“The flash in the sky. The noise. The drive. Me. You pick.”
I glance over my shoulder. Aidan and Mira are fully engaged in ball lightning and sonic booms.
“That’s quite a span of subjects,” I say. “From the lofty to”—I narrow my eyes, taking in his full length—“the mundane.”
“I’ll make it easy for you. Me and the drive. Why’d you come and get me to drive your new car when you make a point of not noticing me the rest of the time?”
“Oh, she notices you!” Mira drops her conversation with Aidan and zooms in on ours. “On the first day—”
“Shut up, Mira!” I say, a bit too loudly. I roll my eyes, knowing my exuberant command makes me look like I care. I rarely make such mistakes. This is not my element.
“You noticed me?”
“Barely.” I look straight ahead, hoping my bored expression will end the questions, but I can see out of the corner of my eye strange gyrations, and I finally turn to look.
Seth flexes his arm and poses, though his biceps do not show through his long-sleeved starched Hedgebrook-issue shirt. He grins. “What did you notice?”
“Your hair needed combing.” I keep my voice flat like a dated documentary.
“She called it scruffy.”
“Oh. Scruffy,” he repeats. I think I hear disappointment in his voice, and I wonder if it is because he wanted me to notice him in a more meaningful way or he just wanted anything significant about him to stand out. His flexed right arm drops and his hand returns to its place on the steering wheel.
Even with the wind rushing over our heads, the car is intolerably silent.
“You know how to drive,” I say. “That’s why I came and got you. And you deserved justice and so did I. I flipped a pancake, and for a while we were both on the same side.”
He nods and I look away, trying to concentrate on a landscape that is a blurred pastel like a Monet painting.
“I noticed you too.”
I squint my eyes, trying to make the greens and grays and yellows racing past us sharpen into something recognizable.
“And not your scruffy hair,” he adds.
Just when I was starting to feel comfortable with the lightness in my chest, it changes. It grows warm and heavy. Where is Mira now, when I need someone to smooth out the wrinkles? She is infuriatingly silent. I immediately scratch her from my list of potential friends, if I ever were to have one.
I fix my gaze straight ahead and try to dream myself to a world of right answers and feelings, and I wonder about the crumpled calendar page in the bottom of my trash can and if, for today, I could be someone else.
8
“THERE! WHAT’S THAT?”
We lean forward and squint.
“It’s just a lodging sign.”
“And food!”
“Where there’s lodging, th
ere has to be gas. Turn!”
“It’s just a one-lane road,” Seth complains. “There won’t be gas.”
“Turn!” we all yell in unison. Brakes squeal as Seth follows orders. The car fishtails, and the back tires hit the dirt shoulder, sending gravel and dust flying into the air, but Seth manages to get all four tires back into the lane.
For all his admiring of the gauges, he hadn’t paid attention to the low tank of gas until finally Aidan tapped his shoulder and pointed out that we were nearly running on fumes. I think of careless Mr. Nestor and am not surprised that he is true to form with his fuel tank as well.