The Outside Groove Read Online Free PDF

forms sitting in the front seat, one of them Fletcher, of course, and the other clearly female. Of course. I fired Hilda up and pulled out of there like I’d seen a tidal wave rolling in.
    ***
    I made it home in time for dinner, but my punctuality was pointless, since, after my mother and I put the food on the table, she still had to call Wade and Big Daddy twice more before they came in from the garage. Once we were all seated and the dishes started around the table, talk turned to racing—specifically, the season opener, sixteen days away, the ninth of May. Big Daddy and Wade got into a prickly exchange about what my father called “prioritizing equipment acquisitions” until the Valley Savings & Trust “sponsorship upgrade” was finalized. Despite Big Daddy’s prior warning against counting chickens until Wade LaPlante Motorsports had a check from its primary sponsor in hand, Wade had seemingly grown more enthusiastic, not less, about spending the team’s limited funds.
    I read the salad dressing bottle.
    During a lull in the dinner conversation when Wade put so much chicken into his mouth that we all stopped to watch him, as if getting ready to save him from choking, Mom asked me if I had any news to share. After Wade had swallowed safely, she turned and gave me that sly, woman-to-woman look that made me want to throw canned goods against the walls.
    â€œCrush,” Wade interjected in a mock cough, then repeated it, “Crush,” in a mock sneeze—a stupid joke he picked up from some movie.
    I glared at him, telepathically trying to make him chew his tongue in half.
    â€œWade,” Mom said. “Let your sister speak for herself.”
    â€œWhat’s this?” Big Daddy interjected in his curt, businesslike manner, like he was answering his desk phone.
    â€œI think Casey’s got her eye on Fletcher, is what I’m hearing,” Mom said.
    â€œI don’t have my eye on anyone,” I said, failing to keep a groan from attaching itself to the end of the statement. Like Wade, I sometimes regressed into early childhood among family.
    â€œWell, you should go out with him,” Big Daddy said, the way he might tell one of his employees where to stick a shrub. “Good kid. Fine kid. I trust him.”
    â€œI trust him, too,” Wade said. “He’s a good guy.”
    As if Wade would know what it meant to be a good guy. According to local gossip, a few months earlier the Red Snake had been spotted outside the apartment of his current girlfriend, Gail Wiggans,
weeks
before he broke up with his then most recent former girlfriend, Samantha Houle. And no one had been the least bit surprised. I, however, didn’t speak to Wade for a month. I liked Samantha. We’d actually had conversations about something other than Wade’s racing career. In the time they were together, almost a year—a One Tank Wade record that’d gone unchallenged—she seemed to find qualities in him that even I, living under the same roof with the guy, had missed. I’m not sure what those qualities were, but Wade acted more mature, more considerate, around her. I thought there was more to Samantha, too, than a pretty face to beam from behind the Red Snake’s windshield.
    â€œSeriously, Case,” he said, every syllable like a fork jabbed into my face, “Fletcher’s top shelf.”
    â€œThen why don’t
you
go out with him?” I snapped.
    The table fell silent.
    â€œDon’t you like him?” Mom said in a singsong voice that sounded like she was helping me pick out a swimsuit. She tapped the back of my hand.
    Feeling her fingers on my flesh, with my brother and father looking on with identical expressions of amusement, I yanked my hand back and whacked my fork on the edge of the table. “For one thing,” I said, “he hasn’t asked me out. And for another, I believe he has a girlfriend.”
    â€œNot so