“So I was thinking about Bri and Toby,” Palmer said, and I looked up at her, putting my phone away, glad to have some distraction from what we were heading toward. “I think we need to get them to sit down together and talk this out.”
“I agree,” I said, “but I don’t see that happening, do you?” Palmer sighed and bit her lip. “I mean, even if we get them both to the diner, or wherever, when Toby sees Bri, she’s just going to leave.”
“Or you,” Palmer pointed out. “They’re both still pretty mad at you.”
“Right,” I said. We sat in silence for a moment, the weight of the situation—the hopelessness of it—seeming to press down on me like a physical force.
“We need to get them together,” Palmer said slowly, “somewhere they can’t leave.”
I nodded, thinking that sounded good if we could work it out. I suddenly remembered Rio Bravo and all the secrets and resentments that had come bubbling to the surface when the men were stuck in the jail together. We needed that, but hopefully with less singing. “That would be good,” I said, “but . . .” I looked over at Palmer to see that she was looking at the bus with newfound interest. “What?” I asked.
Palmer smiled at me. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
? ? ?
I had not expected, when I’d woken up that morning, that by the afternoon I would be in this situation. In all the vague ways I’d imagined my day going—maybe getting a coffee and picking up some dog-walking shifts—this had not been one of the options. Riding in a bus with my dad’s face on it, barreling across New Jersey, en route to tell Clark I was in love with him, while trying to get Toby and Bri to talk to each other, had been nowhere in my list of possibilities. And yet here we were. We weren’t in the Mustang, but I had a feeling my mom would have approved.
“Say something,” I said to Bri, who sat across the bus table from me, her arms folded, looking hard out at the window like she couldn’t hear me.
“I’ll say something,” Toby snapped, from her seat across the aisle. “This is kidnapping. You can’t just force people to be on a bus together.”
“Nobody forced you onto the bus,” Palmer pointed out from where she was standing in the aisle between Toby and Bri’s rows. “You came on voluntarily.”
Both of them scoffed in unison, and Palmer and I exchanged a look. When we’d asked my dad if this would be possible—leaving out, for the moment, that Bri and Toby were currently not speaking to each other—we’d made it seem like we all just wanted to ride down to Clark’s bookstore event together and that Bri and Toby were excited by the idea of being on a campaign bus.
My dad had bought this and checked with Walt, who just shrugged and said he’d been paid for the whole day, so as long as we didn’t go over the mileage, we were okay, and that it didn’t make any difference to him where we went. Once we’d gotten the go-ahead, Palmer and I had strategized. When we’d decided on the plan—we’d pick up Bri and Toby as we went through Stanwich en route to New Jersey, and they’d just have to work it out as we all rode down to the bookstore together—we’d realized we had to actually get them both on the bus, together, in order for this to work.
We’d finally decided to go with the nuclear option—Palmer telling both of them that she and Tom had broken up and that she needed to see them at once. Palmer had knocked on every piece of wood on the bus afterward, convinced she was somehow jinxing her relationship by lying about it. But we knew this was the only thing that would get both of them to agree. They’d figured out the ruse pretty quickly, but there’s not a whole lot you can do when you’re riding on a campaign bus that’s flying down the New Jersey Turnpike, with a driver who refuses to stop at the rest stops.
My dad had figured out that Palmer and I had been doing some creative embellishing but had only told me sternly that we’d talk about it when we got home and had gone to the front of the bus to sit with Walt, casting occasional glances into the back of the bus and shaking his head. I got the sense that I’d probably be grounded again in the near future.
But I also had the feeling, like on the night of the scavenger hunt when he got to drive like James Bond, that he was secretly enjoying this.
Bri and Toby were still refusing to talk to each other, and as the miles whipped by outside the window, I found myself getting more and more nervous. What if even getting them trapped in a space together wasn’t enough? What if we really weren’t going to be able to get past this?
“Guys,” Palmer said in her best reasonable voice, “Andie and I really think that if you just talk to each other . . .” Toby just shook her head, and Bri looked down at her hands.
“I mean, we’re stuck on a bus together,” I pointed out. “We might as well make the best of it.”
“We’re stuck on this bus because of you,” Toby snapped. “Don’t make it seem like it’s just a big coincidence.”