turn in the road. The trees have grown thicker, almost swallowing up the single-lane road, and now even the cows are scarce. I had thought my house was in the middle of nowhere, but this is even more isolated.
“Yeah, it’s just a little further up,” she says, her eyes on her phone. “My aunt went there last week and said the cupcakes are to die for.”
“To die for on a cemetery road, eh?” I snort at my own joke as I come to a stop on the side of the road. We’ve made it to Nana’s Cupcakes, and apparently so have all of the dead bodies.
Mixon Cemetery is an ancient burial ground that truly sits at the end of the road. It literally dead ends right in front of us, and all around, the end of the little count
y road is bordered by a tiny black fence being strangled by years of overgrown grass and weeds.
I put the truck in park and climb out, momentarily distracted by the morbid beauty of the place. The headstones are barely visible through all of the tall grass, and it’s clear that no one has been buried here in probably a century. To our right, at the east end of the little cemetery, is a white shack of a building with a welcoming fresh coat of paint and a set of wooden stairs with a wheelchair ramp that is so new I can smell the fresh cut lumber.
There’s also a new sign hanging down from thin chains. Nana’s Cupcakes is painted on in shaky pink letters.
I put my hands on my hips. “Okay this is the weirdest snack run we’ve ever done.”
Shelby grabs my hand. “Come on. These are the kind of adventures summer breaks were meant for.”
We step inside the small bakery, and our senses are overloaded with the rich goodness of desserts lovingly crafted from scratch. A woman behind the counter wears a name tag that identifies her as Nana. She has short curly hair that’s mostly dark brown with only a little sprinkling of gray. She’s thin and seemingly frail looking, but then she pulls out a massive tray of cupcakes from the oven with one hand and waves to us with the other.
“Good afternoon, girls! So lovely to see fresh faces in here.”
“Good afternoon, Nana,” Shelby says, walking up to the display case and peering down at the cupcakes inside. “What would you say is the best cupcake here?”
Nana’s hands tap the top of the display case and she peers at us with this grandmotherly sort of charm. “They’re all the best, darlin’. I don’t make them if they aren’t delicious.”
“What the heck,” Shelby says cheerfully, turning to me. “You’re not on a diet or anything are you?”
Supercross Me (Motocross Me #2) Page 4
