You Are Here(18)
Author: Jennifer E. Smith

“Don’t you think this is sort of weird?” she asked abruptly, and she watched as his eyes flicked from the gauges to the gas pedal to the rearview mirror, the dog drooling in the backseat. When Peter seemed satisfied that there was nothing especially weird about any of these, he shrugged.

“Weird how?”

Emma shook her head, trying to ignore the dog panting heavily near her right ear. “Aren’t you wondering why I’m dragging you to North Carolina with me?”

“You’re not dragging me,” he said simply. “I don’t mind.”

“That’s not the point,” she said. “Don’t you want to know what we’re doing?”

“I thought maybe you wanted to visit your brother.”

“Yeah, but come on,” she said. “I could’ve taken a plane.”

He pushed his glasses up farther on his nose. “Road trips are fun.”

“Yeah, but by yourself?”

“You don’t ever seem especially desperate for company,” he pointed out. “And anyway, now there’s two of us.”

Emma relented, absently tapping her fingers on the windowsill. Maybe it was better this way, that she didn’t tell him about her brother. When she tried to imagine what she’d even say, it always came out sounding weirder than it was. Or maybe it was just that it was weird. Regardless, it seemed there was no good way to tell someone you were taking them to visit your dead brother’s grave.

“Well,” she said after a moment, “aren’t you at least curious why I didn’t tell my parents?”

He hesitated, then shrugged. “You didn’t ask why I didn’t tell my dad, either.”

This was true, of course; she’d been too wrapped up in her own concerns to inquire after Peter’s. For all their differences Emma could see they were similar in many ways: self-sufficient, if lonely; independent, if a little lost. And though it seemed to her that the air was still thick with unasked questions, she gave in to the silence. It wouldn’t be the worst thing, she figured, getting through the trip in this way. Even two different trains on two different tracks could reach the same destination, as long as they kept moving.

Chapter ten

Peter Finnegan didn’t have a whole lot of experience with being wrong. But as he drove along Route 194 toward Gettysburg, he was becoming increasingly aware that he’d been mistaken about at least one very important thing.

Somewhere in the last hour or so he’d come to the conclusion—somewhat miserably—that he did, in fact, like Emma Healy.

Quite a lot, as it turned out.

She was sitting beside him with one knee propped against the door, her elbow resting on the windowsill, her long hair tied back into a messy ponytail. Every so often she slid her eyes in his direction and gave her head a meaningful little shake, and he knew she was puzzled by his silence on a growing number of topics.

It wasn’t that Peter wasn’t curious. The truth was, he was dying to know the reasons behind her insistence on getting down to North Carolina, her strange determination to make this trip. But he also didn’t want to seem overeager; lately, when it came to Emma, he had a tendency of opening his mouth with the intention of saying something intelligent, only to find, at the very last minute, that it had turned into something outrageously stupid instead.

He was already fairly certain that he’d had a sesame seed stuck in his teeth the whole time they’d been talking at the rest stop, and now he couldn’t help obsessively searching the inside of his mouth with his tongue, so he was sure he must look like an underfed camel. Even worse, it had taken him at least half an hour to wipe his nose and find that he had ketchup streaked across the back of his hand. He hoped Emma hadn’t noticed, but it was a bleak and unlikely hope; unless you were a clown or a highly unusual reindeer, it was hard not to stand out with a red nose.

To add to all this the convertible had turned out to be moody and erratic, lurching this way and that like a skittish horse. Peter’s shoulders were tense and his neck was stiff from attempting to wrangle it into a generally forward-moving direction, the car wrenching testily beneath them every few miles. As they slowed at an exit, the brakes made a grinding noise, and a smell like rotten fruit or overripe socks drifted up from the backseat, where the dog—looking appropriately mortified—crawled to the other side to avoid his own stench. Peter glanced in the rearview, and Emma wrinkled her nose and laughed.

“Jeez, Peter,” she joked. “At least warn me next time.”

“Funny,” he said stiffly, too nervous to manage a laugh.

Emma snaked an arm between the seats and plucked one of his maps from the floor in the back. It snapped in the wind as they sped up again, easing onto the expressway, and she examined it with a little frown of concentration. But just as quickly, she seemed to lose interest, and Peter gritted his teeth as he watched her attempt to refold it, making a mess of things as she crumpled the paper along the wrong lines.

“I don’t need the maps,” he told her. “I know where we’re going.”

“Then why do you have so many?”

He opened his mouth to answer but had no idea how to explain. Emma tossed the one she was holding onto the floor, then twisted to grab another, tugging a European atlas from beneath the dog, who resettled himself unhappily on an underwater survey of the Pacific Ocean.

“It’s really okay,” Peter said weakly. “I don’t need a navigator …”

“I don’t mind,” she said, running a finger between Germany and France.

Peter stifled a groan, turning his attention back to the road and hoping she couldn’t tell just how flustered he was, his mind crowded with worries. He wondered if the car smelled funny, or if the engine was supposed to sound like something was being chewed up inside of it. He wondered if policemen were able to send out nationwide alerts for wandering teens in stolen convertibles. He wondered if Emma was worried too.

She hadn’t been acting any differently than she usually did around him, disinterested and then excited in turns, abruptly short with him and then a moment later charming and engaged. Half the time she was so exasperating that Peter wished the car had an ejection seat, and at other times he found himself sneaking sideways glances at her, devolving into sappy daydreams about what it might be like to sling an arm over her shoulder as they drove.

When her phone began to ring again, Emma set the map down, and Peter tried not to wince as the edge caught the gearshift, neatly ripping Iceland in half. She bit her lip and studied the screen before once again deciding to ignore it, and Peter had a brief urge to reach over and answer it himself, not because he wanted the trip to end—not by a long shot—but because he felt a strange allegiance to the Healys. Somehow, this whole thing felt like more of a betrayal of them, who had always treated him like an adult, than his father, who had never failed to make Peter feel out of place.