The Facade by Judy Corry
Mack
“Hey, you okay, dude?”a voice—Ben?—called from behind me.
I was lying on my back in the middle of the Hastings’ woods and feeling like I’d just been hit by a train.
One minute I’d been pushing my gas pedal to the floor and driving down the road as fast as I could, and the next thing I knew, the sun was blinding me, and I was flying through the air after hitting a tree that had fallen across the road.
“I’m okay,” I said, slowly sitting up and brushing some dirt and leaves off my arms and legs, my body already groaning in pain from the movement. “I guess I kind of blacked out there.”
“Blacked out?” Ben’s dark eyebrows knitted together, like he was worried I was drunk or something.
Which, no, I wasn’t—even if I sometimes considered breaking into my dad’s liquor cabinet on the days when I wanted to numb myself from reality.
“I mean—” I cleared my throat and removed my helmet, setting it on the ground beside me. “The, uh, the sun blinded me, and I guess I didn’t see the tree in time.”
Ben looked skeptically at me, but then seeming to decide it wasn’t his problem to worry about, he shrugged and offered me a hand up.
“Thanks,” I said.
I had just gotten to my feet when Cambrielle’s four-wheeler rushed toward us. She jumped off the ATV when she was ten feet away and called, “Are you okay, Mack? What happened? Are you hurt?” as she yanked off her helmet and goggles.
“I’m fine,” I said before she could get too worked up. “Just decided to make things exciting for a minute.”
“You did this on purpose?” Cambrielle’s voice raised an octave, her eyes widening. “Do you have a death wish?”
“No.”
Not seriously, anyway.
Nothing that lasted more than a few seconds here and there, that is.
“It was an accident.”
Sure, I’d been driving way too fast and wasn’t exactly in the best frame of mind, but I hadn’t purposely tried to off myself today.
Cambrielle stepped closer and reached for my arm to inspect me, like she was looking for a visible sign that I was hurt. “Did you break anything?” she asked, her hands feeling along my arm before moving to the other one. “I saw you flying through the air. There’s no way you’re not hurt.”
She touched my wrist, and I instinctively pulled it away.
“Ouch,” I said, noticing the dull throb.
“Is it broken?”
“I don’t know.” I pulled the sleeve of my riding suit up to look at it. It looked normal. No bones protruding or anything. “I probably just sprained it when I landed or something.”
There was the sound of four-wheelers driving on the main trail below, which were probably Nash, Hunter, and Scarlett driving by.
Ben glanced in the direction of the sound, seeming eager to get back to the trail now that it looked like I was going to live.
“You need me for anything?” he asked, looking between Cambrielle and me.
“I’ll be fine,” I said at the same time Cambrielle said, “You’re leaving already?”
Ben looked between the two of us, like he wasn’t sure he could go. But then Cambrielle said, “Never mind. I’ve got this.”
“Okay, cool,” Ben said.
Before he could leave, Cambrielle said, “Will you at least tell everyone that we’ll see them back at the house? I’m pretty sure we’re gonna have to send someone out for Mack’s ATV, but I’ll take him back to the house so he can get some ice and maybe a bandage for his wrist.”
Cambrielle was planning to stay with me while her crush rode off into the sunset with everyone else?
That didn’t seem very fair.
“Sure,” Ben said, lifting one leg over the seat of his four-wheeler to sit down. “I’ll tell them what happened.”
I touched Cambrielle’s arm. “You don’t need to stay back. I’ll be fine,” I said in a lowered voice, not wanting my reckless driving to keep her from spending quality time with Ben. “I can just walk back.”
“You’re gonna walk back two miles after getting flung off your four-wheeler?” Cambrielle stared at me like she thought I might have hit my head too hard. “Yeah, I don’t think so.”
I tried to tell her with my eyes and a nod of the head that she should let me walk so she could be alone with Ben.
But she didn’t seem to understand my eye signals or head nodding because as Ben started his machine again, she just waved goodbye and then watched him drive back toward the main road.
Once he was out of view, she turned to me again and said, “Let’s get you back to my house.”
I turned off my four-wheeler’s motor which was still miraculously running after everything it had gone through, and then climbed onto the back of Cambrielle’s ATV with her.
“You sure you don’t want me to drive?” I asked, after sliding up behind her on the seat, not sure exactly where I should place my hands. The last time I’d ridden on the back of a four-wheeler was when I was like nine, before my parents trusted me to drive by myself.
“And have you wreck my four-wheeler, too?” She scoffed. “I don’t think so.”
“I know you have this whole feminist thing going, but it just feels wrong for me to be back here and you to be up there.”
“It feels wrong?” She turned to look back at me. I couldn’t see her face through her helmet and goggles, but from the tone in her voice I figured she was probably rolling her eyes at me. Hard.
“Okay, so it just would look weird to have such a masculine guy like myself holding onto a girl who’s over a foot shorter than me.”
“Well, lucky for you, everyone’s already gone, so no one will be around to witness you setting your man card aside for a few minutes.”
I’d already humiliated myself enough by wrecking, did she really not want to leave me with any shred of dignity?
She pushed the button to start the vehicle. I knew for a fact that she didn’t care about my ego whatsoever.
With a sigh, I tentatively placed my hands on her hips and said, “Fine. Take me back to your castle, Your Highness.” And since making jokes was my preferred coping mechanism when put in an uncomfortable situation, I scooted closer and wrapped my arms around her stomach, then added, “Just don’t get any ideas about this, okay? I’m only snuggling up to you because I don’t want to fall off the back with your crazy driving.”
“Says the guy who just drove into a tree.”
She put her thumb on the gas, and then we were headed back toward the barn we’d left only ten minutes earlier.
