Chapter 7 Bahrain
BAHRAIN
THREE DAYS LATER
SAGE
I don’t think anyone is above experiencing schadenfreude, so I take that into consideration when strangers are giddy about my failures.
The flip side of having little girls lose their minds with joy when I sign their shirts and caps is having to deal with sexist assholes on social media telling me I should “pack up my Barbie Power Wheels and go home.” Or having Maya Ardley’s grudge-holding mom act like it was some sinister conspiracy that I just plain outdrove her daughter in testing with Harrier.
But despite being well-conditioned to endure shit-talk, the day I’m having today is hitting me right in my worst insecurities.
Not even making it into the top 15 out of 20 on my first qualifying session of the year?
It isn’t a good look. Sports and Tortes will definitely gloat.
So many eyes are on me, judging whether Emerald were nuts to take a chance on me.
And there’s a clause in my three-year contract that says if I trail Cosmin, Emerald’s other driver, by more than a hundred points at the end of the season, Emerald have the option to put someone else in my seat.
When I head out in Q1 today, the car is fighting me.
I’m so far off the pace it’s heartbreaking.
In dialogue with my race engineer Imani about the details, we agree that we should revert to yesterday’s setup.
I come into the pit and they wheel my car backward into the garage to make some quick adjustments.
Okay, back out for my next attempt…
Things are feeling great until I lock it up in a corner, compromising my exit and losing time down the next straight, and creating a flat spot on the tyre so I’m getting a vibration.
Into the pit again, with minutes left. I’m in the drop zone, not yet having banked a fast enough lap to advance to Q2.
Back out with fresh tyres, I’m on a hot lap.
This is the one.
“You’re purple in sector 2, Sage,” Imani tells me.
Fastest on track!
The moment expands around me. My heart bounds with a powerful rhythm like a sprinting predator closing in on prey that’s inches from their jaws…
Oh, fucking what???
Jo?o Valle, my former teammate at Harrier, overcooks it and puts his car into the wall. As I pass the debris field, I know a red flag is coming. It’s too close to the end for the session to be restarted, which means my gorgeous lap just went into the shitter, and I’m out.
Sure, Q1 got red-flagged because of Jo?o. But at the end of the day, critics will say it’s my fault: I could’ve honed my setup better in practice yesterday, I could’ve avoided locking it up in that corner and needing to pit for fresh tyres.
Sadly, they won’t be wrong.
It’s nine p.m. when I get back to the suite, and I know I’m supposed to go to sleep immediately—tomorrow is race day, and everything will be in motion before dawn—but I’m too nervous. My first grand prix with Emerald.
I wish I weren’t starting it from sixteenth on the grid.
The world is watching.
Judging.
This will be my tenth grand prix. I drove eight races for Harrier the year before last after Jo?o Valle got a penalty-points race ban, then broke his femur in a snowboarding accident like a dipshit.
Last season I subbed in for Valle’s teammate when he got an appendectomy (relatable!) and I scored a killer fourth place in quali.
But this will be my first race as a non-reserve driver, and my first time driving in Bahrain.
I have a night-before-the-GP routine that worked pretty well for me during that eight-race stretch.
First a light dinner—tonight a frittata with salmon and vegetables, along with quinoa salad.
Low-impact workout with lots of flexibility stuff, followed by a massage.
Next I’ll go to my room and put on some music, read through the notes Imani sent me, play a few solitaire rounds of the card game SET, take a bath, and go to sleep.
That was my plan. But as I come into the suite, I hear Priya on the phone in her room and she sounds upset, so I sneak to the open doorway to eavesdrop.
“We should tell her, Julian,” she says. “She needs to know, regardless of where you two are with each other right now.”
Needs to know what?
“It’s three weeks until the Australian GP,” she goes on. “I don’t want the stress of holding this in for that long. It shouldn’t be a secret.”
Details, please!
“No, honey… no no no. Don’t get upset. Please? I won’t tell her what happened to you. No, I won’t. I wish I could hold you right now. Mount Arapiles is only three hours from Melbourne—I’ll come to you there. We’ll figure this out, don’t worry.”
Figure what out?
“Where were you when it happened?”
When what happened, dammit?
“Julian, no. Don’t do anything nuts, all right? Just wait. I’m here for you.”
What’s he doing that’s “nuts”? Dammit, I should just storm in and demand answers…
“Okay, but I’ve gotta go. Sage is gonna be back soon.”
I hear a rustling sound and I’m pretty sure she’s headed for the living room. I dash to the front door and slip out into the hallway, shutting the door silently behind me.
What the hell are they hiding?
Jules must be in some kind of trouble, and on a certain level it feels bad that he’s telling her and not me.
But that’s stupid, right? Why would I expect he’d tell me anything?
Pri is the rescuer, the nurturer. I’m the hothead who punched him on the arm rather than having a serious conversation with him when I caught him with the pills.
I kind of hate myself right now…
I wish I could stress-eat the sloppiest mile-high hamburger ever. Stacked with a greasy layer of onion rings. Enough melting cheese to constipate a flock of geese. A slab of chocolate cake on the side. And two fingers of bourbon, neat.
Fuck it.
I head for the elevators and go down to the lounge to break some rules.
The lounge’s dress code says casual when I check the website, but the place is all dark paneling and luxurious upholstery and gilded tables and thick rugs.
It looks like where rich Edwardian dandies would go to smoke their pipes and talk about…
I don’t know, shooting big game and colonizing someplace?
I take a chair. It’s so swanky here that “casual” or not, my Damned MACHINE GUN ETIQUETTE T-shirt feels out of place.
My blue hair is freshly dyed and pulled into a sweaty topknot.
A guy in his fifties at a nearby table gives me that look recognizable as a combination of What’s wrong with youngsters nowadays?
and Yeah, I would, eyeing my neck tattoo and holding his lips in a way that’s both prim and lascivious. Ew.
I flash a sarcastic toothy smile before turning to put in my order on Emerald’s team account. I ask for a slider and a side of onion rings, chocolate cake, and a bourbon.
While waiting, I swipe open my phone and compose then delete texts to Priya.
Me: Sooooo… is there anything you’d like to tell me?
Me: Every time you lie, Priya Ramachandran, a hummingbird collides with a windmill and DIES
I growl in frustration and smack my phone face down on the table, too hard.
Self-conscious, I look up to see if anyone caught my little tantrum. My gaze lands across the room where there’s a hot guy watching me, his hands paused over the keyboard of an open laptop. There’s an Irish coffee mug beside it, half empty.
What the hell…?
Alexander raises his eyebrows, then closes his laptop and slides it into a leather messenger bag before shouldering it, standing, and plucking up his coffee.
I study his approach. Cream-colored linen trousers and a matching vest, wine-red dress shirt beneath, rolled to the elbows.
Gold necktie pulled loose, top two buttons undone, displaying that peek of chest.
He sinks into the wing chair opposite me.
“Why are you here?” I ask. “You have your own hotel.”
“You mean that delightful accommodation where the sink water was half rust, and I woke this morning to find a spider the size of a steak-and-ale pie on my pillow? For some inexplicable reason, I gave it up and moved to a suite here. For which I’m paying.”
“This place is booked during race week.”
“I have my methods.” He checks his Patek Philippe wristwatch, then slides the laptop out of his bag and opens it. After perusing something, brow stern, he snaps it shut again.
A flutter of paranoia goes through me, considering the miserable qualifying session I had. “What are you writing?” I fold my arms. “Is it about me?”
“It isn’t, you vain girl,” he says with a twinkle in his eye. “But why the hostility? You’ve liked the things I’ve written this week for the social media posts. I thought I was crawling back into your good graces, no?”
Alexander has created good content this week, it’s true. Those props I had him buy have been put to surprisingly great use.
The tap-dance video was a hit—he was right about that.
The next night we did a pic of me (fully dressed in my racing suit) sitting in the unfilled bathtub with that stupid rubber duck perched on my head.
Then one of me peeking seductively over the top of a vintage sexy detective novel called A Not-So-Nice Girl.
He even posed for a “revenge pic” Priya took last night, where I’m holding the prop knife to Alexander’s throat and he’s looking comically terrified.
He’s been a little bit fun. But it’s not like we’re friends or anything.
“I wasn’t writing just now at any rate,” he assures me, re-rolling his left sleeve so it’s more symmetric with the other.
“Lemme check.” I beckon. “And no clicking anything away.”
“Are you daft? You’ve no right to my laptop.”
“Whatsa matter, Sandy? Afraid I’ll see your porn tabs?”
He gives me a lofty look. “Contrary to your delusion that you own me, pet, I’m untrammeled by your authority.”