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She shakes her head, waving a careless hand toward me. “Maybe he won’t even notice.”
I carry the basket out the back door and head across the yard to the wooden bridge that connects our yard to the motocross track. It’s weird seeing your parents turn into people who need to watch things like cholesterol and start taking blood pressure pills. Like the last time I saw my mother, on Christmas break before I headed to Dad’s house, she looked so much older. The crow’s feet in the corners of her eyes seemed twice as deep, and her hands were starting to get brown age spots on them. My parents are getting old, and I’m becoming an adult, and it’s just all so weird and hard to accept at times.
I’d wanted to grow up and turn eighteen for so long, and now that I’m here, I almost wish I were a kid again. They don’t have to write ten page essays, and worrying about their future career is a thing so far in the future that it doesn’t matter.
Mostly, they don’t get broken hearts.
The rumble of dirt bikes thunders through the air as I make my way across the track, heading toward the tall score tower to deliver the guys their food.
As I make the trek up the metal stairs that lead to the main room of the score tower, I think of all the hundreds of times I’ve made this journey. Working at my dad’s motocross track was my first real job after I moved here to get away from my erratic mother. It’s because of this track that I finally had my own money, a way to save it up or spend it how I wanted, without catering to my mother’s whims of blowing every dime we ever had. This track welcomed me into the motocross family, and it’s never let me go. It’s where I met Ash and Shelby, who despite my breakup with the former, will always be special people to me. Working like crazy for another summer is the least I can do to pay it back for all the greatness it’s brought into my life.
The door swings open and an Arctic rush of air conditioning hits me in the face. “Is it cold enough in here?” I ask, turning around to shut the door behind me. The room is in all about the size of my bedroom, so the window unit set to full blast really makes the place into an igloo.
“Well, look who’s back!” The voice that greets me isn’t my father’s, but it’s just as welcome.
I turn around to find the room empty except for Marty, my dad’s longtime friend and Mixon Motocross Park’s resident race announcer. He throws an arm around me and pulls me into a hug that smells like coffee and a faint hint of tobacco. “So, are you all educated now?” he asks, pulling back and holding me by the shoulde
r.
“One semester of freshman level classes hardly counts as educated,” I say, handing him the basket. “Where’s Dad?”
“Should be back any second,” Marty says, but his attention is solely on the burritos. He digs around the ones labeled with Dad’s and my name and finds a blank one. “Why don’t you take a seat and tell me about college life while we wait on him?”
I take my burrito and unwrap part of the foil. Marty offers me coffee from the tower’s industrial coffee maker but no matter how I try, I can’t make myself like the stuff. “There’s really not much to say,” I begin, a little tired of repeating the same boring college stuff to everyone. “There’s classwork, which isn’t that hard, parties that I don’t really go to, and roommates that are randomly assigned, and mine sucked.”
“What was so wrong about your roommate?” he asks with his mouth full of food.
I peel off a piece of tortilla. “She . . . dated a lot. And I wouldn’t have cared, but the guys she brought over were usually half naked on her side of the room the next morning. Also, she cooked all this weird food that smelled terrible.” I shudder at the memories of her hot plate cooking.
The door swings open, letting in a brief blast of hot summer air. I turn toward the warmth, already forming arguments for turning off the air conditioner in my head. I know it’s hot as hades outside, but making it an igloo in here won’t change that. Dad enters, followed by a tall, towering guy I’ve never seen before. He has black hair that’s cut short around the sides, but it’s a little wavy on top of his head. Piercing blue eyes find mine as quickly as if he were already expecting me to be sitting in this exact spot. He has the kind of angular face that always looks like it’s in a smirk, probably from perpetually looking down on everyone because he’s so tall.
Dad heads over to the coffee and pours himself a cup of the grossness that everyone loves around here. “Morning, sweetheart! You ready to get to work?”
“Something tells me the only acceptable answer is yes,” I say, which earns me a chuckle from my dad.
The new guy walks over to the basket of burritos and fishes around, grabbing one without Dad’s name on it. “Good morning,” he says as that smirk transforms into something like a smile. “Hana, right?”
I swallow the food in my mouth and give him a wary once-over. Only now that he’s standing next to me, towering like fifty feet above my head, do I realize that he’s wearing a black Mixon Motocross Park Staff shirt. “Yeah, that’s me. Who the hell are you?”
“Hana,” Dad chides, and it’s almost like an automatic dad-reaction to hearing his daughter curse because he doesn’t even look away from his coffee as he pours sugar into it.
The new tall guy lifts his burrito in a form of hello. “I’m Lincoln. I started working here a couple of months ago.”
It takes everything I have not to flinch. He can’t know that I’ve already heard about him, this mysterious new track employee who allegedly has a crush on me. I peel off another piece of my burrito with all of the casual boredom I can manifest. “Cool. Well, nice to meet you.”
“Definitely.” Lincoln stuffs the still-wrapped burrito under his arm and hefts a black laptop case onto the desk in front of a row of windows that overlook the track. “Maybe you can teach me some insider info on the track sometime.”
“I’m sure you already know it all,” I say, spinning around in my chair so that I face the windows. The sun is rising, casting a bright glow over half of the track. The other half is buried in shadows from the tall dirt jumps.
“I’d still love to hear from the expert.”
Is he smirking at me?
Is he flirting with me? I mean really, this soon? In front of Dad and Marty?
A walkie talkie thunks down beside me and then Dad ruffles my hair, which is in a ponytail, so now I have to fix it. “I’m off to water the track. Call if you need anything.”
Lincoln and I watch as Dad and Marty leave the score tower. If Dad knows about Lincoln’s supposed crush on me, he must not care very much. It took a little while before he let Ash and me be alone in small spaces together. Of course, now I’m eighteen so maybe he thinks it’s none of his business.
