REMEDY [ninjago jaya]

8. The Slightest Glimpse

• Jay Walker •

"Woah," was the first thing to come out of Nya's mouth, and it took Jay an awful lot of time to realize it was an expression of fascination and not disgust.

Nya's eyes swept over his custom-made BMW.

To clarify, Jay wasn't wealthy. Far from it, actually. The BMW had been delivered to the Scrap n Junk by an anonymous person who had apparently gotten a better car to cruise around in. It had been in a less-than-stellar condition, and Jay and his father had worked on getting it to turn on again for three consecutive months. They had also changed its original gray color to a dark navy, with yellow steel cords on all four tires.

While Jay was proud of his ride, it was still a piece of trash he had adopted at the end of the day, and he prayed Nya wouldn't figure it out. He would surely not be able to live the humiliation down.

But the look on Nya's face left little room for worry. "There's no way this is yours!"

Was that a good exclamation or a bad one?

"Uh, thank you?"

Nya noticed his confusion and laughed. "I meant it in a good way. This car is so cool! You've had this color customized, haven't you? Whoever you hired did an amazing job!"

She noticed the customization that quickly? Jay's throat tightened at the compliment, though Nya didn't know he had been the one doing the paint job.

"Thanks," he said, both stopping in front of their respective car doors opposite each other. "Uh, yeah, they did a great job."

Jay opened his car door and settled into the driver's seat with muffled thoughts in his head telling him to let Nya know he was the mastermind behind the look of his car, but another, bigger part of his brain yelled at him not to. Nya would ask questions, and he really did not want to worry about answering them.

"So, where is this hotel?" he asked, his hand reaching around him and grabbing the cord of his seatbelt, locking it into place.

"It's not so far away from here," Nya answered, copying his action with her own seatbelt. She gave him the address and Jay typed it into his GPS app.

As the car powered on and he steered it into the main road, he felt her eyes on him. The tips of his ears burnt at the attention he was receiving and his hands gripped the steering wheel tighter.

"How come you don't have a driver's license?" Jay asked, before quickly adding, "If you don't mind me asking."

"No, it's fine. I'm just uncomfortable handling a car, that's all."

Jay's eyebrows pulled together in confusion. Was she scared of driving a vehicle? Or was she just so spoiled that she didn't have to worry about getting her license because she had other people coming to her aid with everything? The Smith family probably had dozens of staff—butlers, cooks, chauffeurs. Jay would assume Nya hadn't had to clean her own bedroom once in her life either.

Jay didn't want to pry it out of her so he changed the subject altogether. "Can I ask why you're staying at a hotel?"

Nya's breath hitched, her eyes closing.

Did he just cross the line? It was just a question.

You're so, so, so stupid, Jay! Why would you ask her that? She's probably so uncomfortable with you. Why would you even offer to drive her? She would have been more comfortable with a thirty-year-old man than with you!

"My brother is a pain in the ass I'm escaping from," she eventually said, shocking Jay with the description she used on her brother. "He's throwing a party tonight."

"And you're not partying with him?" He could have sworn she would be into partying and drinking and maybe even more.

"What? Hell no!" she exclaimed, laughing.

Jay joined her laughter, though his tone was more nervous than joyous. Was he stepping on her toes or not? He couldn't gauge it well enough.

He was a curious boy, though, and he needed to know more about her.

Every assumption he had drawn about her turned out to be incorrect. What else was he wrong about?

"What about you?" Nya asked him. "Anything interesting about you I should know?"

Yeah, actually. I grew up in a desert, not to mention in a junkyard, I only have one friend, I'm a very awkward person, I think I know more about people than I actually do, my love life is dry as hell, I have no other relatives than my parents, I only ever got my parents to install wifi when I was sixteen, I am a poet, and I am obsessed with astronomy and stargazing. "No, not much. I'm a decent guy with decent...decency."

Smooth.

Nya raised a perfectly-shaped eyebrow. Jay was jealous; How was she able to control the muscles in her face to do that? He couldn't even blink.

"I don't believe that," Nya said. "I don't think that you're that uninteresting," she clarified. "There has to be something about you that'd make me swoon."

Jay almost missed a yellow light turning red, quickly putting his foot down on the brake pedal. How the hell was she so comfortable talking to him like that?!

"I don't know."

"Any hobbies? You're in the robotics club, so I'm assuming you're into that outside of it as well."

Yes, he was. At the junkyard, where he got to craft anything he wanted with the material he could find around him.

"It's a passion of mine," he admitted somewhat smoothly, running the car again after the traffic light turned green. "I've been into inventing stuff since I was little. I think three or four."

"What was your first invention?"

Jay smiled fondly. "It was a pair of wings made of metal scraps and old fabric I found in my parents' drawers. I had this belief that if vultures can fly, so can I, and I just needed wings."

"Vultures?" Nya's question brought him back down to the moment.

Jay didn't let it show on his face, but internally he was panicking. Regular people were not growing up with vultures but with pigeons and crows. He forgot.

"It was one of my childhood hyperfixations," he answered.

"Let me guess," Nya said. "You didn't fly?"

Jay grinned. "I ate more dirt than I'd like to admit."

Nya shook her head, a smile on her face.

"What about you?" Jay asked. "I know we began on rough terrain," he said, referring to their first conversation earlier that day, "but I really am curious. Have you been an inventor in hiding this whole time?"

"No, I can't say I have been. I've always wanted to invent, but I haven't been able to because of my life."

Because of her life...?

"What do you mean?"

"You know, all the pressure that comes with having to look picture perfect for the camera and all that stuff. I remember telling my mother I wanted to be gifted a toy toolbox for my seventh birthday, but she told me it was something only boys played with. I got a pink Barbie dollhouse instead. For my eighth birthday I asked for toy cars. I got a play kitchen and a cookbook. After that, I gave up asking and just let it be."

Jay's lips thinned at the slightest glimpse into the childhood of Nya Smith. Her somber tone tugged on his heartstrings, her downcast eyes stabbing into him more than he wanted.

"That's...wow..."

"Yeah." She cleared her throat. "Anyway, now that it's my last year of high school, I decided to do what I've always wanted to do. I don't know if I'll ever get to be creative in my adult life so I want to say I at least got to experience it once."

"What do you want to do after you graduate?"

"I'm going to study law at NCU."

"No." Jay shook his head. "I asked what do you want to do, not what you're planning on becoming."

Silence coated the air before Nya answered in a meek voice, "I would love to own an autobody shop."