You Are Here(21)

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.

“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.