Page 27 of False Start

I winced as followed her into the car, my hip smacking the center console. The passenger door squeaked as I shut it, metal grinding against metal.

“Of course we’re going to win.” The knee-jerk response stemmed from a lifetime of competitive sports. Football and track, hell, paintball the night before.

“That’s not how this works.”

“It’s how it works for me.”

She snorted, manhandling the shifter between us into reverse with a painful crunching sound. “Fine. I guess I can’t tell you anything.”

She leaned into the backseat and retrieved a book, handing it to me. “Here’s all the information I have about the event.”

The tattered stack of papers had been thumbed over quite a bit. Oily smudges covered the edges, and more than a few pages were ripped.

“You know you can just read this shit on the Internet, right?” I joked. “You don’t have to print it out.”

She rolled her eyes as I skimmed past the history of the event that took up the first five pages. I stopped on the first rule, reading it aloud. “Don’t be a dick. Really? That’s a rule?”

“Yeah,” she sighed. “I should have thought about that before I agreed to this truly insane plan. I’m not sure you can handle not being a dick for more than a couple of minutes.”

“I thought we just called a truce?”

The hint of a smile pulled at her lips, but she kept her gaze on the road.

I shrugged. “Alright, maybe I’ve been a little bit of a dick. I’m sure you’ll keep me in line.”

“Like I won’t have enough to do. How good are you at navigating? Reading maps?”

I flipped through a few more pages. “I have GPS on my phone.”

She groaned as she grabbed the book from my hands, thumbing through pages with her eyes still glued to the road.

“Read this.” She pointed to a page before shoving the papers back at me. “We get a list of checkpoints, but we need to figure out where they are. There are no addresses.”

“This seems like a lot of work. You sure you don’t just want to rent out a track and race this bad boy?” I tapped the dashboard. Black plastic flaked in my hand.

“We just need to finish the race. That’s it.”

“Did your dad just want to finish the race or win it?” I asked.

She winced, and I regretted asking. The “don’t be a dick” rule might actually be a challenge.

Her lips flattened, jaw tightened. “I don’t know.”

“I think we could win.”

“You can’t navigate and can’t drive manual. We’ve never done this before, and some of the other teams have done it a dozen times without winning.” She sighed. “Did you just show up on the football field and start winning?”

I considered the question. She had an answer in mind, but I told the truth. “Yeah.”

Her head whipped toward me. “Yeah?”

I shrugged. “I was always really fast and a good catcher. Football just came natural to me.”

She shook her head, mouth agape. “Seriously?”

Rather than an awed breath that I normally received, Kit seemed almost offended. The reaction took me off guard, got under my skin. “Seriously. It’s not like I didn’t put in the work.”

Even with my inherent talent, making it to the NFL required work. Hard work. Sure, more for some other players than me, but she didn’t need to know that.

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