By skipping lunch and getting some help from Mel, Telzey and Will got the grass pretty well done by the time other racers started showing up in the middle of the afternoon. Fortunately the infield concession stand opened early, and a couple of chili dogs were enough to hold them, and would probably hold them through the evening, as well.

Telzey had been through a race night the week before, and this gave her some reason to think that the newness might have worn off a little and that she might be able to approach things with a little less awe. As it worked out, that wasn’t quite the case. After all, tonight she’d really be racing her own car, not just messing around in a meaningless Powder Puff race. Somehow that made things seem a lot more serious than they had been the week before.

After she and Will got done with the mowing, they put the equipment away then walked down to the shop to get their cars. While they were there, Telzey took the opportunity to change into her firesuit pants. Even though it was late April, it had warmed up enough for Telzey to finally get out of her sweatshirt for a while. It seemed as if it had been worth the effort because Will could hardly get his eyes off of her tank top – maybe she’d have to do something like that again.

They drove their cars from the shop down to the pits, got out the support cart, and parked it in front of where their cars and Chuck’s would sit. Chuck still didn’t have everything worked out – it was an awful lot of detail work to put his car together in a week. It was together now but he was still chasing bugs and making adjustments, so it wasn’t clear if he’d actually be racing that night.

Once they got everything set up, Telzey made the air pressure adjustment she’d been considering in the morning, and then headed out to take a few hot laps to test it out. As near as she could tell the car didn’t seem to push quite as bad, so that had probably helped. Will took a few laps in the 89 and didn’t seem to find anything major he could adjust, although he fiddled with the tire pressures a little to no great advantage.

While there was serious work on the cars going on in the pits, it was also a chance for racers and friends to socialize. Telzey had met a lot of people in the pits last week and remembered some of them, but the previous week she’d been more of a guest than a racer. Now, she had her own car and it gave her quite a bit more credibility around the pit area – people seemed to take her a bit more seriously.

She’d just gotten back from her test laps when Jim, Ann, and Jack Kaufmann pulled in and unloaded their Sportsman and Pony Stock. It wasn’t long before they came wandering over to where Telzey and the Austins were set up, and were trying to help Chuck with his car. “I see you guys heard my suggestion,” Jack smiled. “How are things working out?”

“Telzey is real pleased with the 24 car,” Will reported. “I have heard a few cuss words out of Chuck today, though.”

“Just got to get everything working right,” Chuck said from under the car. “It’s been getting better all day, but I wish I had another day to work on it before we go racing. It ought to do for tonight, though.”

While Chuck worked on the car, Telzey and Will talked with the Kaufmanns for a while, and spent a little time talking to some of the other Pony Stock drivers Will knew. It was quite a mixture, something that Telzey hadn’t quite realized the previous week. It ranged from David Lampson, who had just turned thirteen, up through John Adorney, who was eighty-one and had been a racer for over fifty years – in fact, he’d raced MMSA midgets with Mel and Arlene for a while.

Although John had long known Will, Telzey was new to him, having missed the previous week. It turned out that John had raced things a lot faster than Pony Stocks and MMSA midgets – he’d even tried the Indianapolis 500 one time in an independent entry, but hadn’t made the field. He still enjoyed getting out and mixing it up, although he said straight up that while the action was about as close in the Pony Stocks and they were a little slower than the old barnstorming racers, they were a whole lot safer and therefore more fun to drive.

It turned out that there was one more girl among the Pony Stock drivers, someone else who Telzey hadn’t met the week before, Larissa Zoisite. She was a little older at seventeen, Chuck’s age, but this was her first full season racing. She’d run a couple events in a borrowed car the year before and decided she’d liked it, so she and her boyfriend had spent much of the winter fixing up a Chevy Cavalier for her to race. Either she hadn’t made it the week before or Telzey hadn’t noticed her, but it was nice to know that there was another girl going through the same thing.

Eventually it was time to start qualifying. Telzey and Will were near the front of the lineup when it started, first come, first served. Telzey had reason to be pleased with her 19.695, almost three hundredths lower than the only timed lap that she knew about from the morning practice, so her practice and messing with the tire pressures must have done a little bit of good. Will bettered that though, getting his time down to 19.623, four hundredths less than the week before, but still only the third fastest qualifier when all the times were settled later. Telzey was fourth, which meant that she’d be starting in the inside position of the back row of the first Pony Stock heat.

After the qualifying, but before the drivers’ meeting got under way, Jim got a chance to talk to Telzey for a minute and give her a bit of warning. “I don’t know if you noticed who’s starting next to you,” he said.

“I did,” she nodded. “The 17 car, someone named d’Lamater. Wasn’t he the guy that caused the wreck in the first turn of the first heat last week?”

“Right, Matt d’Lamater,” Jim nodded. “He was part of it. He’s fast, but he can be a nutcase and likes to run up front. You saw the idiot move he made last week and what happened. That doesn’t mean he might not try it this week, since he’ll be in the perfect position.”

“I thought about that,” she said. “You’re going to tell me to lag back a little and be ready to stand on the brakes and evade.”

“You got it,” he said. “The first turn is always the worst of the race, anyway. There more than anywhere else you don’t just want to focus on the car right in front of you, but on what’s happening farther up in the field. Beyond that, you should remember that you’re out there to learn how to handle yourself in a race. Even though you’re pretty fast, don’t expect to run at the front like last week. You’re going to have to learn to pass people who are racing you, not just staying out of your way.”

The drivers’ meeting was very similar to the week before, with a few changes in faces since the Vintage Modifieds were running at Springport that weekend, and their place in the traveling show had been taken by a snarling pack of 600 cc Mini-Sprint cars. These were little winged versions of the big sprinters, and without the wings they would be a little more like the old MMSA midgets than a modern midget. With their modified motorcycle engines they were popular in the area, and there was a good field of them present.

The opening ceremonies were rather similar to the week before, except that they didn’t run the antique MMSA midgets. Again, a group from the local American Legion post did a formal flag raising, and this week, Becky Spheris from the high school sang the National Anthem and only fractured a couple notes.

Telzey wasn’t paying a lot of attention to the opening ceremonies anyway; she was sitting in the 24 car, all strapped in and helmeted and ready to go, waiting for the ceremony to end so she could get on the track for her first real race. If she thought that she’d been excited last week, she was more so this week, if anything, since last week had given her a better idea of what to expect when she was out there.

Finally, the ceremony was over, and Ray waved the cars out onto the track. It took a few seconds to get out there, and the field formed up loosely behind the car on the pole position who’d qualified poorly on account of something not quite right with his engine. Telzey was sure she’d heard the name but she still was learning everybody; however she was under the impression that this wasn’t his first time leading the field around the track. They took about three laps to warm up, then Tony Demby, the flagman in the tower in front of the grandstand waved to them to close up, and waved the white flag.

They kept going fairly slowly through turns one and two, and picked up speed going down the back stretch although they were still going well under race speed when they went through the final two turns. By now, everybody but the guy on the pole and Telzey were chomping at the bit to go, and having whoever it was on the pole bring them up to the starting line slowly just caused a traffic jam. All of a sudden, at the acceleration cone the guy on the pole stomped the throttle and managed to get half a car length lead before anyone realized what was going on.

The guy in the car next to Telzey, was one of those who was suckered in. He seemed to be jumping the start around the outside of the first turn, but he didn’t get to since everyone else reacted the same way. He moved outside anyway, but realized there was nowhere to go when another car moved in front of him. As a result, he was basically hung out to dry.

Telzey, however, had hung back just enough that she didn’t actually have to stand on the brake to keep from ramming the car in front of her, as several other cars in the field had been in danger of doing. As a result, she had a little more speed on, and when everybody seemed to jump to the outside she decided to take the open space to the inside. The end result was that she went into turn one in ninth place and came out in fifth, but with fast cars behind her and slower ones in front.

Very quickly, she learned that Ray had been right: it was not as easy to pass a car when they were running close to the same speed and didn’t particularly care to be passed. In fact, under the circumstances she had her hands full to keep from being passed by some of the cars behind her.

It would be hard to detail everything that happened in the next two or three laps. From Telzey’s viewpoint, all she was trying to do was to pass any car that was within reach in front of her. Since there were several slower cars due to the inverted field she got around several, but was passed by two or three faster ones behind her in the process. When it all shook out, she was in fourth place when Demby held up the crossed flags to signify halfway, five laps. Jack Kaufmann in the 25 was leading, but was battling hard with d’Lamater in the 17. She wasn’t all that far behind them, but she had the 48 car in front of her, and Wolsley the driver wasn’t in any particular mood to let her pass him.

As far as Telzey was concerned, the rest of the race was pretty much trying to find a way around Wolsley and not succeeding. She gave it an especially good try on the inside on the last lap, but it wasn’t quite good enough to actually make the pass for the position. In a similar manner, Jack managed to hold off the 17 car to win the heat.

Even though Telzey had finished fourth in the heat race, she was perfectly satisfied with the position under the circumstances. She’d set out with the intention of learning something, and she most assuredly had – if nothing else, to not be so quite easy about giving up positions while the field was re-inverting itself in the first few laps.

It seemed almost anticlimactic for Telzey to follow the 48 car back to the pits. She pulled into her pit stall, where Will was waiting for her. “Good race, Telzey,” he yelled at her.

“I just couldn’t get past him,” she said, shutting down her car. “I got a fender up on him a couple times but I couldn’t put him away. He kept cutting down on me.”

“You could have got him expecting you to try to pass him low, and then taken a shot on the high side,” Will suggested. “It probably wouldn’t have worked but at least you’d have him wondering. He might move high to block and leave you wide open for another shot on the low side.”

“Yeah, that’s true,” Telzey nodded as she took off her helmet. “I guess I still have a lot to learn.”

“Hey, don’t sweat it,” Will grinned. “Fourth is nothing to sneeze at in your first real heat race. I didn’t do as well.”

“Well, I guess,” she shrugged, still not quite satisfied with herself and wishing she had done better.

“Hey, whatever it takes,” he said. He stuck his head into the window, and gave her a brief post-race kiss, then continued, “I better go get saddled up; they’ll get to doing the lineup for my heat any second now.”

“I’ll be along in a minute,” she promised, and began to unbuckle her five-point harness and climb out of the car. It took her a minute; Will was buckling himself into the 89 car when she made it over to him. She wished him luck and gave him a pre-race kiss of her own; then he started the car and drove down to the main pit lane for the lineup.

By now the second heat was under way. While she stood by Will’s car she watched it the best she could, but the view was limited and she didn’t know many of the racers in that heat. It didn’t help that the heat took what seemed like forever to run: there was a false start caused by a spin in the first corner, then a series of spins, some resulting in bent cars, that kept the caution flag coming out. After every caution it took a while to get things cleaned up and the field lined up again – and then sometimes not even a lap would get completed before the caution flag flew again. Will could see even less from inside his Plymouth, so he and Telzey just talked, although at times there wasn’t much to say.

Finally the second heat ground to an end, and as the winner finished up his victory lap the last heat of the Pony Stocks headed out onto the track. With his good qualifying time Will was right at the back of the field, so he was going to have his work cut out for him. Telzey decided that she wanted a better look at what was going on than she’d get from her pit or from pit lane, so she looked around to see where the Kaufmanns’ hauler was. It proved to be pretty close to where it had been parked the week before, so she headed over there and asked Jim if she could come up and join them.

“Sure,” he called down from the hauler. “There’s always room for one more, especially if that one more is a pretty girl racer.”

“I don’t think I’m all that pretty,” she replied shyly as she climbed up to the top of the hauler, “but I’ll take the compliment anyway.”

“Oh, I think you’re gorgeous,” Jack grinned. “I’d go so far to say that you’re the prettiest girl racer on the track. Of course, you get ugly real quick if you finish in front of me.”

“Men!” Jack’s mother Ann snorted. “Every time you try to pin them down they move the target on you. So how are you doing, Telzey? That looked like a pretty good race to me.”

“It would have been better if I hadn’t gotten hung up behind the 48,” she replied. “I think I was faster than him but I couldn’t quite make the pass.”

“I hope you learned something from that,” Jack replied seriously. “Wolsley can be just about the toughest guy out there to pass, even if you’ve got some speed on him. Somehow he can make that car about thirty feet wide.”

“I saw that,” she agreed. “I think I picked up on some of what he was doing.”

“You know, for being an absolute newbie, I think you’re pretty good,” Jim commented. “When you get some experience and pick up some of the tricks, you’re going to be hard to handle, especially with a car as good as yours is.”

“Thanks,” she replied. “We went through it pretty carefully but couldn’t find much wrong with it.

“Doesn’t surprise me,” he replied. “I knew that was a pretty good car. I guess maybe we’d better watch this race.”

Telzey really did want to give some attention to the race, mostly because this was Will’s heat, and she wanted to see how he did. She switched her attention to the track, where the field was coming down for the green, accelerating strongly. She noticed that Will wasn’t hanging back like he had the week before, and somehow he managed to get under the car ahead of him in the first corner and make it stick. It was a little confusing to watch the first lap since there was racing from one end of the field to the other, but somehow when the first lap was over the 17 car was leading Will, and by the time another lap was over Will had passed him.

Will was starting to pull away a little when two cars touched in the middle of the field, and both of them spun, fortunately not hitting anything very solidly. That gathered the field back together for a restart several non-counting laps later, with Will leading the field. When the green flag flew again the 17 car got on the throttle early and jumped past Will right past the start-finish line, but Will hung onto his bumper like glue as the two pulled away from the rest of the field. For the next several laps Will tried to get past the 17 on the outside, but just couldn’t quite manage it. He even drifted back a little as they went down the back stretch, but when they hit the last turn, the 17 drifted high to try to take Will’s line like he had done for the last several laps, and Will dived inside of him. Coming out of the turn Will had all but passed the 17, but the 17 had a little more momentum from being on the outside, and it wasn’t a done deal until they crossed the finish line. Will clearly had made the pass, but not by much.

In watching the action, Telzey realized that Will had done just about what he’d suggested to her: get the guy in front expecting him to come one way, and then come the other. His advice had been so sound he’d taken it himself.

“Gotta go!” she said to the Kaufmanns, and hurried down to the pit lane and out to the victory circle, getting there right in front of the photographer. After last week, she had a favor to return, a kiss right in front of the whole grandstand. When she did it, it set off a big cheer from the crowd, and a nice blush from Will. This had potential for turning into a tradition, she thought as she grinned back at the crowd.

*   *   *

Isn’t that just the cutest thing you ever saw? Ashley thought sarcastically as she saw Telzey kiss Will in the winner’s circle.

The grandstands at the race track were about the last place that Ashley could have imagined being on Saturday night after the world had blown up in her face earlier in the week. She’d been “too sick to go to school” for a couple days, although her parents hadn’t been aware of it. When she got back to school on Thursday a lot of the humiliation and teasing had died down. It wasn’t over with, but her cheerleader friends were still more or less on her side and beyond that she could ignore or stare down most other detractors.

It still burned to think that she’d lost so much face around school earlier in the week over what that little eighth grade brat had done to her. How could the little bitch dare to challenge her? Most of her free time the last few days had been spent trying to think of some way to get back at the little twerp.

There was no simple answer that she could come up with. The tools that had worked for her up to this point had mostly been used on people right around her own age, in her own school. There wasn’t much she could do through the school to get even with an eighth grader who wasn’t much into sports or school activities. It would be harder to get back at her through family or friends, mostly because she didn’t have any in the area, except for that little Holst brat, and the Austin family.

Finally, Ashley realized that since the kid wouldn’t play in her yard, she would have to take the trouble to the kid’s yard — the only way that she was going to be able to get at the miserable kid was through the racetrack. If she hadn’t been so quick to break up with Chuck she still might have had her foot in the door, but it needed to be done at the time and what was done was done. But the kid was going to be around the track more than around the school in the coming months, and although the Austins were the establishment there, that didn’t mean nothing could be done.

Ashley really hadn’t spent a lot of time around the track in the past, but if she were going to get at Telzey there she figured that she’d better be finding out more than she knew. She thought about getting a pit pass this evening, but they were expensive, and right now her money was in limited supply, another humiliation that had to be blamed on that little brat getting out of her place and causing her trouble. She’d managed to get a ride out to the track with a neighbor she knew who liked to go out there, and usually took a cooler full of beer with him. He was in his forties, so it was no trouble to look a little sweet and sexy, for the sake of the ride, for the sake of sitting up in the “alcohol use” section of the stands where she might not be noticed, and to cadge a couple beers out of him over the course of the evening, as well. It wasn’t a perfect solution, but at least it let her get out to the track and see if she could figure an angle.

So far, she hadn’t seen any obvious answers, and for that matter, the track itself might not be the answer. But right for the moment, as long as she had access to her neighbor’s beer cooler she didn’t consider the time wasted. There had to be something, but she just wasn’t seeing it . . .

*   *   *

Telzey and Will hit the infield concession stand for more chili dogs and Cokes, then climbed back to the top of the Kaufmanns’ hauler to watch the Street Stock events. The racing was pretty good, but since Chuck wasn’t racing Street Stocks anymore they only had a limited cheering interest. There was plenty of time to talk with the Kaufmann family, and tease Jack about needing a girlfriend.

After the Street Stocks came the Mini-Sprints, which put on a pretty good race that sort of gave Telzey an inkling of what the races must have been like for Mel and Arlene in the MMSA cars. They were really pretty neat and fun to watch, but she thought her heart was more with the more or less stock cars.

As the single Mini-Sprint heat drew to a close, Jim got down from the hauler and headed over to his Sportsman. Will and Telzey figured they’d better go see if Chuck needed any final help with the 15 car, which had qualified in the middle of the pack. Chuck still hadn’t been very happy with the car at qualifying, but he was out of time by then, so pretty much had to go with what he had.

For the Sportsmen the car count was actually a little down from the numbers they’d had the previous week. They were still running two preliminary heats, but the fields were on the small side. Both Chuck and Jim were in the first heat, but as it turned out they didn’t race each other – Jim was the class of the heat, and Chuck, while not the slow car of the heat, wasn’t far ahead of it. Clearly he still had some work to do on his car.

One of the less neat things about driving Pony Stocks was that the drivers missed a part of the intermission show because they were lining up for the first of the feature races, which got under way immediately afterward. Because of his third-heat win, Will was on the inside of the next to last row, and Telzey was several cars in front of him. There would be a long way to go to get to the front, although several cars were quite a bit slower and there were twenty-five laps instead of ten to do it. Instead of the nine- and ten-car heats, there were twenty-four cars in the feature – a couple had dropped out due to damage in the heat races. There were a lot of cars out on the track, and Telzey wondered just how bad a mess was going to happen in the first turn. This time, there could be no hanging back to avoid the mess because she was not at the back – the best she could hope to do was to not get caught up in it.

As always, there were several slow laps to let the cars get warmed up, then the one to go signal before the green flag dropped. The field came out of turn four accelerating hard, well before the cone that marked the point where the cars were supposed to start charging. This allowed the field to stretch out a bit, and although cars were three and four wide going through turn one and there may have been some fender banging, there was no one out of shape enough for a yellow flag to be thrown. In the mess in the first turn Telzey actually managed to pass a few cars, as the field strung out a bit, she was able to pass a few more in turns three and four. She wasn’t at the front of the pack but near it when she crossed the start-finish line on the first lap, but as in the heat race she had slower cars running ahead of her and faster ones coming up from behind.

While Telzey was trying to pass the cars in front of her, she had also made up her mind to try to work harder to keep from being passed – she’d learned that from Wolsley in the 48 car in the heat race. By the time they were five laps or so into the race, most of the really slow cars had fallen behind and she’d only been passed a couple times. Neither of the cars that had passed her was Jack’s 25 car nor Will’s 89, but she figured they couldn’t be too far back.

As she drove as hard as she could, she began to be aware that there was a car trying to pass her on the inside. A couple of times the car had gotten up about as far as her quarter panel, and she’d been able to look to the side enough to see that it was d’Lamater in the 17 car who was trying very hard. That just made her push herself that much harder. That went on for another lap or so before she more felt than heard a “thunk” from the back of the car, and all of a sudden the track was spinning around outside the windshield. Instantly she knew what had happened – d’Lamater had laid a fender on her and she’d been spun.

*   *   *

Good! Ashley thought as the yellow flag came out. At least someone knew how to handle that little brat! It serves her right for getting in someone’s way like that. It was too bad that she just spun to a stop without hitting anything, because it would have been nice to have had her pile into the wall and wreck the car the way Ashley had been wrecked when she’d been spun the week before.

You can’t have everything, she thought, but that was a good start.

She wondered who that was in the 17 car that had treated the little brat like she ought to be treated. Maybe she ought to find out, she thought. So he didn’t do a perfect job this time, maybe if he were young and single and not too bad looking he could be persuaded to try again and get it right the next time . . .

Now, there was an idea with potential . . . maybe this evening hadn’t been wasted after all . . .

*   *   *

Fortunately the car came to a stop without damaging anything and the engine was still running, so Telzey looked up and saw that there were no cars coming and that the yellow lights were on, so she pulled back onto the racing surface, a little shaken and a little mad. There was no telling if d’Lamater had done that on purpose, but if he had it was a pretty lousy thing to do. The field was sorting itself out into the running order as she got back under way, so she ran under several of the cars that had passed her after she spun, heading to get her spot back like she was allowed under the rules. As she passed the start-finish line she saw Ray waving her on, so she kept on going, passing several more cars as the field went on around the track for another lap.

As they came around again, she could see Ray standing out on the track, pointing a rolled-up black flag at the 17 car with one hand, and pointing at his butt with the other one – a signal to go to the back of the field, she guessed. Sure enough, she saw d’Lamater pull to the side and slow to a crawl, so she passed him and pulled back in behind the car that had been running in front of her before the spin.

When she came around again, she noticed that the 07 car, which she realized had been leading before the yellow flag, had been pulled to the side and Ray was talking to him. She wondered what that was about, but noticed that on the next lap the 07 was no longer in front. As the field continued to circulate, she remembered that the 07 car had finished near the back of the second heat, so hadn’t been that fast. What had he been doing leading that long? Finally, she realized that the 07 must have run a second under its qualifying time, and was being given a one-lap penalty. She counted the cars in front of her, and realized that she was sitting in seventh.

After what seemed like forever, she could see the white flag being waved from the flag stand, the signal for one lap to go. They came around the track again, and as they came out of the fourth turn she stood on the gas.

Whoever it was two cars in front of her either hadn’t been totally on the ball or didn’t have that much acceleration, because Telzey closed on the two cars in front of her rapidly. As she crossed the start/finish line, she ducked to the inside, passed one car even before hitting the turn and got past the other one in the next corner. By now, she was closing on the car ahead at a reasonable pace and looked to be able to pass him shortly.

She did pass him the next lap, and in the next five laps or so managed to pass the other cars that had been running ahead of her at the restart. Unfortunately, in those five laps or so she was passed twice, once by Jack in the 25 car, and once by Gustafson in the 12. Then, all of a sudden, there was a red car with white numbers trying to get past her as well – Will, in the 89 car!

Knowing that he was faster than she was, she was tempted to let him by, but at the same time she didn’t want to give up her position, so she tried even harder to keep him from passing her. She actually managed to hold him off for several laps, until a yellow flag from a spin somewhere else on the track caused the field to slow to a crawl once again.

They drove around slowly for several laps like they had before, while the field sorted itself out again. She figured that Will would try to get the jump on her on a restart, and while he may have been her boyfriend he was also a competitor, and she wasn’t planning on giving him anything easily. As it turned out, she managed to hold him off on the restart and on the first turn, but he changed tactics on her and got past her on the outside a lap later. While she could rationalize that it was likely to have happened anyway, it still didn’t make her feel any happier, except that she’d proved that she could hold him off for a while.

The rest of the race was mostly spent battling with Wolsley in the 48 car, but this time she was in front of him and she wasn’t giving him an inch. It seemed like the race had gone on forever, at least for 500 miles if not more before the white flag flew, and then, a lap later, the checkered flag. So she was fourth in her first real heat race, and fourth in her first feature, and only had the vaguest notion that Jack had again won the feature, while Will had managed to get by Gustafson for second. Under the circumstances, she had little reason to complain about her finish – it was pretty darn good for a newbie like her, she figured.

Even the incident with d’Lamater didn’t really bother her very much – it was just one of those racing things, she figured. She knew with the experience of being there that there sometimes wasn’t much difference between just enough and too much. The driver of the 17 car had rightfully been sent to the back of the field and had to fight his way back up through the pack, to finish something like sixth.

*   *   *

Ashley was steamed about the 17 car being sent to the back of the field. It was a heck of a way to treat what she was already thinking of as “her guy,” who had done nothing wrong except do what he had to do to get past that little brat. It just proved to her that the little eighth grader was a favorite of the track management, and Ashley wondered just whose butt Telzey had kissed, and how hard, to be able to get that kind of treatment.

It was just too darn bad that her guy hadn’t been able to get back up through the field for another shot at the driver of the 24 car. Maybe this time he would have punted her hard enough that she would have noticed.

More and more it began to seem as if this d’Lamater guy might be the tool she’d been seeking. Even better, if she could work it out so it didn’t seem like a direct confrontation, maybe she could get her vengeance and not be blamed for it. If that was the case, so much the better. Already things seemed to be returning to their proper order.

*   *   *

The rest of the evening went along pretty well as far as Telzey and Will were concerned, if a little dull since their part in the show was over with; all they had left to do was to sit back and watch the rest of the races.

Since the Street Stock feature was getting under way by the time they got out of their cars, they didn’t get to cross the track to the grandstands until it was over. As soon as they could, they went to the grandstands to find where Telzey’s grandparents were sitting – they could have watched the race from the pits, but decided that the view was better from the grandstands, which it was, and so had passed on the pit view. “Was that race of yours as exciting on the track as it looked from up here?” Cal asked.

“It had its moments,” Telzey grinned as she sat down beside them, still dressed in her fire suit. “Let me tell you, it’s harder than it looks.”

“I almost had a heart attack when you spun,” her grandmother commented. “I was so happy to see you pull back out on the track. Is the car damaged at all?”

“There’s a little dent in the fender,” she reported. “It should be easy enough to bump back out. The paint isn’t even scratched very much. Things like that happen and we don’t worry too much about it.”

“I didn’t get a clear view of it,” Will added. “I was too far back and busy trying to get past the 48 car to pay attention.”

“You did pretty well yourself, Will,” Cal grinned.

“I think I had a shot at Jack,” Will replied. “But I spent so much time getting around Gustafson in the 12 that I just didn’t have the time left to do it. That was a pretty good race, all right. We both got a good start in the season points championship, and Telzey was really the rookie of the evening. I even had trouble getting around her.”

“I saw that you didn’t cut your boyfriend a lot of slack,” Cal laughed.

Telzey got a grin on her face about a yard wide. “When we’re on the track he’s not my boyfriend,” she said. “He’s just another car to be passed. We go back to being boyfriend and girlfriend when we get off the asphalt.”

The Mini-Sprint race got under way just about that time, and they turned their attention back to the race. Telzey sat back watching the tiny racers buzz around the track, thinking that the view was better from up here but that it was even better from the seat of her car. It was much better to be involved than to be sitting in the stands watching. The race ran fast and fairly cleanly, with only a single caution caused by a spin along in the middle of the race.

While getting the race back together was going on, some of her classmates came down to greet the two of them, saying things like how cool it had to be when you could go out there driving like that. Will had been racing long enough that the new had worn off among the eighth graders at Bradford Middle School, but to have a girl out there too was pretty awesome to some of the girls. Telzey thought that she’d started to gain a reputation at the school in spite of the short time that she’d been there. A couple parents also came over to congratulate them. Since they didn’t have anyone they really knew in the Mini-Sprint race, they spent the time gossiping with their classmates and just being friends.

That really wasn’t the case for the Sportsman race. Jim Kaufmann and Chuck were both in this race, and Jim had to be considered a favorite since he’d won one of the heat races. As in the other races, he started at the back of the field, but worked his way up through it fairly quickly. Chuck had apparently started to get a handle on the 15 car, because he was running in the top five at the midpoint of the race, and only drifted backward to seventh near the end. “He gets that thing figured out and he’s going to be hard to handle,” Will predicted.

Finally, the Sportsman race roared to an end, with Jim winning it by a nose over the guy in the 44 car. Since Jim was a special friend and Chuck really didn’t have a lot of hope of winning this race, the ending was pretty special, especially because of father and son feature winners when Jack’s race was counted in.

After the race, Telzey’s grandparents decided to head for home, but she and Will headed back across the track to the pits, to greet anyone from the crowd who wanted to come down and say hello. There were several people who wanted to, especially some more classmates, who looked the cars over carefully, and perhaps with a bit of awe. It was hard to believe that these were really pretty much stock grocery-getter cars and could be found almost anywhere on the streets – these had just been lightened up a bit and had their safety features enhanced.

It took a while for the crowd to die down, but finally they decided it was time to get the cars and stuff put away so they could go home; it was getting late, after all. Telzey, Will, and Chuck got in their cars and drove them down to the shop. Chuck drove the two back up to the track in his street car so they could finish picking stuff up and get a little start on the work they’d have to do the next day. As they drove through the pits, Chuck happened to glance up and commented, “Now, that’s strange.”

“What’s strange?” Will asked.

“I’d swear that was Ashley,” he shook his head. “What would she be doing here?”

“Where? I don’t see her.”

“Over there with d’Lamater and Larissa Zoisite,” he said. “I’m sure it’s her. I figured she’d be happy to never see this place again.”

*   *   *

It wasn’t impossible, Ashley thought. Harder than she’d imagined, but not impossible.

Matt d’Lamater was indeed single. He was another high school student, like her, a junior about to become a senior, just like her. He was from Paddington, which wasn’t real close by and probably had few local connections. He seemed like a nice enough guy, considering that he didn’t exactly strike her as college material. He wanted to be an auto mechanic, and it seemed likely that’s just about all he would ever be. He was hardly the most handsome guy she could imagine, as he was missing a couple teeth and had a couple tattoos that didn’t exactly strike her as sexy.

And, to make it worse, he already had a girlfriend. Larissa Zoisite was another race driver, although a new one – the race tonight had been her second one. She and Matt had spent a fair amount of time building up her car over the winter and from what little Ashley could tell they’d done a pretty good job of it. They had known each other for a long time and liked each other quite a bit – in fact, it seemed like they were a pretty good fit. She wasn’t the prettiest thing she’d ever seen, and had a few extra pounds – more than a few, compared to Ashley’s slender cheerleader frame.

If d’Lamater was like any guy she’d ever met, he’d find it hard to resist a serious come-on by a good-looking, sexy blonde cheerleader. It seemed likely that he could be induced into dumping his girlfriend without a lot of difficulty, and since he was from well out of town she might be able to do it without letting her friends here in Bradford find out.

This might just work, she thought. Now, what was the best way to do it?