“Two more miles, two more miles,” I muttered to myself. The Dodge was only going around fifty miles an hour now, and the black car was gaining on us.

Another sound caught my attention over the rushing wind and dying car. “Sexy Back” was playing somewhere. Somewhere nearby.

I looked around until I spotted my book bag at David’s feet. “You got my bag?”

By this point, David was huddled against the passenger door, staring at me with naked horror. He shook his head, like he hadn’t understood the question before blinking a few times and saying, “Oh . . . um, yeah. I thought you might need it.”

“Why did you follow me?”

David looked over his shoulder at the black car. “Huh? Oh, well . . . I wanted to, uh, ask you some more questions about what the hell is going on with you.” He turned back around and wiped his glasses on the bottom of his T-shirt. “Of course, I thought you were on drugs. I didn’t realize you were actually an assassin or something.”

He was lying, I could tell. Maybe it was a Paladin thing, or maybe I was finally seeing through him the way he always seemed to see through me.

“Bull,” I said.

“What?” He looked at me with wide eyes.

“Bull,” I repeated. “You didn’t want to ask me more questions about the paper. Why did you follow me?”

“I’m not lying!” he insisted, glancing behind him again.

“Yes,” I said calmly, even as the black car got closer, “you are. Why did you follow me?”

The black car thumped our bumper, but I wasn’t worried anymore. We were only a few houses away now.

“Because you were crying!” David shouted, his voice cracking with fear, and, I thought, anger. “You were upset and I felt bad about the stupid article, and then that weird shit happened with Ryan, and even if I don’t always agree with the things you do at school, you do try and you didn’t—”

He broke off and sagged against the seat, closing his eyes. “I just . . . I don’t like crying girls, okay?”

We were quiet for a second while I took that in.

“That was very nice of you, David,” I finally said. “Now hold on because I’m about to drive into a fence.”

“Yeah, okay,” he muttered, his eyes still closed. “You do that.”

Then his eyes shot open. “Wait, what?”

My house was there on the right, and I swung the Dodge straight through our fence.

We crashed through with enough force to rattle my bones and shatter the windshield into roughly a million spiderweb cracks. But that was okay. I didn’t need to see now.

I kept pulling the wheel to the right, which meant that I missed our pool, driving David’s car straight to the back corner of our yard.