The Thrashers(45)

Jodi volunteered to go over to her house and talk to her, try to show her the news articles she’d found of other drive-in screens falling down, but Zack insisted he go.

Jodi lay on her stomach on her bed, FaceTiming with Zack, Paige, Julian, and Lucy.

“Jodi,” Paige said suddenly, and Jodi watched her jump up and run out of frame. “I totally forgot. I saw this and grabbed it for you!”

Zack checked his reflection in the FaceTime screen as they waited for Paige to bounce back onto her bed. Paige held up a hot pink flyer.

“It’s for an art contest! Zack and I saw it at Burr’s!”

“Oh, yeah,” Jodi stuttered through a response with the knowledge Zack and Paige had gone to lunch without inviting the rest of them. “I saw that at Burr’s, too.”

“Are you gonna enter?” Zack asked.

Jodi shook her head noncommittally. “Maybe! It’s for twelve-year-olds, too. I don’t think I could handle being bested by a seventh grader.”

“Or,” Lucy said, “you beat out all the seventh graders, make them cry, and we make Mr. Burr hang your picture next to our favorite booth with a plaque that says ‘For Contest Winners Only.’”

Jodi laughed as they kept building on the joke, talking about Reagan Matthews’s shithead little brother and how to get him to enter the contest just so Jodi could beat him.

At the end of the call, Paige was laughing and taking Zack’s phone and screenshotting the call screen showing all of their faces. Jodi watched her face fall for only a second before laughing at something Julian said. Later, Jodi texted her, the flare?

The three dots appeared and disappeared over and over for five minutes. Then finally:

i think it was just your mirror

Jodi’s skin broke out in chills. She whipped around, looking over the room, ignoring the rest of Paige’s texts that reassured her that it was just the grainy FaceTime call. She fell into a fitful sleep full of memories.



* * *



Jodi sat under a tree, reading the assigned chapters of A Separate Peace, looking up whenever Lucy screamed. They were in an abandoned parking lot at dusk under the pretense of teaching Jodi how to drive, but Jodi hadn’t slid behind the wheel in over an hour.

Because Emily wanted to learn how to drive, too.

Then, Zack and Paige wanted to play Ride or Die, the game they’d all come up with over the summer.

Lucy hollered, and Jodi looked up to see her long, dark limbs splayed over the hood of Paige’s moving car, going about fifteen miles per hour over the potholes in the lot. The point of the game was to ride on the hood of a car, completely at the mercy of the driver.

Jodi thought it was the stupidest way to have fun since she tried getting high for the first time, and … she didn’t think she had the balance to stay on the hood without flying off. They usually played this game in a grassy field, which had the added advantage of being able to land on grass instead of pavement, but the ride was bumpier, too.

Paige pulled the car to a stop, Lucy jumped off the hood, and Paige exited the car with Zack, Emily, and Julian.

The other reason Jodi didn’t want to play?

Paige stood in a circle of the four others, squeezed her eyes shut, extended her arm with her finger in a point, and spun in a dizzy spiral. When she stopped, her hand was pointed at Julian. Paige groaned.

The other reason was that Jodi didn’t like the one-in-four chance she had that Julian would be behind the wheel. She couldn’t trust that he would actually stop when the person on the hood screamed out “ride or die!”—their safe word, of sorts. He hadn’t stopped when Zack used it last month, and Jodi had yelled at him from the passenger seat of Zack’s Mustang.

Paige jumped up on the hood of her car, and Julian slipped behind the wheel.

Jodi half wished she’d just been dropped off at home, but even if she wasn’t participating—even if she was watching Emily Mills take her place in the circle—she didn’t want to be left out. If Paige broke her arm today or if Emily crashed Paige’s car into a tree, Jodi would have to hear about it secondhand for the rest of the school year.

She watched as Paige held on for dear life while Julian accelerated. He angled the car toward a section of grass, and just as Paige started to form the words, “Ride—!,” Julian hit the brakes and Paige flew.

Jodi gasped, jumping to her feet. Paige shot into the grass, rolling several times. Jodi was running toward her before she heard Paige giggling. Lucy was out of the car and at her side, and then both girls were laughing.

“Julian!” Jodi yelled, jogging the rest of the way to the car. “What the fuck?”

Julian stepped out of the driver’s seat, and when Jodi reached him she shoved him against the door.

“Hey! She’s fine!” He said, gesturing to Paige, who was still cracking up. “I knew what I was doing, Mom.”

“Okay, okay,” Zack said, stepping between the two of them before Jodi could bite back. “Paige is okay. We all know what we’re signing up for when we get on the hood.”

Jodi spun on her heel and stomped over to Paige. She didn’t have a scratch on her. Paige and Lucy assured her that everything was alright.

When Jodi turned back toward the car, Zack was helping Emily get onto the hood.

“No. Nope.” Jodi shook her head. “Not a chance.” She marched over to the car and reached for Emily’s arm. Emily smiled and slid her hand into Jodi’s instead, allowing herself to be tugged down.