Breakdown (Crash into Me) Read online

  “Okay,” I said.

  He nodded happily, slapping his hands together so the sound echoed. “Nice! But first ring me up one of them fruit things. A man can’t work on an empty stomach.”

  I grabbed him the biggest danish on the tray. “Drama queen.”

  “Damn straight.” He reached into his pocket, but I beat him to it.

  “Consider it a down payment for services rendered,” I said, taking off my apron. “Now come on, let’s see if you work as well as you play.”

  While I sat on the curb I watched, watched how his long and muscular legs stuck out from my ugly car, a strange contrast if there ever was any. William hummed happily to himself though, and the sound echoed from all the metal pieces. Vaguely, I thought he kind of looked like a turtle with his head in his shell—just an extremely handsome turtle whose head I couldn’t see.

  I thought I probably could have watched him all day and all night if the sun stayed with me, but the bakery closed at two, and before I left I had to do some dough prep for the next day and close out the kitchen, not to mention the fact that I hadn’t exactly told my manager I was taking a break.

  “So, will she make it, doctor?”

  “Yeah.” He slid out from under my car like the pavement wasn’t even there. Vaguely, I imagined his bare back, hard with muscles and the faintest of scars from boyhood adventures.

  I had to pinch myself to make the image go away.

  “It needs a new oil filter and the gasket is a little loose, but I already tightened that up pretty good.” William flipped the large wrench in his hand, catching it expertly enough to suggest he had done it a thousand times before. I flinched anyway and he laughed. “I can order you a new filter. It’ll probably be here in a day or two.” He shrugged, still laughing. “Shouldn’t be too expensive.”

  I had to admit that was something of a relief. I had been putting off the funny noise coming from my car for weeks, not worrying about it since I figured it would soon not be my problem. Now that I would continue to be stuck with my car, however, it was nice to know I wouldn’t have to spend a small fortune on it.

  “Wait.” I rewound William’s words in my mind like a tape in a VCR. What was it about what he had just said that sounded so strange? When it hit me, I frowned. “Why is your car a she and mine is isn’t?”

  “Well…” He took a torn rag from his back pocket and used it to wipe the dirty wrench. “I’d explain it to you in detail, Jumper, but I don’t want to insult your taste.”

  When I saw how hard he was trying not to laugh, I reached my leg out to kick him, but he dodged the second before my foot made impact with his ankle. We laughed together.

  Setting the rag and wrench down, William sat on the curb beside me, almost close enough so that our knees would touch if I moved the right way. I inhaled deeply and tried to play it off like the end of my laughter.

  “To be honest, Jumper, I’m surprised you don’t have new BMW or something with that big house of yours.”

  I shrugged.

  “My mom wanted to get me a car when I graduated from high school… ”

  “You kidding me? Why wouldn’t you jump all over that?”

  “Ha ha.” I rolled my eyes. “You wouldn’t either if you knew my mom. It would have been the brand she wanted and the color she wanted. Besides, I wanted to buy my first car. If I didn’t, she would have held it over my head as long as I lived.”

  William nodded. “I felt the same way about my first girl. Buying that first one is a serious thing, a real matter of pride.”

  “Can I assume you’re talking about a car?”

  Feigning offense, he pulled away like he was truly disgusted. “Of course, Jumper! I’m not some kind of a pervert!”

  “Really? Tabby tells me you’re with a new girl every week.”

  “Who? Oh, you mean Frenchie!” He scoffed and waved me away. “Don’t listen to Frenchie, she likes to run her mouth. Maybe it comes from working with so many women. Is she right about you being a business major?”

  I nodded shamefully. “Yeah.”

  “I gotta say, Jumper, I don’t see it.”

  “Let’s just say I lost a very long argument.”

  He laughed just long enough to make me forget my troubles. “What is somebody like you gonna do with a business degree?”

  Often in those last weeks of high school, I had asked myself the same thing. Yet once the sadness of that summer really took over it never really seemed to matter very much. I was just going through the motions of school because I thought I had to. Once I had made up my mind to die I just chalked up school to an obligation I had to continue until the end. But I was still here, and if I was going to give this whole living thing a real shot, what was I going to do?

  I shrugged. “To be honest, I never planned on getting that far.”

  The mention of how we met seemed to put a morbid spin on our playful conversation, and both of us felt the tension that wedged itself between us. For William, I got the feeling it was new for him, a foreign feeling that he was unfamiliar with and didn’t quite know how to handle. I, on the other hand, had been hand in hand with awkwardness my entire life, and I knew from experience it was better not to let the silence wither on.

  “William?”

  When he didn’t answer right away, I considered that he had gone by Billy for so long he had forgotten his birth name—either that or he was just being stubborn. When I glanced over at him from the corner at my eye, I realized he was just deep in thought.

  “Yeah, Jumper?”

  “That night…” The sudden memory of my suicide attempt filled me with a lapse of shame that I could not explain. “How did you know what I was going to do?”

  Luckily for me, William seemed to already know the question I was going to ask, his stare never-ending at the tip of his boots, concentrated. “I like driving that area because of how quiet it is. The road is too narrow for cannonballs, but you can still rev it up for a startup practice.”

  I let him talk on, hypnotized by the sound of his voice and the smell of his soap and motor oil.

  “When I first saw you, I really did think you were a ditched date, or maybe just a drunk. But after I drove past I started thinking about how low your head was hanging and how you didn’t have anything with you, and I got a bad feeling. If nothing else, I figured I should go back and at least ask. Once I saw the dead look in your eye—”

  I held out my hand to stop him. I didn’t want to hear about how sad I looked.

  “Sorry, Jumper.” He shrugged. “You asked.”

  We looked up at each other at the same time then, a revelation between blue and brown. It was like a staring contest, neither of us blinking or daring to speak with anything but our eyes. I only found myself looking away when his smile and dimples deepened. A second later my attention was drawn to the danish crumbs scattered around his wonderfully formed lips.

  I busted out laughing.

  “What?” he questioned “Did I miss something?”

  “You sure did.” Still laughing, and without even thinking about, or having the commonsense to stop myself, I reached my thumb to the corner of his lip. I was successful in wiping the crumbs away, but afterward my stupid thumb stayed there for much too long, and while it still could have been my mind settling into my psychosis, I could have sworn that, just for a second, he leaned into my hand.

  “Lottie!”

  We pulled away at the same time, William standing up on the curb and me trying to look casual as I looked back towards to bakery storefront. My fellow counter girl used her hip to keep the door propped open, and her unibrow scowled at me intently. Without saying anything else she went back inside, gesturing to a line of imaginary customers. I sighed and shook my head.

  “I, uh, have to go.”

  William’s back was turned toward me even as I stood up and stretched, stalling as long as possible before I had to leave him.

  “Thanks for the help, with my car and everything.”

 
; “Thank you for the danish.”

  William sighed like he was about as tired as I was before turning back to me. When he did though, his smile was back on his face. Oddly, however, there seemed to be a sense of panic in him, a sense of urgency to finish something important.

  “You’re coming to the race Saturday, right, Jumper? A bunch of us are gonna be there, and we’re doing touges, and some of us are doing drifting too. If you wanna hang out, Tabby and her friends and going to be there…” All of his words were rushed, bundled together like a final scene before a commercial. By the time he remembered to breathe, I just stood there for a second, mouth open and staring at him like an idiot.

  “Y-you mean I can go? I have an invite?”

  I felt his panic fade, and it made me feel decided better. “Sure, Jumper. Want me to pick you up?”

  My throat felt like I was going into anaphylactic shock. “Uh, sure?”

  “Cool.” He reached over for his wrench and bumped his knee into mine. “Try not to fall into any mixers before then.”

  Chapter Eight

  The fifty-eight hours between the time I was due to see him again wasn’t nearly as excruciating as I expected it to be, especially after Mom left Thursday morning for St. Louis and I went on a miniature shopping spree at Kitchen Chemistry. I bought myself double Dutch coco, a stainless steel jubilee pan, some candy oils, and just because I couldn’t get them out of my head, a set of car-shaped cookie-cutters.

  In the meanwhile, William texted me every day.

  What was it about the last few days that had been different? Not so different that I still wasn’t sad, I could still feel my depression, the hands of despair that had been on me over the last year or so, they just weren’t quite as heavy as before. The thing of it was, was that I had been depressed for so long—so inexplicably sad—that I guess I had come to accept it as a part of my identity.

  One week ago I had tried to kill myself. And William had brought up some decent points, making me think about my potential future. If I wasn’t going to be a suicide, then what would I be?

  William did make me feel better, I couldn’t deny that. But so did Tabby, Eggs, Mickey, Cosmo, and all of their stupid nicknames for each other. Granted William made me better in a far different way…

  Bizarrely enough, I wasn’t ashamed to admit that it wasn’t just the new variety of people that had improved my disposition in the last week. It was more than that, and I knew it. As it was, however, I just couldn’t put my finger on it. It laid there on my tongue, undefined and waiting like a car that was stuck in park.

  We drove for almost an hour before stopping for inspection at, of all places, a church. It was one of those big Baptist churches with a white picket fence around the entire property and a small cemetery on the premise. In my mind it was ironic how this group of thugs, sex fiends, and lawbreakers were so respectful on that “sacred” ground. Almost every spot was taken, racer or otherwise, but people were relatively quiet, taking their garbage with them when the trash cans filled up, and doing their best not to step on the small shrubs between the walkway.

  “This is only inspection, right?”

  William nodded excitedly. “Yeah. The race will be right down the street tonight though.”

  We parked next to a corvette painted to look like it was covered in colorful feathers. Too excited to do anything but follow William, I felt like a little kid again, my eyes threatening to pop out of my head at the growing spectacle surrounding us.

  With only the racers and hustlers around to determine betting odds, the average cars of spectators were not around to tarnish the beauty of the tricked out cars. Briefly, I thought each of them looked like pieces of art, each body a canvas that the mechanic had sculpted and restored to say a little something about themselves.

  I wondered what William’s car said about him.

  When I caught up to him, he was staring down at a cherry red car that sat low to the ground and had a small crowd gathered around its open hood. Like the night we played chicken with the cops, the look on William’s face was concentrated, his late summer eyes dangerous.

  “This is the closest thing we’ll see to competition tonight, Jumper,” he said as if reading my mind. It took me a solid second to realize he had included me in the involvement of Bloody Mary. I felt oddly privileged, smiling before I even thought to stop myself.

  “I’ve been meaning to ask you,” I said, feeling braver. “Why do you call your car that anyway?”

  William walked away from the cherry red car and its crowd. Without instruction, I followed him, that concentration in his face alluring in a nerdy sort of way. It was only when he seemed to realize I was there that he spoke up again. “You mean why is her name Bloody Mary?”

  “Yeah.” I shrugged. “Tabby said it had something to do with the urban legend.”

  “You really can’t listen to Frenchie, Jumper. She believes everything she hears.” William stretched his neck from side to side, making the muscles look deep and firm. I looked away and focused on his voice instead. “No, I was reading a lot of books about history around the time I was restoring her—mostly stuff about the English monarchy, the Tudors, all that.”

  “The Tudors?”

  “Yeah.” He smiled. “You know, Blood Mary, Queen of Scots—”

  Back where we had parked Mary, I ran my fingers along the side-view mirror. “I’m familiar with the figure. I just don’t get the reference.”

  William smirked and pulled up the collar on his military styled jacket. “Cause this lady smokes everyone who gets in her way.”

  We walked around for a few minutes more, William pointing out the importance of this and that while I did my best to remember the name of all the people and parts he introduced me to. And while I didn’t see Tabby, I did see Mickey, and I managed to say hello before he and William talked about distributer caps for ten minutes. I also learned the tricked out ice cream truck actually sold ice cream—easily the first surprise of the night.

  The text message that delivered the final betting odds came simultaneously. I could tell from the barrage of beeps and whistles of ringtones that went off around us that inspection was over. And while it was entertaining to watch people make last minute bets to the hustlers, I couldn’t ignore that tug on my wrist that was so rough it was almost painful.

  “The show hasn’t even started yet, Jumper! Now move that pretty cooling rack of yours and let’s go.”

  “Hey!” Surprising both of us, I pulled out his grasp and shoved him ahead of me. “Don’t be rude to me! Just because you invited me doesn’t mean you get to order me around. Jerk.” Unsure if I had gotten my point across, I added the insult for good measure. Like an extra dash of sugar, I figured it couldn’t hurt.

  William looked behind him, his eyebrow up and dimple twinkling. “Geez, Jumper, you sure are grumpy for someone so pretty.”

  As soon as my brain registered the words my heart started to pound—outright throb. Reminding me of the old cartoons where wolves eyes popped out of their head, and their hearts exploded at the sight of a pretty girl, I considered hitting myself over the head with a mallet.

  Where were the piano movers when you needed them?

  “Flattery.” I gulped. “So lame.”

  As lame as it was, however, it made me listen to him. I supposed, because of that, we were one of the first cars to pull out of the church parking lot. It had occurred to me that I hadn’t asked where we were going; it also dawned on me that I didn’t care.

  “Why a church?” I asked after a minute. “It seems a little… I guess the word I’m looking for is unlikely?”

  “That’s part of the point, Jumper. If a cop drives up and sees a filled up church parking lot, he’s usually just gonna think there’s a revival meeting or something.”

  “Even with the cars you guys drive?”

  His gaze never left mine. Consequently, there was only the slightest concern of him swerving on the road. Really, what I was feeling was that blast of i
ntensity I couldn’t define. It surged through me mercilessly, stealing both my senses and breath away.

  William looked back to the road, blinked hard and shook his hair from his eyes.

  “W-what was it you were saying?”

  “The cars? In the church?

  “Right. Jon is part of the parish. That helps a lot.”

  I did my best to shake off William’s stare and get back to reality. What he said about having an insider in the church made complete sense. From what I had seen and heard so far, while these people were technically breaking the law every weekend, they had formed a community amongst themselves, a group where everyone played a part and contributed for the sake of the rush. They all seemed to want the danger nearly as badly as I did—they were just careful about how they achieved it.

  They were an elite sort of group. And it seemed I had been invited in.

  “You ever go to church, Jumper? Most Italians are Catholic, aren’t they?”

  While the question wasn’t entirely out of the blue, it still surprised me. God had always been a distant mystical creature in my life, right up there with Santa and The Tooth Fairy. Did William believe in God? Did that make it easier to be happy?

  I shook my head until my silk headband threatened to come undone. William, who I thought had been concentrating on the road, smiled faintly.

  “I went a couple of times when my nana was still alive—my mom’s mom. The two of them argued all the time because my parents wouldn’t send me to Sunday school.”

  “You’re a lucky one then.” William laughed. “My sisters and I dreaded every Sunday morning within an hour of getting back from church that same day.”

  “Sisters?” It was harder to picture than anything else, a little William amongst a group of girl-faced Williams. I had to blink hard to try and make the image real.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Three of them.” He held up his fingers to demonstrate. “No brothers.”

  I laughed freely. At least that explained why William was so good with the girls. Suddenly then, I could see it: William being forced to play princess dress-up and shoved off to ballerina rehearsals. “Where are you along the line?”