By Eric Walters
One street race, one crash, and one question a teenager can't outrun: do you tell the truth or pretend you weren't there?
Jake just got his license, and tonight he's got his brother's car. He and his friend Mickey cruise the strip, another driver revs up beside them, and the two of them take the bait and race. In seconds it goes wrong, a chain-reaction crash, real people hurt, and Jake and Mickey drive off telling themselves it wasn't their fault. But Jake can't make the guilt sit still. Mickey wants to bury it. Jake keeps circling back to the one thing he can't shake: he was there, and someone got badly hurt because of it. The whole short book is him deciding whether to come forward.
Eric Walters writes lean, fast stories for exactly the older child who's decided reading is a chore. The hook is a street race, which sells itself, and the guilt underneath keeps the pages turning without a single hard word to trip on. It's a full teenage dilemma at a reading level that won't defeat a struggling reader, so your child gets the pride of finishing a real, grown-up story quickly.