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“You have to agree or I’m out.”
“Fine. Deal.” I feel like I can’t breathe. Am I really going to give Holden another chance to let me down?
He latches onto Mara’s arm and walks out of the store. I follow, collecting my nerves from where they’ve spilled all over the ground. “Okay, well, we need to discuss a schedule for this whole thing.”
“Saine,” he says with a sigh, stopping next to his mom’s beat-up minivan. “I have to get home. It’s a school night and a long drive.”
Thirty minutes isn’t long, but I guess... “Longer than you’d like in this hunk of junk, I imagine.” There’s a vicious scratch along the side from when it got keyed in the school parking lot last year. Corrine went on a crusade with campus security to find the culprit but turned up empty-handed. And no, it wasn’t me.
“Says the girl without a car.”
“You don’t have a car?” Mara asks, jumping into the back seat when Holden slides the door open for her. “How did you get here?”
“Shit.” I pull out my phone. “Yvette was supposed to take me home.”
“Can’t we give her a ride?” Mara asks in a quiet voice.
I’m opening my Lyft app to request a driver when Holden puts his hand over my screen.
“Want a ride?” he asks in a voice that clearly says he is only asking so Mara doesn’t throw a fit the entire journey home.
“No,” I say like a lying liar. I do want a ride, but I definitely don’t want one with Holden. He’s... him, and Corrine wouldn’t like it andIwouldn’t like it. I’m not even sure I trust him to drive me after the car accident post-prom that’s left me jumpy when other people are behind the wheel.
Holden shrugs toward Mara and opens the driver door.
“Holden.”
“She said no,” he whisper-screams to Mara. “When someone says no, it means no.”
As unappealing as a short drive with Holden seems, it would be a good way to get extra footage, to discuss a schedule. Plus, if he still lives where he used to, he’ll pass by my house anyway.
“Okay.”
“Okay what?” Holden says, his door nearly shut.
“I’ll take a ride.”
“Yes!” Mara pumps her fist. “Thank god, Holden likes to listen to NPR or whatever and I’ll die if I have no one to talk to and have to hear abouttaxes.”
I round to the front passenger door and slip inside, steeling myself.
“I’m trying to educate you,” he mumbles.
“I have school for that.”
He starts the car and clears his throat, looking at me from the corner of his eye. “You still live on Ambrose?”
“Yep.”
“Okay.”
Maybe thirty minutesislong.
“Saine?” Mara breaks the thick, awkward silence. I hadn’t been able to work up the courage to start actually planning this thing aloud yet.
I angle toward the back of the van, my camera in hand, thankful for her saying something. I had been filming B-roll of the highway while keeping myself alert, but this could end up being more useful, and even though I’m not usually bothered or deterred by silences, I couldn’t seem to form any words this close to my former best friend and his brand-new (to be determined?) stepsister. “Yes?”
“Can I ask you for advice?”
