Tous les chapitres de : Chapitre 141 - Chapitre 150

Marianna POVThe reception is small and loud and goes until midnight.Oliver gives a speech that lasts fourteen minutes and references Monaco, the hip flexors, the metadata on the 2022 paddock photo, and concludes with: Duane texted me in May and said, and I quote: 'Marco's sister arrived. She's a problem.' I just want everyone to know that I knew, from that text, exactly what kind of problem she was. He sits down to applause he accepts with the modesty of someone who is not modest about it at all.Marco gives a speech that is four sentences long, which is either restraint or the Georgetown-trained recognition that some things land harder when they're shorter:She's my sister. She's the bravest person I know. She deserves everything that's happening right now. Duane—don't mess it up.Patrick, who is not asked to give a speech, gives a speech anyway, because Patrick has loosened his definition of appropriate contexts after a glass of champagne and a year of working with someone who subm

MariannaWhile I'm crouched behind a roasted pig like a war criminal, let me tell you about the letter.It was 2015. I was fourteen.To set the scene: I had braces with alternating pink and teal bands, because I thought that was a personality. I had a Tumblr I updated like it was a second job. I owned a shirt that said LOVE in cursive across the chest. I was, in short, at the absolute height of my powers.And Duane Richter was seventeen, winning karting championships in Europe, and home for exactly nine days in August.I counted them, backwards, the way you count down to a launch. He was staying in our den on the pull-out couch. I understood pieces of — money moving around, a boarding arrangement near some racing academy in Italy, adults on phones with their voices lowered.For nine days, Duane Richter's toothbrush was in my bathroom. Blue. Angled in the cup toward mine like they were talking.I need you to understand I could not have survived that as a normal person. Nobody could hav

MariannaFestival day. 6:15 a.m. I've been awake since five.The outfit took three days.I landed on: white sleeveless blouse, tailored. Good jeans, the dark ones. White sneakers I cleaned with a toothbrush like a psychopath. Small gold hoops, my mother's.And the hair — the hair I started at 5:40, diffuser, curl cream Jill left at my place, and Miami's humidity was at sixty-eight percent which is practically alpine, so by some miracle of barometric charity I got the good curls.I looked in the mirror at 6:50 and thought: okay. Okay. Not that girl anymore.I knew the odds of Duane even seeing me were maybe five percent. The drivers were doing show runs downtown; we were touring the paddock opera

MariannaThe heat is wrong.The heat is wrong, because containers are cool, containers are steel and shade, and this dark is wet. This is August-at-2 a.m. dark, air you have to chew, and somewhere below me there's music thumping through a floor, bass with no song attached, and I'm in a hallway.I know this hallway.I don't want to know this hallway. It has carpet that smells like spilled beer, and at the end of it a bathroom door. and the door at the end clicks — tidy, institutional — and the air gets hotter, and a hand closes around my wrist.Damp. Hot. Sure of itself.Relax, says a voice I have spent four years unhearing. It's a joke. It's a—I'm banging on the door—"MARIANNA."I came up out of it like breaking water.Sitting up. Heart at redline, sheets soaked and twisted around my legs like I'd fought them and lost, no idea what walls these were, gold light streaking a strange ceiling, rain sound, glass, where — and light snapped on, and the walls became a guest room thirty floor

MariannaThere is no seat belt in the world that fits a person who has just been outed as a nineteen-year-old virgin on speakerphone.I tried every configuration. Strap over the shoulder. Strap tucked behind me. Sat forward, sat back, put one foot up on the seat, and immediately removed it because his interior costs more than my degree. Twenty-two miles from Brickell to Coral Gates, and I spent the first two writhing around like the leather was electrified, which he obviously noticed, because he notices when a rear tire loses two degrees of temperature.He said nothing.That's the thing about Duane Richter I'd forgotten during my two-year moat era: the man can drive forty minutes in silence and feel nothing. Not awkwardness. Not curiosity. He'd have made an in