You Are Here(22)

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.

His own phone hadn’t made a sound since he’d set off from home earlier, and he wasn’t sure exactly how he felt about that. He wondered if his dad might have spoken to the Healys by now; though they weren’t much better off in the information category, they at least had somewhat of an idea of Emma’s whereabouts, based on the fact that she’d been with Patrick until this morning. Still, Peter didn’t like to imagine what might be going through Dad’s head right now. He wondered if it was an angry silence or a careless silence, this thing between them. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

But it was nearly dark now, the domed sky closing in all around them, and he had a foot on the gas pedal and two hands on the steering wheel, he had Emma Healy beside him and a strange dog in the backseat, and he was heading to Gettysburg, a place he’d been fascinated with since he was eight years old and was first told about the unfathomable tragedies of that long-ago war.

Everything else was beginning to seem faraway and unimportant.

The dog turned in three cramped circles in the backseat, then settled down with his nose tucked beneath a paw, and Peter felt a quick rush of affection for him, a fellow outcast, as unlikely a stowaway as himself on this trip that nobody really understood.

Emma leaned forward to turn on the radio, then fiddled with the dial, landing on each station for a minute or so before flipping through to the next one. When she caught Peter looking at her with raised eyebrows, she shrugged and switched it off again.

“Maybe we should play a car game or something,” she suggested.

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. The license plate game?”

“What’s that?”

“You try to spot as many license plates from as many different states as you can,” she explained. “You’d probably love it. It’s very ‘fun with geography.’”

“Sounds slow.”

“So is geography.”

He made a face at her. “What else you got?”

“The animal game?”

“Let me guess,” he said. “See how many animals you can spot?”

Emma grinned. “Sheep are worth two points each.”

“Thank God we’re not in Ireland,” he said. “Where do you come up with these anyway?”

“They’re pretty standard road trip games,” she said.