Chapter 2

Chapter 2

            Quinn Bonney stared at the long curve of brake lights stretching out in front of him on the highway. He could see flashing emergency lights in the distance and he hoped that that meant the end of the traffic jam. He played the padded steering wheel like a drum, enjoying the echo and the thrum of the top 40 music countdown in the empty cargo van.  He rocked back and forth to try to get the van to sway to the music on its fancy rental-van hydraulics. At six foot two, had been the tallest kid in his class ever since ninth grade. Now a senior in high school, with thick sideburns and a mop of curly oatmeal colored hair, he had had no trouble at all convincing the woman at the car rental agency that he was twenty five years old, thereby avoiding the $75 surcharge on under age renters. He pocketed the extra money Paul had given him to cover that expense and pondered whether to use it in the casino on board the Queen Mary 2 or to take Madison out for a decent dinner before he left.

            On the one hand, Madison was still under the impression that he was rich and a $75 dinner would go a long way towards maintaining that illusion. They could get the full fondue extravaganza with three kinds of meat and double dip chocolate dessert at the Melting Pot. If they went on a Monday night they could get bottomless virgin pina colada lemonades for free. $75 might even get them into a matinee movie before dinner, if they skipped Odyssey of the Mind and left straight from history class. It’d be a pretty nice flourish, thought Quinn, to surprise her with a going away date like that, before setting sail on the luxury liner. Who knows where that might lead.  He hadn’t mentioned to her that he was going on board to work nights cataloguing library books for his uncle. He preferred to leave her with the impression that it was a black tie affair, all high tea and how-do-you-do.

            On the other hand, she was going to find out eventually that those treasure chests at the end of the famous Bonney Boys adventure stories were not so boundless after all. His own college savings, Jack and Cable’s tuition, various gifts and whatnot that his parents had forced him to put away for the long term, left him better off than some people, to be sure, but he was hardly sleeping on a mattress stuffed with gold coins. If she only liked him for his money, she was going to find out eventually what the true state of affairs was. She’d put the pieces together – the tandem bicycle with a stuffed animal strapped to the back seat, the jeans with holes in the knees, the family vacations to ‘rustic camps’ in ‘out of the way places.’ Even if she thought now that it was all an elaborate ruse to mask his embarrassing wealth with conspicuously grungy behavior, she’d see through it before prom, wouldn’t she? You didn’t get to be captain of the glee club by being stupid, after all.

            Then again, it was March now. Prom was only two months away. If he could play up this Queen Mary trip for a few weeks, maybe actually ask her to prom when he got back. Make a big deal about renting a limo and then see if he could unload the last of those Confederate banknotes on eBay to spring for a class ring… So what if she did only like him for his money? There were worse things. Like not having anyone to go to prom with.

It was all unfolding perfectly. Unless she went digging around on the internet and found his embarrassing old Amazing Race blog, he’d covered his tracks pretty well. No sign of him on the RPG message-boards any more. He’d deleted most of his dad’s family blog from the web (though he’d left it intact on the hard-drive and hacked the computer to lead his own family to that master file when they logged in, so they wouldn’t know it wasn’t getting out of the house any more). If Madison hadn’t googled him yet, there was no reason to think she’d do it now. Not with sectionals coming up in three weeks.

            Traffic squeezed from four lanes down to two as they neared the emergency lights. It didn’t look like an accident at all. It was a crew of line-painting trucks. At four o’clock on a Thursday. Quinn shook his head in disgust. He knew he was going to be in the doghouse when he got to the auction late. When he finally eased the van past the work crews, he noticed that they weren’t even working. Other drivers noticed it too, and there was a steady blast of horns as cars squeezed past. Then it was off to the races. Cars shot out of the congested lanes into the open road ahead like they were fired from a cannon. Tires burned as frustrated drivers floored the ignition pedals and raced their engines to make up for lost time. The rental van didn’t have much in that department, so Quinn checked his mirrors to try to slide over into the right lane. He couldn’t see well with the van’s solid sides. A wailing horn blared from his right as a silver BMW passed him on that side. With the blinker on, he stole a glance back over his shoulder, out the little rear window of the van. Nothing in sight. He started to change lanes, but there was another horn. A green Honda, again passing on the right. Quinn tried to straighten out back into his own lane, but a pickup truck from his left was already veering in front of him. He tapped the brakes. The empty van squealed in protest and started to skid. He straightened the wheel. The van leaned forward – those wobbly rental van shocks again – and Quinn thought he had it under control. Then the pickup trunk in front of him hit its own brakes hard. He was too close for Quinn to stop short. He had to change lanes to avoid contact. It was too crowded on the left. He swung to the right, into the next lane. There was a blare of horns. Quinn kept it steady into the right lane, speeding around the braking pickup. The van drifted slightly onto the shoulder and he heard the fine grit kick up in the wheel wells. In his mirrors he could see cars in his wake braking and swerving, but everything seemed OK. There were no lane lines on the new blacktop on this side of the paint crews. Quinn’s heart was beating fast, as he let the van roll back down to 50 then 45 miles an hour.

            All of a sudden, there was a blast of some sort from the road beneath him. Had he hit a pot hole? The van veered hard left. He wrenched the wheel to the right. He heard a scraping just beneath his feet. The van canted forward again. He couldn’t straighten it out, so he twisted hard right. As the van angled roughly onto the shoulder, Quinn saw a tire bounding ahead of him down the road. The grinding and scraping beneath his feet told him that it was his own tire. He tried to brake again, on the shoulder, but the three wheeled van skidded sideways. It was all in slow motion now. He had all his weight on the brake, as the van fishtailed on the loose gravel on the side of the new blacktop. Then, just as it seemed it would stop safely, something underneath the van gave way. Its front end lowered itself another notch towards the road. The stump of the missing front tire planted itself in the soft shoulder, and the van, pivoting on it, tipped ever so slowly onto its side.

            As the ground rose up towards him, Quinn hung onto the steering wheel. The van rolled gently, almost all the way onto its top. Then it settled down on its side with the driver’s side door on the ground. His backpack which had been on the passenger seat fell on top of him and his phone and notebook and bottle of iced tea fell out. The radio had somehow stopped and Quinn could hear cars racing past. He wasn’t the slightest bit hurt; he could tell that instantly. But he lay still, muscles tensed, for what seemed like a long while. Beneath all the sounds outside and the pounding blood racing in his head, he could hear another buzzing of some sort. At first he thought he might have hit his head. But it wasn’t coming from his head. It was coming from near his head. At his left shoulder, which was resting on the van door – the glass wasn’t even broken – his phone, set on vibrate, was alerting him to an incoming call.