“Will just have to deal with it. I’ll just … tell her we hit lots of traffic in the mid-Atlantic states.” I could barely believe that I was saying these things. My mother was going to kill me. She’d left another message on my phone that morning, and I hadn’t listened to it yet, or responded. Even though I had been trying to push these thoughts away, I knew she was probably worried. Guilt twisted my stomach and made my Francakes churn. But Roger looked up at me, and I tried to shake off these feelings. After all, she was the one who had gone off and left me for a month; I couldn’t do the same to her for four days?
“Let’s do it,” I said as firmly as I could, even though my heart was pounding. “Kentucky.”
Roger stared at me for a moment longer, then nodded and offered me his pencil. “Want to figure out our route, Chekov?” he asked. He peered at the map. “I don’t think it’s actually going to take us long. And if we go through Kansas, we can meet up with my friend Drew….”
“I think we’ll go through Kansas,” I said. As I flipped through the state maps, looking at the interstates we’d have to take, a thought occurred to me that made my stomach clench a little bit. “Roger,” I asked, not really wanting to know the answer, but making myself ask it anyway, “is this—the Hadley thing—why you agreed to come on this trip in the first place?”
He looked up at me and met my eyes, a little guiltily, and I knew the answer was yes. This shouldn’t have bothered or disappointed me, but it did. “It’s okay,” I said quickly. “I mean—”
“Well, yes,” Roger said, interrupting me. “It was, at first. I mean, my mother asked me, but I didn’t have to agree. I could have gotten my father to pay for my flight. But I thought it would be a good way to see the country, and I thought that Hadley was here, and if I could just see her, and talk to her …”
I nodded, telling myself not to be bothered by this. Of course he hadn’t been excited about taking a trip with a high schooler he barely knew. I hadn’t been happy about the trip; why was I suddenly upset that he hadn’t been either?
“But seriously,” he said, with enough gravity in his tone that I looked up at him. “It’s not what I thought it was going to be. I’m having fun. I mean, it’s an adventure, right?”
“Right,” I said, looking down at the country. “An adventure.” And since he’d just put his cards down on the table, I thought that I should probably return the favor. “I didn’t want to do this at all,” I said. “I mean, at first. But now … I mean, I’m glad. That we’re doing this, I mean.”
“Me too,” he said, smiling at me. A busboy came and cleared away our plates with a loud sigh, which I took as our cue to leave. We headed out of Fran’s, causing the bell at the top of the door to jingle, and stepped out of the way of two bleary-eyed truckers who were stumbling in.
“One thing,” I said, as he unlocked the car with the clicker from a few feet away. “The guy last night at the party,” I went on, as we walked around to our opposite sides of the car and looked at each other across the hood. This had been bothering me since it happened. “The one who said that you had fire. What—what did he mean?”
“Oh,” Roger said, and I noticed that he wasn’t looking at me. “I guess that must be a guy thing. It’s stupid.” He looked down at the key chain, fiddled with it.
“Was it about my hair?” I asked, sure that this was the answer and dreading it.
“What?” he asked, looking up at me. “No. Your hair’s great. It meant that he thought you were hot. And he thought that we were … together.”
“Oh,” I said, understanding Roger’s reaction now and feeling my face get warm.
“Yeah,” he said with a laugh, opening his door and getting in. I stood outside the car for a moment longer, trying to get my face to cool down and feeling a small smile start to form on my face. Because if I remembered correctly, Roger hadn’t told the guy that it wasn’t true. This shouldn’t have made me happy. But it did.
As soon as Roger steered the car toward Kansas, the landscape began to look much more Kansas-like, even though we were still in Colorado. Soon the mountains were gone, and everything was flatter, dry-looking, straw colored—and we had our big open skies back again. As expected, the land was very, very flat. But it was just as arresting, in its own way, as the mountains had been. There was an expansiveness, a peacefulness to it, and I propped my feet on the dashboard, leaned my head back against the headrest, and just took in the scenery.
When we crossed the state line into Kansas, I noticed that signs with lights attached to the top began appearing at the side of the road, reading WHEN FLASHING, TURN TO WEATHER ADVISORY CHANNEL. I hadn’t paid much attention to these at first—I felt that after Colorado, it was going to take a lot to surprise me, sign-wise—until I realized that the weather advisory that the sign was referring to was most likely a tornado. Suddenly the skies didn’t seem so peaceful anymore, but at least, as far as I could see, they were still clear.
“Is it a person?” Roger asked.
“Yes,” I said. “Nineteen.”
“Is it a man?”
“No. Eighteen.”
“Is she alive?”
“No. Seventeen.”
“Is she famous?”
“Very. Sixteen.”
When we headed into the Sunflower Mart, without even asking, Roger grabbed a cream soda for me and a root beer for him, then made a beeline for the tiny apparel section.
“Amy!” he yelled, even though the mini-mart was empty.
“What?” I asked quietly, coming over to join him.
“Behold,” he said, spinning the black plastic display, causing the sunglasses, priced at $4.99, to whirl around. “Sunglasses.”
I tried to figure out if this was his way of telling me that I’d been wearing his too much, even though I thought I’d been careful not to. I resolved not to wear them at all in the future. “Okay,” I said, embarrassed, walking over to the chip section and grabbing some Doritos.
“You can get some! And for a reasonable price, too.”
“I’m okay,” I said, picking up some candy. “But I won’t borrow yours anymore.”