The dump that was my car lived to see another day and so did I, after thinking I could expire from the embarrassment.

Manny, Gabe's cousin, was a professional mechanic and he charged me one third of the cost to replace my dead battery. There was a definite resemblance between the two but it was clear that Manny lived the harder life, and I didn't mean it because of the grease under his fingernails. It was in the way he was easier to laugh and enjoy the simple things in life, which included his fascination with the things that didn't work in my car. Meanwhile Gabe held himself with the arrogance of someone who hadn't wanted for much in life and thus, didn't have to look out for little nuggets of happiness or success. It just simply happened for him.

And now I owed him. Ugh.

The thought roiled on my insides as I walked up the lawn, heading for the machine shop at school where we were going to make the first manufacturing tests for our project. We'd divvied up the different systems of the car among the five in the group. Taylor had got the transmission, a guy named Tom who was an okay student was in charge of aerodynamics, another one called Brandon had the entirety of the loads calculation, Gabe had the engine and battery and I had the chassis.

I didn't know if I could trust the work Tom and Brandon had done, because I didn't recall them being in the honor roll like Jasper and Adrian, but the rest of us were going to kick ass. I couldn't wait until we had the car assembled and started testing and fine-tuning it.

"Liz, wait."

The annoying voice stopped me mid step. Glancing up, my eyes zeroed in on the bane of my existence and his girlfriend heading in a path that would cut mine. I scrambled to hide behind the thick trunk of a tree and wait for them to pass. The last encounter with Liz wasn't something I looked forward to repeating. I got that she was jealous, especially having a serial dater for a boyfriend, but there was no need to call me the names she'd spat in my direction or threaten with hitting me just because she suspected Gabe and I had an office affair. Her words, not mine.

Liz stormed across the campus with wide steps meant to leave him behind, but he caught up with a jog and tried to hold her hand. She slapped his away, though.

"No, I'm sick and tired of this," she screamed, as though the students milling about absolutely had to hear her drama.

It was a shame I didn't have any popcorn in my backpack.

Gabe ran a hand through his hair, dark brown and cascading all the way to his shoulders. He set his eyes on her under scrunched up eyebrows and I hated the devastation the look could wreak on a lesser girl. "Please help me understand why you're so upset because I'm coming up blank."

She threw her hands up in the air. "I want to spend time with you but I can't! If you're not in class you're at work with that bitch who keeps hovering around you. And now you have a project with her? You've got to be shitting me. Just come right out and tell me you're cheating on me with her."

My body vibrated with the desire to throw one of my safety boots right at her face. But I forced myself to take deep breaths and stay rooted in place.

"Again with that?" He released a sigh that deflated his posture. "I've invited you over and over to hang out at my place after class but-"

"But what?" she cut in, flipping her long hair behind her shoulder. "You want me to hang out with you at your family's place with your mom who absolutely hates my guts? Why don't you get an apartment I can crash at or better yet, why don't we move in together?"

The way his face contorted was a work of art. It was as though he was choking from eating raw garlic. "That's not true and if you came over more often you could see that."

I noted that he'd evaded two topics deftly. The first one was the fact that I was neither a bitch nor his paramour, for which he deserved the second boot thrown at his pretty mug. The second was that he completely bypassed the point about them moving in together. Color rose up Liz's light skin and I thought this last piece would be the one she'd throw back at him.

Instead what came out of her mouth was, "And why would I want to get to know her? It's not like I ever want her to be my mother in law, for fuck's sake."

The breath I sucked was so big that the wind stopped. Everything stood at standstill as the words sunk in on Gabe. A display of emotions that I'd never seen before flashed across his face. His square jaw set tight with anger, to the point I worried whether he'd cracked the enamel of his teeth. His fists tightened and even from five meters away I could see the white in his knuckles. But the scariest part was how his eyes blazed. The sunlight hit his honey eyes straight up, but I watched in real time how they darkened to molten chocolate.

"We're done."

"What?" she recoiled as though the possibility that those would be his next words had never crossed her mind.

I pulled up the collar of my black t-shirt and bit into it to hold back the laughter. This was so much better than the telenovelas I occasionally caught up with online.

"You heard me." Gabe's voice was flat like a plank that he dropped hard on her. "Get another boyfriend who can shape his life around yours."

He turned around and Liz clung to him, babbling and repeating the phrase but babe, that he ignored with a very dry good luck. She stood there, watching his retreating back as he went into the same building I needed to get to. I was going to be late but the last thing I wanted was for this girl to see me going after her now ex. She was the kind who saw two innocent things as connected and part of a big conspiracy against her. As much as I couldn't stand her ex, I'd always wondered how they'd even got together when every other girl I'd ever seen hanging from his arm behaved like he was a celebrity.

When she finally turned around, I caught red cheeks and nose typical of tears. I wiggled around the tree so she wouldn't see me as she passed and finally made it to the machine shop where, effectively, I was the last one in.

Gabe rolled his eyes at my entrance and said. "The queen is here, we can finally start to work."

I gritted my teeth and briefly, the little angel on my shoulder told me to bite back the insult threatening to spill out of my mouth in light of the fact that he'd just broken up with his girlfriend but nah.

"Oh yeah?" I asked while flipping him the bird. "You're always late to everything and this time you lucked out on getting through the door a minute before me."

His eyes narrowed and made me catch on to what I said. Time to change the topic. I rummaged through my backpack and pulled out the printed drawings of my chassis design and spread them around the work bench everyone was gathered around. There was significant noise as some other students worked on various projects. I spotted a couple that clearly were from the earlier semesters, machining screws from stubs of aluminum. On a different area, Adrian and Jasper were cutting sheet metal. They waved over our way and I sent them a friendly nod before pulling my attention back to my group.

They picked up my drawings and I folded my arms. There were no flaws. I'd asked Jeff if it was alright to run my designs through with him, using the company's software and he'd agreed. We'd checked the calculations together and my design was simple, effective and very light.

"Aluminum piping," Gabe said, lifting his eyes from the paper. "Are you crazy?"

I looked around me and found a loose wrench that could make for a satisfying weapon. Instead I used the less traumatic, but nonetheless blunt weapon of words. "What the hell are you talking about?"

He gave me a look as though I was the one who had no clue.

Brandon raised his hand as if this were class and said, "Uh, welding aluminum isn't easy, you know?"

"Or cheap," added Tom, stretching his face into a grimace. "If we used the budget the school gave us for the project it'd pretty much go up in smoke just making the chassis."

Taylor came to my rescue before I bit their heads off. She huffed and it sent her bangs flying. "Yeah, but if we don't make the chassis with aluminum the car will be too heavy and we won't be able to win the race."

That settled over everybody like a cloud. The final examination wasn't just on account of the design and manufacturing of the car, but also on its performance. I'd overheard another group a couple of days ago discuss about building their chassis out of plumbing piping. Cheap, light and somewhat durable unless their engine overheated in the dead of Orlando's summer heat. Or unless another car crashed against theirs. Not that I was planning to install spikes on the wheels of ours, but still. You never knew.

I sighed and said, "I can do it for free."

All eyes turned to me and a specific pair of them narrowed.

"You don't believe me?" The question was rhetorical, as it was patently clear. "Fine."

I left them there and headed over the the discarded junk, where I found a two inch aluminum pipe that someone had burnt from one end. I gave it to Taylor and asked her to saw it in half, sand down the edges to perfection and bevel it a bit. She saluted and as she did that, I went over to the attendant to request some welding implements. They didn't have pure argon but a mix with helium would work just fine. The TIG was busy but the MIG machine was free so I checked it out along with gloves, a mask and tools. The attendant helped me drag everything to the work bench, leaving me to set it up as Taylor finished up with the piping.

I rolled up my sleeves because things were going to get really hot in here. As I ignored the boys' stares, I put on my gear, secured the two pieces of piping with a press attached to the work bench, turned on the ventilation and dropped the mask down to get to work. It was over in a flash, figuratively speaking, because welding aluminum well had to be done a lot faster than with steel.

Papi had taught this to Cora and I at his shop when we were thirteen, well after Carlos had gone through the lessons. Our friends from school were starting to learn how to drive and meanwhile we did metalwork at the family's company. He'd even taken us along for jobs in remote areas of our home state, when oil piping broke and had to be repaired. Nothing amped up the adrenaline quite like oil pouring down on the soil from a pipe that had burst. Or even worse, if the oil poured straight into the lake.

Obviously Cora and I asked papi to teach us how to weld underwater but that was where he'd put his foot down.

I turned the machine off when I was done and didn't even need to remove the mask to know I'd made a perfect seam. All I lacked was the American certification, but I could do this for a living.

The shock was painted clearly on their faces.

I wiped the sweat dripping from my forehead with the back of my arm and asked, "Any other issues with my design?"

Brandon shook his head and Taylor started laughing.

"Oh, we so got this," Tom said with the widest grin I'd seen on a human.

Then I made the mistake of looking over at Gabe. The heat from the welding torch paled in comparison with what was in his eyes and my body's reaction to it was also a lot stronger. New rivulets of sweat trickled down my back and chest because I knew, at that exact second, that if Gabe had ever looked at me this way before, I would have burned.

I did my best to ignore him through the rest of the session but the proximity to him was suffocating me. My only consolation was that soon he'd get a new girlfriend and I could go back to pretending he'd never made my insides feel like molten lava.

Bet you weren't expecting this temperature so soon. And obvi I don't mean from the welding torch, lol. Gabe's eyes are enough to cause instantaneous combustion.

Is Cata starting to catch fire? ;)