Read Online North of Beautiful by Justina Chen Headley - Free Book Online Page B

down, turned toward the empty spot just as we hit black ice, hidden under this innocuous, innocent snow. The car wheels spun out of control.
    “Terra!” Mom cried.
    I whipped around to make sure she was okay — knowing full well she was — when the one I should have been concerned about was standing bull’s-eye in our trajectory. Mom was gripping her seat, bracing herself. I pumped the brakes the way Dad had taught me.
    The last thing I should have done was close my eyes. But that was what I did, unable to watch as our car slid into the truck and killed that boy.

Chapter eight
    Longitude
    NO SOONER DID WE SLAM into the Range Rover than Mom’s dirge of oh-my-God, oh-my-God started. I lifted my head off the steering wheel. It wasn’t Mom whimpering. It was me. I bit my lower lip to stop from making another sound too out-of-control for comfort and then forced out a question: “Are you okay?”
    Mom’s panicked little breaths hung in the cold air inside our car, frozen in fear. That damned broken heater. This damned broken car. I gripped the steering wheel even tighter, hoping it’d stop my trembling. It didn’t. I turned to Mom, asked her so loudly, I could have been yelling across a long divide, “Mom, are you okay?”
    She barely nodded in response, her wide eyes on my forehead, confirming what I knew but was too afraid to check in the rearview mirror. The skin above my eyebrow stung. Only then did I feel a slow trickle making its way down the side of my face. Since Mom wasn’t grabbing a Kleenex to stanch the flow from my forehead, the cut couldn’t be that bad. And then I remembered the boy.
    God, the boy.
    “Oh, no!” I yanked on my door handle and ran to the front of the car, catching a flash of crimson jumping out of the black Range Rover at the same time.
    A woman’s worried voice cried through the still, cold air, “Jacob!”
    I swallowed hard, took a deep breath as though preparing to plunge into a fast-running river. And then I crouched and peered beneath my car.
    No boy, no blood, no guts.
    “Thank God,” I muttered, leaning my head against the truck in relief.
    “You know,” said a deep voice from behind me, “there are easier ways to meet a guy than to run him over.”
    I swiveled around to see a guy near my age, very much wearing black, very much alive. Outside of Halloween and my infrequent trips to Seattle, I’d rarely seen anyone quite like him: an Asian Goth in a black trench coat, black jeans, black rock concert shirt. Apparently, neither had the good people of Leavenworth who were gathering on the sidewalk on the other side of my mangled car. They watched him vigilantly as if being a Goth guy was vaguely dangerous, like those homeless men shambling about downtown Seattle, muttering to themselves in a whiskey haze.
    “Jacob, are you okay?” came the woman’s voice from behind us now, strident with insistence. Even distraught, she was still the portrait of wealth, hair colored preternaturally blond, a red overcoat cinched tightly around her waist, and perched in high black boots. You could almost smell eau de Republican wafting from her as she threw her arms around Jacob.
    “I’m fine,” he said.
    “God, I thought you were behind the truck.” She shook her head, reeling at the miracle of his survival. And then her eyes settled on me and I witnessed a second miracle as she transformed from distressed woman to avenging warrior. She threw back her long hair and straightened to her full height, a few inches shorter than me and Jacob, but it was her laser-sharp tone that made her deadly: “Do you know what you almost did? You could have killed him.”
    “Mom, chill,” said Jacob. “You skidded, too, remember?”
    Mom? I looked from Jacob to his mother, two disparate maps connected in a seam I couldn’t see. The only adopted Asian kids I’d ever seen were Chinese girls, all under ten, who visited Colville with their families. I knew this because I used to make a study of them,