“Switch places with me,” she snarls. But I’m too happy for Toraf to return the animosity.

Once she’s in the driver’s seat, her attitude changes. She bounces up and down like she’s mattress shopping, getting so much air that she’d puncture the top if I hadn’t put it down already. She reaches for the keys in the ignition. I grab her hand. “Nope. Buckle up first.”

It’s almost cliché for her to roll her eyes now, but she does. When she’s finished dramatizing the act of buckling her seat belt—complete with tugging on it to make sure it won’t unclick—she turns to me in pouty expectation. I nod.

She wrenches the key and the engine fires up. The distant look in her eyes makes me nervous. Or maybe it’s the guilt swirling around in my stomach. Galen might not like this car, but it still feels like sacrilege to put the fate of a BMW in Rayna’s novice hands. As she grips the gear stick so hard her knuckles turn white, I thank God this is an automatic.

“D is for drive, right?” she says.

“Yes. The right pedal is to go. The left pedal is to stop. You have to step on the left one to change into drive.”

“I know. I saw you do it.” She mashes down on the brake, then throws us into drive. But we don’t move.

“Okay, now you’ll want to step on the right pedal, which is the gas—”

The tires start spinning—and so do we. Rayna stares at me wide-eyed and mouth ajar, which isn’t a good thing since her hands are on the wheel. It occurs to me that she’s screaming, but I can’t hear her over my own screeching. The dust wall we’ve created whirls around us, blocking our view of the trees and the road and life as we knew it.

“Take your foot off the right one!” I yell. We stop so hard my teeth feel rattled.

“Are you trying to get us killed?” she howls, holding her hand to her cheek as if I’ve slapped her. Her eyes are wild and glassy; she just might cry.

“Are you freaking kidding me? You’re the one driving!”

“You said to step on the brake to put us into drive, then to step on the right one to—”

“Not at the same time!”

“Well, you should have told me that. How was I supposed to know?”

I snort. “You acted like the freaking Dalai Lama when I tried to tell you how to shift gears. I told you, one was for go and one was for stop. You can’t stop and go at the same time! You have to make up your mind.”

From the expression on her face, she’s either about to punch me or call me something really bad. She opens her mouth, but the really bad something doesn’t come out; she shuts it again. Then she giggles. Now I’ve seen everything.

“Galen tells me that all the time,” she chortles. “That I can never make up my mind.” Then she bursts out laughing so hard she spits all over the steering wheel. She keeps laughing until I’m convinced an unknown force is tickling her senseless.

What? As far as I can tell, her indecisiveness almost got us killed. Killed isn’t funny.

“You should have seen your face,” she says, between gulps of breaths. “You were all, like—” And she makes the face of a drunk clown. “I bet you wet yourself, didn’t you?” She cracks herself up so much she clutches her side as if she’s holding in her own guts.

I feel my lips fracture into a smile before I can stop them. “You were more scared than me. You swallowed like ten flies while you were screaming.”

She spits all over the steering wheel again. And I spew laughter onto the dash. It takes a good five minutes for us to sober up enough for another driving lesson. My throat is dry, and my eyes are wet when I say, “Okay, now. Let’s concentrate. The sun is going down. These woods probably get pretty creepy at night.”

She clears her throat, still giggling a little. “Okay. Concentrate. Right.”

“So, this time, when you take your foot off the brake, the car will go on its own. There, see?” We slink along the road at an idle two miles per hour.

She huffs up at her bangs. “This is boring. I want to go faster.”

I start to say, “Not too fast,” but she squashes the gas under her foot, and my words are snatched away by the wind. She gives a startled shout, which I find hypocritical because after all, I’m the one helpless in the passenger seat, and she’s the one screaming like a teapot, turning the wheel back and forth like the road isn’t straight as a pencil.

“Brake, brake, brake!” I shout, hoping repetition will somehow penetrate the small part of her brain that actually thinks.

Everything happens fast. We stop. There’s a crunching sound. My face slams into the dash. No wait, the dash becomes an airbag. Rayna’s scream is cut off by her airbag. I open my eyes. A tree. A freaking tree. The metal frame groans, and something under the hood lets out a mechanical hiss. Smoke billows up from the front, the universal symbol for “you’re screwed.”

I turn to the rustling sound beside me. Rayna is wrestling with the airbag like it has attacked her instead of saved her life. “What is this thing?” she wails, pushing it out of her way and opening the door.

One Mississippi … two Mississippi …

“Well, are you just going to sit there? We have a long walk home. You’re not hurt are you? Because I can’t carry you.”

Three Mississippi … four Mississippi …

“What are those flashing blue lights down there?”