Chapter 13 – Jack
Chapter Thirteen
Jack
It actually was nice driving along with Luna sitting beside me—maybe Sam was right, and I did deserve a break once in a while. And even though Luna and I were not, and would never be, a thing, having someone around who understood my lifestyle . . . I’d missed that.
It was so nice not to have to lie.
And then I watched Luna take off her heels to put her feet up on Betty’s dash. “What the—did Rosalie let you do that?”
“Rosalie didn’t have a car, silly.” Luna rolled her eyes at me. “She didn’t know how to drive. She was way too old to learn.” She gave me a defiant look as she settled in.
I looked between her painted toes and her. “So, what . . . you just miss being whammied?”
“We both know you’re not going to whammy me, Jack. Not over this.” Her nose wrinkled in thought in the rear view as I merged onto the highway. “Why do you call it that anyways?”
I inhaled to tell her, then glanced in her side view mirror, where a semi without running lights was bearing down on us at speed.
“Hang on!” I shouted as I flung an arm across her to keep her from taking a nosedive into the very same dashboard, at the same time as I yanked the wheel left while gunning the engine.
Betty was too big a car to clear the lane quickly, and the truck clipped the back corner on Luna’s side. She screamed as we began to spin, and I tried to control the car with one hand, while stopping her from getting shaken like a rag doll by a dog.
And then something else hit us. Betty was shoved into the empty space above an overpass, right before the barrier wall began.
I used the last chance I had to steer us away from the wall, which meant going down into the desert landscaping below.
Betty bounced, hit something wrong, and then twisted in midair like a dolphin flipping back into the sea.
Shrubbery and rock made metal shriek as it scraped against us, glass was everywhere.
Luna was screaming—until she wasn’t—and then I heard things crunch and there was only black.