Chapter 45 - 44 : The Ferrari

Chapter 45: Chapter 44 : The Ferrari

Big Bob’s lot looked the same as ever. Faded pennant flags strung along a wire, the cartoon fat man on the sign still grinning. The only difference was that half the cars were gone, and the neon prices on the windshields that were left had all been written fresh.

Bob was waiting at the showroom door, working a piece of gum.

"Sold thirty-one last month." He skipped hello and led with that. "Twenty-five years I’ve had this place, and that’s the first time I ever had to pull inventory off another dealer’s lot."

He didn’t head into the showroom. He led Rhett and Dom around back to the service bay instead. The roll-up door was half open, and inside sat one car under a canvas cover.

Dom stopped walking. In his experience, nothing good had ever come out from under a tarp.

"Relax." Bob caught the look. "It’s not a trap. It’s a car."

He grabbed a corner of the canvas and pulled.

Red.

Not the sun-faded red of the used Hondas out on the lot. The kind of red that shone, red you could see your own reflection in. Low to the ground, a V8 under the glass engine cover, a little silver horse on the tail.

Dom made a one-syllable noise that didn’t belong to any language.

"1999 Ferrari 360 Modena." Bob dropped the canvas on the floor. "Belonged to an internet guy down in Orange County. Bought it the day his company went public in ’99. Company went under in 2000, he hung on to the car for six more years, and last month he couldn’t anymore. The bank took it, and after a lap around the auction circuit it ended up with me."

"And?" Rhett asked.

"And the bank wants ninety-six for it. You know what the market’s like this year. Nobody’s even buying houses, so who’s buying a Ferrari? Every month it sits here, I pay the bank six hundred in interest." Bob moved his gum from one cheek to the other. "So I thought of you."

Rhett walked half a lap around the car with his hands in his pockets, looking it over with real interest.

"So why am I looking at it?" He glanced up at Bob. "I made a little money, sure, but nowhere near what you’re thinking. Or are you planning to give away another car?"

"Not selling it. Not giving it away. Lending it." Bob said it like the decision had already been made. "You drive it for three months, free. No rent, you don’t spend a dime, bring me the gas receipts and I’ll pay you back. Insurance runs through the dealership policy."

He pulled a license plate frame out of the car. Big letters across it. BIG BOB’S AUTO · GARDENA.

"One condition. This stays on the car. Wherever you drive it, my name goes with you."

"Oh?" Rhett took the frame and turned it over in his hands.

It wasn’t the car that gave him pause. He’d driven Ferraris before. Back in his other life he’d driven things that cost more than this one, though every one of them had been on a company lease, listed as a company asset. What he was weighing was how it would look to everybody else.

The upside was obvious. An eighteen-year-old college kid, two months into making videos, driving a red Ferrari. That was a headline all by itself, and it would do more for him than any ad he could buy. The downside was just as obvious. Somebody was going to make the car the story. Say he’d let it go to his head. Say his team was blowing the audience’s money. Say the whole thing had been an act from the start.

But a few nasty comments weren’t going to bend a curve that only went up. A new star out of nowhere, paired with a supercar. It fit. That was exactly the picture people wanted, and if he didn’t give it to them, somebody else would.

That settled it. He looked up and grinned. "And what if I get used to it in three months?"

Bob heard the yes in it and let out a breath he’d been holding. He snatched the plate frame back out of Rhett’s hand. "Then you buy it. I’ll knock a little off. That’s the best you get."

Dom whistled. A month and a half ago Rhett had been stretching a thirty-five-hundred-dollar bank balance, and now a man was practically begging to lend him a Ferrari, and all Dom did was whistle. He’d stopped being surprised by this kind of thing weeks ago. He just couldn’t keep the shine out of his eyes.

"Shotgun’s mine, then. Only me." He paused. "...And Kelsey?"

Rhett raised a hand like he was about to smack him.

Dom flinched back with a look of mock terror. "Oh, oh, oh, and Claire! Claire too! How could I forget Claire!"

Rhett lunged and got him in a headlock, and the two of them shoved each other around the service bay until they nearly knocked over a jack stand.

Bob stood off to one side with his arms folded, laughing at them. Must be nice to be young, he thought.

Dom didn’t say a word the whole drive back. He had one hand locked on the grab handle above the door and the other holding up his old camcorder, and he didn’t put it down once from the moment they got on the 405.

At one red light, a city bus pulled up alongside them. Half a bus full of high school kids pressed against the windows, looking down. One of them started slapping the glass and yelling something. Through two layers of glass they couldn’t hear it, only see the shape of it.

PAGE SEVEN.

They pulled into the student lot at three-thirty, right as classes let out.

Rhett picked the most ordinary spot he could find, between a Nissan with its taillight taped together and a Ford with a back seat buried in dirty laundry. He cut the engine. Within a minute, there was a ring of people around the car.

Point-and-shoots, cell phones, people with their hands over their mouths, people circling the car again and again. A guy in a Kappa Sigma sweatshirt shoved his way to the front, took a picture with the hood, then realized what he was wearing, turned the sweatshirt inside out, and took another one.

Two rows over, Trent’s black Cayenne was just pulling in.

On a normal day, his car was the most expensive thing in this lot, and he was used to heads turning when he drove in. Today, no heads turned. He drove to the end of the row, came back, made a loop, and finally saw the streak of red in the middle of the crowd.

His car sat in the middle of the lane for three seconds. Then he threw it in reverse, backed all the way out of the lot, and went to park somewhere else.

He ground his teeth the whole way out. A used Ferrari. So what? Tomorrow he’d go buy a new one. The newest model they made.

Then he remembered his dad had cut off his card.

He slammed his palm into the steering wheel. The horn blared, and a girl crossing behind him jumped back onto the curb.

Dom’s camcorder caught all of it.

Hendricks came by at five. Most of the crowd had cleared out. He walked a slow lap around the Ferrari, looked from under his hat brim at the corner of the windshield where a student permit should have been, looked at the car again. Then he took out his ticket book and wrote one.

The violation box read: No valid permit displayed.

Fifteen dollars. Rhett paid it and pinned the ticket to the corkboard in B14.

That same evening, up on the second floor of Carrington Hall, Pruitt’s office window looked straight down on the student lot. In a row of dusty sedans, that streak of red was hard to miss.

He stood at the window with the phone to his ear. "Yes, Mr. Delaney drove a Ferrari to school." He paused to listen. "Red. It’s in the student lot with no permit. Campus police just wrote him a ticket."

The caller asked something else.

"One more thing." Pruitt pinched the bridge of his nose. "He’s cooking up something else on campus. Bigger than the last one, I’m told. We’re still replanting the flowerbeds from the last one."

Whoever it was said something brief, and the line went dead.

Pruitt set the receiver back in its cradle but didn’t go back to his desk. He stayed at the window, looking down at the Ferrari, and didn’t draw the blinds until the light was gone.

By the next morning, the red Ferrari was in more than three hundred Facebook albums. Monday night, KTLA ran a two-minute piece on the evening news. The title was From Dorm Room to Ferrari.

The reporter asked whether he’d bought the car with his video money. Rhett leaned against the door and smiled at the lens.

"This one came from Big Bob. Big Bob’s Auto, over in Gardena." He tapped the plate frame. "And if any of you want a car that isn’t a Ferrari, go see him too. He’s a good guy. Says it right on his sign. No credit? No problem."

It wasn’t until the reporter got back to the station and sat down to cut the piece that she realized he’d never actually answered the question.

The next morning, there was a line outside Bob’s showroom before it opened. He called to say he’d sold six cars by lunch, and one of the buyers had driven up from San Diego just to see the cartoon fat man in person.

"Three months." Bob was out of breath on the other end. "Did I lowball that? Should I have said six?"

That night was Halloween.

Half the campus was in green tracksuits. Not the nine hundred they’d sold, those were long gone. Green sweatpants from Walmart, a white T-shirt, a three-digit number scrawled across the chest in Sharpie. The numbers were all over the place. The most common one was 218.

On fraternity row somebody went as the giant pelican, the head built out of cardboard boxes, and he had to stop every few steps to hold it on. One guy painted himself brown from head to toe, stuck branches all over his head, and stood at the door of a party the entire night without so much as a twitch. People put beers in his hand. That didn’t get a twitch either. The next day his picture was shared more than four hundred times on Facebook with a one-word caption. TREE.

The most popular costume was a single sheet of printer paper, safety-pinned to the chest. Page seven of the sign-up form.

Rhett didn’t go to any of it. He left the Ferrari in the student lot and went to bed. In the morning the hood was covered in candy wrappers, and a dozen notes were tucked under the wipers. Most of them said the same thing. I READ PAGE SEVEN.

The biggest thing going on in B14 that week wasn’t the Ferrari, and it wasn’t Halloween. It was the hot sauce.

Sierra lined up ten bottles of hot sauce in order on the workbench, from ketchup all the way to a little black glass bottle sealed in wax with a skull on the label. She came in every afternoon and worked her way a little further down the line.

Monday she got to bottle three. Nothing showed on her face. She just stood up when she was done, walked very calmly into the hall, and came back three minutes later.

Tuesday she got to bottle five. This time she ran.

Behind the switcher, Dom quietly raised his camcorder. When Sierra came back, her eyes were red, and there was still nothing on her face. She glanced at the camcorder.

"Erase that."

"It’s for the blooper reel," Dom said.

"Erase. It."

Dom promised to tape over it. After Sierra left, he popped the cassette out, wrote BLOOPERS on the label, and hid it in his drawer.

The first guest was Mac. When he heard the news, his first reaction wasn’t excitement.

"She gets a show first?" He stood in the middle of B14 with both hands on his hips. "I signed before her! I was first! I’m the FIRST CONTRACT!"

Rhett didn’t say anything. He pulled a folder out of the drawer and turned to page three of Mac’s contract. Just three lines, in his own handwriting.

He tapped the second line. Next spring: your own series.

"Spring’s a long way off," Mac said.

"Then make those three gym videos good." Rhett closed the folder. "Make them good enough, and spring shows up early on its own."

Mac opened his mouth, then shut it again. He clapped his hands once, turned, and headed for the door.

"Where are you going?" Dom asked.

"The gym." Mac didn’t look back. "Spring’s not gonna move up by itself."

The door swung shut behind him.

Rhett put the folder back in the drawer. There was one thing he hadn’t told Mac. Spring wasn’t late by accident. The audience genuinely loved Mac on camera. The open arms at the caution tape. The Iron Pit deal. The way the camera couldn’t stay off him once he walked into a frame. Under every video, somebody was asking the same thing. When does the big guy get his own show?

Let them keep asking. The more people asked, the higher the show would fly the day it finally launched. Until then, he could find ways to put Mac in front of people a little more often. How, how much, and where, he hadn’t worked out yet. He only knew one thing. Nobody could be allowed to see him doing it.

The first episode was set to tape Wednesday night. Rhett was leaving for San Bruno first thing Thursday, and he wanted that tape in his bag when he went.

Wednesday afternoon, when Claire walked into B14, the room went quiet for half a second.

She wasn’t wearing a hoodie. It was a dark green wool coat, cleanly cut, a little white collar showing at the neck. Her hair wasn’t the usual grab-and-twist either. She’d blown it out. None of them had ever seen her blow out her hair.

She walked straight to her desk, sat down, opened her laptop, and started coding as if nothing had happened.

Rhett looked up from behind his screen.

"Looks good," he said. "Keep doing that."

Claire’s fingers stopped on the keyboard. She didn’t look up. But on her screen, the line of code she’d just typed was the same letter over and over.

After a moment, she said, very quietly, "I also bought hard drives. Three. With my own money."

"Claire."

"The coat came first." She deleted the line of letters and started over. "The drives came after. The order matters."

Behind the switcher, Dom and Sam traded a look. Neither of them dared make a sound.

That evening, Rhett pulled the Ferrari out of the lot to go fill the tank. First thing tomorrow, he’d be driving it five hours north to San Bruno.

At the main gate, he caught a gray sedan in the rearview mirror, parked across the street. A middle-aged man in a windbreaker sat behind the wheel with the window rolled halfway down, and a long lens poked out through the gap.

The light turned green. Rhett drove on through.

In the rearview mirror, the lens followed him all the way to the corner.