“No,” she says, and her smile slips. “Not exactly.”
He looks at her closely, so closely that she finds herself shifting beneath his gaze. “Well then,” he says, “maybe that’s the problem.”
As they near Iowa, the land lengthens out like someone took a rolling pin to it, flat and low and endless. Hugo can’t get over all the cornfields, miles and miles of them as far as he can see. They ripple in the wind like they’re made of water, full of whirlpools and eddies, and he wishes he could stick a hand out the window and let it pass over the feathery tips.
Mae is at the far end of the car, chatting with a couple about her film, and when Hugo closes his eyes for a second, the thought bubbles up again: I don’t want to go back.
It fizzes inside him, bright as a sparkler.
A crow flies by out the window, coasting effortlessly at the same speed as the train, and he realizes his mind is already tiptoeing in that direction, spinning over an imaginary globe.
It wouldn’t be forever, he thinks, and the arguments begin to line up in his head then, one by one, a blindly hopeful procession.
People take gap years all the time. And he’s got money saved, some from summer jobs and some from when the six of them modeled for a local department store as children (a deeply embarrassing chapter of their lives). It’s not a lot, but he could do it on the cheap, find discount flights and stay in hostels, live off bowls of peanuts in random pubs if he had to. He’s already proved he can get himself from London to Denver, at the very least. (Wallet aside.)
Maybe he could simply defer his scholarship and start uni the following autumn, graduate a year behind the others, give himself a chance to try something new before then, to take what he’s felt this week and carry it with him over the course of a whole year.
Because that’s the thing: it’s only been a few days, but already he feels entirely different. And now that he knows, how can he do anything but keep going?
The idea flutters in his chest like a bird in a cage, and he looks around for Mae, suddenly eager to tell her. At the end of the busy car, she’s sitting at a table with a Hasidic couple, her notebook open in front of her as she listens to them, and he smiles to himself, struck once again by her passion. But then he imagines trying to explain this to her without it sounding like he’s just going to skive off for a year, and he can feel his excitement start to wilt.
Mae knows exactly what she wants, and that’s never been Hugo’s strong suit. Now that he’s found something, now that he’s got a plan—or at least the start of one—he wants to be sure of it before telling her.
They spend the rest of the afternoon doing interviews: an economics professor from Idaho who was recently widowed, a family from Singapore on their first trip to America, a mother and daughter who are making a pilgrimage to Salt Lake City. A few people decline, and one even laughs in their faces. Another—a grizzled white man with a long beard—simply gives them the finger. But most people have stories to tell and are eager to share them.
The couple they saw earlier—Louis and Katherine—turn out to be celebrating their recent retirements, and they’re in it for the long haul: Washington, DC, all the way to San Francisco.
“Then what?” Mae asked, and Katherine smiled.
“Exactly.”
At the end, Hugo couldn’t resist posing one last question. “So what’s your favorite color Starburst?”
“I like the red and orange ones,” Louis said, “and she likes the pink and yellow ones.”
“Which is how you can tell we’re perfect for each other,” Katherine added.
At dinner, Hugo and Mae are seated across from two white women in their fifties, Karen and Trish, sisters on their way back from visiting their mother in Iowa.
“Does she live on a farm?” Hugo asks, because from what he’s seen of the state so far, that seems to be all there is. But they both laugh at this.
“Where are you from, darlin’?” Trish asks. She has curly blond hair and very red lipstick, and she’s wearing a shirt with little sequins on it. Her sister, Karen, is more muted; she has the same color hair, but hers hangs long and straight, and she has glasses and very little makeup on. They both peer at him with open curiosity from across the table.
“England,” he says, and to his surprise, they both say “Aww” and scrunch up their noses in a way someone might when they’ve come face to face with a kitten.
He can feel Mae watching him with amusement, but he doesn’t look at her, because if he does, he knows he’ll be distracted by how she purses her lips when she’s thinking about something, or how the dress she’s wearing today—a yellow so sunny that he can’t stop looking at it—inches up when she sits down, and how even though she’s so much shorter than he is, her legs somehow seem to go on forever in it.
“Have you ever been?” he asks the sisters, who both laugh.
“No, we’ve never bean,” Karen says, mimicking his accent. “But maybe one day. I’d sure like to see that castle. What’s it called? The one where the queen lives.”
“Buckingham Palace,” Hugo says. “But that’s in London. I’m from a place called Surrey, which isn’t too far from there.”
“So how did you end up on a train in Iowa?”
“How does anyone end up on a train in Iowa?” Mae jokes, and they both turn their attention to her.
“You’re not from England,” Karen points out.
“No, I’m from New York. But also not the city.”
“How did you two meet?”
“It’s a long story,” Hugo says, reaching for Mae’s hand underneath the table. She clasps his back, and he feels an instant warmth spread through him. Outside, the sun has dipped low, casting long shadows on the fields of corn. They pass a herd of cows huddled close, a road with a dusty pickup truck lumbering by, a small town with an American flag waving high above the buildings. It all feels unreal somehow, sliding past like this, as if it’s part of a film montage.
Once they’ve ordered—a steak for him, some sort of chicken dish for her—they hand back their menus. The sisters are on their second glass of wine each, and Trish winks at them from across the table. “If you’d just spent six days with our mother, you’d be drinking too.”
Karen lifts her glass. “Amen.”
“So what’s England like?” Trish asks.
Hugo shrugs. “You know, mostly just tea and crumpets. That sort of thing.”
He’s only teasing, of course, but they both nod very seriously. “Do you go to college here or there?” asks Trish.
“Neither,” he says. “Yet.”
There must be something in his voice that warns her off a follow-up question, because she nods and turns to Mae. “How about you?”
“I start at USC next week,” she says. “That’s where I’m headed now.”
“Well, isn’t that wonderful,” Trish says, then nudges Karen. “It’s wonderful, isn’t it?”
Karen nods. “Wonderful. My three are still little, but I’d love it if they got into somewhere like that one day. Or somewhere in England,” she says, looking over at Hugo. “Do you miss it?”
He grins at her. “Would it be absolutely horrible if I said no?”
“Trust me,” Trish says, “we get it. We just spent a week watching soap operas and learning to crochet. Home can be overrated.”
“It’s just that I’ve never really been anywhere else,” he says. “And it’s nice to be on my own for a bit. But it’s only been a few days. I’m sure I’ll start missing them all soon.”
“You have brothers or sisters?”
Hugo glances sideways at Mae, then says, “Both. There are six of us.”
“Older or younger?”
He hesitates, as he always does at this point in the conversation. “The same age, actually. We’re sextuplets.”
They both stare at him blankly.
“Multiples,” he says. “We were all—”
“Yeah, darlin’, we know what sextuplets are,” Trish says, shaking her head. “It’s just…wow. There are really six of you? All the same age?”
He nods.
“Are you identical?”
“Some of us,” he says. “But I’m the handsome one.”