Infinite Cashback System

Chapter 219: 220 | Do I Look Like I Have AAA?

"Battery?" Jordan asked from six feet away, which was apparently six feet too close because she spun on him with the energy of a cornered raccoon.

"The hell do you want?"

"Sounds like your battery’s dead."

"No shit, Sherlock. You figure that out with your ears or did your one brain cell have to work overtime?" Her voice came out husky, lower than Jordan expected, with a slight rasp that suggested either too many late nights or a two-pack-a-day habit or maybe just the natural consequence of screaming at inanimate objects in parking garages.

She looked him up and down with those violet contacts, and the assessment took about one point five seconds, which meant she either saw nothing worth examining or everything worth examining.

Jordan raised both hands. "I have jumper cables. In my car. Right there." He pointed at the Civic. "If it’s just the battery, I can get you going in ten minutes."

Her eyes narrowed. The purple streak fell across her forehead. She looked at Jordan’s Civic, then back at Jordan, then down at his shoes, then back up at his face, running a calculation that probably involved the statistical likelihood of being murdered in a parking garage versus the inconvenience of calling a tow truck. The tow truck apparently lost.

"Fine. Whatever."

Jordan popped his trunk and retrieved the jumper cables his father had packed when he first moved to California, because David McKnight believed in being prepared for exactly this situation and also earthquakes, flat tires, and the total collapse of Western civilization. Jordan connected the red clamp to the positive terminal on his Civic’s battery, then walked to the Accord and lifted the hood.

The engine bay looked like it hadn’t seen maintenance since the Obama administration. Oil residue coated everything. A coolant hose had been repaired with electrical tape.

He connected the cables and returned to his car to let the charge transfer. The girl leaned against her driver’s door with her arms crossed, one boot propped behind her on the tire she had just assaulted.

She pulled a lollipop from somewhere, unwrapped it, and stuck it in her mouth with the deliberate energy of someone who wanted to be watching something on her phone but refused to admit she had nothing better to do than wait.

"Try it now," Jordan said after three minutes.

She dropped into the driver’s seat. The starter whined. The engine turned over, sputtered, and died.

"Again."

The starter whined harder. A click. Nothing. Not even a cough this time. The engine had officially given up on life.

Jordan walked back to the Accord and looked at the battery terminals more carefully. Corrosion had eaten through the positive clamp so badly that the metal underneath had turned to green powder. He followed the cable from the terminal toward the engine block and found a wire that should have been connected to the alternator dangling free, the connector cracked and black with carbon scoring.

"Not the battery. Your alternator cable’s fried." Jordan disconnected the clamp and started coiling his jumper cables in neat loops. The rubber was still warm from the charge transfer. "Could be the alternator itself. Hard to say without testing it, but either way, this thing isn’t starting without a tow truck and someone who knows what they’re doing with a voltmeter."

"Fan-fucking-tastic." She bit down on the lollipop. The candy cracked between her molars, loud enough that Jordan heard it from six feet away. She crunched through the shards and kept talking around them. "Exactly what I needed today. A two hundred dollar tow bill and another four hundred for the alternator. Maybe five if they find something else wrong, which they always do. On top of the eight hundred dollars I already owe my parents just for being alive and occasionally requiring food."

"You have AAA?"

"Do I look like I have AAA?" She gestured at herself with both hands, a full-body display that included the ripped tights, the combat boots with their platform soles held together by hope and superglue, and the wallet chain hanging from her hip like a vestigial tail from a more financially stable timeline.

Jordan looked at the Accord again. At the duct-taped side mirror. At the bumper sticker collection that included three different Warped Tour years and something in Japanese he couldn’t read. At the girl standing next to it in an outfit that cost either twenty dollars at a thrift store or two hundred dollars at Hot Topic, and he genuinely could not tell which.

"No," he said.

"At least you’re honest about it." She pulled the lollipop stick from her mouth and flicked it toward a storm drain grate three feet to her left. It sailed past, bounced once off the asphalt, and rolled to a stop near the rear tire of her car. She looked at it. Made no move to pick it up. Apparently littering was not high on her list of moral concerns today. "Great. Fantastic. Love this for me. Guess I’m walking home in fishnets and platforms because my life is a series of excellent decisions that keep paying dividends."

"Where do you live?"

The question came out of Jordan’s mouth before his brain authorized it. This kept happening. His impulse control had improved in some areas—double-texting, unnecessary apologies, buying smoothies for people who didn’t ask—but apparently "offering assistance to strangers" had not yet made it onto the list of behaviors requiring pre-approval from his frontal lobe.

She stopped looking at the lollipop stick and started looking at him instead. The violet contacts turned her stare into something uncomfortably direct, like being examined by a creature from a planet where eye contact was a form of combat. Her expression mixed suspicion with something else, something that might have been curiosity or might have been the specific kind of interest a person developed right before deciding whether you were useful or just another waste of time.

Her tongue came out and ran across her lower lip. Both snakebite piercings. Left side, right side, slow and deliberate.

"Why, you offering?"

"I’m offering a ride. Not a marriage proposal."

Her mouth twitched. Just one corner. The snakebite piercings caught the light as her lip moved. "I live off Brookhurst. Near the Raising Cane’s."

Jordan ran the geography. Brookhurst was about fifteen minutes from campus, twenty in traffic, roughly the same direction as his apartment complex. Not far. Not close enough to walk in platform boots and fishnets without attracting either attention or blisters.

"I’m heading that direction. I can drop you."

She stared at him. The violet contacts made the stare more intense than it had any right to be, like being evaluated by a very judgmental alien. Her tongue ran across her lower lip, hitting both snakebite piercings in sequence, and Jordan’s brain registered this observation and immediately filed it under "information that serves no productive purpose but will be remembered anyway."

"What’s it gonna cost me?"

"Ten dollars."