Titans Read online

  For my daughter—

  Whatever you decide to do in this big, blue world,

  your mama will bet on you to win.

  I love you, I love you.

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  PART 1: FRAGILE THINGS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  PART 2: THE LONG SHOT

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  PART 3: THE SEASON

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  PART 4: THE DERBY

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  CHAPTER SIXTY

  CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO BY VICTORIA SCOTT

  COPYRIGHT

  Tonight, the Titans will run.

  I can see their eyes glowing red from my hard-won place outside the fence. Grown men jostle me from both sides, sloshing pints of beer, hollering over one another as they place last-minute bets. The moon dips low in the sky, lured by grumbled curses and bare-knuckle fights and cigarettes pinched between dirtied fingertips.

  My parents don’t know I’m here. I snuck out my bedroom window with Magnolia an hour before midnight, an hour before the race would begin. Last year, I watched the machines run on a local sports channel—one of the few my family could afford. The Gambini brothers should have been thrilled. The first year and already they had cameramen and a spot in homes across Detroit.

  This time, though, I won’t watch from under my mother’s arm, her fingers working their way through my hair. I breathe in the pungent smell of sweat and urine, and press closer against the fence. Magnolia stands beside me, her sight set on the course. She takes my hand in hers and gives it a good squeeze. I squeeze right back, and narrow my gaze to the Titans.

  From inside the starting gate, the steel horses stamp the dry earth and toss their heads. I can make out the jockeys’ colored jerseys and anxious hands as they work their Titans’ control panels. I know from reading online that they’re sending manual instructions to the horses’ control centers, setting speeds and calculating lean percentages and determining how close they’ll push their horses to the slay zone.

  The horses are a mixture of the real things and race cars. That’s why I’ve studied both. There isn’t much to do in the suburbs of Detroit, especially when where you live is less suburb and more slum. As working conditions at my father’s plant worsened, and my parents began to argue, the horses were transported into the heart of the forest that nuzzled my house. A glittering promise of hope in the form of iron bolts and smooth steel.

  The starting light in the center of the track flicks on, throwing red across the dirt. The Titans lose their ever-loving minds when they see that particular shade of cherry. They may not have real minds, or real thoughts, but like any other computer they have the potential for recognition and reaction. The jockeys toe their stirrups, lean forward in their black leather seats, and grip the handlebars as their horses thrash.

  I see all of this through the bars of the starting gate.

  And then the light changes colors.

  It blinks yellow—on and off, on and off.

  Yellow.

  The crowd moves in, bodies flush against my back until my nose is pushed through the chain-link fence.

  Yellow.

  My heart thunders in my chest so that I can feel it in my throat. Magnolia tightens her hold on my hand.

  Yellow.

  Finally, finally, the onlookers quiet. The absence of sound is jarring. It’s the loudest thing I’ve ever heard—all those men breathing rapidly, eyes widening, hands clenching their bet cards.

  Green!

  The gates slide away. A gun fires.

  And the Titans run.

  They run and the world trembles beneath my feet. Steam puffs from their nostrils and their eyes cut a crimson path and their bodies clash against one another, steel on steel. As the Titans rumble past, a smile sweeps across my face. Watching them is like kissing a speeding train. Like dancing with a hurricane. The horses are terrifying and beautiful at once. They are mindless beasts, but under the stadium lights, their bodies moving down the track like ghosts, they are glorious.

  I’m thirteen years old the day I first witness the Titans run.

  It’s the same day I watch a grown man die.

  It’s the first Monday of summer. There’s no Ms. Finchella with her chalky fingers and history papers. There are no Styrofoam trays with steak fingers and questionable gravy. And there’s definitely no gym class where kids are separated by the volleyball kneepads they don: florescent white for those who come from money, and murky gray for those who grab from the used pile.

  Who needs those things when it’s finally summer? When the sky spreads out over our neighborhood with blueness so deep you could slurp it through a straw. I dig my hands into my pockets and tip my head back, open my mouth like maybe some of that blue will float down like snowflakes. Once my eyes are cast upward, I find myself counting those fluffy clouds, sorting them into categories based on size and shape, seeing mathematical calculations dance across their white bellies.

  Of course, I see numbers everywhere—in the leaves, in the way the grass grows, even in the lines that cross my palms.

  My feet carry me between two clapboard houses while my brain keeps sorting patterns, until a sharp rapping sound steals my attention. It’s Magnolia waving from inside her window. She slides the glass pane open and music blasts into the warm air like it’s relieved to escape her room.

  “Whatcha want, Astrid?” she asks with a smirk.

  “Nothing,” I reply. “Wrong house, wrong window.”

  She laughs. “Even so, it’s your lucky day, because I’m in the market for a little adventure.” She climbs through the window, knobby knees getting stuck in the frame before she yanks them out. My best friend wears black shorts and a black tank. She’s even got black sandals on her feet. You’d think she was allergic to color, but that’s not it at all.

  “You like my new piece?” s
he asks when she rights herself.

  I admire the orange headband in her long blond hair. Attached to it is an orange veil that lies backward, just begging for a breeze so it can flip forward and cover her heart-shaped face. Now the black makes sense. Magnolia claims people should dress to accommodate their accessories, not the other way around. And Magnolia’s favorite accessory of choice is one worn on the crown of her head.

  “I made it this morning.” She nudges the band back. “Still need to sew on a line of sequins to the bottom.”

  “Nah, no sequins.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  She grimaces. “What do you know?”

  I smile. “I don’t. I just like to get a rise out of you.”

  Magnolia’s white teeth flash behind red lipstick. It clashes with her orange headband, but I won’t tell her that. The only thing Magnolia likes better than her custom headpieces is her Revlon red lipstick, No. 22. “What do you want to do?”

  I shrug. “Go for a walk?”

  “Yeah?” She’s already heading toward the street, our footsteps retracing the same path we’ve cut countless times before. “You think anyone will be out there this soon?”

  “Maybe.”

  We don’t have to mention the place by name to have this conversation. It’s why we spend so much of our summers in the woods past Candlewick Park—to catch a glimpse of them in the daylight, though most don’t ever make an appearance until nightfall. Just thinking about the Titans running at Cyclone Track gets my blood pumping.

  “How’d your dad’s interview go?” Magnolia asks.

  I cringe at this question. Both our fathers lost their jobs at the electrical plant a couple of months ago. “Strategic restructuring,” the newspaper called the layoffs, which only made my father angrier. The company replaced the men with machines made in Taiwan, is the truth. I know because Dad went around the house in the weeks following his “restructuring” and searched for anything in our house made in Taiwan. A couple of my younger sister’s stuffed animals, our microwave, and one of my mother’s favorite hand shovels were among the culprits. He threw them all away, save the microwave. “It’s today,” I tell her.

  “Oh, I thought it was last Friday.”

  I step over the curb and into crisp leaves. “Rescheduled.”

  Magnolia nods like this is something she expected. “Dad says he might apply there too if your dad likes the place and the monkey who interviews him.”

  “No point in doing it before then,” I reply. But we both know Magnolia’s dad has probably already applied. Between the two old friends, they’ve marched their way into every plant and factory Detroit has to offer. Magnolia’s dad even took a class at the library on creating a resume. You’d think he’d discovered another planet, listening to him gloat over that manila-colored piece of paper.

  Little good it did him.

  Magnolia must notice the distant look on my face because she rubs my back. I smile with one side of my mouth and return the favor. It’s our ritual. Our we’ll get through this one-two dance. On some twisted level, it’s nice to know I’m not alone in this situation. That Magnolia and I are both waiting for things at our houses to implode. But it’s also twice as scary, because there’s a specific something Detroit factory workers do after they’ve exhausted their options.

  My stomach twists, imagining my family packing their bags for another town, another house. I can’t do that again. I won’t survive the nights in grimy motels, or worse, the days huddled in our car while my dad hunts for jobs elsewhere.

  It nearly broke my family the last time we lost our house. But this time would be even worse, because it would mean leaving Magnolia. Of course, she could leave first.

  My mind spins as I skip from one potential solution to another. This is what I’ve done every day since Dad became unemployed: think through the ways I could help my family. Yes, my dad needs another gig. But at this point, we just need money. Enough so that if he lost another job in the future, we wouldn’t have to entertain worst-case scenarios. My landing a minimum wager could help, but the last time Mom came home with an application from a craft store, Dad shouted about respect and a man’s responsibility to support his family. My sisters and I watched the vein in his neck throb, making ourselves small at the table.

  It must be almost noon when we reach the Gambini brothers’ pride and joy. Young girls and women aren’t the norm at the midnight races, but during the day, no one shoos us away. So we linger near the woods, a good distance from the chain-link fence, and watch for signs of life. In the middle of the season, jockeys and managers and sponsors bustle back and forth between the stables and track. But there’s time still before things are in full swing, and most jockeys elect to train on private tracks, on private property, paid for by family money.

  Magnolia sits on the ground and produces a deck of playing cards from her pocket. I sit next to her and she deftly shuffles and splits the cards, five to each of us. Magnolia gazes at the empty track and says, “Let’s start with lowball, aces down.”

  She’s suggesting low poker on my account, because I always end up with crap cards. It doesn’t matter, though, Magnolia will beat me either way. Her father taught her, though she’s since become a much better player than him. Admittedly, that’s not saying much. Magnolia’s dad has lost and repurchased a family vehicle more times than I can count with his own deck of cards. If you ask the man, he’s always up. But tell that to his children, who are living on the dwindling dollars tucked discreetly inside his wife’s hatbox.

  Although Magnolia despises her father for what he’s done to them, the card games stuck.

  I suppose gambling runs in the blood. I would know, after all. It was my grandfather’s own addiction that cost us a home the first time. That one-story, green-shuttered, ranch-style house was supposed to be left to my father and our family. It was my grandmother’s adamant wish. But she went quietly one night when I was very young, and my grandfather was not a quiet man.

  He gambled everything he had in his bank account, and then every hard-earned wad of cash we hid between his walls. Finally, he gambled away that house note too, and onto the streets we marched.

  My grandfather’s affinity for cards was worse than an addiction. It was wild and frenzied.

  My father’s addiction is of the softer sort. Slow to grow, but steadfast once it bloomed. He likes cards too, and Magnolia’s old man because of it. But it was the Titan races that lost us the last safety net we had.

  Magnolia and I play for an hour or so, our eyes flicking to the barren track, until finally, after my best friend has made a mockery of me hand after hand, the sound of someone approaching reaches my ears.

  The guy is wearing an orange hunting vest over a plaid shirt. Hairy forearms protrude from rolled sleeves, and he’s got a perma-grimace thing going on, as if he’s never had a real, gut-clenching laugh in his entire life. White hair that’s on its last legs, a tall, thin frame, and eyebrows so thick they demand respect—that’s this guy. He looks pale. He also seems angry about who knows what, but pale nonetheless. I notice trickles of sweat running down his face, and consider telling him to lose the hunting vest. It’s summer, for crying out loud.

  The old guy is barely holding himself up, and he’s breathing rapidly. Magnolia notices the man and his condition, and whispers that we should go get my mom. But I have a motto I’ve stood by since I was eleven years old, and it’s solid as the sun.

  Don’t let others do for you what you can do for yourself.

  I can help this man as easily as Mom could. So I stand and approach him. “Hey, you okay?”

  He grumbles.

  “Want to sit with us?” I ask, gently taking his elbow.

  The man looks at me, his grimace extra grimace-y. He looks familiar somehow. “I’m fine,” he says.

  “Uh, you don’t look fine,” Magnolia adds, coming to stand beside the two of us.

  He tugs his arm away and nearly tumbles backward in the process.


  “You’re already sweating bullets, old man,” I tell him. “You want a mouthful of dirt too?”

  The man snaps at me with his vicious dentures. Not that I’m certain he wears dentures, but it seems likely. “I don’t need your help. Leave me alone.”

  “When people say they don’t need help, you know what they usually need?”

  He glares at me.

  I keep a firm grip on the man and look at Magnolia. “Get his other side. Let’s get him down.”

  Magnolia juts her chin out. “Uh …”

  “Just do it, Mag,” I clip.

  The man releases a string of profanities lovely enough to make my younger sister sing with delight, but still we strong-arm him toward the ground, next to our playing cards. He’s not fighting us that hard. Not really. And after he settles himself in the leaves, he resorts to silently scowling.

  “Since you’re no longer speaking, we’re gonna have to stick around for a while to make sure you don’t bite it.” I sit a few feet away, and Magnolia flops down across from me, eyeing me like, Can we just get out of here?

  “Take off that hunting jacket, at least,” I tell him.

  His jaw tightens.

  “Take it off.”

  He grumbles.

  “And here we have it, folks,” Magnolia booms. “The two most stubborn individuals ever to grace Warren County.” She laughs nervously while the man and I have ourselves a nice staring contest.

  Eventually, Magnolia gets comfortable enough, or maybe bored enough, to change the subject. “How’d you finish junior year? Have you gotten your grades yet?”

  “Yeah, they posted Sunday.”

  Magnolia grins. “Well, how did the math genius make out?”

  I can’t help the smile that lifts the corners of my mouth. “I did okay.”

  “Pfft. You probably got a hundred on Slander’s final.”

  I don’t respond.

  “No way.” Magnolia’s eyes widen. “You got a hundred on that slimeball’s test? Doesn’t that mean he puts your name in next year’s final?”

  My laughter gives me away, and Magnolia shakes her head. “Just think of all those future juniors cursing your name as they try and work through … through …”

  “Division postulates?” I offer.