No Right Turn Read Free

The second they’re gone, I race back down the hallway to my bedroom and peek out just in time to see Don open the passenger door and Mom, kind of awkwardly, slip into the car. Then Don walks around to the driver’s side and hops in too. The car’s windows are tinted dark, and I can’t see in very well. He fires up the engine; it has a pretty decent roar. They back out and take off.
    I decide right away that he’s an idiot and that I’m not going to like him. Period.
    Cool car, though.

ONE
    I’m walking home from school after getting off the bus. It’s the following Tuesday, and I go past Don Lugar’s house. In his driveway he’s polishing the Stingray. I’ve never been a gearhead, never cared that much about cars. It’s not like Mom and I have had thousands of extra bucks to burn on anything. So cars have never been that big a deal to me, and big-boy toys like Corvette Stingrays are about as realistic to me as … I don’t know … as nothing, they’re just something I know I’ll never have.
    My dad had always talked and acted like he hated muscle cars and cool classics—he called them “show-off cars.” Whenever we saw one on the road, he’d always say something about “what a waste of money” or he’d look at the driver, usually some middle-aged guy like himself, and mutter, “Grow up.”
    But there’s something about my dad that’s bugged me ever since he died. On the day of Dad’s funeral, afterward, everybody came back to our house to sit around and drink punch and eat cookies and try and pretend that everything was going to be okay. I couldn’t stand it, so I left the living room, where a lot of people were sitting and standing around. The kitchen was just as crowded. I didn’t know where to hide until I spotted the closed door to Dad’s office. I didn’t want to go back in there, I really didn’t, but I knew that it would give me some privacy. And truthfully, something weird pounded in my head—a strange feeling of being pulled toward that closed door and then on into the room. So that’s where I went.
    It was already all cleaned up; some of Mom’s friends from the hospital, other nurses, had taken care of it. I took a slow breath and started looking around. Pretty soon I started snooping through Dad’s stuff.
    Most of the things I’d seen a million times. But in the bottom drawer of his big oak desk, hidden under a pile of old bills and manila folders, and I mean really hidden, like it was a secret porno stash, I found a stack of magazines and books. I looked at the dates on them and they went back for years. There were dozens of them: hot-rod magazines, boating magazines, hang gliding, flying, and skydiving, all these magazines and books that I’d never seen before. One of the books was called Sports Car Color History, Corvette 1968–1982 .
    Why did my dad have all this crap? Why did he hide it? What good was any of this to him since he’d never skydived, hang glided, owned a boat or a hot rod? And if my dad had hated ’Vettes so much, like he always sounded when we saw one, why did he have a book about them? I glanced at the magazines and thumbed through a few of the books, but I didn’t stay in there very long; the room gave me the creeps. I put everything back where I’d found it and got out.
    So when Don Lugar showed up at our house driving his Corvette, I wondered what Dad would have thought about it. What would Dad have thought about a guy who actually had a real show-off car, hitting on Mom?
    Don’s taller than my dad was; he dresses just like most older guys—kind of dorky. Now he looks up and says, “Hi, Jordan, how you doin’?” like we’re already old pals or something.
    â€œNot bad.” I pause, I want to just keep walking, I want to ignore Don, but I can’t stop staring at his car.
    I haven’t