REDLINE

Chapter 1

The thing about Hollow Creek was that it smelled like rain even when it wasn’t raining.

Avery Chen noticed that f before the kudzu swallowed the chain-link fences, before the hand-painted water tower with HORNETS stenciled in flaking gold, before the gas station that doubled as a shop that apparently also sold lottery tickets and boiled peanuts. She noticed the smell. Heavy, green, wet, alive. Chicago had never smelled like that. Chicago smelled like concrete and exhaust and the particular metallic cold of Lake Michigan in October.

Hollow Creek, Louisiana, smelled like somewhere that had stopped trying a long time ago and was fine with it.

She was not fine with it.

“You’re going to love it,” her mom had said, which was something people said when they knew you weren’t going to love something but felt guilty about that fact. Her mom had said it three times during the twelve-hour drive from Chicago, once outside of Memphis, once when they crossed into Louisiana, once when they turned off the highway onto Route 9 and the Spanish moss started hanging from the live oaks like the trees were draped in old lace.

The apartment was above a laundromat. It was literally, physically above a laundromat, which meant that from six in the morning until nine at night, the floor hummed with the rotation of industrial dryers, and the whole place smelled faintly of fabric softener. Her room had one window that faced an alley. Her desk fit if she pushed it against the wall. There was a water stain on the ceiling shaped like Florida.

Her mom had stood in the doorway and said, “It has character.”

Avery had said, “Sure.”

She had not unpacked everything, just the essentials which included her laptop, her notebooks, three of them, college-ruled, black covers, her camera, her voice recorder, and her charging cables. The rest was still in boxes because unpacking felt like admitting that the place was permanent, and she wasn’t ready to admit that yet.

Hollow Creek High School was a single-story sprawl of tan brick surrounded by a parking lot full of trucks. There were not a lot of cars, mostly trucks, F-150s, and Silverados, and one ancient Chevy Blazer with a bumper sticker that said IF YOU CAN READ THIS, YOU’RE TOO CLOSE and another that said PRAY FOR RAIN. Avery pulled her mom’s Civic into the visitor spot, grabbed her bag, and sat for exactly thirty seconds telling herself this was fine.

It wasn’t fine but she got out anyway.

The front office smelled like industrial cleaner and burnt coffee. The secretary, a woman with reading glasses on a beaded chain and a nameplate that said MRS. FONTE, looked at Avery over the rim of her glasses with the expression of someone who had processed a hundred new students and found all of them equally temporary.

“Avery Chen.” Mrs. Fonten typed something. “Transfer from… Lakeview Prep Academy, Chicago, Illinois.”

“Yes ma’am.”

The ma’am landed well. Mrs. Fontes' expression shifted, slightly. “You’re on the journalism elective.”

“Yes ma’am. I requested it on the enrollment form.”

“Mm.” Another keystroke. “Mr. Beaumont runs the paper. The Creekside Courier. He’ll get you sorted.” She said Courier the way you said the name of something you were a little embarrassed about. “You’ve got homeroom in 104, first period English in 112, then journalism elective third block. You’ll figure out the rest.” She slid a printed schedule across the counter like she was dealing a card. “Any questions?”

Avery had approximately forty-seven questions, most of them about why her father had decided to relocate his sales territory to Baton Rouge with eleven days’ notice, three weeks into her junior year, in the middle of a semester when she’d been shortlisted for a regional journalism award. She said, “No ma’am. Thank you.”

Homeroom was fine. English was fine. She sat in the back of both, said nothing, and watched. That was the thing about being a journalist, or wanting to be one, which was close enough, you learned to watch before you talked. You learned that the first ten minutes in any new room told you more than the next hour would, if you paid attention.

What she noticed in homeroom was three distinct social clusters, a girl in the second row with paint on her knuckles who wasn’t pretending to read her phone like everyone else but was actually reading, and a boy in the back corner who had his head down on his desk and appeared to be genuinely asleep despite the morning announcements playing at full volume over the intercom. Nobody nudged him. Nobody seemed surprised.

What she noticed in English was that the teacher, Mr. Tran, was good. Sharp. He asked questions that didn’t have obvious answers and he didn’t fill the silence himself when students didn’t respond. He waited. Which was rare. When he handed back a graded essay to the girl in front of Avery, the girl turned it face down immediately. A hundred and eight students in that school and the social geometry was already organizing itself in Avery’s head, the girl who hid her grades, the boy who slept without consequence, the paint-fingered reader. She wrote it all in her notebook, shorthand, fast. Not as a story but as just an observation. She’d been doing it since she was thirteen. Her first journalism teacher had called it primary sourcing your own life and Avery had never stopped.

Third block. Journalism elective.

Room 118 was smaller than the other classrooms, jammed with mismatched furniture, a cluster of four desks pushed together, one long table against the wall with a printer and a dying succulent, a corkboard covered in old issues of the Creekside Courier pinned in overlapping layers. Mr. Beaumont was sitting on the edge of the long table eating a granola bar and talking to a girl with box braids and a laptop open in front of her when Avery came in.

“Chen!” He said it like he’d been expecting her. He was younger than she’d imagined mid-thirties, maybe, with a Louisiana State lanyard and a flannel shirt that had seen better decades. “Priya, this is our transfer. Avery Chen. Lakeview Prep, Chicago.”

The girl who was called Priya looked up. She had sharp eyes and the stillness of someone who processed things quickly and let very little show. “I heard about you.”

Avery sat down across from her. “Good things?”

“Your bylines came up when I Googled you. You had a piece in the Illinois Student Press Association newsletter last spring. The one about the school board redrawing the district boundaries.”

Avery blinked. She hadn’t expected that. “You Googled me.”

“I Google everyone who might end up on the paper,” Priya said as if this were obvious. “You’re good. The sourcing on that piece was solid.” She paused. “You’re also clearly miserable about being here, which is fair.”

Mr. Beaumont pointed at Priya. “She’s the editor. I’m the advisor. You’ll mostly be dealing with her.” He finished the granola bar and balled up the wrapper. “We’re a monthly print run, eight pages, plus we’re trying to expand the website. Priya runs it like a broadsheet, which I respect, even when it gives me headaches. You want a beat?”

“Whatever’s open,” Avery said.

“Community and local affairs are technically open,” Priya said, “but it’s open because it’s boring and everyone knows it’s boring and the pieces don’t get read. What are you actually interested in?”

Avery thought about the right answer versus the true answer and then decided, in a town this small and a room this small and across from a girl who had already Googled her, that the right answer and the true answer might as well be the same thing.

“Investigative,” she said. “Long-form. If there’s something here worth digging into, that’s what I want.”

Priya looked at her for a long moment. Something moved behind her eyes, maybe calculation, or maybe recognition.

“There might be something,” she said.

She didn’t say what. And Avery, who had learned to wait, didn’t ask.

She heard it for the first time at 11:47 PM.

She wasn’t asleep, she never slept well in new places, her body stubbornly refusing to trust unfamiliar darkness and she was at her desk with her laptop open, reorganizing her notes from the day, when she heard it. A sound so low and distant it was almost atmospheric, almost not a sound at all. An engine. It was not the kind you heard on Route 9, the ordinary grind of someone driving home late. Something with more velocity in it. Something pushing.

She went to her window.

The alley below was empty. The laundromat was closed and dark but from somewhere beyond the rooftops northwest, she thought, toward the flat open land she’d seen from the highway, the stretches that the GPS had labeled as agricultural preserve, she could hear it. Engines. More than one. Revving in that specific staccato way that meant acceleration, sustained speed, competition.

She grabbed her notebook and wrote the time, then wrote northwest? multiple engines, not highway traffic. deliberate. racing?

Then she wrote, “ask Priya.”

She stood at the window for another four minutes. The sound faded. Then it was just Hollow Creek again, breathing its green rain-smell into the dark, and the distant dryer hum of the laundromat’s last load cycling down.

She didn’t know yet that she’d just heard the Redline Circuit for the first time.

She didn’t know what it was going to cost her to find out.