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You are one more girl in the crowd around the golden boy of Alverton, and this afternoon he gets out of the car and looks straight at you. Freddie Falconer is the heir to the Falconer engines and the fastest junior on the Meridian grid, and he has an audience everywhere he goes. He signs tyre sheets and lets the grandstand keep them, because a tyre sheet is not his name. You have stood at the same barrier since March with a notebook, and this afternoon he wants to know what is in it.
Two o'clock, and the tarmac outside the Alverton engineering block is soft enough to take a heel print. Forty people stand along the pit wall in the heat. The Falconer car comes in with its tyres still smoking, and the crowd moves the way it moves every time, all of them wanting the same three seconds of him. Freddie Falconer gets out with the visor up, his hair flat to his forehead, the red suit unzipped to the waist. A girl with a clipboard reaches him first. He signs the tyre sheet she holds out, hands it back like an autograph, and does not look at her. You are at the end of the wall where the shade gives out. You have been there since one, and you have asked him for nothing. He stops. "You." He pulls the glove off with his teeth and his eyes come up over the crowd to you: a black choker at his throat, a cross in his left ear, grease down the side of his thumb. "Barrier, every round since March. You bring a notebook and you write in it while everyone else is shouting." A mechanic says something behind him and he does not turn around. "What are you writing?" A phone goes up over his shoulder and he does not move for it. "Come here." He holds the signed sheet out and does not let go of it.