He did not know that she was thinking about the photo shoot. Or about the drive north to the lake. Or about her grandmother's blood pressure. Or about a girl in red headgear from Texas whom she had lost to, eleven months ago, in the semifinal of the national championships, by a single point, on a kick she had seen coming and not moved away from fast enough, and whom she would almost certainly have to fight again in nine days in Colorado Springs. He did not know any of that. He only knew that she was still, and that it was oddly beautiful, the way the rain was oddly beautiful, the way the reflections of the canopy lights lay in long white streaks across the wet black asphalt, and he stood there with his milk and his bread and his résumé and watched her for a moment without meaning to.
That was when he heard the car.
He heard it before he saw it. A deep, snarling, rising roar from somewhere down Linwood, the sound of an engine much too big for the street it was on, and then a high squeal of tires on wet pavement, and then a sheet of dirty water exploding up over the curb at the entrance of the station as something came through the big puddle much too fast. Theo flinched back. And then it was there, swinging in under the canopy in a long low swoop, and he forgot to breathe.
It was orange. Not a normal orange. A violent, glowing, almost fluorescent orange, the color of a traffic cone or a hunting vest or the inside of a fire, so bright that it seemed to light up the whole gray forecourt by itself. It was impossibly low and impossibly wide, all sharp angles and scooped vents and sweeping curves, like something that had been designed not to drive on a road but to slice through air, and it had doors that, Theo was almost certain, opened upward instead of outward. He had seen cars like it on the internet. He had seen one, once, in real life, from a distance, parked outside a nightclub downtown, with a crowd of people standing around it taking pictures. He had never in his life expected to see one at Mr. Farouk's gas station on the corner of Linwood and Fifth.
It slid to a stop behind the gray SUV, a few feet from its rear bumper, its engine still snarling, rain beading on its glossy orange hood and running off in rivulets. The windows were tinted almost black. Theo could not see who was inside. He stood there gaping at it. On the far side of the forecourt, a man in a work truck at pump four, who had been reading the OUT OF ORDER sign with an expression of profound disgust, turned around and gaped at it too.
The tall young woman at pump one did not turn around.
She did not even turn her head. Theo saw that very clearly, and he would remember it. A supercar had just come roaring into the gas station and stopped ten feet behind her with its engine revving like a chainsaw, and every person in the place was staring at it, and she did not even glance at it. She stood exactly as she had been standing, with her hands on the nozzle and her eyes on the climbing numbers, perfectly still, as if nothing had happened at all.
The engine of the orange car cut out. The silence it left behind was enormous.
For a second nothing happened. Then the driver's door swung up and open, exactly as Theo had suspected, rising like a wing, and a pair of legs came out of it, bare and pale, ending in a pair of glossy red high heels with pointed toes, and set down on the wet asphalt. Then the rest of the driver followed, unfolding from the low seat in a way that looked both practiced and difficult.
She was small. That was Theo's first thought. Small and slim and very blonde, almost white-blonde, her hair pinned up on one side and falling smooth and straight on the other, with big gold hoop earrings and a bunch of gold necklaces piled around her throat. She was dressed in red. Completely in red. A shiny red top that wrapped around her chest and left her shoulders and her stomach bare, and a shiny red skirt, very short, that flared out in pleats around her thighs, and the shiny red shoes. All of it the same glossy, wet-looking, lacquered red, so that in the rain, under the white canopy lights, she looked like she had been dipped in candy. Or blood. She looked like she was dressed for a party, or a red carpet, or a music video. She did not look like anyone who had ever been in this gas station in its history.
She stood beside the orange car for a moment, in the rain, looking at the pumps. Theo saw her look at pumps three and four with their flapping OUT OF ORDER signs. He saw her look at pump two, with the yellow bag over one of its nozzles. He saw her look at pump one, and at the gray SUV beside it, and at the tall young woman in the leather jacket standing beside the gray SUV.