Page 29

“You’ve been driving me around for years, I saw the license.”

“Yeah, and it’s fake.”

For a second, he stares at me like he’s trying to decide whether to be furious or impressed. Then he rubs both hands over his face and groans. “Whatever. We’re already here. Just get in the car.”

That feels like a terrible decision, but I get in anyway.

The second the doors shut, everything goes too quiet. Not actually quiet—the engine turns over, the vents hiss weak air at us, somebody in another row slams a car door—but inside the car it feels sealed off, close and unreal. The dashboard glows soft blue. My hands look strange wrapped around the steering wheel, like they belong to somebody else.

Max slumps into the passenger seat and buckles himself in. “Please try not to kill us.”

“No promises.”

“I hate when you say stuff like that.”

I pull out of the lot with my shoulders locked tight. The road leading away from the scare fest is crowded at first, cars inching out in a long, glowing line, red brake lights bleeding across the windshield. I keep blinking because every reflection looks like movement. Once, I swear I saw something small and white crouched by the curb, watching the cars go by.

I jerk my gaze away before I can really look.

“Are you okay?” Max asks.

“No,” I say.

“Cool. Great.”

We make it to the freeway, and that somehow feels worse. The entrance ramp curves hard, and by the time I merge, the speed of everything around us makes my pulse kick up into something mean and frantic. Headlights streak past. Taillights smear red in the distance. The lanes feel too narrow, the dark on either side too open. Every sound is too loud—the tires on asphalt, the rattle in the back seat, Max tapping his fingers against his knee.

I grip the wheel harder.

The rabbits keep showing up.

Not real. I know they’re not real. But they’re there anyway—little bursts of white at the edge of the road, shapes slipping through the median grass, one sitting dead still on the shoulder with eyes bright as coins. Every time I glance there, it’s gone. Every time I look back at the road, I’m sure there’ll be another one waiting.

“Slow down,” Max says suddenly.

“I’m going the speed limit.”

“You’re drifting.”

I straighten the car too sharply. A horn blares somewhere behind us.

“Jesus Christ,” Max snaps, bracing one hand against the dash. “Keep it straight.”

“I am keeping it straight.”

But I’m not, not really. The lines on the road keep warping, bending at the corners of my vision. My head pounds harder with every passing second. I blink once, twice, and for one awful second, there’s a rabbit in the middle of our lane.

Big enough to be impossible. Frozen in the wash of the headlights.

I gasp and yank the wheel.

Max shouts my name.

The car swerves so hard that my shoulder slams into the door. Tires scream against the road. We shoot across the next lane, and there’s a horn, impossibly loud, then headlights from somewhere they shouldn’t be, too close, too bright.

The impact is violent and wrong.

Metal crashes into metal with a sound that doesn’t even register as real at first. My whole body whips sideways. Something smashes against my ribs. The airbag punches me hard in the chest and face, hot and explosive, and suddenly everything is smoke and dust and the shriek of twisting steel. The car spins—once, maybe twice, I can’t tell—and then slams to a stop so hard my teeth crack together. Until the car flips over.