It was a 1978 Nova, technically a classic according to Paj. It was all hers, a summer waitressing job at Denny's later-only she couldn't bring it home. It sat in the school shop, dark green looking almost black in the garage. She liked to visit him. She called it "him." In fact, she named him Stu. She knew it was weird to name a car but it had just come to her. Paj said it happened that way sometimes with cars. He'd been working with them all his life, and some just had names that they liked to be called, he said. She often sat on Stu's hood and commiserated with Paj about parents and grades and SATs and what a bummer they all were. Bummer. That was Paj's word, but she liked it, she found it apropos, considering her situation. Apropos wasn't Paj's word, however, it was a vocabulary word in the SAT study book.

Ted was determined that she was going to U of M next fall-his alma mater. She didn't care. The University of Michigan was as good as any school, as long as she could work on cars somewhere. Of course, he wanted her to be pre-law or pre-med. She was going to be pre-whatever until she could figure out how to wrangle her way into the racing circuit and begin qualifying. As long as she was keeping up her grades, her stepfather didn't seem to care. It was the SATs that were killing her. Her verbal pretests were top notch, it was her math that was the problem. Geometry to be specific. Until she made a solid 500 on her math SAT, Stuie was stuck in Paj's garage. No score, no car. She found it rather unfair, and ironic, considering Ted the real estate attorney didn't know the difference between an isosceles triangle and a parallelogram, but she couldn't argue with him. At least, not while her mother was around.

"Paj, they're getting me a tutor," Cat lamented, sprawling her books on Stu's hood and using the bumper to hoist herself up into the midst of them. "I feel like such a failure, like I'm some Special Ed reject or something." She sighed.