Chapter 8
The Assist
Austen
The check engine light was the first variable to fail. The steering column was the second.
Momentum carried me to the shoulder. I wrestled the wheel, tires crunching onto gravel, and came to a stop on the side of the road.
Silence.
No hum of the heater. No NPR. The sound of rain hammering the roof like a thousand tiny fists.
“No,” I whispered, gripping the wheel. “No, no, no.”
I turned the key. The starter clicked—a dry, hollow sound. Click. Click.
Battery? Alternator. Definitely alternator.
I rested my forehead against the cold steering wheel. I ran the numbers. My bank account balance was $842.15. The tow truck would be $150 minimum. The diagnostic fee $90. The part $200. Labor $120 per hour.
$842.15 minus approximately $600.
That left $242.15 to survive until the end of the semester.
I’d hoped to stretch my summer earnings across the finish line, but the car gods had demanded a sacrifice in the form of a new alternator.
That buffer was gone. I didn’t want the distraction, but I didn’t have a choice.
I was going to have to pick up tutoring shifts again.
Panic, cold and sharp, spiked in my chest. I had a plan. My safety net. And now it was scrap metal.
I pulled out my phone to call a tow truck. And I had no bars. Of course, my car would die in a dead zone. I leaned forward and hit my head against the steering wheel.
I got out of the car. The wind hit instantly, soaking my hoodie in seconds. I knew where a garage was nearby, so I braced myself against the weather and started hiking.
Forty minutes later, the verdict was in. The shop was closed. The tow truck was “delayed due to weather.”
I had two options.
Wait two hours for the bus, walk a mile in the sleet to campus, and leave the car to get towed/impounded.
Call someone.
I didn’t have “someone.” I had colleagues. I had professors. I had Maya, but her Mini Cooper was in the shop, and she was terrified of driving in rain, anyway.
I pulled out my phone. My thumb hovered over Roommate (Luke).
Asking for help violated the primary rule of the system: Minimize debt. In foster care, favors were currency. If you gave someone a ride, they owned you. If they bought you food, they expected compliance. Debt was dangerous.
But my options were limited.
I hit call.
“Hey. You, okay?”
Luke’s voice was deep, warm, and startlingly alert for a Tuesday night.
“I,” I started, then my voice cracked. I hated it; hated sounding small. “I need a favor. A logistic assist.”
“Name it.”
I heard the jingle of keys on his end. He wasn’t asking what it was. He was mobilizing.
“My car died,” I said, listing the symptoms and the location. I tried to keep it clinical. Facts. “I was going to walk to the bus stop, but the weather is… suboptimal. And the bus runs once an hour.”
“Where are you?” he asked. I gave him directions.
“Stay there,” Luke said. The command was absolute. “I’m leaving now. Ten minutes.”
“Luke, you don’t have to—”
“I’m walking out the door. Stay inside where it’s warm.”
The line went dead.
I stared at the phone. He didn’t ask for gas money. He didn’t ask why I was stupid enough to drive in this weather. He calculated the vector and launched.
Ten minutes later, I was huddled next to the shop under an overhang when Luke’s massive black truck pulled up to the curb.
Luke got out. He wasn’t wearing a coat, just a gray thermal henley that clung to his shoulders. The rain didn’t seem to touch him. He moved with that goalie efficiency—no wasted steps.
“Come on,” he gestured for me to get in. Held opened the passenger door.
I threw my bag over my shoulder and ran for the opened door and scaled the truck to get inside.
“Heat’s on max,” Luke said, getting back into his side before putting the car in gear.
I nodded, unable to speak. My jaw was locked up from the shivering. I pulled my hood down, water dripping onto my nose.
“Thank you,” I managed. “I hope I didn’t pull you away from anything important.”
“I was throwing a tennis ball at a wall,” Luke said, merging into traffic. “You saved me from terminal boredom.” He turned and gave me a sideways glance. “Dude, you’re shivering.”
My teeth chattered in response. I gave him a weak smile and wrapped my arms around myself tighter. “At least you have heated seats.”
He drove differently than I did. I drove defensively, calculating risk. Luke drove like he owned the physics of the road. His hand rested lazily at the top of the wheel, his eyes tracking threats before they happened.
“Is the car dead-dead?” he asked. “Or just sick?”
“Expensive-dead,” I murmured. “My best guess is four hundred for the alternator and labor. That’s…” I trailed off. The math was suffocating me. “That’s a problem.”
I glanced at him. He wasn’t judging. He was acknowledging the variable.
“We can probably find someone else to look at it,” Luke said. “Ryan’s uncle owns a shop in town. Might give a discount.”
“It’s not just the repair.” I wiped my glasses on my shirt, though it was wet too. “It’s the liquidity. My scholarship covers tuition and housing. It doesn’t cover alternators.”
The silence stretched. I felt exposed. Luke Carter, with his expensive Division I gear and his seemingly endless meal points, probably didn’t understand what it meant to have your entire future jeopardized by a car part.
“You hungry?” he asked abruptly.
I blinked. “I missed dinner.”
“Good. Because I’m starving and I’m not eating North Point rubber chicken tonight. There’s a diner up the road. My treat.”
“Luke, I can’t—”
“My gas, my rules,” he said, voice firm. “Consider it payment for the radiator fix.”
I opened my mouth to argue the inequity of that exchange—manual labor on a valve versus gasoline and chauffeur services—but he pulled into the Galaxy Diner before I could formulate the equation.
The diner was a sensory overload of neon and grease. We slid into a booth.
I ordered a grilled cheese and tomato soup—the cheapest warm thing on the menu. Luke ordered a burger the size of a human head.
When the waitress left, I wrapped my hands around the mug of tea, trying to leach the last of the cold from my fingers.
“I almost didn’t call you,” I admitted. The words felt heavy, but necessary.
“Why?”
“Because asking for help introduces a debt variable,” I said, staring at the steam. “In the system—foster care—you learn fast that favors come with interest. Nothing is free. If someone gives you a ride, they want something. If they buy you dinner, you owe them.”
I risked a glance up.
Luke looked angry. Not at me. His jaw was tight, a muscle jumping near his ear.
“I’m a person, not a bank,” he said sharply.
I flinched.
He saw it and softened. He leaned forward, his massive shoulders blocking out the rest of the diner.
“In hockey,” he said, “you get an assist if you pass the puck to the guy who scores. It doesn’t mean you own the goal. It just means you helped get it there. That’s it. No interest. No debt.”
The waitress dropped our food. Steam rose from my soup.
I stared at it. “The assist,” I repeated.
“Yeah. You set me up with the radiator noise the other day when I was… when I needed cover. That was an assist. This is just me passing the puck back.”
I picked up my spoon. I looked at Luke. He wasn’t keeping a ledger. He wasn’t calculating ROI. He was playing the game.
The knot of anxiety in my chest loosened, just a fraction.
“The alternator is going to wipe out my savings for an apartment deposit, so I could live off campus next year,” I said quietly. The most honest thing I’d said to anyone in years. “That’s why I’m stressed. I’ve been saving for months.”
“We’ll figure it out,” Luke said, dipping a fry in ketchup. “August is a long way off. Constants change.”
I cracked a smile. “Variables change, Luke. Constants remain constant. That’s the definition.”
“Nerd,” he said, grinning. “Eat your sandwich.”
We ate. And for the first time in hours, I wasn’t doing math. I was existing.
Midway through the meal, the waitress swung by with a milkshake. “On the house. Vanilla.”
She dropped it in the center of the table with two straws.
I looked at the shake.
“I don’t do dairy,” Luke lied smoothly, sliding it toward me.
I narrowed my eyes. I had seen this man drink a quart of milk from the carton. “You drink protein shakes made of whey.”
“Whey is different. It’s… performance dairy.”
I rolled my eyes, but I took a sip. The sugar hit my bloodstream like a drug. “It’s good. Try it. Consider it extra fuel.”
I pushed it back to the center.
Luke hesitated, then leaned in. He wrapped his lips around the straw—the straw right next to mine. I watched his throat work as he swallowed.
Heat flared in my stomach that had nothing to do with the soup.
“So,” Luke said, pulling back. “Christmas break. You staying on campus?”
“Probably. Less travel cost.”
“You should watch Die Hard,” he said. “It’s the ultimate Christmas movie.”
I stopped mid-sip. I looked at him with genuine horror. “Excuse me?”
“You heard me. Bruce Willis. Nakatomi Plaza. Christmas Eve.”
“It’s a hostage situation in a corporate high-rise,” I said, putting my spoon down. “The holiday is incidental. It provides a reason for the party, nothing more. You could set it on the Fourth of July or a retirement party and the plot remains functionally identical.”
“False,” Luke said, pointing a fry at me like a weapon. “The emotional core of the movie is John McClane trying to reconcile with his wife for the holidays. The music is Christmas music. There is literally a dead guy with a Santa hat on him.”
“A corpse in festive wear does not a Christmas movie make,” I countered. “A Christmas movie requires a theme of redemption, charity, or magical realism. Die Hard is about ballistics and glass shards.”
“It has redemption! He realizes he was a jerk to his wife.”
“He realizes he might die,” I corrected. “That is survival instinct, not holiday spirit. If I am hanging off a building, I too would likely regret my marital disputes. That is adrenaline, not Santa Claus.”
Luke laughed. A full, chest-deep sound that made heads turn in the diner. He looked delighted.
“Okay, Professor,” he said. “What’s a real Christmas movie then?”
“The Muppet Christmas Carol,” I said instantly.
He blinked. “The Muppets?”
“It adheres to the source material while introducing a meta-commentary on the narrative structure via Gonzo the Great. It is statistically the most accurate adaptation of Dickens.”
Luke stared at me. And he smiled. Not the polite smile he gave fans. The real one. The one that made his eyes crinkle at the corners.
“Fine,” he said. “We’ll watch both. We’ll run a comparative analysis.”
“Acceptable.”
By the time we got back to Stony Creek Hall, the rain had stopped.
The dorm room was quiet. It smelled like lavender detergent and old books. It smelled like home.
I went to my desk. Picking up the puck,—the one Luke had given me after the shutout—I turned it over in my hands.
“Thanks for the ride,” I said, not looking at him. “And the dinner.”
“Don’t worry about it.” Luke sat on his bed, groaning as he stretched his back.
“Luke?”
“Yeah?”
I set the puck down, centering it perfectly under the lamp.
“If you ever need an assist…” I looked at him. “The stats say I owe you one.”
Luke looked at me. His expression was unreadable, but his eyes were soft.
“That sounds more like a debt than an assist,” he said.
“But, if I ever need anything from you, I won’t hesitate to ask.
And you can do the same thing with me. I don’t get what it had to have been like for you growing up in the system, but it sounds like it warped your perception of what friendship is. ”
“We’re friends?” The words were out of my mouth before I consciously spent a second to ponder them.
“I hope so,” Luke said, propping himself on the side of his bed looking at me.
“Besides Maya, I don’t really have many friends. I have colleagues and acquaintances, but I’ve never really had friends. Growing up, I was rarely anywhere long enough to make them.”
“That sounds horribly lonely.”
“Maybe, but when it’s all you’ve known, you really don’t know any better. You adjust.”
“Well, Mr. Lovell, I’m happy to call you a friend. And I’m happy that I ‘stuck’ with you as a roommate.” He actually used air quotes.
I nodded. I opened my laptop. The blue light washed over my face. The repair bill was still a disaster, and I had no idea how this would impact my finances, but those were problems for tomorrow. But the room didn’t feel cold anymore.
“And I’m happy to call you a friend,” I whispered before turning my attention to my laptop. I wasn’t a floating variable. I had a constant.