The Perfect Shade of Red

(tw: mention of blood/injury)

Gracie blamed her mother for the time she lost with her father. The older woman was too protective, too jumpy, and too scared of the world. Gracie wasn’t. She was more like her father, and that is what she would tell anyone who asked.  She loved being daddy’s little girl. She enjoyed all her father’s hobbies. At least, she tried to. Honestly, she was never into cars, but she would die before she rejected an offer to help her father fix up his red convertible. That was what they did every time she went over to his house for a single Saturday afternoon, every fourth weekend of the month. She was never sure about what shade of red the car was. Maybe there wasn’t a real name for it. The car used to be crimson, but had faded so much from the sun it had turned into something else entirely. Whatever the color was called, she was in love with the look of it. It was the most perfect shade of red in her eyes. The seats were cracked leather, but comfortable for her to sit on when they spent all those hours outside. Everyone else mocked how the car looked, saying her father didn’t take care of the exterior the way he should, saying that he was always ruining the paint with the way he’d wipe his greasy hands on the top of the hood. But Gracie still loved it, inside and out. 

For years she worked on it with her father, sitting in the sun, handing him tools, or reaching her smaller arms towards places his muscular ones couldn’t fit. Gracie felt that she put her heart and soul into that car. But she never rode in it. Not once. Not even just down the street and back because her mother was paranoid about everything.

“There’s no airbags,” her mother would holler each time she came to pick Gracie up from her father’s house. The woman threw a fit every time she spotted Gracie sitting in the passenger seat. “Those aren’t even real seat belts,” she’d insist while gesturing to the lap belts. 

“If the car was that damn dangerous, it wouldn’t be legal,” her father would snap back at her.

“No, Philip, it just means the government doesn’t care about you old hotheads dying in car crashes. I don’t want my daughter in this tetanus chamber.”

Gracie’s parents got married when her mother became pregnant with her in college, but they were divorced before the girl even turned three. Gracie’s maternal grandparents were wealthy, so her mother never demanded her father paid child support. It seemed like a nice gesture, but her dad insisted that she turned down money from him as a way to ‘control him’. If he did anything, tried anything, or said anything that offended her mother too much, she’d threaten to take him to court. It shut him down each and every time. Gracie assumed that’s why her father never tried harder to take her for a ride in his convertible, or why he didn’t try harder to see her more often. He was worried about losing his money, which Gracie could understand. 

When her father died, Gracie found herself unwilling to forgive her mother for how much time she lost with him. Gracie was so sure the woman’s unfairness was the sole reason she was never close with her dad in the way she wanted to be. She was the reason Gracie only ever saw him once a month, even though they lived in the same town, and she was the reason that Gracie never rode with him in the car she spent her childhood working on. What really broke Gracie’s heart was the fact that the car was sold fourteen months after her father’s passing. In his will, he left the car to his brother, who didn’t want it, so he got rid of it. Her uncle called it a piece of junk, and that was that.

But if it was a piece of junk, why couldn’t Gracie just have it? She was seventeen by the time it was sold, and could already drive for a year. Why couldn’t she mess around with it, especially if no one else wanted it? It was sold for just under three thousand dollars. She could have paid that, given enough time, if anyone had given her the chance. 

Gracie tried going to car shows, hoping to one day see the car again. Maybe someone would have it all fixed up. But the Chrysler Newport model was hard to come by. At least, in her home state it was. 

She had no luck finding another car the perfect shade of red that her daddy’s was. Not candy apple red, not cherry red, but that perfect sun bleached crimson.

Luck came two years later. 

Gracie was stopped at a gas station three hours from home when she caught sight of a Chrysler pulling into the parking lot. She wasn’t sure what year the car was, but she knew it was a Newport, just like her father’s. It wasn’t red, it was black, but it didn’t make the spotting any less exciting. It was still a Newport. It was still a convertible. 

Gracie didn’t even bother thinking what she would say before she suddenly jogged over to the car. She knocked on the window before the person even turned the car off. “Hello?”

The windows were tinted, but she saw the inside figure flinch at her sudden arrival. The door was pushed open. She was surprised to see a boy not much older than herself behind the wheel. Normally, the classics were saved for those old enough to have spare time to work on them. 

The boy looked at her, anxious. “Shit, did I hit you?”

She blinked. “What?”

He looked around, seeming to think she owned the car parked next to him. “I’m sorry. I’m not used to parking this.”

“Oh.” She shook her head. “No, you didn’t hit me.” She patted the top of the car, something her dad used to do all the time. “Is this yours?”

“Actually, um-” He adjusted his eyes to the sun, looking at her completely now. She saw his gaze wander down to her legs for a moment, before snapping back to her eyes. He smiled. “Yeah-Yeah. You like it?”

“I love it,’ she commented. She took a step back, looking down the body of the vehicle. The chrome lining shined like a diamond. “What year is it?”

“Um-” It looked like he had to take a moment to remember. “1965.”

That was close. Her father had a 1966 model. “Do you ever take the top down?”

He liked the way she smiled when she asked him these questions. So he nodded, smiling back. “All the time.” He caught onto her excitement. “You, uh, wanna go for a ride in it?”

A ride? In this apparent ‘death trap’ that scared her mom to death? With this random boy who was bad at parking?

Gracie almost said ‘no’, but she suddenly realized she did want a ride, as if to mentally prove her mother was overly paranoid for always denying her rides with her father in the past. 

Throwing caution to the wind, she gave a larger grin. “Sure.”

The boy let out a startled laugh, like the answer surprised him. Then he smiled wider. “Shit-go ahead and hop in. I can take the top down.”

“You need help?”

“No, no. I got it.”

Gracie helped anyway, seeing him struggle with it. He was kind, holding the door open for her, shutting it behind her. He practically hopped back into the driver’s seat. He held out his hand. “I’m Travis.”

She shook it politely. “Gracie.”

“Ya’ever ridden in a car like this before?”

She let out a soft exhale. “...No.”

“They go fast,” he told her. He shrugged, smugly. “If you drive ‘em right.”

Gracie smiled at him again, realizing that maybe it was her smile that gave her this opportunity in the first place. Her father always said her mom’s smile got people to bend over backwards for her, so maybe she inherited it. “I like fast.”

He laughed again. “I’ll take you around the back roads, how about that?”

“Sounds good.”

“Sounds good,” he repeated after her. 

He pulled out, the car jerking slightly. Gracie secured her lap belt. The wind felt nice when he first pulled away from the gas station. He hit the back roads, speeding up. The wind hit harder. She reached back, trying to tie her hair up. The boy looked excited. 

“You live around here?” the boy yelled. He was trying to make small talk, while she was trying to take in the feeling of freedom from the convertible. She knew she would have loved this feeling even more as a younger girl. 

“Close by,” she hollered back, although she had no idea where she was, she just didn’t want to admit to a stranger that she wasn’t familiar with the area. 

The fact she was ‘local’ seemed to encourage him more. It was like the idea that he might see her again made him try harder to impress her. 

“Hey, why don’t you hold on? Imma take a sharp turn.”

She didn’t have time to react before he did so. She shot her hands out, using them to stop herself from slamming into the side of the door. 

That was when she felt her first surge of fear. Gracie glanced at the dashboard. The speedometer read ‘25’, but she knew that couldn’t be right. 

“How fast is this thing going?” she asked. 

“No idea,” the boy laughed. He tapped the speedometer. “It’s broken.”

Her stomach dropped. Maybe it was because she had changed a speedometer with her father before, knew it wasn't that difficult to fix, or because he was driving with one broken at all, that it suddenly occurred to her that this boy might not know what he was doing with this car. As she registered the fact that he struggled with parking it, and that he didn’t know how to take the top down, she realized it might not even be his. He might not know how to handle an older car at this speed. 

The wind was cold, but that wasn’t why goosebumps started prickling over her skin.

“Maybe you should slow down,” she suggested. 

He thought she was teasing him. “No, you like it fast.”

She tried calming herself down. It was fun. It was a fun ride. She nodded to herself. Have fun. Have fun. Have fun.

“Go ahead and hold on again. I’m gonna take another-”

He was going so fast that they hit the corner sooner than expected, and it wasn’t until that moment that Gracie realized the boy didn’t know the most dangerous difference between old cars and new cars. 

The breaks. 

They didn’t stop like he expected. Instead, the wheels began to skid.

“Sh-!” He didn’t have time to curse. Less than two seconds passed between the time the wheels left the street, to when the car hit the tree.

The vehicle slammed into a small cherry tree planted on a pasture just beside the back road. The big, clunky car broke the tree in half, the trunk snapping, before the car came to a harsh halt. 

Gracie couldn’t stop herself this time. There was no ‘real’ seat belt that kept her back against the seat. There was no airbag to break the impact. Her upper body slammed into the metal dashboard. 

“Ahhhh!” The boy screamed, and it sounded like he started calling for help, but she couldn’t make any words out. His chin took the brunt of the impact, slamming against the top of the steering wheel. Blood streamed down the front of him, and he found himself unable to close his jaw. The tip of his tongue was sliced from his front teeth bending back at impact. 

Gracie picked her head up, pain exploding in her face. Had the tree been any bigger, she was sure she would've broken her whole head open. She didn’t need to touch her nose to know it was broken, the pain made that clear, as did the blood that started pouring down her face. It dripped down, starting as thick droplets before turning into a stream that fell onto her lap. 

She couldn’t move for a moment, her body going into shock as she stared at the blood now pooling over her legs and hands. She flinched when she noticed a shard of glass from the windshield had lodged itself into her palm. The boy tried to say something else, but she could hardly hear it. 

As she stared down at her legs, it suddenly dawned on her that the blood spreading over her pale skin cast the most beautiful shade of red she’d ever seen. There it was, the first time she ever caught a glimpse of that color again, a perfect match to her daddy’s old convertible.