You Are Here(46)

“I just do,” he said, feeling his face go hot all the way to the tips of his ears. Around the highway, beyond the pine trees that stood straight as flagpoles, clusters of mountains had begun to hitch themselves up from the land, sloping toward the sky like great whales, gray and rounded and hazy in the distance.

“You know,” Peter said, “there’s a campground, too.”

Emma looked over at him.

“We could maybe spend the night up there.”

“We don’t have tents or anything.”

“Well, it’s not like we were planning on staying in a four-star hotel, anyway,” he said. “We could just wing it.”

“Don’t tell me you know how to camp, too.”

Peter grinned. “I’ve read a couple of books about it.”

When they came across the right exit on the Blue Ridge Parkway, Peter swung the car off onto the spur, following the signs for the campground. They stopped at a sagging mini-mart set a few hundred yards back on a gravel drive. Two of the three gas pumps were out of order, and there was a sign out front advertising a sale on both ice and ammo. Inside, a guy about their age with too-white teeth and too-blond hair was stacking cans of soda behind the counter, and he flashed them a too-bright smile as they walked in.

“Let me know if y’all need any help with anything,” he said, mostly to Emma, his eyes following her intently as she veered off toward the food aisle. Peter glared at him before hurrying to catch up with her.

“What a creep, huh?” he said as Emma thrust a bag of marshmallows at him. She scanned the rows of canned foods until she found the beans, then the packages of hot dogs and graham crackers, orange soda and dog biscuits, handing them over one by one until all of it was balanced in Peter’s scrawny arms. He glanced over to see that the guy was now leaning against the counter, his eyes still focused on Emma as he chewed a piece of gum with the slow rhythm of a cow, his jaw working in methodical circles.

“He keeps watching you,” Peter whispered, nearly bumping into Emma when she stopped before a rack of cheap-looking clothing. “It’s weird.”

She picked up a blue sweatshirt with a big red star on the front that read roanoke, virginia: star city. “Maybe he likes me,” she joked, and Peter snorted, a feeble attempt to illustrate just how far this was from his own mind. Emma raised her eyebrows, and he felt the heat spread from his neck up into his face. He twisted the bag of marshmallows hard in his fist, feeling them lose their shape between his fingers.

She grabbed another sweatshirt from the rack and shoved it at him. “Here,” she said. “One for each of us.”

Peter could nearly picture the lone five-dollar bill still tucked in his wallet. “Don’t you think we should save our money for something we actually need?”

“It’s a present,” she said, marching up to the register where the attendant was waiting, his ridiculously white teeth bared in a leering grin. “For our birthdays.”

Peter dumped the pile of food onto the counter, adding a blue lighter to the pile, then slid his sweatshirt beside hers, surprised that she’d remembered. He watched the guy ring them up, half wishing—despite the sweatshirt’s scratchy material and shoddy lettering—that he could put it on right away, though he at least had the good sense to be embarrassed by the significance he knew he’d attach to it because Emma had picked it out.

“This’ll look nice on you,” the guy said to Emma, folding the sweatshirt into a plastic bag alongside the can of beans. “Real pretty.”

“It’s a birthday present,” she told him. “To myself.”

“Happy birthday,” said the guy. “A real pretty shirt for a real pretty girl.”

Once they’d paid, they walked out of the store together, both struggling not to laugh until they were a safe distance away. Emma held up the sweatshirt and twirled in a circle.

“Real pretty,” Peter said in an exaggerated drawl.

“Aw,” she said, tossing his sweatshirt to him. “You’ll look real pretty in it too.”

“I think this is the first time you’ve ever gotten me a birthday present.”

Emma smiled. “If it makes you feel any better, I forget everybody else’s, too,” she told him. “I’m terrible about that stuff. I must’ve gotten at least some of the absentminded professor genes.”

“It’s okay,” Peter said with a grin, holding up his sweatshirt. “This top-quality half-polyester, half-cotton garment more than makes up for it.”

“Only the best for you,” she said as she opened the door and slipped into the car. Peter stood there a moment, not quite ready to be on the move again. The air had already lost the spongy quality from earlier in the day, shedding the mugginess of the city as they pushed farther into the mountains. There was a coolness here that pinched at his lungs and made his eyes water as he yawned and stretched and squinted out at the glancing sun and the needle-like pines. He felt suddenly happy, and he could tell Emma was too, as if the cure to the blues were always to be found here in this run-down husk of a gas station, and they only ever had to come here to discover it.

The dog was lying on his back in the car, blinking lazily up at the sun, and he scrambled to his feet with a little grunt as they rejoined him. Just beyond the mini-mart the road took an upward swing, and the car bucked and surged as Peter coaxed it along, winding through the dense woods and up toward the campground. Emma was holding her new sweatshirt in her lap, tracing a finger along the edges of the star, and Peter’s mind crept toward nightfall, nudging aside reality—against his better judgment—to consider the kinds of scenes found only in the movies: scenic overlooks and parked cars, a lanky teenager with his arm slung over some girl’s shoulders, the confidence of the lean-in, the big kiss backlit by the hazy white moon.