Betrayed by My Childhood Love novel · Chapter 27 of 32

Chapter 27: The Delphy

I sat on my dorm bed and stared at the photo of Annika's front door.

A white door with a brass number on it.

Somebody had circled it in red.

Under it, four hundred comments.

Somebody should pay her a visit.

I called my father. It went to voicemail.

I called Waylon.

"Don't read the comments," he said.

"I already read them."

"Then don't read any more." He was quiet a second. "What do you want to do?"

I didn't know.

Then I did.

I opened the account I barely used, the one Lyndon had tagged me on three summers ago.

I had two hundred followers before the video.

I had four hundred thousand now.

I typed one line.

I'm the girl in the video. The engine was mine, and I got it back. That's my sister. Leave her alone.

I looked at it for a long time.

I'd never called her that.

I hit post.

It went around faster than the video had.

By morning, it was on the same morning show.

By the next weekend, the photo of the door was gone.

The comments on Annika's page had turned into strangers arguing with each other, which was better than strangers going after her.

Annika didn't post anything.

But on Sunday night, my phone buzzed.

You said sister.

I looked at it for a while.

Don't make it weird, I wrote back.

She didn't answer.

The little word underneath changed to Read.

That fall, the Owls built a new motor.

It had four vanes and copper behind every one, and it was half again as big as the one that won in New Mexico.

The sophomores did the welding. The birthday girl did the brazing.

Waylon came over from the graduate building every night with two Dr Peppers and stayed until the janitor kicked him out.

In October, we fired it.

Twenty seconds. Clean.

The team wanted to name it.

They argued for a week.

Someone wanted The Pinwheel Three. Someone wanted Boiled Shrimp.

The birthday girl stood up on the test bench and settled it.

"We name it for the person who taught us all to braze and swear," she said. "All in favor."

Every hand went up.

We painted it on the casing in Rice blue, in letters a foot high.

THE DELPHY.

Then we called Gran and told her to come up to Houston for the weekend.

We didn't tell her why.

She walked into the shop on Saturday morning in her coveralls, with a cooler of shrimp salad sandwiches.

She stopped in the doorway.

The motor was on its stand in the middle of the floor with every light in the shop pointed at it.

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