She pulls to a stop in front of my house, engine idling and lights off. I climb out my window, softly closing it most of the way behind me, careful not to let it latch so I can climb back in later.

As I near the ‘75 Chavelle, I can already see the lone figure through the tinted windows, smoke curling up and out of the driver’s side window that’s cracked n inch or two. I pause a moment to take it all in: the smell of gasoline fu,es from the engine, the color of the paint in the dim street lights... I try to tattoo my brain with the purring of the motor, finely tuned by the driver’s own hands...

"Get in."

I shake myself out of my abeyance and circle the car, her words ringing in my ears. Those two words have meaning; there’s a love there that wouldn’t be heard by anyone else, if anyone else to hear them. Even said with contempt and anger that’s always threatening to rise to the surface and boil over in a fit of blunt destruction, I can hear the gentle love that goes deeper than I can understand.

I smooth my hand over the paint on the door, a dull green that would be unattractive on any other car, before letting myself in and sliding into the bucket seat.

Before the door is fully closed, she releases the e-brake and the car slides smoothly forward, inching its way down the street. Once we’re two houses down, at the beginning of the cul-de-sac, she puts a tiny bit of pressure on the gas pedal and I latch the door. A few moments later, we’re cruising through the stop sign at the end of the street, and I’m choking on smoke as she passes me the joint.

Dressed as I am in pseudo boarder shorts and tee-shirt, I feel out of place in her car, in her world. Clad in simple jeans, undershirt and plaid button-up combo, and care-worn cowboy boots, she seems too cool, too amazing to be real. Yet she is real, and she’s mine. Not in a sexual, get-your-hands-off-my-girlfriend sense, since she’s twenty-four and I’m not fourteen, but in a watch-what-shit-you-talk-about-my-sister sort of way.

I met her at the gas station on the edge of town, the Sport Stop, about a year ago. I knew one of her coworkers, and was hanging out waiting for him to finish his shift one day, and she roared into the parking lot, cigarette hanging off her lip and music blaring. She killed the engine a d coasted into a spot in the front, Panera pouring from the car like a tangible thing, redbull in hand and heat slightly bobbing to the beat. The guy I was waiting for, Joey, squealed out “Jenn!” And waved frantically toward the car. I turned to look as she tilted her sunglasses to him and climbed out of the car, music silenced when she opened the door, and I remember thinking that it was as if the universe had ceased to breathe as this incarnation of coolness revealed itself to the world.

She stepped past me with a quiet “what’s up” and up to the window, a raggedy backpack slung over one shoulder, and began talking to Joey through the window as she slowly finished her cigarette. I was hooked.

I got to know her slowly through the next year, and she became my intermittent tutor. She could write better than most published authors I’d read, and algebra was like a second nature to her. Science she hated, but I could do that on my own. Everything else was hit-or-miss.

As we slowly became closer, I began to think of her as family, and she and her father became the sister and father I’d craved my whole life. They loved me, accepted me into their lives and their home, letting me do homework while Jenn cooked, wrote, or played video games and her father cleaned his guns, did his devotions, or worked in the shop. She’d tease me like a big sister, but I knew she cared, and her father got onto me about smoking cigarettes, but let me handle his .9 mil and go shooting with them, so I knew he accepted me. I finally felt like I was amongst family. Even now, as she idly switches between radio stations, I consider Jenn my sister.

She takes a corner too fast and I careen into the window, which shakes me back to the present. I gaze out at the countryside that’s flying past my side of the care, trying to place where we are. It’s too dark, though, and the scenery looks the same as the rest of the roads we’ve taken. I glance at Jenn out of the corner of my eye and wonder why she called me out tonight. So far, we’ve been silent, but with Jenn, that could change at a moment.

She’s got the widow completely down now, having finished the joint and moved on to a cigarette, and she’s idly switching presets again, steering with her knee. The clashing genres of heavy metal, Christian, rock, and county seem to blend together as she shifts through them, finally settling on “Truck Yeah” on preset six, which I think is Cat Country.

I realize we’re back in town now, cruising down Reinway, and I’m sure she’s headed for my buddy Seth’s. We’e often picked him up, usually early in the morning and cruised for a few hours before school, but it’s usually when we get a call or text. I haven’t gotten one, and Jenn’s phone has been silent, but sure enough, she kills the lights and radio as we reach the end of his street.

I clumsily slide into the back seat as she cruises past Seth’s smoke-spot on the edge of his house. I catch motion out of the corner of my eye as I slip a box from under the street, and a second later, Seth is heaving himself through the moving window.

I hand the box to Seth as he settles into the seat, and he wordlessly takes it and begins to sift through the contents as Jenn reaches the end of the street and the lights and radio come on again. Seth hands the box back to me, and as I slide it under the seat I see he’s rolling two joints.

We’re back in the cuts and Jenn’s flipping stations again. Seth groans as AC/DC’s ‘Back in Black’ blares from the speakers, and Jenn looks at me through the rear view, expression blank, but I read the look plain as day.

“Seth, cord,” I mutter, barely audible over the radio, but he hears me, and as I pull my iPod from y pocket he passes the cord to the radio back. I plug it in and push play, and the strange piano/guitar plucking blasts through the car Seth lights a joint and hands it to Jenn, who hits it and passes it back to me.

“Why must it, feel so wrong, when I try and do right...” Seth takes a hit.

“Do right...” Jenn hits it, passes it.

“Soaring through paradise, when I’m closing me eyes...” I hit it, hand it to Seth.

“I’m, Mr. Solo-Dolo... oh, oh, oh...”

We ride in a haze for a while, letting various songs pump through our bodies. Eventually, the joints are gone and Jenn’s pulled a bottle of whiskey from the glovebox. She takes a long pull and hands the bottle to me, and I choke down a swallow. Sputtering, I hand it to Seth, and sigh back into the seat, lighting a cigarette. Seth and Jenn share the rest and Jenn tosses it, empty, into the backseat.

We ride for an hour in relative silence before Seth makes e retrieve the box again. His time, he rolls it all before he hands me back the box, and I curiously hand him an empty cigarette pack. It’s a half hour more before I realize we’re stopped on the side of the road, and Jenn has lit a joint again. he music pounds, Nightwish, I think, as she smokes it and we sit quietly.

Finally she snuffs it out on a soda can and glances back at me. There’s something there, in her eyes, that makes my whole body cold, but then her bleary eyes shift to Seth and it’s gone.

Seth opens the door and steps out, and Jenn sits still a moment. I’m still trying to place the feeling that’s welling inside of me as she opens the door and the music goes dead. “Get out.” She doesn’t even glance back at me.

I slowly climb over the seats and close her door, wondering what’s going on. The air outside the car is crisp, a shock from the war, smoke-tinted reside that brought us here.

I’m shivering slightly as I look around, trying to see where Jenn and Seth went. Seth’s head pops around the open trunk, and he hisses at me like an angry goose.

“Get over here! You gotta help me carry some of this stuff; there’s too much for just me.”

“This stuff” turns out to be I’ve ominously heavy black duffel bags. I hoist one onto my shoulder and have just gotten up the nerve to ask where Jenn went when she appears from the other side of the car, dressed entirely in black. I can’t even see her face.

She shoulder Seth aside and rummages n the trunk, emerging with two black bundles. Shoving them at us, she mutters, “hurry” and begins pulling the rest of the bags from the car. I let the bag I’ve got slide to the ground and follow Seth the a clump of bushes near where we’re parked.

I tug at the cord tying my bundle together and begin sorting through the items. Garments like the ones Jenn is wearing litter the ground and I began pulling them on. Seth stops me before I pull the hood on and paints my eyes black, and I’m jealous of how steady his hands are. He finally lets me pull me pull the hood over my face and I turn away while lacing up the boots, ashamed of the shivering that has nothing to do with the cold.

Seth tugs me to my feet almost before I’m done with my boots and guides me toward the car, where two of the bags wait. I sling one over my shoulder, conscious of the lumps that feel like weaponry and stump after him toward an old dilapidated barn about a half mile from the road.

Seth nudges me when I hesitate, and, praying my fear doesn’t show on my face, i duck through the hold in the side of the structure. Seth follows, and i look around into a world that is tinted with smoke. There’s Jenn, standing in the center of the barn, her face lit by the light of a single lantern at her feet. Encircled b a crowd of seven or so burly, aggressive-looking guys about her age, she was speaking in a low tone, acknowledging us only when she’d finished her instructions. As the grunts around her nodded, she looked our way and beckoned us forward with a nod. We broached the circle, standing in front of her, and I gladly noticed the beads of sweat trickling down Seth’s cheek.