is great because she doesn’t.
Ali takes the long curve of the Oak Knolls exit and feels the pull of inertia, her body straining against her seat belt. The brightness of the highway dims to that of a country road. Stars appear.
Her music is turned way down. Ali glances over at Grace. Quite a bold move for a newbie riding shotgun in an older player’s car. “You got something against hip-hop?” she asks, and immediately moves to turn the volume back up.
Grace laughs. “No! I just don’t want us to wake the town up.”
“Right. Okay.”
About a quarter mile farther, they reach Oak Knolls. Ali, the last car in line, sees the traffic light go yellow, and the car ahead of her guns it through. Ali gets stuck at the red. Not a big deal, she can still see them. It’s more annoying. Another pause.
She lets out a huff, twists her neck until it cracks, turns her stereo off because the volume is too low to really hear the song anyway. On her left, she sees a grassy postage stamp rimmed with white curb, there to set off a wooden sign proclaiming Welcome to Oak Knolls. Next to it, a smaller sign is pushed into the grass on thin metal stakes, like the kind people put in their front yards at election time. It says Varsity Girls Field Hockey State Champions.
After rolling her eyes, Ali scans the intersection, left to right and then left again. Not a single car to be seen. Only the taillights of the last car in the Wildcats’ caravan pulling farther and farther away.
Ali tells herself to run the red. Just run it. There’s no way she’s getting a ticket. And even if she did, even if there were one of those red-light cameras sneakily mounted somewhere, what would a ticket even cost? Like fifty bucks? Her father would probably just pay it, thinking he’d done it. She looks left and right and left again. She looks at that stupid sign.
Kearson leans forward from the back seat. “It’s green,” she says helpfully.
“Thanks,” Ali says.
As Ali continues forward, her passengers—Kearson and two juniors in the back seat, and Grace in the front—chat about how cute the downtown area of Oak Knolls is, pointing things out to one another. A cupcake café with pink awnings. A bookstore called Never Not Reading. A tiny theater with a glowing marquee that looks like it’s been around since movies were invented.
“You couldn’t pay me to live here,” Ali says, announcing her way into the conversation. “Oak Knolls is a complete dump.”
The girls laugh and Ali laughs too, even though she used to love going to see movies at that theater. Unlike the multiplex in West Essex, they put real butter on their popcorn, not butter-flavored oil.
If the cupcake café was open when the movie let out, she’d stop in. Not for cupcakes—the best ones really did come from Park & Orchard in West Essex—but the incredible frozen hot chocolate they made. And it was at the bookstore where she’d first seen a shelf talker for the dystopian series she’d gobbled up two summers ago.
But Ali doesn’t come to Oak Knolls anymore. She doesn’t want to risk accidentally running into Darlene Maguire. Ali knows she’ll face her eventually, but she wants it to happen on the field, when she’ll know it’s coming. The worst thing would be to get ambushed. What if Darlene made some racist gesture again, only in front of Ali’s family? What if baby John-John was with her?
“Ali, you missed the turn,” Grace says, but her eyes aren’t on the road. She’s focused on Ali’s hands, gripping the steering wheel, the tendons flexed and taut. “You okay?”
“I’m fine,” Ali says, more sharply than she intends to. She tries to soften it with a smile, but it comes to her face like a stick dragged through wet cement.
She’s always had a fire inside her. A heat Ali could stoke to help her dig deeper, run faster, work harder. Bright but controlled, like coal shoveled into an engine bolted to the base of her spine. But since the championship loss, it’s turned into a different kind of flame. One that’s more unpredictable and dangerous, like the spark off a frayed wire. She never knows where or when it might zap her.
When Grace brought up Darlene Maguire earlier, Ali totally stumbled. Same thing when Coach delicately broached the subject at the Psych-Up. Ali barely managed to keep her cool when watching the video Darlene