Page 88 of Better Than the Movies
“Car!” I braced myself for impact as the brake lights in front of us glowed bright red through the drenched and foggy window. Wes’s tires tried to stop on the wet pavement, but the brakes locked, and we were going to slam into that Suburban.
Wes steered the car to the right, throwing us up and over what might’ve been a curb, and then we were headed for something very green. It looked like a forest.
“Shitshitshitshit,” he chanted as he attempted to control the car. His foot mashed on the brake, but as the headlights lit up the steep, muddy slope in front of us, we just kept moving down that hill and toward the trees. We were going to hit a tree—there was no way we weren’t—and I said a prayer as fast as I could while my heart pounded.
He jerked the wheel again, and as soon as he did, I felt a huge bump, like we’d hit something, and I worried the car was going to flip over.
But it lurched to a stop instead.
I looked over at Wes, and his face was flushed like he’d just come back from a run. We were both breathing hard as thunder continued to pound, the rain slapped on the roof of the truck, and the radio still played “Dark Love.” “Did that just happen?”
“Are you okay?” His hands were still tightly wrapped aroundthe wheel, and he blinked at me, frozen, before he unclenched his fingers and put the car in park. “Holy shit, Liz.”
“I’m fine.” I tried to look out the windshield but still couldn’t see anything. “Oh my God, we’re fine…?”
“Oh my God.” He laid his back on his seat and let out his breath. “That was wild.”
Wild. From the time he’d slammed on the brakes until now had probably been a minute—tops. But that minute had been like an hour. In the span of that minute I’d worried that we were going to die. I’d worried about how my dad would survive if something happened to me, I’d worried about Joss, I’d worried about Wes’s mom, and I’d mourned the fact that I’d never get the chance to see things through with Wes.
Bizarre, right?
“I can’t believe we’re okay,” I said, remembering the way Wes had jerked the wheel. I said, “You were incredible.”
He unbuckled his seat belt and didn’t look at me. “Incredibly reckless for driving in this weather, you mean.”
“No, I mean not only did your driving keep us from slamming into that car, but then it kept us from slamming into a tree.” I unbuckled my seat belt too, and added, “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet. I might’ve gotten us stuck.” He reached in front of me and opened the glove box, rummaged until he came up with a flashlight. “Wait here—I’m going to check it out.”
He opened his door and got out. I tried peering through the windshield, to see for myself, but the windows were so fogged,I saw nothing. I opened my door and stepped out, immediately getting pummeled by the hard pounding rain as my foot squished down into the wet mud.
“Shit!” I lowered my head and ran around the front of the car to where I could sort of see Wes kneeling next to the tire. I stopped beside him and squatted. Yelled, “Seriously? A rock?”
It looked like our tire had slammed into a huge boulder and then gotten hung up on it. Wes’s front tire was literally off the ground. He squinted, rain sluicing over his face as he looked surprised to see me. “I thought I told you to wait in the car.”
“You’re not the boss of me,” I hollered through the rain, and his face went from rock-hard seriousness to amused softness in a second. I said, “Besides, if you die, I’m stuck out here all alone.”
“True,” he bellowed, grabbing my wet hand with his and pulling me up. “I’m getting back in the car—would the lady care to join me?”
“She would, actually.”
Instead of coming around to my side, he opened his door and gently pushed me inside. I giggled and climbed in, scooting over to the middle of the bench seat, and when his big body got in and the door slammed shut, the inside of his car seemed incredibly insulated.
For a few seconds we were quiet, each of us wiping water from our faces and pushing drenched hair from our eyes. Then he pulled out his phone and dialed a number.
“I’m calling my dad,” he said as he raised the phone to his ear, looking at the steering wheel. “He can get here fast, and his buddy has a tow truck.”
“Cool.” I looked down and whispered, “Oh no—my Chucks.”
They were covered in wet, sticky mud, and that made me more upset than it should’ve. They were just sneakers, after all, and it was just mud. But… I’d wanted them to stay as perfect as they’d been when Wes had walked them over to the counter at Devlish and paid for them.
Maybe I could wash them in bleach when I got home.
I pulled down the visor and looked in the mirror as he told his dad what had happened and where we were. I wiped under my eyes in an attempt to eradicate raccoon-eye, but my trembling fingers were no good.
I flipped the visor back up and took a deep breath. I was shaken by the accident, but this weird surge of adrenaline I was feeling was something more.
Because it occurred to me, as Wes’s car sat there with one tire in the air, that life was unpredictable. No matter how much planning you did, and no matter how safe you played it, some intangible was always going to rear its head and shake things up.
