Finally, traffic starts to move a little. It’s time to pull over to fill up the tank and switch driving shifts. My butt is numb from all the traffic-sitting, and this is the most relieved I’ve been to trade in the driver’s seat for the passenger’s. Bobby leans on the side of his car and chats with us as we pump and pay. He doesn’t need gas for a few hundred miles; apparently Bobby gets great mileage in his french fry mobile. Good for him. For the past several miles, Ted has had that look in his eyes that Stan has decided means he needs to get out and pace. Maybe he’s right, because Ted is currently all over the rest area, pacing up a storm, while Callie finds a patch of grass and plucks out some blades to braid in the car.
Back on the road, we pass another giant diner done up in chrome, and a song I like comes on the radio. I turn it all the way up, lean back against my seat, and let it wash over me. The traffic’s building up again, and I can tell we’re going to be at a standstill soon. As we slow down, I look over at the diner, which is directly outside my window now. We slow to a stop, and as I’m looking at the diner and the cars parked outside it, a flash of bright color in the diner window catches my eye. It’s the sleeve of a high school varsity jacket, worn by a pretty girl about my age who’s sitting alone in a booth and putting her hair up in a ponytail. A guy is walking toward her, he’s maybe a little older, and my first thought is “Ugh, creep.” But then he starts dancing at her. And he’s really good. And he’s totally in sync with the song playing in our car, and I think to myself that this is the most magical thing I’ve ever seen while sitting in traffic. But the pretty girl in the jacket just isn’t having any of this. So the guy steps up his game. He pulls some sunglasses from his back pocket and puts them on, and then he drops out of sight beneath the table, like he did a split, and then a moment later he comes back up and leaps into the air, right onto the table, does a crotch grab and bends his body back, then hops down into the booth across from her.
I break out into wild and ecstatic applause, and Stan kind of flinches as if I woke him up from a trance.
“Stan!” I say. “Did you see that?”
“No,” he says.
I look back to the diner as we inch forward a bit. The guy is chugging water, his chest heaving from having given it his all. The girl continues to stare at her phone.
Things like this, you can hardly believe them, even when you see them. But there they are, in front of your eyes, proving that anything can happen out here.
The traffic has barely eased up over the past two hours. We’re on a particularly pitch-black and lonely stretch of road when my phone lights up with a text from Dave.
Heard a good joke today.
I hardly have the heart to text him back—I’ve been pretty standoffish with him, with anyone outside this car, and also sometimes inside it, ever since that awful talk with Mom—but of course I do because he’s Dave and of course I miss him a lot.
i could use a joke rn, I text.
Why did Ernest Hemingway cross the road? he texts.
Then, like, a minute passes, and the ghost ellipses keep popping up and dying down, and so I text, idk. why?
To die. Alone. In the rain. I read the punch line, and I actually snort.
aw, that was a good one, I text back. snort-laugh-level good.
Good, he texts. I miss you. How’s the road?
Well, let’s see, Dave. This is what the road is like: A bear tried to kill us, but we lived, but only because Stan’s Iceling brother picked it up, smashed its head into a guardrail, and killed it right in front of us. Oh yeah, and we met another guy with an Iceling sister who also built an island, so they are also headed north, and we are all headed north, quite possibly tracked by the government, which may or may not include our parents, who may or may not have been lying to us our entire lives.
the road’s exhausting is what I really type. but we’re fine.
Ugh. That felt terrible. Not even the lying-by-omission part—that I’m fine with. What feels terrible is feeling so alone with everything that’s happening, and not knowing when that kind of loneliness will end. Or, depending on how big a deal this trek up north really is, if I’ll ever be able to try to turn that loneliness into something else, something no less melancholic but certainly much less maddening.
And then it hits me. Not that I’ll never be able to tell anyone about any of this—I don’t know yet whether that’s true or not—but that my whole life from before we got in the car is over. No matter what happens with Callie—Callie, who’s drinking water from a bottle through a straw in the backseat while Ted squeezes a crayon he must have grabbed from the diner before the bear—no matter what happens to or between any of us on this trip, we can never go back. Because if the government thinks they’re monsters, and if Mom tells them about the island, then they’ll know where we’re going. Unlike us, they know exactly where we’re going.
But we have to take them. We told them we’d take them, and we have to. That’s it. That’s it now.
My phone buzzes. Dave again.
Babe, I’m sorry things’re weird and exhausting. But however weird and exhausting things are, you’re doing this for Callie, whom you love. So there’s that. And that’s something. You know?
And it’s not that I start crying. But I do, a little, just a few tears.
“Huh,” Stan says.
“Hmm?” I say, wiping away all evidence of an emotional moment.