“What’s wrong? Are you okay?” I said, jolting upright as soon as I saw her name on my screen. It should’ve been a sign, how constantly worried I was about her. It should’ve been a sign, because I knew she was depressed and reckless and there was always that voice in the back of my head that was scared her grief would get the better of her. Not that I ever thought she’d hurt herself or anything like that. It was more like I thought she might spontaneously dissolve on purpose, her atoms scattered away on the breeze.

“Chill out. I can’t sleep, that’s all. Do you have anything important to do at school today?”

I had an (unfinished) (FML) English assignment due, I had a newspaper progress meeting with Hink, and Hotchkiss had been asking after my math homework for a week, but they seemed far less important than spending time with Grace, so I lied and said, “No.”

“Good, ’cause I’m outside your house. We’re going to have an adventure.”

“You’re here?”

There was a tap at the basement window. Grace was crouching on the other side of the grimy glass, looking tired, still dressed in the same clothes she’d been wearing yesterday.

When Mom came downstairs to wake me an hour later, I pretended to feel sick while Grace hid under my bed. After the Birthgiver had gone to work, I begged Dad to let me spend the day with Grace while already knowing he’d rat me out to Mom as soon as he could. He finally, reluctantly agreed, on the condition that he was allowed to play GTA V in my room all day, and I was forbidden from telling anyone.

I was shocked to find Grace’s car parked in its usual spot outside my house.

“You drove here?” I said.

“Surprise.”

“First time since . . . ?”

“Yeah. I don’t know why. I woke up in the middle of the night and decided it was time. After all, I’m never gonna make it into Fast and Furious 11 if I don’t get back into drifting.”

I smiled and Grace said, “Henry. Don’t look at me like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like you can see the gold veins forming before your eyes,” she said, but it was playful, not accusing. “I’m still not a bowl.”

“Not a bowl. Duly noted.”

We drove north to the outskirts of the city, and then through the national park for over an hour, slowing at all the lookouts but never stopping. Out here on the coast, it barely looked like fall. The slips of beach visible through the forest were bleach white, and although most of the trees were stripped of their leaves, there were evergreens among them, palms and shrubs. We drove with the windows down despite the cold, my face numb and my ears ringing with the speed.

Eventually the open coastline was swallowed by a forest, still as colorful as a jewel box despite the approaching cold. The traffic signs said things to the effect of SLOW DOWN, WINDING ROAD AHEAD, but Grace ignored them. In fact, she cranked the music so loud that she couldn’t hear me even if I’d been screaming, and then she sped up. My knuckles blanched of color at every hairpin twist in the road as I scrabbled desperately to keep myself from being thrown around the front seat. Grace braked, accelerated, smoked the tires, drifted around each bend. And then, instead of slowing down and readying herself for the next one, she’d speed up in between turns.

I held on and prayed to deities I didn’t believe in that I wouldn’t die today. Not like this. Not like him. Over and over again, visions of crashes replayed in my head. The impossibly hard crunch of a car slamming into a tree, crumpling around it like a paper fan. A body—mine—wrenched from the vehicle, tossed through the windshield, a rag doll of blood and bone. Skin sloughing off against asphalt. Limbs snapping, the splintered ends of bones piercing through skin.

Grace was a decent driver, if not maniacal. I trusted that she had control of the car, but at these speeds, her reaction time would be negligible. All it would take was an animal on the road, an overcorrection, a pothole. And then, still, there was the lingering voice at the back of my head, the one that reminded me over and over again to worry about her safety.

I’d never felt so close to death before. Never been so afraid of my own mortality as I was in a car with her at the wheel.

Did things like this matter to her at all? Grace saw the world as little more than a temporarily ordered pattern of atoms. Dying only meant that the atoms briefly allotted to your human form were to be redispersed elsewhere.

Finally, finally, she brought the car to a stop at a lookout and turned the music off. She grinned at me and stepped out into the brisk coastal breeze. It was an odd kind of day. The sun beat down warmly, but the wind carried in a chill from the ocean.

“What the hell was that about?” I said as I slammed my door closed. My legs and hands were physically shaking, and not from the cold. I tried not to let her see how unnerved I was, because a small part of me thought that maybe, just maybe, she was trying to screw with my head on purpose. I sat down on the barrier fence that separated the lookout from the wilderness beyond it and rested my elbows on my knees, trying to steady my breath. Grace sat down next to me—sometimes the way she positioned herself around me felt as platonic as a sister—her scarf half covering her face.

“I used to drive along this road all the time, even before I got my license,” she said, her words muffled. “I know it like the back of my hand. Actually, I know it better than the back of my hand. I could draw it from memory. I don’t really know the back of my hand at all. I wonder why people say that?”

“You can’t fucking drive like that after nearly dying in a car accident.”

“I wasn’t the one who veered off the road, if you want to know. That was Dom. I loved this drive before he died. I should be able to love it again.”

The bitterness in her voice. Grace had never spoken of Dom in any negative light before, but here she was, blaming him for the crash that killed him. I suppose it made sense for her to be mad.