The Dodge rattled, and squealed, and thunked, but, thank God, it lurched forward just as the black car’s front grille kissed our bumper. The shock was still enough to send me flying painfully into the steering wheel, and David into my back.

“What the hell?” David yelled in my ear.

My eyes still on the street, I reached down with one hand and unfastened David’s seatbelt. “Scoot!” I hollered over the clunking of the car and the rush of wind pouring through the open passenger window.

We were hurtling down the oak-lined avenue, branches forming a leafy arch overhead. My hands were slick with sweat as I clutched the steering wheel, and my calf muscle was already aching from how hard I was mashing David’s foot on the gas pedal. There was still a trace of that disconnected feeling I’d had when fighting Dr. DuPont and Ryan, like I wasn’t completely in control of my body, but this time, I was definitely feeling more there, if that makes any sense.

I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw that the black car was only a few feet behind us. We’d gotten a head start, but they were driving a much better car. Already, the Dodge was shuddering like its frame was about to fly into pieces, and we were only going seventy miles an hour.

Then it occurred to me that we were going seventy miles an hour on a street where the speed limit was twenty-five. I sent up a quick prayer that there were no little kids riding bikes anywhere nearby, and pressed my foot down even harder.

David gave a grunt of pain as my heel dug into his foot. “Sorry!” I yelled. “But come on! Scoot!”

I could tell he was trying to get out from under me, but the only way to do it quickly (and so I could maintain our speed and my concentration) would be to actually put his hands under my butt, lift me off him, and slide. Instead, he was trying to slide out from under me without touching my butt, or hips, or really any area that could be considered inappropriate.

That wasn’t going so well. It’s not like I weigh very much— I’m maybe a buck ten—but David is a slight guy, and I was pretty firmly wedged onto his lap. While I appreciated this rare show of chivalrous behavior, now was not the time for David to worry about my delicate sensibilities.

Especially since I’d just realized this was a dead-end street.

“Scoot, scoot, SCOOT!” I yelled at David.

“I AM SCOOTING!” he shouted back.

Then he looked out the windshield and saw the same thing I had: the large grove of trees at the end of the street that we were headed straight for. At seventy-five miles an hour.

He used three different versions of the F-word, and before I knew it, his hands were on my butt and he was sliding into the passenger seat. I landed on the nubby seat with a grateful sigh. Now the steering wheel wasn’t pressed into my chest, and David’s bony knees weren’t cutting into the back of my thighs. Cheap upholstery had never felt so good.

David was several inches taller than me, so I had to slide down a little to maintain my pressure on the accelerator, but we never swerved or dropped our speed.

“Thank you!” I said, but David didn’t seem to hear me. He was running a shaking hand over his paper-white face and mumbling to himself.

“Buckle up!” I shouted.

That he heard. I buckled my seatbelt, too, and then looked over at him as the trees got closer and closer.

“Why are you smiling?” he shouted, terror all over his face.

I was smiling? I could see my reflection in his glasses, and he was right. I was smiling kind of big, actually. And then I realized why. Because even though this was scary and dangerous and so, so illegal . . .

It was fun. I felt in my element and in charge. I’m always happiest when I’m excelling at something, and, to quote one of those World of Warcraft websites I’d stumbled onto, these bad guys were about to get pwned.

The smile turned into a laugh as I gripped the steering wheel tight in my left hand and reached down with my right.

“I’ve always wanted to do this!” I shouted.

The end of the street was only a few dozen yards away. The black car was right behind us.

I pushed down as hard as I could with both feet on the brake pedal, and at the same time, I jerked the emergency brake up and spun the car hard to the left.

And it worked! Okay, so it wasn’t a total success. The black car was so close to us that it hit us as we spun, crunching in the back door on my side. David gave a low groan, but whether that was for his car or the fact that we had been literally seconds from death, I wasn’t sure.

The rear of the car fishtailed, taking out at least three mailboxes as I righted the Dodge and sped off in the opposite direction, back toward the Grove. I had an idea.

I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the black car had done a similar spin and was now following us again, although we had a much bigger lead this time.

It wasn’t going to last long, though. I could see sparks shooting up from the rear tire. It had probably gotten crunched along with the back door. The Dodge also seemed to have trouble shifting into fifth gear, and I heard a grinding sound that couldn’t be good. I only hoped I had enough time . . .

We shot down the street, the car wobbling now and much harder to control. We passed one house where a woman in a flowery shirt and hot pink capri pants dropped her garden hose and stared at us in openmouthed shock. I cringed. Mrs. Harris, who was in the Junior League with my mom. I really hoped she hadn’t recognized me.

We passed the Grove, and I was super thankful there was no one loitering outside the gates.

“Two more miles, two more miles,” I muttered to myself. The Dodge was only going around fifty miles an hour now, and the black car was gaining on us.

Another sound caught my attention over the rushing wind and dying car. “Sexy Back” was playing somewhere. Somewhere nearby.

I looked around until I spotted my book bag at David’s feet. “You got my bag?”

By this point, David was huddled against the passenger door, staring at me with naked horror. He shook his head, like he hadn’t understood the question before blinking a few times and saying, “Oh . . . um, yeah. I thought you might need it.”

“Why did you follow me?”

David looked over his shoulder at the black car. “Huh? Oh, well . . . I wanted to, uh, ask you some more questions about what the hell is going on with you.” He turned back around and wiped his glasses on the bottom of his T-shirt. “Of course, I thought you were on drugs. I didn’t realize you were actually an assassin or something.”

He was lying, I could tell. Maybe it was a Paladin thing, or maybe I was finally seeing through him the way he always seemed to see through me.

“Bull,” I said.

“What?” He looked at me with wide eyes.

“Bull,” I repeated. “You didn’t want to ask me more questions about the paper. Why did you follow me?”

“I’m not lying!” he insisted, glancing behind him again.

“Yes,” I said calmly, even as the black car got closer, “you are. Why did you follow me?”

The black car thumped our bumper, but I wasn’t worried anymore. We were only a few houses away now.

“Because you were crying!” David shouted, his voice cracking with fear, and, I thought, anger. “You were upset and I felt bad about the stupid article, and then that weird shit happened with Ryan, and even if I don’t always agree with the things you do at school, you do try and you didn’t—”

He broke off and sagged against the seat, closing his eyes. “I just . . . I don’t like crying girls, okay?”

We were quiet for a second while I took that in.

“That was very nice of you, David,” I finally said. “Now hold on because I’m about to drive into a fence.”

“Yeah, okay,” he muttered, his eyes still closed. “You do that.”

Then his eyes shot open. “Wait, what?”

My house was there on the right, and I swung the Dodge straight through our fence.

We crashed through with enough force to rattle my bones and shatter the windshield into roughly a million spiderweb cracks. But that was okay. I didn’t need to see now.

I kept pulling the wheel to the right, which meant that I missed our pool, driving David’s car straight to the back corner of our yard.

The black car wasn’t so lucky. Not only did it hit the water, it had been going so fast that it hit it with all the force of driving into a brick wall. I could hear the splash, and as I looked in the rearview mirror, I saw the huge wave that came out of the pool.

The Dodge came to a shuddering halt, bumping against something solid that I thought might be my mom’s new birdbath.

Whoops.

I put the car in park and turned it off, plunging us into silence. Well, not total silence, since I was breathing pretty hard and David kept mumbling, “Please don’t let us be dead, please don’t let us be dead.”

“David,” I said, reaching over to grab his arm. He reached over with his other arm and covered my hand with his.

“Pres?” he said, opening his eyes, which still looked very wide and very blue in his pale face. “We’re not dead,” he said, almost like he was talking to himself. “How did we not get dead?”

I smiled at him and squeezed his arm. “Because I’m awesome.”

He stared at me and his smile got bigger and brighter as the fear drained out of his face. “We’re not dead!” he said, like he just now got that we were still sitting in his gross—and now completely busted—car instead of playing harps in the sky or whatever.

I was smiling back, my grin probably exactly as crazy as his. “We’re so not dead!”

He laughed and the sound was so full of relief that I found myself laughing, too.

He turned to me, still grinning. I was grinning back when he reached out, grabbed the back of my neck, and pulled me to him.

Chapter 9

For one horrifying second, I thought he was going to kiss me. I wasn’t really sure how I’d react if he did. I mean, I knew that if he kissed me, it would be a kiss of the “I am so glad I am not dead that I would kiss a flesh-eating zombie were it sitting in this car beside me” variety more than the sexy, “I only write mean articles about you because I am secretly in love with you” type.