Moment of Truth - Kasie West Page 0,71
but instead of moving backward, the truck jumped forward. The wheel jerked and the left front tire was off the platform and on the ground before I could step on the brake. The right tire was now suspended in midair in front of the ramp. I slid to the left, my body slamming into the door, my head hitting the window.
No. This couldn’t be happening. I applied the gas, slowly trying to ease the truck forward, hoping to just get it all on the ground and start again. The left tire spun and spun, obviously not fully on the ground, which meant the platform must’ve been holding up some of the center of the truck. No.
Amelia knocked on the driver’s-side window. I rolled it down with the cranking handle.
“What are you doing? Your parents are going to kill you.”
“Not helping. How do I move it?”
She backed up, assessing the position of the truck. “One of the back wheels isn’t fully grounded. You’re stuck.”
“Thanks. I caught that.”
“Your parents are going to kill you.”
“You already said that.” I turned off the engine and opened the door. I fell out, barely catching myself before hitting the ground. Then I, too, backed up to assess the position of the truck. “What if I moved one of those ramps so it’s facing backward under the left front tire and then drove forward a little?”
“Then what?” she asked.
“I don’t know.” I grabbed a fistful of my hair and a pain shot through my right shoulder. I pinched it hard. “Then put the other ramp forward under the right tire?”
“Then you’d just have this same situation but in reverse.”
“You think?”
“I don’t know. We can try it.”
At two o’clock in the morning we gave up. The truck hadn’t moved from its original lopsided position and I was pretty sure the only thing we’d managed to do was tear up a section of grass under the left tire. “It’s fine. We’ll fix this. We have all day tomorrow.”
“Is it time to tell me yet what you were doing?”
“I was facing my fear. Being Heath Hall.”
“What?”
I thought about telling her who and what Heath Hall was and represented but I felt like that took away from the secrecy pact of it all. She’d know in a couple days when that backpack and instructions ended up in her care. So instead, I said, “My parents choose my brother over me every time.”
She didn’t argue. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m tired of it. I thought if I drove this truck tonight that I’d be facing a fear, the fear of competing with his memories my whole life. I thought I’d be facing the memory of my dead brother once and for all. Telling him in a way that I had won. Or maybe that it shouldn’t be a competition at all. I don’t know. It sounds weird, I know.”
“So wait, you drove this truck around? Like out of this yard?”
“Yes, I was just getting back when you pulled up.”
“Wow, Hadley. And how did it feel?”
“Freeing.”
She smiled. “I bet.” She put her hands on her hips and looked at the truck again. “And now you’re trying to put it back?”
“Yes.”
She hesitantly asked, “What about your parents? Don’t you want them to know?”
“I think the message would be a little too shocking. I want to ease them into it a bit by talking to them first.”
“Probably a good idea . . . except.” She gestured to the truck. “Now you’ll just give them a heart attack.”
“I know.” I let out a defeated breath of air. “This will not go over well. It would’ve been one thing if I had just left it parked in the driveway. That would’ve been shocking enough. But this?” I couldn’t even finish that thought out loud. This would be like a punch to the gut. This looked like a broken truck. A wrecked truck. This would be more than a shock. I felt beyond terrible. That’s why I was going to fix this. I had to.
Amelia walked around the platform again, as though some new idea on how to solve this would suddenly come to her after over an hour of trying to figure something out and failing. “Where did you go?”
“All the places I wanted to go and never could. I took Jackson.”
She clapped and gave a little jump. “Tell me everything.”
I climbed up on the platform and into the bed of the truck. It teetered just a bit with my weight but the way it was sloped forward provided a