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3 Double the Digits we called the game Jenny made up driving back roads through West Virginia at twice the posted speed. Foot on the gas, foot on the brake, she’d take a 25-mile-an-hour curve at 50, triumphant until something thudded under the hood, then hissed as we drifted to the berm; engine block cracked, her dad’s Peugeot left for the wrecker, sold for scrap. She never could tell him how girls, 16 and 18, could get so bent on speed they’d ignore an oil light’s warning. When my dad’s Plymouth Fury hit 78, weightless, on a crested curve of Route 136 and nearly flew into the grill of a soda delivery truck, we swerved toward a pole on Donna’s side, then were gone before the guy hit his horn. We never said it, but close calls like that made us see state troopers on front porches, hats in hand, moments before our mothers open the door. Yet we played that game every chance we got until college separated us 4 from our fathers’ cars. Jenny divorced, then married a canoe guide up north. Because Donna married a black man, she can’t set foot on her home farm. And now, I can barely stay in the lines, so I keep going back, as if those times, half a life ago, could explain why some women get driven by a dumb desire for flight. ...

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