The Mustang

Just a teaser, if you can't wait till summer.

Copyright 2013]

-S.

Prologue:

My mother isn’t very good at planning. She had my brother in the back of a Mustang, so she named my brother Mustang. With me, her water broke while riding a Harley, and so I was named Harley. You’d think she would have learned by the time she had my younger brother, but he was named Charger, so I guess you could say that she didn’t.

My brother knew everything about cars. At fours years old, he knew more than most adults. When I was born four and a half years after him, he made it his mission to teach me everything he knew: A lot. He taught me how to identify different models at five, how to check under the hood at eight, how to drive at twelve, and how to drift at fourteen. Everything he knew, I knew. Everything he could do, I could do. Everything he could fix, I could fix. Anything he could drive, I could drive.

I was fourteen, getting one of my drifting lessons when I first understood the dangers of car racing. Some guys came up to my brother, lead him away from me, and started threatening him. I could tell they were threatening him; I’m good at determining body language, that kind of stuff. When he came back, I asked him what was wrong and he told me not to worry about it, just to focus on my braking and drifting.

I was fifteen when my brother disappeared. He went off to a race one night and never came back. The only thing that was left of him was his black 1965 Mustang with a twin turbo engine from a Nissan skyline, import and muscle hybrid, with a letter explaining that it was mine now. It was pure sexiness, and now it was mine. The one thing my brother left behind was the car he was born in, his namesake, his drive.

I’m eighteen now and living up to his name in car races. I don’t know where he was, or when he was coming back, or if he was alive at all. But I did know one thing: I was going to race all over the country until I found him. And if he was dead, I would find whoever was responsible, and run them over my brother’s Mustang. If not for me, then for my brother. It was the only way to thank him for the lessons and rides and experience. It was the least I could do.

The soft purr of that Mustang always reminds me: I wasn’t just racing for myself, I was racing for him. Each and every win.