Page 38 of The Fast Track

I ignore the hand he’s holding out and push myself up. Luckily, some light dirt seems to be the only damage, unlike the last time I went crashing into the ground in front of him.

“You’re not hurt, are you?”

“No thanks to you.” I seize my backpack, clutching it to my chest.

A fat Princeton Review tome slides out and lands with a plop on the cracking asphalt. I want to scream with frustration. After all that, some zipper somewhere must have come loose.

Cameron wrinkles his forehead. “Are you prepping for uni exams?”

A flush spreads from my collar to my forehead. Caught red-handed. By the last person I’d want to know I’m studying. I can already hear the insults in his snooty posh-boy accent:Good thing you’ve got backup plans, Kwong. Probably gonna need it.

“Yes,” I admit, bracing myself.

Cameron tilts his head, looking at me hard. “I’m doing A-levels.”

“A-what?”

“Our equivalent to your SATs.” He gestures toward my practice book. “That is what you’ve got there, isn’t it?”

I force myself to give a tiny nod.

“My nan pushed me to do at least one or two if I could. In case racing, well…” He shrugs, letting the rest of his words hang between us. The redness around his ears matches the blotchiness all over my face.

I want to ask him why he’s taking A-levels when he’s the one who called Pat a melt for stressing about his tutoring sessions. But then again, I, too, talk a big game about Formula 1 while secretly worrying I’ll never cut it.

We stand silent for a moment, then Cameron clears his throat. “We could multitask, if you want.” At my confused look, he elaborates. “I could read you practice questions while you work on the car, and vice versa.”

As weird as it would be to do practice questions withsomeone who, two minutes ago, I would have expected to roast me like a Thanksgiving turkey, it does sound better than battling local students for a seat at the downtown Starbucks. Efficient, too, to kill two birds with one stone.

“Sure, okay.”

“Okay.” He nods, looking as surprised as I feel.

We retrieve the toolbox and FC-80 parts from the creaky shed and spread the pieces out on the ground for easy assembly. To my relief, Cameron volunteers to go first.

“I’ve got a history exam next month.” He reaches into his gray backpack. A second later, he hands me his iPad, a Quizlet already loaded.

“But we have two races!”

He grimaces. “Only one window a year.”

And I thought taking the SATs postseason was going to be a pain.

While Cameron bends over the sorted car components, I find the most comfortable-looking patch of ground in the shade and plop myself down. “Witte and Stoly… pin?”

“Agrarian reforms in early-twentieth-century Russia,” he says without missing a beat, getting to work on a rusty main plane and end plate. “Changes included the development of large-scale individual farming and public education. The success of the reforms is debated.”

I swipe to the next prompt. “Council of Clermont.”

“Pope Urban II, 1095. The pope’s speech included a call to arms for the First Crusade, resulting in the capture ofJerusalem and establishment of the Kingdom of Jerusalem.”

I raise my eyebrows. It’s not like I thought he would be a total academic slacker, but I didn’t exactly haveCameron Evans: CEO of Historyon my bingo card either. Between traveling for races and off-track conditioning, there’s limited free time to focus on schoolwork. “Seven Years’ War.”

“Global conflict between 1756 and 1763 involving most major European powers and many smaller states. The conflict ended in victory for the Anglo-Prussian alliance, resulting in Britain’s rise as the world’s dominant naval power.”

We go through the rest of his question bank in the amount of time he takes to build nearly all the front wing. Estates General. Robert Peel. He even aces the one about the Freedmen’s Bureau, which I can only vaguely remember despite getting a 5 on my AP US History exam last year.

“Wow,” I say after he finishes rattling off a detailed summary of the causes of World War I. “You know your stuff.”