Uninvited: An Unloved Ones Prequel #2 (The Unloved Ones Prequels) by Kevin Richey

Chapter One

 
    My grip on the steering wheel is turning my knuckles white.
    “You’re doing fine, Jackie,” my boyfriend Todd assures me. But his face is tense too.
    He has a beautiful face, with pouting lips and bright green eyes. He’s one of those people who doesn’t even have to try to look attractive. He wakes up that way.
    “Look ahead,” he says quickly, when he notices me looking at him. “Keep your eyes forward.”
    I nod. This is my first time driving on a real road with other cars. I don’t feel ready for this, but Todd pressured me into it.
    As I’m approaching the intersection, the stoplight turns yellow. I panic.
    “What do I do?” I gasp.
    “It’s yellow,” Todd says, which is no help at all.
    I take my foot off the gas and it hovers above the brake. Do I stop? Is there time to go through? The car slows as we pass the crosswalk, and the light turns red.
    “What are you doing?” Todd yells, and I slam my foot on the brake, thinking I was supposed to stop after all. We are thrown forward into our seatbelts as his Honda Civic skids to a stop—in the middle of the intersection.
    Cars pull forward around us and start honking. I hear a man’s voice yelling obscenities. We are blocking traffic, and a black truck has pulled up to my window, its grill staring me in the face and growling as the owner revs the engine.
    “Move!” Todd screams, and I reach to the clutch and switch it to reverse. I look in the rear view mirror, and there’s already a car behind me that pulled up after I stopped.
    Todd slams his hand against the glove compartment. “Not backwards! Forward! What are you waiting for? Go, go!”
    My hand is shaking as I switch the car back to Drive, and I press the gas pedal to clear the intersection. Cars are still honking behind us as we drive down the block. The smell of exhaust fills the air. Meanwhile, I’m still trying to recover from the feeling that we’re about to be killed.
    “Pull over,” Todd says through his teeth.
    “Todd,” I say, “I’m sorry, I didn’t—”
    “Pull. Over.”
    I flip the turn signal and turn the car into an empty parking lot outside a closed nightclub. Todd snaps out of his seatbelt and slams the door behind him when he gets out of the car. I fumble with my belt, and then open the door, stepping out and aside so he can get into the driver’s seat. My heart is beating like crazy as I round the front of the car, and hop into the passenger seat and buckle up.
    Todd is silent as he adjusts the mirrors. I flip down the passenger mirror to adjust my hair, but it's exactly how I left it. I wear it pulled back into a tight bun. People tease that it makes me look like a businesswoman instead of a teenager, but they don’t understand: you have to dress for the job you want. Even if you’re sixteen, and it’s still ten years away. I turn back to Todd and see that he’s upset.
    I can understand why. I made a mistake, and in his car. He’s been very nice to let me use it to learn to drive, since my mom didn’t have time to teach me. She works late hours, and doesn’t have the energy to teach me at night.
    “I don’t think I can teach you,” he says, and starts the car. “I don’t know why this is so hard for you when grades and stuff is so easy. You’ve got a four-point-oh grade point average, but you can’t figure out a stoplight.” He shakes his head. “You’re going to have to sign up for one of those driving schools or something.” We pull out of the parking lot, and he turns back toward my house. He’s able to drive with one hand on the wheel.
    “I’m sorry,” I say as we easily pass through the same intersection that gave me so much trouble. “I didn’t know what to do. It turned red and I got scared.”
    “Sometimes,” Todd says, “sometimes it’s safer to go through the red.”
    I’m quiet, trying to digest this bit of education, as we travel through a residential neighborhood, now the only car on the road. We’ve got