The Eleven Miles
Before the world knew her as Nikki Traynor, she was a seventeen-year-old walking eleven miles through the desert because nobody had ever told her a car needs maintenance.
She had aged out of foster care that week. Everything she owned was in the back seat of a six-hundred-dollar sedan, pointed west toward a better life, when the engine quit at noon on a two-lane road. The car died because a service had been skipped. Nobody was coming, so she walked.
Doc's station
At mile eleven she found a service station that hadn't pumped gas in twenty years, with one light on in the back. That light belonged to Doc, an inventor-mechanic with wild white hair and goggles on his forehead, and a rack of the first bottles he ever blended. Doc drove her back, fixed the sedan on the shoulder with two bottles from that rack, and taught her his first rule, written in block capitals on page one of his notebook: PULL THE SAMPLE. He was the first adult who ever came back for her. She came back every Saturday after that, and she grew up in that shop learning to listen before she looks.
Ms. Nickerson
By day she is Tracy Nickerson, the quiet auto shop teacher in big glasses whom nobody looks at twice, driving a dusty white Jeep with a cracked windshield. When the Signal lights the sky with the PS mark, she slips out, calls the Chief at the plant for the Key code, and pours one bottle across the hood. The Jeep shifts into Mile One, her two-tone Professional Series Wrangler, with the Rack in the back already lit. Nikki Traynor is on her way.
One more thing
Her one flaw is that she can't leave a car until it's fixed right the first time. She misses the ferry, the toast and every date she's ever set, because somebody's car wasn't right yet. Everyone underestimates her, and she lets them, then solves the problem while they're still explaining it. "I'd rather be late than back."
Maddie Denton
Catarina "Kit" Binns
Victoria Byers
Paige Grosse