You Are Here(17)
Author: Jennifer E. Smith

He licked his fingers one at a time. “So then what happens in a week?”

“We’ll get it repaired,” she said with a shrug. “I don’t know. We’ll figure something out then.”

Peter seemed pleased at the “we,” and Emma realized she was too. It was a strange little crew she’d gathered—her slightly odd next-door neighbor and a three-legged dog—but it felt good to have company all the same.

“I saw your parents yesterday,” Peter said, and Emma lowered her eyes. “It didn’t seem like they realized you’d be gone for so long.”

As if on cue her phone began to ring again, and she jammed her thumb against the off button. “You didn’t say anything, did you?”

He shook his head. “My dad doesn’t exactly know where I am either.”

“Oh,” Emma said, feeling worse instead of better. This only meant they’d have more people worried about them, more parents trying to figure out where they were. Peter’s dad was a police officer—the town sheriff, of all things—and she wondered what kind of trouble two almost-seventeen-year-olds could get into for this kind of thing.

But Peter was now beaming at her from across the table, his eyes large against his freckled face—looking as desperate for approval as the dog at their feet—and so she smiled back at him with more confidence than she felt.

When he finished his burger, he balled up the wrapper to toss into the nearby garbage can. But his throw went wide, glancing off the side of the bin, and the dog pounced on it, bobbing his head up and down and looking confused when it didn’t easily clear his throat. Before she had a chance to think better of it, Emma sprang up and wrestled him into a headlock. Ignoring Peter’s protests, she pried open the dog’s mouth and thrust a hand in, emerging triumphantly with the slobbery wrapper. The dog coughed a few times, and Peter stared at her.

“You shouldn’t stick your hand into a strange dog’s mouth,” he said, sounding so much like her father that all Emma could do was nod wearily as she returned to her seat, the dog now pressed against her leg and eyeing her with a look of great devotion.

Peter regarded him skeptically. “He’s not coming along, is he?”

“From what I’ve seen of your driving, I doubt he’d be up for it,” she teased, and Peter turned as red as the dot of ketchup on the end of his nose.

But even so, Emma wasn’t surprised when the dog trotted after them later, waiting patiently while Peter helped her check the engine of the car one more time. Once they were satisfied it was good and dead, she locked the door and they carried her things across the parking lot, moving from the old blue convertible to the new one. They climbed inside, and Peter put the top down, and then the dog—looking slightly miffed at not having been invited—took a running start and catapulted himself into the back, his toenails skittering across the trunk before he slid down into the seat.

Emma twisted around to look, and Peter stared at his rearview mirror in surprise. “Well,” he said after a moment. “I guess he earned it.”

The dog wagged his tail and rested his chin on the side of the car as they pulled out of the rest stop. The wind flattened his fur and made his nose twitch, and he closed his eyes, looking about as happy as Emma suddenly felt.

“I’ve always wanted a dog,” she said. “I feel like every kid should have one.”

“Maybe not one this big though,” Peter said. “He could just about flatten someone with those paws.”

“Nah,” Emma said, reaching back to rub the dog’s ears. “He’s a gentle giant. I can tell.”

“I hope you’re right,” he said with a grin. “And I hope he doesn’t decide he’d like to eat us.”

They drove on in silence for the first hour or so, heading west across Pennsylvania, moving fast along the tree-lined highways that sliced through rivers and ravines. Every so often Peter reached over and swiveled the gearshift in small baffling circles, like the joystick to some old video game, and the car staggered onward, the open top and rushing wind making it too loud to talk. Emma pulled on a sweatshirt and curled up in the seat, content to let herself be carried along by someone else for a change.

But even later, once they hit the back roads and the breezes fell flat all around them, Peter remained quiet, and Emma began to fidget. She glanced over, watching him as he drove, his back straight and his eyes roving the horizon, where a pink band had formed above the bluish hills. A field of cows gazed back at her from the side of the road with vacant, dull-eyed stares, and Emma frowned back at them.

It was hard to understand Peter’s lack of curiosity, of surprise, of anything. If the situation had been reversed, if he’d called from a rest stop in New Jersey and asked her to come get him—and not just to pick him up and take him home, but to drive on to North Carolina for no apparent reason—she wouldn’t have hesitated to tell him he was out of his mind.

But Peter was different. Not only had he agreed to come get her, but he’d done so without requiring any sort of explanation, without questioning her reasons for the trip. And while it was true that this was pretty much how things had always been between them—Emma distant and unbothered, Peter quietly eager—it felt different now.

They’d known each other for eight whole years, had waved across their lawns and said good morning and occasionally walked to school together. They’d passed each other in the halls and nodded in the cafeteria and even once been lab partners in science class. Peter had eaten breakfast at their kitchen table more times than Emma could count, and while he talked with her parents, she’d passed him the butter and filled his water glass and teased him for getting jam on his face.

But the truth was, they’d rarely talked beyond the barest skeleton of a conversation—the hellos and how-are-yous and good-byes that serve as the tent poles of common decency—and somehow that had never struck her as particularly odd. You wouldn’t be expected to tell your deepest secrets to the mailman, and you would never think to confide in the checkout guy at the grocery store. It was the same thing with Peter Finnegan. He was the guy next door. The nice-enough boy from her school. The smartest kid in her math class. Nothing more.

But it was different now. At home the silence between them was comfortable, something worn and familiar. But here in the car there was a sharpness to it, as if the air itself had turned into something prickly. And for reasons she couldn’t quite explain, Emma felt that this was somehow her fault.