We continued to drive, and I noticed that Roger was sitting up a little straighter, looking around as well. There was just nothing. No gas stations, no mini-marts, no fast-food restaurants. And there were almost no other cars. Occasionally there would be one behind us, but it would inevitably pass us. It wasn’t like there needed to be a passing lane—you could see ahead of you for what looked like miles. Very occasionally a car or semi came roaring up the opposite lane. But in two hours, we’d only seen about three other vehicles.
“Um,” I said when I couldn’t take it any longer. “Is it just me, or is this kind of strange?”
“Very,” said Roger. His expression was troubled, and it made me realize for the first time how cheerful he normally looked.
“Should we …,” I started. I looked out at the road, which seemed like it just continued on, more of the same, for miles. “Should we turn around?” My heart sank a little at the thought of having to retrace our steps, lose those two hours, and still not be where we wanted to be.
“I don’t know,” Roger said. He was sitting up very straight now, both hands on the wheel, and his brow was furrowed. We drove without speaking for a while, just the sounds of Roger’s mix playing. Finally he said, “Look, we’ll have to hit a town soon, right? And once we do, we can go from there.”
“Okay,” I said, figuring that he had to be right. Civilization hadn’t totally disappeared. At some point, we would meet up with a highway town. We had to.
An hour later we hit a town.
I had never in my life been so excited to see a gas station. It was a tiny little place, two pumps and a mini mini-mart. We pulled in, and I used my mother’s card to pay for the gas. As Roger filled up, he told me what he hadn’t wanted to tell me before—that we’d actually been getting pretty low, and if we hadn’t come upon this town of Fallon, Nevada, when we did, we might have been in serious trouble.
When the tank was full, we used our respective bathrooms and met up inside the tiny mini-mart, which actually looked more like a house. But I didn’t care. I figured that we’d just hit a strange, deserted stretch of Nevada, but soon we would be back in the happy world of roadside amenities and Golden Arches and other cars on the road.
I grabbed a cream soda from the glassed-in case against the back wall, then, after hesitating a moment, grabbed a root beer as well. Roger was studying the chip selection, but I caught his eye and held up his soda, raising my eyebrows. He nodded and gave me a small smile. I passed the candy aisle, picking up my Skittles and grabbing Roger a bag of Reese’s Pieces a little grudgingly, as I’d always hated any kind of peanut butter candy. Peanut butter, in my opinion, belonged in sandwiches and nowhere else. I saw something I’d never seen before, a candy bar in a red wrapper called LOOK! It worked, because I did, and decided to try it. I met Roger up at the counter, where he was setting down a bag of BBQ chips. I added my armful of snacks, and the woman behind the counter, who was tiny and white-haired with slightly weathered skin, rang us up.
“So we just drove in,” Roger said, as she punched numbers into the register using the eraser end of a pencil. “It was kind of … deserted.”
“Course it was,” she said, not looking up from her register and continuing to punch in numbers. “What did you expect?”
“Well,” said Roger. He looked at me. I didn’t know how to answer this either, but I jumped in anyway.
“I guess we were just surprised that there wasn’t more stuff,” I said. “But that stops now, right?”
She looked up at Roger, then at me, then out at the car. “California?” she asked a little dismissively, reading the white plates. I nodded. “Figures,” she said. “You kids even know where you are?”
“Fallon?” I asked tentatively, hoping she hadn’t meant the name of her gas station, as I’d already forgotten it.
She shook her head. “For about another minute you’re in Fallon.” She rang up our total, $13.11. I dug in my pocket for my mother’s cash and handed her a twenty. She gave me back my change and scooped our snacks into a plastic bag. “But you’ve got miles and miles of road ahead of you with not much there.” She handed me the bag across the counter. “Welcome to the Loneliest Road in America.”
Roger and I slammed our doors and looked at each other. “Well,” he said.
“Yeah,” I agreed. I could hear that I sounded as shell-shocked as he did. Maybe it had been my horrified expression, but the woman behind the counter had softened slightly after she’d told us exactly what road we’d ended up on. She explained to us that Highway 50 was famously deserted, and she couldn’t believe that we’d managed to make our way to it by accident. She told us to always make sure we had enough gas, as there were a few towns, but they were all more than a hundred miles apart. Then she wrote down her phone number and told us her name was Barb, and that her brother-in-law was a state trooper, and that if we had car trouble, to give her a call and she’d let him know. Then she’d sent us on our way.
Roger put the keys in the ignition but didn’t start the car. “I don’t know what to do,” he said, rubbing his hand over his face. The worried expression was back. “I mean …” He looked over at me. I’d long since taken his sunglasses off, but I played with them in the cup holder when his direct look began to make me uncomfortable. He let out a breath. “Your mother is trusting me. My mother is trusting me. And they both expect me to get you across the country, and soon, and safe. And now we’ve gone way off course, and we’re on the saddest road in the country—”
“Loneliest,” I corrected, but Roger kept on going.
“And I just don’t know what the best thing to do is. Should we turn around and find an interstate? And call your mother and tell her exactly where we are? Because I’m not feeling so good about this anymore. I think we might have found the Highway to Hell. We really might be in an AC/DC song at the moment.” I looked up and met his eyes, then looked right back down again. “What do you think we should do?” he asked.
“I think …,” I said. I looked down at Barb’s phone number and thought about the road we’d just driven on. I thought about facing more of it. Much more of it—according to Barb, at least eight more hours on Highway 50 before we would make it to the interstate in Utah. But to my surprise, it didn’t bother me. Now that I knew why we weren’t seeing any cars or people—that we hadn’t actually entered some kind of Lost-esque purgatory—I was much more okay with it than I had been before. “I think we should keep going,” I said. Roger sighed and gripped the wheel, and then let it go. “I mean, time-wise, it doesn’t make sense to go back,” I continued.