Chapter 11 Queenside Castling
Only once I’m on an empty Paddock Club balcony overlooking the circuit’s starting line do I recognize Faust’s comment for the compliment it is. Then I sink my hands onto my knees and wait out this swell of nausea.
He remembers me.
Me. My face. This whole time, he remembered me.
Is this what a panic attack feels like? My ribs are too tight and my skin is flushed and there’s a rabbit in my heart blinking up at the big headlights as a car barrels toward me, too distracted by the bright, pretty lights to move.
And it is a pretty thought—like blinding, white light before asphalt and steel—that meeting me for a few minutes was enough to make a mark on someone.
On him. That Faust of all people could be the one thing I never saw coming: my match. And…
I had to lie to him.
I had to tell him that he’s wrong about me, and I like Bernard.
My phone buzzes where it’s stuffed into my shoulder bag. The one short bzzt of a voicemail. A few seconds later, there’s another. My fingers tremble as I slip it out and read the screen. Two voicemails: one from Renata, the other from Maisie.
This is it. Goodbye, Cat Cromwell. You had a really good run, and now you are certifiably screwed.
“If you’re going to throw up, you cannot do it on a Paddock Club balcony. Upper management will sniper-rifle you.”
The choir of voices screaming get the hell out of dodge quiet as Mei appears next to me, a little sweaty, clutching two influencer swag bags and three phones.
Does she know, too? Or just Faust? One bag slips from under her elbow and something inside it crunches ominously. She doesn’t seem to notice.
“Sorry.” I force myself to a regular standing position, wipe away my panic sweat, tuck back my hair. Just two girls having fun in the Paddock Club! Formula 1 is so great! “It’s the noise.”
“Did you eat?”
“I had… coffee.”
She swipes up the discard bag and fishes out a plastic-wrapped lump of beige. “Vegan Rice Krispies Treat. Apparently, the ‘Mediterranean diet’ is coming back—which, what the fuck.”
Relief feels like a warm, cozy hug. Mei wouldn’t be giving me influencer castoffs if she thought I’d lied my way into this job. Smiling faintly, I grab the broken Rice Krispies Treat from her and dig in. Sugar might help me not pass out.
“I talked to Faust, by the way,” I say between dry-mouthed bites. “He’s, uh, yeah. We talked.”
“Oh?” She pulls an orange can from the bag and holds it out to me. “Drink.”
Nonalcoholic mimosa is written on the label. So, artisanal orange juice with fancy packaging. I follow her orders.
“Sorry again he’s like that,” Mei says after a beat.
“Stubborn?”
“Feminist, but occasionally stupid, so it does rebound damage.”
“Ha.”
Maybe if I keep playing it cool, Mei won’t believe Faust when he tells her the truth.
She’s already back to typing on her phone, only occasionally looking up at the pre-race show playing out on screens around the clubhouse.
Out on the track, workers are starting to move away from the cars, tire warmers removed, the crowd thinning to just the drivers and the circuit.
I don’t have that long before the race starts and she’s distracted, and then the race ends and Faust’s free and she might be very distracted.
“Mei?”
“Hm?”
“Thanks for not letting me vomit around the upper class.” I’m trying to gauge her reaction. So… why does saying that make a ten-pound knot wrap itself around my throat?
She glances up, smiling impishly. “Haven’t even seen your first GP. Are you already getting sentimental?”
“Absolutely not.”
“It happens to the best of us.”
Glowering, I turn to the TV, ignoring her tiny cackle.
Man, she reminds me of Renata. They’d love each other, too.
Suddenly a bit seasick again, I finish my orange juice right as the Formula 1 theme song starts playing from each sound system—because of course they’d play their own theme song at an actual race, to their favorite customers.
And guess what? The Paddock Club elite clap.
A montage starring each driver plays across the screens: Number one, Arthur Graywood, Cavalli, nodding at the camera with a smirk.
Number twenty-four, Christine Fay, Stark-Benzin, flicking her hair back.
Number eight, Fausto Ferreira Sanchez, no smile, arms crossed—
My stomach flutters.
Tables clear as the rich people book it to the long bank of windows overlooking the garages, our balcony filling up, brushing my shoulders.
Mei goes to a corner and I do, too, my legs numb, skin tingling.
I think back to that night at the high school fall dance, frozen in my sequined dress.
How my body felt like I couldn’t move. That was the last real date I’ve been on.
When I’d gotten home, my feet were bleeding from walking miles in Steve Madden heels, and my sisters cried and Grandma swore and Dad tried to drive to the school gym to confront the boy, but me?
I held it together. I said I was okay, it wasn’t a big deal, I didn’t like him anyway.
Later, when everyone else was asleep but us, Dad made me pancakes and we sat on the porch, two big moths under a buzzy yellow light looking into the blue.
No one in Waterfield deserves you, kiddo, he’d said. You’re too good for ’em.
Is that why you don’t date?
It’d been years by then, longer now. You girls are my life now. My heart’s full, Dad said. But you? You’ve got all the time in the world.
We hadn’t known then that there was any chance he was lying.
Hadn’t fought over statistics and what I should do with my life.
And we’ll never know, if I have my way—since I feel the same.
I don’t have room for anyone new. There’s a big, blinking, no more room at the inn sign on the motel billboard of my heart, and that’s not coming down anytime soon.
Because there’s my family that’s here, and my family that’s gone, but the grief doesn’t go away; it shape-shifts into new silhouettes.
When one memory heals, the pain just moves somewhere else, to another dark corner of your body, a different hiding place, a new disguise worn over its familiar face.
It’s the Irish prayer about ankle-turning that used to sit in her kitchen, then it’s macaroni and cheese with mustard, then it’s Goodbye Horses, then it’s white butterflies.
Then you see a chair on the side of the road that’s her favorite shade of red-wine purple, and you remember that her chair will always be empty.
Faust can hate me. He can think the worst of me. That’s fine. Mei, too. Christine. Eddie. It doesn’t matter.
My heart is full.
I can do this.
Below the railing, there’s a palpable commotion as the final workers clear off the track. A calmness works itself through me as the cars peel through the formation lap, the noise of the circuit dropping to a fuzzy murmur. Muffled through the plaster walls of my priorities.
No, it isn’t me doing that. The air around me has gone weirdly hush. My skin shivers with it, the energy of hundreds of thousands of excited people holding their breath.
Beep.
Beep. Beep.
Beep—
One more short beep reverberates through the miles-long circuit.
It’s the sound of the five red lights above the track turning on; I remember it well.
That’s the sound of a race about to start.
Startled, my eyes swivel to the starting line, where Faust’s long, chrome-gray car is nestled in the middle of the pack. Right behind Bernard.
My thoughts catch, tripping over themselves.
Then they go quiet, too.
Before I have time to fully comprehend that I’m about to see a Formula 1 race in person from the Paddock Club, while working on my favorite team…
the lights go out and the cars jump forward and it’s happening, here, right now.
And I’m filled with ridiculous, incandescent excitement that doesn’t leave room for anything else.
The cars hurdle down the track toward an unbelievable kink in the circuit that doesn’t seem physically possible while driving this fast. Only it is, and one car after the other takes the corner, effortlessly falling into a line.
Almost effortless. There’s a tangle near the front, a dark blue car I don’t recognize gunning for an overtake and failing miserably, locking up and spinning offtrack.
“Oh my god, I knew that was going to happen, but no one believed me.”
I jump, grabbing the railing as I turn to find—a waiter? Judging by their black pants, white button-down, and short black ponytail. “Do you mind?” she asks sheepishly. “I kind of only took this gig so I could get in for free.”
“Oh yeah. Please.” I squeeze to the left to let her lean against the railing with me. “I can cover for you, too, if anyone comes looking. Blame me for everything and anything.”
“Really?” She brightens up, grinning. “You’d Karen for me?”
“Of course. You were just helping me figure out which chardonnay to order.”
She laughs, then goes deathly quiet. I follow her eyes to the gigantic screen across the balcony, above the grandstand, streaming the race.
I’m not sure what I expect. Another spin-off?
Gravel damage? Missing wheels? It’s the first grand prix of the season; the grid will be a mix of shaken-up teams and rookies and egos.
There’s a lot to prove and little space to do it.
I don’t expect to see Christine’s car, crumpled against a barrier, on a screen the size of a movie theater.
Smoke billows from the shredded rear, as if she’d tried to brake her way out of the collision, and that’s all I can process at first. I feel like smoke, only half-real. Mostly air. “Goddamn,” the waiter breathes out—right as Christine’s radio message appears on the screen.
He ******* drove into me.
The rest of my stomach, and all accompanying internal organs, evaporate. As far as I know, there’s only one “he” that Christine would follow up with that many censored letters.