Page 64 of Run Away With Me

There was clearly something going on there, and I could tell she didn’t want me to poke into it. Brooke was either wildly enthusiastic about anything to do with her car or completely shut off, and I could never tell which way her mood would swing or why.

‘Can I ask you something?’ I tried.

‘You can ask,’ she said lightly. The ‘but I won’t answer if I don’t want to’ was left unspoken.

‘Why …?’

‘Why cars?’

‘Yeah, I guess.’

Brooke tilted her head from side to side, stretching her neck. She glanced over her shoulder, then pulled into the outside lane to overtake a semi-truck before answering me.

‘I suppose I realized a year or so ago that I was being groomed for politics.’

I went on high alert at her choice of word – ‘groomed’ carried a lot of weight, and I wasn’t sure exactly what she meant by that.

‘It all started to click in place,’ she said, looking out the windshield and not at me. ‘Daniel will work in law, Julianne is in medicine, Hope will cover off the arts … and I didn’t have a clear path like they did. I was talking to Meredith when she was home for spring break last year, and she kind of joked that my dad would love to say his kid was a senator or something, and I was like, holy shit, she’s right.’

The worst thing was, I could see it. Brooke would be good in politics, with her charm and her debate skills and her good looks. She had the kind of personality that people would rally behind. It wasn’t such a stretch to imagine a Mayor Summer one day. A Senator Summer. Even a President Summer.

‘I’m guessing that’s not what you want,’ I said.

‘No,’ she retorted with a harsh laugh. ‘Definitely not. I had already started talking to my uncle Tony about him helping me to buy a car, because he knows everything there is about them. And he pulled up a picture of the Mustang on his phone. He said he was gonna buy it anyway, but if I helped him fix it up, it was mine.’

‘I wondered …’ I said, then trailed off, but Brooke waved a hand at me, encouraging me to continue. ‘I wondered if it was, like, some kind of … rejection of femininity.’

She laughed again, brighter this time. ‘No, not exactly. I just saw it as an opportunity to do something different – toget out of the house for a few hours and go somewhere my parents wouldn’t be breathing down my neck.’

‘Oh.’

‘Not such a big deal.’

Brooke’s wildly varying moods around her car were starting to make sense now. It wasn’t a girl-boss thing, like I’d thought, but something she’d used to get away from her parents. It was her independence.

‘So, when did you start your life of crime?’ I said, sensing Brooke wanted to move on to other topics.

I watched as her temperament neatly shifted gears again. She tipped her head back and laughed.

‘Oh my God, Jessie, you’re fucking hilarious. It’s hardly a life of crime.’

‘I grew up in the church, remember,’ I said. ‘Before last night, I’d never even stolen a candy bar.’

‘All right. Well, we were kids. Meredith was born in between me and Julianne, and her half-sister, Friday, is six months younger than me.’ She glanced over. ‘Uncle Tony doesn’t have more than one kid with any of his ex-girlfriends.’

‘Good for Uncle Tony,’ I said mildly.

Brooke cackled, clearly happier now she was back on familiar ground. ‘I know, right? Anyway, the four of us used to hang out in the summer, and Meredith was, like, the ringleader. Tony always encouraged her rebellious streak, so she had no problem being a rule-breaker. She would get us shoplifting lip-gloss, candy bars, that kind of thing. She learned how to pickpocket while away at camp.’

‘Oh, I did not go to summer camps like that,’ I said, reorganizing the cassettes.

‘Me neither!’

‘We had a lot of nature study and Bible study and singing around campfires.’ The first few summers I went to church camp I hated it, but I felt like I had to stick it out since our church had fundraised for the less fortunate kids to go. After a few years, though, it became an escape. No one called me Mouse at camp, and even though it was before the Creep came along, it was good to get away from real life for a few weeks. ‘It was better than being at home.’

‘I never went,’ Brooke said. ‘I would’ve hated it. Anyway, that’s where Meredith learned how to lift wallets and stuff. She said they used to practice in their bunks at night until they could all do it without anyone feeling it. And then when she came home, she taught us.’

‘Did you do it a lot?’

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