Page 116 of Unmanageable

My chest burns.

I feel like a stray dog she’s letting ride along in her car, unwelcome and totally in the dark about what I did wrong.

The girl who threw forty plastic checkers across a motel room floor has vanished, replaced by an edgy, irritable ghost who seems to flinch every time the van hits a seam in the concrete.

We hit a construction delay—just a long line of idling semi-trucks and a guy in an orange vest holding a stop sign under the gray drizzle.

“Are you kidding me?” Scottie snaps, slamming her laptop shut. “We’ve been sitting here for three minutes.”

“Scottie, the guy has a sign,” I say, my thumb tapping the steering wheel. “Unless you want me to drive the van through a ditch full of wet gravel, we’re waiting. Relax.”

“Don’t tell me to relax!” she barks, her eyes meeting mine, and they are wild, frantic, and filled with a hurt I can’t identify. “You don’t have to manage the partners, Cash! You just have to stand in a net and let people hit you with pieces of rubber!”

I stare at her. The silence inside the van turns cold.

“That was uncalled for.”

Scottie blinks, the sharp edge of her anger faltering as she reads the hurt on my face. Her mouth opens, as if to say something—maybe an apology, maybe a retraction—but she stops.

She doesn’t apologize. She just turns her shoulder toward me, pressing her forehead against the cool glass of the passenger window, her breath fogging the corner of the pane.

“Whatever,” she mutters. “Just… drive when he moves the sign.”

When the van crosses the state line, the sign welcoming us to the Evergreen State passes by in a blur of gray mist and green pine. Scottie doesn’t even look at it.

She has pulled the sweatshirt up over her chin, her knees tucked back into her chest, her whole body shrunk into a tiny, defensive ball against the door.

She has completely shut down. She isn’t typing, she isn’t checking the waiver wire, and she isn’t looking at me.

She’s just a ghost in the passenger seat, staring out into the gray rain as the highway leads us straight toward the city lights in the distance.

I keep both hands on the wheel, my eyes fixed on the wet road ahead, praying that I can get my Scottie-girl back soon.

32

Scottie

“You missed the turn-off for the bypass,” I say, my voice clipped.

Cash doesn’t turn his head. His jaw is set hard, his large hands gripping the thin steering wheel at ten and two with enough force to turn his knuckles white.

The smirk he’s worn since the library is gone, replaced by the dark, hostile irritation of a guy who has spent six hours being poked with a stick.

“I didn’t miss the turn, Scottie,” he says, his voice dangerously low. “The GPS adjusted for a lane closure on the bridge. If you’d take your face out of your balance sheets for ten seconds, you’d see the orange signs.”

“The orange signs are for the northbound shoulder, Cash. I have the municipal transit layout right here on my screen,” I snap, tapping the tablet. “But please, feel free to ignore the person whose entire job description is managing the logistical efficiency of your life. Let’s just wander through the suburbs until the rink closes. I’m sure Coach will love it when we’re late.”

“Shut up, Scottie.”

“Don’t tell me to shut up, Cash.”

“Then stop acting like a fucking hall monitor,” he barks, the volume making the small, boxy cab of the van feel suddenly claustrophobic.

I look out the passenger window, my chest heaving beneath my pullover, my throat hot and dry with an anger that has absolutely nothing to do with lane closures or traffic. It’s the kind of prickly, defensive rage that starts in the stomach and ends in the teeth.

The skin on the back of my neck is cold, a low, buzzing static crawling up my spine the closer the odometer gets to the city center.

Oklahoma.