ALICE Ch 47

“Do you know Kendra Porter?” Faye asks. Her hands are in her lap and she stares at them as she sits beside Alice on the bed.

Alice frowns. “I do. Remember the name, at least. Not sure I ever raced her. She was in F2.” She nods, memories coming back. “She set some times in Baku. She’s quick. What happened to her?”

Faye sighs. It’s a long, unhappy sigh. “She got knocked up.”

“Oh.” Alice sucks her breath in through her teeth. Then her eyes pop open and she looks sharply at Faye. It is, of course, possible with a simple operation for girls like them to be viable. “Did you…?”

Faye looks up at her in disbelief. “What? Of course not.” She goes very red. “I didn’t even know her.”

Right. The virgin energy is so strong with Faye. How did Alice forget?

“Sorry. What about her?” Alice pats Faye’s leg reassuringly.

“She was supposed to have my seat.”

That hits hard. Alice never cared about the details when it came to joining FUTA. She’d had two offers and been grateful for them both. She had not questioned them or the circumstances framing them. She knows nothing about Faye’s side of it. She assumed what everyone else did.

Faye’s eyes are moist when she looks up at Alice. “It was never supposed to be me,” she says.

“I don’t understand.”

“Mum made all this happen. She has a plan,” Faye says earnestly. “There was you, Valeria Flores, the Woodcocks, and Kendra. FUTA’s got to have women drivers, see?”

Alice nods patiently. “Yeah…”

“And Mum sold the plan to Annette with the provision that she could fill the seats with proper drivers.”

“Sure,” Alice says.

“And she got you. But not the Woodcocks and not Valeria Flores.”

“Kendra.”

Faye nods. “Only Kendra was already…you know.”

“Right.”

“There wasn’t much time when we found out. As soon as she knew, she refused to get in the car. We were in Miami. Annette was there. It was the last demonstration before they greenlit the rest of the money. I was there, and I’d done a quick lap in Silverstone. We thought if Mum could get the money locked in then we could find a driver. So, I volunteered. Mum didn’t like it, but we did it. We didn’t tell the investors that it wasn’t Kendra in the car.”

“And you drove a quick lap,” Alice cuts in.

Faye shrugs. “And it worked. And Mum told them the truth. And then it was me.”

“You didn’t want the seat?”

“Not like this! I was supposed to stay where I was for at least another two years. Then we thought that maybe someone like Williams or Haas would pick me up for a Netflix subsidy. Because Netflix would love me racing against Mum.” Faye’s hands clench on her knees.

“Wow.” Alice frowns and joins Faye in gazing at the black mirror that is the television in front of them. “So, your mom didn’t pull strings to put you in the car.”

Faye shakes her head miserably.