Her eyes widened, her jaw slacked open, but a smile curved her lips. “Well, look who just grew a pair. It’s about time. Welcome to the real world, baby.” She started the car and peeled out of the spot.
Allen resisted the urge to grab hold of the door handle. The bitch was fucking with him.
Fine. He’d make this trip for Julie’s sake, but when they got to the East Coast, Carrie Ann was going to have a terrible accident that no one would be able to save her from. Now all he had to do was figure out exactly what kind of accident would take her the most quickly...and most painfully.
* * *
Carrie Ann set the cruise control at eighty-five. Probably about twenty miles an hour faster than Geekboy had gone the whole time she’d slept. His little outburst had surprised her. Apparently he had a breaking point. But didn’t everybody? She sure as hell did. Seeing Drew break down had crushed her. Most of all, she wanted the best for her brother and if taking Julie out of the picture meant he would function close to normal, then she had to try. He was her responsibility. She’d promised her mother she’d take care of him.
The more she thought about it, the more she had to concede a selfish reason as well. She was tired of playing second fiddle. She wanted to be on the A-list. Hell, deserved to be on the A-list.
For so many years she’d been so close to stardom, a hairbreadth from fame, but she’d never quite reached it. She played sidekicks in movies and in real life as Julie Fraser’s best buddy. She was always the “and along with” and costarring, but rarely the headline. Thirteen fucking years of working for every job while her best friend got it all handed to her on a platinum platter.
Julie wasn’t anything special. Carrie Ann had way more in the looks department, the talent department and the brains department. But Julie was the one with everything. Her house, her car—although why she drove a Prius when she could afford a fleet of Bentleys was still beyond Carrie Ann—her career. She had everything, and Carrie Ann didn’t see the justice in that.
There had been a handful of years when just being seen with Julie put Carrie Ann in the spotlight enough to warrant a spike in her career, but after Nowhere to Hide, that had changed. She’d gone back to working for every role.
Her knuckles tightened on the wheel.
“Are you still pissed at me?” Al asked. His eyes were at half-mast with his arms folded across his chest. He yawned and Carrie Ann saw all the metal fillings in his teeth.
“I’m pissed at myself,” she said, looking at the long stretch of highway in front of her. She didn’t even know where they were.
“For bringing me along?” he asked. He might’ve been a geek, but he was an observant geek.
“For expecting you to have my urgency,” she said. “I want to get there for her birthday and it’s not a big deal to you. I should’ve made it more clear.”
“Fine. So I know. Can we get past it now?”
Yeah, she wanted to pull over, shove him out of her car, hit the gas and leave him stranded on the side of the road. She could have too. It’d be easy. But then she really wouldn’t make it to the East Coast on time.
“Consider me past it.” It was everything she could do to keep her voice steady and not mock him. How had she ever thought she could be with him on a regular basis? She usually considered herself a better judge of character. Besides, if he had all the money he boasted about, why did he live the way he did? There was something fishy about Al Gates. Something very fishy.
Of course, it wouldn’t be the first time someone lied to get closer to her. Or to Julie. People knew her as Julie’s BFF so Carrie Ann always had to live with people befriending her just to meet Julie. But this guy had said he was her neighbor, so that didn’t fit the usual scenario.
“So, where did you go to college?” A rich computer geek had to have gone someplace fancy. MIT or an Ivy League school. Someplace that made geeks into millionaires.
“CSUN,” he said.
“Cal State Northridge?” She hated asking stupid questions she knew the answer to, but she expected more