Chapter Three

When I was fifteen, I started developing. I’d always been really small for my age, looked more like a boy than a girl except for my hair. But almost overnight I grew six inches, gained about thirty pounds - most of it in my tits and my ass. And Sly, Angel’s pimp, was the first to notice. He’d always been somewhat aware of me, hanging around in the background. And he’d tried to get me hooked to crack and heroin, just for the hell of it. But, after I got the tits and ass, he decided that I could make some money for him. He wanted me to work for him, and he needed to get me addicted to drugs to make sure I wouldn’t go anywhere. He started harassing me all the time, even following me to my aunt’s house, hanging out on the street in front or even in the yard.

My aunt was a great woman, she made me feel more at home than my mom ever had. I came first for her; she never ignored me because some guy was around. She made sure I went to school, stayed out of trouble, all that. For just over two years, she was the best thing in my life. Everything else completely sucked, especially school. It didn’t take long for the other kids to find out that Sly was practically stalking me, and it seemed like their best entertainment was coming up with stories to explain it. My favorite one was that I’d fucked him, stolen several thousand dollars from him, and he was on a mission to get it back. Anyways, all the girls treated me like I was a pariah, and all the boys acted like I’d do anything they wanted me to. Beating the shit out of a few of them went pretty far in showing how wrong they were, but there was always a new asshole taking a dare from his friends or trying to improve his rep by saying he’d conquered me. As if.

I hated school, with a passion. The only thing that kept me from dropping out was my aunt. Almost every night, after she got home from work, she would check to make sure I’d done my homework. I remember, she used to call all of my teachers on a weekly basis to see how I was doing. Which was actually pretty embarrassing. I mean, teachers aren’t supposed to know about your personal life. But hey, maybe it made them go a little easier on me.

My aunt and I had this cheesy tradition. Every Thursday she got off work early, and that would be our ‘girls night’. We’d order pizza, rent movies, spend the whole night on the couch in front of the TV. We’d talk, too, about all kinds of things. She used to tell me stories from when she was little, stories about how her and my mom grew up. They had it pretty rough, too, especially after their mom died. She never tried to make excuses for my mom, though. She just explained. It made me understand my mom a lot better, made it hard to be really mad at her. I mean, yeah, I was still bitter about how my mom was. But, my aunt made me see that my mom didn’t really mean to hurt me. She just wasn’t strong enough to overcome her own problems. I still didn’t like my mom very much, but after hearing the stories, I couldn’t hate her anymore. I just felt sorry for her. And my aunt would always tell me about how she put herself through school, how she got away from her childhood. She got me thinking that maybe I had a future, that I didn’t have to end up like my mom. I could be like her, instead. So, except for all the shit I got from the kids at school, life at my aunt’s was pretty good. But Sly scared her. It was just the two of us living at her house, and she didn’t think she could protect me if Sly pulled something more than just hanging around outside. She called the cops a few times, but they never did anything to help us. So she sent me to stay with her son, Leon, who lived back in my old neighborhood.

Leon was just barely 19, a mechanic. He’d moved out of my aunt’s house right after he graduated high school, gone to live close to his job, the only decent one he could find. It was almost funny; Leon worked for a guy who’d opened a garage in the old neighborhood after the Toretto garage closed. I’m sure he didn’t really want his little kid cousin living with him. But he didn’t have much of a choice; his mom insisted, even though he said he was too busy with work to look after a kid.

A few months before I went to stay with Leon, the owner of the garage was arrested for possession of stolen goods, sentenced to ten years in prison. After that, Leon was the only one working there, so he had to manage everything himself and was barely ever home. That was okay with me, though. Living with Leon was like heaven, compared to my mom’s house. I never wanted to go back there. And what I liked best about living with Leon was his job. I used to go hang out at the garage with him all the time, so he could keep track of me. At first, I didn’t even want to touch any of the cars. They reminded me too much of Mr. Toretto and what I’d lost. But then one day, about a month after I started living with Leon, he had a Honda Civic he was working on for some guy. Leon loved that car; he had some kind of thing for Civics, for some reason. Personally, I don’t think they’re worth crap. This one was nice, though, for a Civic. It was light blue, flame trim, chrome bumpers, dual exhaust. It got towed in one day, and I still remember the exact conversation that Leon and I had about that car. It’s what started me to getting my life back.

“Wasn’t this car just in here a week ago?” I asked. “You losing your car skills, man?”

Leon looked at me like I was crazy to insult his mechanical talent, and for a minute I thought he was just going to ignore me completely, but he answered. “Yes, it was just in here a week ago. And no, I’m not losing my car skills. This guy is just extremely talented at fucking up his car, and has tons of money to pour into the thing. He wants to race. It’s his new hobby or something.”

“Hard to race when his car has to be towed into the garage…did he just add stuff on to the engine instead of rebuilding it or something?”

“Exactly. Like I said, extremely talented at fucking up his car. And a dumbass, to boot. Besides all his engine problems, he’s burned out his clutch three times already. Pretty soon I’m going to have to try a metallic clutch, but I’m not sure even that would help him.”

“So he wants to race, huh? What’ve you done to the car?”

Leon held up his fingers and started ticking things off. “Pirelli tires, as you can see. A spoon engine, Motech exhaust system, VeilSide aero kit… The last time this car was here, I had to replace the brand new heads I’d just put in. Wonder what he did to it this time. Shit, I spend so much time working on this car I might as well own it myself.”

After thinking about it a minute, I offered a suggestion. “You should check the distributor and oxygen sensor, man. This year of Civics always have problems with those. Which is why, if he wants to race, he shouldn’t be pouring his money into a crappy ass car like this.”

“Hey now, watch your mouth, girl,” Leon protested immediately. “Civics aren’t bad for racing. Hell, just the stock model has a sixteen valve engine. And you know, if he knew the first thing about cars, he wouldn’t have all these problems. But the longer he stays ignorant, the longer I can make money off of him... You’re right, though, it probably is the distributor.”

That was the last thing we said for a few minutes, until he looked up from the engine of the car with a puzzled expression on his face.

“Yo, Letty?”

“Yeah?”

“How’d you know that these Civics have problems with their distributors?”

I laughed. “Hey, I know cars, man.”

“Oh you do, do you?” he laughed right back at me.

“Yep. One of my old neighbors used to race. He let me hang out, help him with his cars. Mr. Toretto.”

“Ah,” Leon nodded in understanding. “Yeah, I remember him I think. We hung out there sometimes when I was over at your house, right? With…Dom and Mia? And…what was that other guy’s name…Vince? They still race?”

“No. Mr. Toretto died. Slammed into the wall at the track going 120. Broke his neck, then got burned up in a car-be-que. Dom and Vince, they would probably still race. But Dom got sent to Lompoc for assault, and six months later Vince was in juvie.”

“Sounds rough.”

“Yeah,” I sighed. “Yeah, it was. I miss them.”

That was the last time we talked about how I knew so much about cars, but from then on, Leon wouldn’t let me just hang around the garage while he did all the work. Over the next few months, he taught me just about everything he knew about fixing cars. My life would’ve been almost perfect, except for Sly. Somehow he’d found out I was living with Leon. He never really did anything to me, but he’d follow me every time I left the garage. It was creepy. One night, he broke in and trashed a few cars, caused almost 100,000 dollars worth of damage. That’s when Leon decided something had to be done.