Descending Star

GARAGE

Jacob had been bickering with Leah Clearwater all week, and it came to a head on Friday afternoon, on the way home from school, when she hopped into the Rabbit to pick up where she'd left off at lunch. She started right in, and she so thoroughly distracted him that he nearly hit two cars and a pedestrian on the way out of the parking lot.

Trouble was, he no longer recalled how it had started or what the point was. He suspected she was giving him crap just to do it. Leah had been a miserable pill since kindergarten, and as a daughter of the Council Elders, there was no escaping her. His alternate theory was that Billy had put her up to making his life miserable and maybe even paid her from his cookie jar. Jacob planned to confront Pop about that theory tonight. But first he had a date with Quil and Embry. They were meeting him at the garage. He'd found two old transmissions in a landfill. Deadweight, sure, but good for parts. The guys were going to help him dismantle and clean the parts tonight. Tomorrow they'd take the running transmission out of the Rabbit, and take that apart, too. With any luck they'd be able to swap out enough parts to fix fourth gear and prevent it from popping out at three thousand RPMs.

She dumped her backpack on the floor, put her feet up on it, and drummed on the dashboard.

Jacob tried to ignore her. How did she even get into the car? He had floored the accelerator, and she still got in. Her drumming was a chisel being bashed into his temple. "Leah. Stop, all right? Just stop."

She went right on drumming. She'd always sucked at chorus. Since she was three, she never held a single tune. She'd never played a musical instrument. There was this thing that went all the way back to cavemen, where any fool with two sticks could be a drummer, but it didn't work that way. Not with Leah in the car.

He rapped his head on the steering wheel.

She mocked, "I can't believe you roped your boys into working on trannies all weekend, over a girl."

"She's not the only reason, okay? And just shut it. I should throw you out of the car."

"You have until July to fix this trash."

"That's not a lot of time; we only have so many weekends. And hell, you're not even supposed to know about it."

She discovered that the glove compartment, when kneed, produced satisfying low resonance. She used it as a bass drum. "I heard it from you, idiot. You, and your big mouth. You'll need a fast car, to get down there and give her a big 'how da ya do,' before she does a nosedive off that cliff and buys it."

He slowly turned and glared at her. She smirked at him, pounding a beat in four-four time, and advised, more or less with the rhythm, "Watch the road."

He ground his teeth with irritation. No wonder big Sam Uley had dumped her for hot fawning Emily. He knew better than to say that. Instead he informed her, "I can't believe you suckered your girls into fooling around with those dead motocross bikes."

"No different from Jet Skis," she crisply bragged. "And they're not dead. Both motors are running now."

"Do you even know how to ride one? Do any of you?"

"No."

"You're gonna break your necks."

"Boys ride'em. How hard can it be?"

"Harry wouldn't like it." Jacob didn't like it all that much, either. But she'd pull his fingernails out with pliers before he admitted that.

She glowered for a bit with the observation, "He wouldn't care at all if it were Seth fixing them up."