“I don’t remember, but I was just thinking—”
“Something about the name,” said Brooke. “It was like a pun, it was really funny. I didn’t get it then, because I didn’t speak English, but I get it now. Was it a TA?”
“It was a Flying J,” I said.
“Are you sure?”
“I want to go back there and shower,” I said. “They even have a laundromat, so we won’t have to wash our clothes in the sink.”
“That sounds expensive,” said Brooke.
“Ten bucks apiece,” I said. “Plus two for the washer and two for the dryer. But we have to clean up or we’ll never get anywhere.”
“So that’ll be…” she tilted her eyes back, adding in her head. “About twenty-eight dollars left.” She wiggled her eyebrows, grinning at me.
“How on earth did you know that?”
“You talk in your sleep,” she said. “I was hoping it would be something salacious, or at least something creepy, but apparently you just count money.”
I finished packing my bag and stood up. Boy Dog stood with me. “I’m full of surprises.”
She grinned slyly. “We could save ten bucks by showering together.”
“No.”
“I’m kidding,” she said. “I’m totally kidding. But you get this really funny look on your face when I talk about sex. It’s great.”
“Sex is inextricably linked with violence in the vast majority of serial killers—”
“Ugh,” said Brooke, finishing her own pack and standing up. “Please tell me more about your carefully calibrated psychological profile.”
“I’m trying to keep you safe.”
“I don’t always want ‘safe,’” she said.
“All the more reason for me to protect you.”
“Thanks for keeping me alive,” she said. “You know I really do appreciate it, right? Teasing aside?”
“I do,” I said. “Thank you.” She’d probably appreciate it more if I hadn’t gotten her possessed in the first place, but there you go.
We hiked back to the highway and then six more miles to the truck stop. I didn’t want to spend the money for showers, but we needed it, and it would help us hide. I gave Brooke the first turn, and while she was in the stall I threw all our clothes into the biggest washer they had and then wrote a short letter for Brooke’s other personalities to read if they surfaced while we were apart: My name is John, and you know me. I’m in the shower right now, and our clothes are in the washer. The basset hound you see roaming around is named Boy Dog, and no I didn’t name him, but he’s ours, and it’s very important for you to stay with him and with the laundry. I’ll be out as soon as I can. You are wonderful, and I’m excited to see you again.
That last bit was a suicide deterrent, just in case; the rest was to keep her from wandering off. She’d only left once in the last year, at a bus station somewhere in Nebraska, and I’d only just managed to find her, hitchhiking out in front. She was about to get into someone’s truck when I ran up to her, half dressed and still soaked from my shower. Showers were the only time we were really apart, and I didn’t want her to get confused and leave again, so I’d started writing her letters. She hadn’t run off again, so I guess they worked.
I thought about her body in the shower, naked and wet and—
No.
She came out of the shower looking fresh scrubbed and satisfied, though she was dressed in her old dirty clothes again because everything else was in the wash. I talked with her just long enough to make sure she was still Brooke and that she knew what we were doing here, and then I gave her the letter and told her to keep it in her hand no matter what. I slipped into the shower stall I’d paid for and washed as quickly as I could, which turned out to be a solid eight minutes before I was convinced that I’d gotten all the dust and mud out of my hair. It was long, and I needed to cut it again, for ease of maintenance if nothing else. I threw my dirty clothes back on and stepped back into the hall, relieved to see Brooke still waiting for me.
“That was fast,” she said. “Mine was, like, twice that long.”
“We paid for it,” I said. “You may as well get the most you can out of it.”
“But not you?”
I did a quick visual check of the hall, making sure we still had all of our stuff. “I’m fine.”
“The washer’s still going,” she said, pointing toward the laundry room down the hall. “How much longer do you think we have?”
“Ten minutes, maybe,” I said. “Then another hour or so for the dryer.”
“We could eat,” she said.
I shook my head, thinking about our money. “Not in the restaurant.”
“The burger place?”
“The most cost-effective source of nutrients in a truck stop is the snack aisle,” I said. “We’ll get pretzels sticks, sunflower seeds, and some baby carrots from the cooler section if they have them. We can drink out of the drinking fountain.”
“You really know how to show a girl a good time.”